Goals

How very, very basic of me. Here it is, New Years Day 2015, and I'm about to publish a list of goals for the year. Which-let's be honest-is basically just a trick of wording to deny I'm making New Years resolutions.

Certain people are awesome, ready made adults. I was never one of these people. I swear I was better at adulthood at fifteen than I am now. It's depressing. And it can feel impossible to really fix your broken disaster of a life. But that's exactly what I've spent the last couple of years doing-fixing my broken life. It's never to late to get it together.

Some of these goals are carryovers from last year and some specific things I've been working on steadily over the last few months. Knowing I've been able to make and sustain these changes gives me confidence I'll be able to attack more areas of my life. And it seemed right to start documenting my attempts at being a real, functioning adult {way, way late in the game} because as I was starting the process of getting it together I kept looking for a blog detailing a similar journey. I didn't really find it {although I do love Adulting}. So why not chronicle my experiences?

These are the fifteen in fifteen I'll be working on this year. These aren't in any order of importance, by the way.

1. Read more. Everyone who knows me in real-life just laughed out loud. I'm a voracious reader. The last year, though, I've really struggled with finishing books. Part of it is a time crunch, part of it is I'm just distracted. So I'm setting a goal of reading twenty-five books this year, which sounds doable {I'm trying not to overwhelm myself}. You can follow along and make fun of my book choices at Goodreads.
2. Socialize. This is basically my life. I get up, go to work, come home, hang out with J and the furs {which I love}, go to bed, do it again. For many reasons I severely pulled back from the world but it's time to rejoin fully. My own lameness keeps me from lots of fun social things-last night my best friend texted me to come to her party, but I was already passed out at ten o'clock. On New Years Eve. Must work on this. I've joined a book club and the first meeting is in a few weeks {and a book club will also help me work on goal one. Yay for efficiency}.
3. Money, Money, Money. This is one of the goals I've already started working on. I'll do a big post soon. 
4. Cook. I love cooking. I've written before about struggling to kick the take out habit. It's time to take my own advice and reboot my kitchen habits. Eating at home will also support my money {i.e. have more of it} goal.
5. Do one new thing with J each month. Maybe it's playing a new board game, checking out a museum, trying a new cuisine, making something together...no rules, other than doing something new together monthly. 
6. Walk. Here's another area of my life where I've gotten lazy. Here's an area with a simple fix available. At least three times a week I'm going to put Emily on her leash and walk around our {wonderfully walkable and scenic} neighborhood. I want to get into better shape without making a big deal about it. This will help.
7. Drink Water at Work. I can have coffee when I get to work, but I'm giving up keeping a two-liter of Coke under my desk. Water, water, water. I'm not going to say I'm giving up soda all together, but not drinking it at work will help keep it under control. 
8. Keep on keeping on at work. I love my job. I feel lucky to have it. I actually thinking working on my other goals will help me be better at work.
9. Calendar my life. This one of those areas I'm already working on. I found a system that really works well for me. Now I need to consistently work the system throughout the year.
10. Blog weekly. This is part of the accountability factor of working on my goals, but also I actually enjoy writing and blogging and have missed it. 
11. Unf?ck our habitat. We've lived here for four years. It's amazing the amount of sheer nonsense you can accumulate in four years. Weirdly, this is one of those areas where working on our money helped our house. I'll explain more later. I've been decluttering, organizing, and scrubbing all week.
12. Make home home. Again, we've lived here four years. We're going to live here at least another year. Time to really make it work for us, and to invest in things that will work for us no matter where we live. A great kitchen cart. Matching plates. Eventually a new sofa. 
13. My poor car. I love my car, so why do I let it deteriorate into a trash heap? Yes, I have a long commute. That's not a good enough excuse. 
14. Use my degree. Yes, I love my job but I miss working on genealogy and historic preservation projects. There's a chance I might get some freelance work this year in these fields, but even if I don't I need to plan and work on some projects.
15. Remember why I'm doing this.

This is what I've learned over the last couple of years. Start where you are. Is your whole life one big mess? You can't fix it all at once. I found a great job. My self-confidence started to increase. I had more disposable income. I started working on really getting on top of my money situation. Etc. 

My life isn't perfect and even if I work hard at all these goals all year it still won't be perfect. It will be better, and it will be better for J and our beloved furs.

So. What are you working on this year?

Beyond The Book: Arthur Hailey's Hotel

This post covers collecting, a crazy old book, hotel design, Disney World, and urban legends. Hang in there!

I've mentioned my parents enjoyed antiqueing when I was a kid, and I quickly realized developing my own collections would make our weekend jaunts a whole lot more exciting. Something to look for! And since I was quite the little bookworm, collecting books was a natural fit.

This fact helps explain why my reading habits closely resemble those of your average AARP member.

So today I thought I'd write about one of my favorite old books, Arthur Hailey's Hotel.

Arthur Hailey was the James Patterson of the sixties and seventies. Instead of murder mysteries, Hailey turned out potboilers centered around a crisis in different professional settings- hospitals, government, airports, public utilities, the automobile industries, banks, news broadcasts, and police departments.

The plot themselves are of the white-collar, middle-aged man career in trouble finds love in the workplace variety. If Jacqueline Susann pioneered the Sex and Shopping novel, then Arthur Hailey pioneered the Sex and Work Crisis novel.

Let's talk Hotel. An independent New Orleans hotel, owned by the exactly as racist as you'd expect for his generation and class Warren Trent, is teetering on the edge of financial disaster. Curtis O'keefe, a thinly veiled Conrad Hilton-esque character, arrives in town to take the hotel over. Hotel manager and Bright Young Thing Peter McDermott is only at the the St Gregory because of a scandal involving sexing up a married woman at a New York hotel which has so marred his name he can't get a job anywhere else (this is weak tea. Even Hailey seems to think this is super dumb. He should've tarnished Peter with a better scandal). Meanwhile he's falling in love with tragedy plagued hotel secretary Christine even as the trouble plagued teenage heiress Marsha Prescott pursues him.

Filling out the secondary characters are a bad tempered French chef, an on the make bell captain, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's evil alternate universe twins, a Canadian miner with a secret, a dentist with a crisis of social conscious, and a thief. The secondary plots revolve around drunken hit and runs, drunken frat boy debacles, trophy girlfriends, mechanical failures, and race relations in New Orleans.

Seriously.

The BEST part of Arthur Hailey's novels is the insane amount of research he did on the setting. Hailey's plots might be soap opera-y but the amount of detail he reveals about the setting (in this case, the running of the a hotel in the mid 1960s) is astounding.

Honestly, read this book and you'll understand how hotels went from this...

Photo of Claridge's from New York Social Diary

to this...

Hotel Valley Ho from Historic Hotels

There was such a giant seismic shift in public buildings and service post-World War II. The amount of change, social and structural, that occurred was simply phenomenal. I don't think the world of 2013 and 1993 look all the different; but a huge change occurred between 1945 and 1965 (when Hotel was published).

Perhaps even more fascinating than the changes that did occur were the ones that didn't. Hailey studied up on cutting edge ideas for each of the fields he took on in his books. Many of these ideas didn't come to fruition.

There's a scene where O'keefe (the Hilton avatar) surveys the lobby and thinks about the all the ways he's going to modernize the St Gregory. Some ideas are super familiar to us today. He was going to cut down on less profitable tenants like florists and drugstores on the main floor; do away with lobby seating, so that people have to pay to sit in a restaurant or bar; and commercialize every square inch of space possible. He tells Warren Trent that you can sum up what the public wants from a hotel in three words "an efficient, economic package." Hailey's tracing the veer from old world individual service into the mass produced every hotel the same experience. (Wonder what O'keefe would make of the boutique hotel trend?)

Some other very basic ideas that were apparently revolutionary at the time are common place now. These include things like motor lobbies, key cards, and computerized systems.

Most of his other ideas I don't believe were ever commonly used in real hotels. These include helicopter pick-up at local airports; escalators dedicated to specific rooms (???); automated delivery systems for room service and purchases (using dumb waiters, I think); beds that recessed into walls were a machine would change the linen and make them up; and floors made of steel mesh that could be vacuumed from underneath. The ideas put forth by Hailey called for hotels to be built in completely new ways.

Oddly enough I think the real life hotel that best encompasses these ideas is Disney's Contemporary Resort.

Photo From Kingdom Travel

The contemporary opened in 1972 and this picture of the lobby shows the monorail cutting through the lobby (reminiscent of O'keefe's transportation schemes).

Photo From Yesterland

It's the construction of the Contemporary that really veers toward the modern hotel Hailey verbally sketched. The frame of the Disney World Contemporary is made of steel and concrete.

Photo From Yesterland

 Here's where it gets interesting (finally, the three of you still reading this post think!). The hotel rooms were built off site, lifted by crane, and set into place amidst the steel girders and welded in.

Photo From Yesterland

These modules contained EVERYTHING. These sliding glass doors lead out to the balcony; inside was the entire, decorated hotel room and bathroom. The front of the module even contains the hallway floor directly outside the guest's door.

Here's where the urban legend comes in. Many people swear that the hotel was designed so that the modules could be taken out for repairs and redecoration.

Think about that for a moment. For the room to be repaired or redecorated the module would have to be cut out from the steel girders, disconnected from the electrical/plumbing/communication systems, lifted out by a crane and then trucked out for refurbishment. OR you could just send in a plumber, painter, and curtain hanger. Which sounds more economically feasible?

So what books are you'll obsessing over? And what's your favorite kind of hotel? Personally, I love both super modern and super old-fashioned. Anything but B&Bs are good for me!

The 10 Best Books of 2012

Original Image From Harvest Books

...or at least the best books I read in 2012 that I think all of you should read! Certainly I didn't read ALL THE BOOKS. No matter what my family thinks (I am, admittedly, a rather voracious reader).

All Book Images From Amazon

Gone Girl  will be an ubiquitous  entry on the Best Books of 2012 lists. There's a reason. It's a really, really good read. I started it after dinner one night and J woke up at 2am to find me still enthralled with it. Sometimes its nice to read a well-plotted novel full of interesting characters that isn't trying to redefine the genre.

I couldn't help casting it in my head, and it's a shame about Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillipe's divorce because they are MEANT to play the main characters. Add in Sarah Michelle Gellar as Phillipe's sister and we'd have a Cruel Intentions reunion. Which would be nothing short of awesome.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business explains the psychology of habit. It also delves into how corporations utilize our habits to make us better consumers. The New York Times ran an excerpt explaining how Target can predict which customers are pregnant. Freaky.

Imagine: How Creativity Works demystifies creativity, explaining the historical, cultural, and environmental factors behind individual creativity and creative movements. The good news is that anyone can harvest their own imagination by reconsidering their preconceptions of how creativity works. As a frustrated novelist I found it fascinating, informative, and helpful.

UPDATE: My brilliant friend the Englishist informed me Jonah Lehrer was accused of self-plagiarism and problems with attributions regarding this work and some of his other journalism. I enjoyed the book, but find plagiarism abhorrent (although I find self-plagiarism to be a complex topic, Lehrer's was apparently rather blatant. The issues with attributions are more troubling).

The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb: A Novel's author, Melanie Benjamin also wrote Alice I Have Been about the girl who inspired Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I loved that book. I equally loved "Mrs. Tom Thumb." Benjamin creates worlds you simply fall into and characters whom seem incredibly real, no matter how strange the circumstances. Plus I find descriptions of circuses and other traveling shows from the 19th and 20th centuries reliably fascinating.

John Irving's In One Person feels like an old-fashioned novel in the best possible sense. There's a rootable if deeply flawed narrator and a character driven plot. The Hotel New Hampshire and The World According to Garp are two of my favorite novels of the post-WWII era. This book is just as good.

Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West is simply amazing. It covers the adventures of two rich young women in 1916 who want more out of life than tea parties, so they volunteer to teach out west. This decision completely changes their lives in amazing ways. Non-fiction, but reads like a great novel. If you ever read These Happy Golden Years and wondered what Laura's first teaching job was really like for her...this helps provide context for an answer.

The House of Velvet and Glass is the follow up to The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane. Just like in "Dane" Howe creates a magical New England full of atmosphere and complicated, well-drawn women dealing with the ties of families and the pull of history.

Next to Love was maybe my favorite book of the year. I just loved it. Feldman creates complicated women who must send their men overseas in WWII and then deal with the fall out after the war ends. Her portrayal of PTSD in returning vets is just amazing, and as the wife of a vet I found it deeply touching. I also love how she realistically weaves in how history effects the fabric of every day life for these women, but in different and surprising ways. I really can't recommend this enough.

The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat: Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance is a lot of fun, and full of interesting information about how Claiborne (amongst others, like Julia Child) changed the  food culture in America with the power of his New York Times column and how what he started continues to inform food trends today.

The Age of Miracles is a heart-breaking, mind-twisting what if of a book. The world starts turning more slowly and we experience what that means through an incredibly fleshed out young girl. I kept thinking about her experiences and the vulnerability of existence way after I finished the book.

So. What books did y'all read and love this year?

Good Lines, But A Total Mess

No, not Neeley O'Hara. Our credenza. It's a nice little mid-century piece with great lines (love those skinny legs), but it's become a total mess, probably because it serves many purposes. It's our landing strip. The drawers hold...well, almost everything. Stray electronics, important papers, wrapping paper/letter writing materials, and craft supplies all find a home here. The center sections holds magazines, books, and various decorative items. The top is our biggest flat surface, excluding the dining room table, in the house. A lamp, our key dish, books, pictures, the television...

Why is it such a mess? It's multi-tasking ways, the fact it's so convenient to drop things here, and not editing it as how we use the space changes. The ancient television isn't even hooked up, because we never watch television in here. And yet there are cords everywhere! J's pile of magazines is falling all over the place, the DVD player has migrated in here for reasons no one can remember (and is backwards, so obviously it's never been used in here!). Really, what's up with this mess? And I really like the credenza! In fact, I'd like to redo it, something I'll pontificate on in a later post. It's starting to stress me out, so time to attack.

After moving the tv and backwards DVD player to the Future Den (more on that UNHOLY MESS some other time), our t-shirt lamps are united for the first time! This also means I can eventually move the side table out of here, which is awesome, because as you can see here it's much to large for the space.

The rest of this fast little credenza makeover consisted of editing down the decorative items. I was hoping to edit the magazines, but J swears he needs all of them. Ahem. Anyway, in the name of marital harmony, I simply turned them around so they became a white block and popped a picture of Lila in front of them.

The credenza now reveals one of my deep, dark secrets. I collect vintage books. There, I said it. “Valley of the Dolls” has had pride of place for awhile now. “The Godfather Papers” now joins it to create a little vintage book/awesome for different reasons movie vignette. On the lower shelf is a stack of cookbooks and craft books from the '60s. Love the cover design on all of these books (and yes, I actually read them).

I love milk glass, and this little vintage hobnail milk glass “I Dream of Jeannie” bottle is one of my favorite things. Unbelievably, I found it in the trash! I think it looks great with the milk glass ashtray we use for a key dish.

And the ugly old curtain/homemade shade things are gone as of tomorrow (I'm making a new window covering as part of the Pinterest Challenge)! The window sported broken, plastic mini-blinds when we moved in with shorty curtains on the side. I threaded a tension rod through the hems of the shorties and hung them as a replacement for the blinds/temporary solution. Almost two years ago. Sigh. Still, they were the best I could do at the time and definitely better than the old blinds!

Did anyone else spend the weekend taking care of an overused/cluttered spot?