I love back to school time. The students look so smart in their new clothes, carrying books and wearing eyeglasses. Hey, would someone tell me why students are wearing glasses with space between the rims? I thought the whole point of wearing eyeglasses was to see.
During this time I see a lot of advertisements for books that help one organize and clean up. I remember back during the beginning of high school and college how being organized meant life or death. So many books to carry, I color coded my notebooks to match my textbooks. This way I could rush out to class with the right books without looking at them.
Don’t be like me. Take advice from the professionals. Julie Morgenstern, founder of Task Masters, has been a professional organizer for 20 years. Her ever popular Organizing from the Inside Out is now in its second edition. She can help you organize any room in your house. Tricky attic space, asks her. Filled-to-the-gills garage, consult Morgenstern.
Right now I am paying close attention to her organizing the mobile, cubicle and home based office. Although I work in an office at Northwest, I have a habit of taking my work with me. Can you say workaholic?
Mission: Organization by Home and Garden Television suggest lots of hooks and labeled boxes. This would be a perfect book for those new dorm students who are living away from home for the first time. Suggestions on where to place things and label them is a skill one will be able to use for the rest of his life.
For those of you who have a love-hate relationship with material stuff open up Regina Leeds, One Year to an Organized Life. In this book she breaks down work into convenient months. One organizes the Christmas decorations in January when it is time to store them instead of July.
Chapter nine is dedicated to the busy school year starting in September. Plan the lunches and the clothes one will wear the night before. Why, well if you dress in the dark, people tend to make fun of unmatched socks and shirts that are on backwards.
Peter Walsh of the hit television series Clean Sweep has written a book that rivals the size of any history textbook. Within the 450 page tome one will find a whole section dedicated to education and career. How to Organize Just About Everything is just that - everything.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Organizing Books (copy)
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (copy)
Henry Lee was standing at the corner of bitter and sweet. He arrived early that morning when he heard the news. As the day progressed more and more people joined him in the wait. They mulled around whispering in excitement over a discovery soon to be revealed.
Henry stood facing the old Panama Hotel. The building loomed large in his childhood dreams where there were no broken windows or graffiti. He knew the company that bought it had their hands full, but he was thankful they saw potential and renovations were forthcoming.
As the breeze lifted Henry’s thinning hair, he thought back to the time when the hotel symbolized a large red stop sign. He was forbidden to walk past the hotel and into Japantown. His father, a Chinese Nationalist, would kill him if he ever set one foot in the enemy’s territory.
Chinatown was Henry’s home and the hotel stood as a bead connecting the two neighborhoods in an endless strand. Even now, in 1986, one could still stand at the hotel and look down both streets to the horizon. Once filled with bright Japanese and English signs, Seattle’s Japantown sat patiently waiting for someone to refill the neon.
Japantown was the prosperous of the two rival neighborhoods when Henry was a child. They supported opulent services like Toyama Jewelry Store and Ochi Photography Studio where Chinatown was filled with food markets and laundries. Henry remembered how things sparkle on Maynard Street, but his own Chinatown was dust and dirt.
The hotel was off limits back then, too. It was owned by a Japanese family. Henry remembers looking into the lobby from the sidewalk the day they closed the doors. Would the grand chandelier still grace the sky like it did back in 1942?
Finally, there was movement on the hotel’s steps. The owner, a small woman, raised her petite hand to open a bright red and white, bamboo parasol decorated with orange koi. The crowd sighed and Henry’s heart skipped a beat. Locked away in the basement since 1942 were hundreds of trunks and suitcases belonging to Japanese families who were relocated to Army internment camps.
Thank you to my librarian friend who suggested this stellar debut by Jamie Ford. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is everything one wants in a romantic historical novel.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Crazy for the Storm (copy)
Norman Ollestad grew up amongst beach waves and fresh snow in carefree California. On his first birthday his father surfed with Norm latched to his back in a homemade papoose. At the age of three, his father drove to fresh powder and coaxed his son to ski the bowls. Other children his age could only dream about his exploits, but Norm thought his life normal.
The Ollestads lived on Topanga Beach north of Los Angeles, his mother in a trailer close to the surf and his father in a house overlooking the bay. Norm was very young when they divorced. It was an amiable affair and he could flow in and out of both homes without causing tiffs. The local surfers acted as guardians, too. He was never alone while in the water.
His father, Big Norm, was loved among the Topanga surfers. He was easy to get along with and had a calling for the big waves. All he needed was a storm and locals would see him out at the point trying to ride a pipeline into the beach. By the time little Norm was eight, he was joining him in the tubes.
Big Norm was a child actor with his greatest role as oldest brother in the movie Cheaper by the Dozen. In his 20s he started to work for the FBI as an agent, but became disillusioned with J. Edgar Hoovers’ employee practices. He began to write about his experiences and the book Inside the FBI was published in 1967. Norm’s hippy lifestyle had financial backing.
Little Norm’s life changed forever on February 19, 1979. The flight, in a Cessna 172, was to be a quick jaunt to Big Bear City before heading home for school the next day. Eleven-year-old Norm was elated from his winning ski run the day before and all excited to plow more fresh powder. His dad was following yet another storm in the San Gabriel Mountains of California.
The plane encountered heavy fog and hit the side of Ontario Peak. Little Norm remembers the crash site in frames as the fog lifted enough for a small peek and then lower. First frame, the pilot’s body is lying prone outside the fuselage. Next frame, the pilot has a hole in his face where his nose used to be. To his left the fog lifts and he can see his dad’s girlfriend crying still strapped to her chair. One of his last frames he stares at his motionless father.
Norm will have to transverse sheets of vertical ice in this true story of survival. Crazy for the Storm is an engaging adventure book for males of all ages. There is language and sexual content, but hey, it is also the seventies and California. ;D
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
The Lost City of Z (copy)
“Dr. Livingston, I presume?” No, it is Lieutenant Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett whom is still lost in the jungles of South America.
Colonel Fawcett to his friends, although he was never awarded the higher rank, gave his life while exploring the Amazon region searching for a lost tribe with three story structures he called Z. It was Fawcett’s personal search for El Dorado of which early conquistadors claimed was a city filled with gold.
Fawcett had his doubts about the gold. As he traveled up the Amazon River to discover the source, each new tribe—who claimed him as the first white man ever encountered—did not wear or fashion anything out of the precious metal. They were in simple cotton loin if dressed at all. Ears might be pierced and plates might adorn their lips, but the material was either wood or bone.
Unlike his Victorian peers, he believed that prior to European’s first visit an advance tribe numbering in the thousands farmed and stored their food, built community buildings along with religious temples, and spoke a complicated language. He based these beliefs on stories he heard from various chiefs who spoke a native language mixed with Portuguese.
Even though Fawcett did his explorations after Queen Victoria’s death, he is considered the quintessential Victorian explorer. He took the daytime to survey all areas on his journey and drew maps while fighting fatal bugs and snakes under the night’s stars. Instead of combating or converting the natives, he study their culture and took detail notes that he used later to write articles for London Newspapers. “And every few years, when he emerged from the jungle, spidery thin and bedraggled, dozens of scientists and luminaries would pack the Royal Geographical Society’s hall to hear him speak.”
His success was based on two valuable skills. First, he was immune to the various threats in the jungle like flesh embedding maggots and malaria. He hardly ever got sick or struggled with the insatiable bugs that fatally attacked his other peers. Last and most important, he made friends with head shrinking, body clubbing, and cannibalistic natives who inhibited the region.
An engaging nonfiction, I spent hours reading The Lost City of Z by David Grann, and do not regret a second.
