Salon thread 2: Making dealing with the world easier

[jenett]

Welcome to our second salon discussion thread. Wander in, invite a friend along, and chat! (Not sure what's going on? Here, have a brief FAQ.) The first one went swimmingly! People! Talking! About awesome stuff! Feel free to talk about anything: my topic of the day is just to get us started.

Some of the comments in last week's thread got me thinking about the little stuff we do to make dealing with the world easier for us (lifehacks). And then why. Some stuff I do (briefly, on the theory it might encourage conversation)

1) I am very boring about my clothing. (basically, a black skirt and coloured knit top, or a coloured skirt and a black knit top.) Except for special occasion clothing, it is all cotton, it all goes in the wash together, and I basically only have to think about it when I want to. When I want to be fancier, that's what jewelry is for.

2) I do not have glasses in my house. I have pottery mugs. I am less likely to drop them (yay, handles) and if I do, they break into bigger and much less transparent pieces. (I am not as clumsy as I was during the worst of the medical foo, but, y'know. It's still useful.)

3) I have no idea what I did before a smartphone, which for me is less phone, and more "thing that fills at least a dozen other needs, but is only one thing to keep track of, plus more than enough books to keep even *me* occupied for a while, and oh, yeah, occasionally it makes phone calls.")

4) I periodically write up a document called "The care and feeding of Jenetts (or at least this one)" designed to help people navigate spending time with me. I had hoped to have a sample here but a) the week got away from me a bit and there was other stuff that had to take priority and b) some bits of it need to go under access lock. (For those who can see my locked posts, I expect to finish it by the end of the week.)

Anyway, this includes things like methods of communication, privacy notes, basic health stuff, more in-depth health stuff (with a focus on "Here's what you need to know so we can enjoy time together."), things I like as presents, things I'm really bad at doing, foods I eat and don't eat (and a brief "why" so people can figure out which bits really apply in a given setting), and stuff people should know if they want to visit me.

What stuff do you do? I'm especially curious about anything where you do it and other people look at you and blink and then go "Oh, that's an awesome idea!" (I've had that with my mugs, for example.)

(A word on advice: please don't give it in this discussion unless someone asks for it. A bunch of people I know will read this have Complicated Stuff, and I trust that they have found solutions that work for them for reasons that work for them. That said, if you'd like advice, go ahead and ask for it!)

Music in the background: Last week's salon had a lot to say about the topic of music, and it got me thinking about listening to the stuff that connects us to the universe. So, on my playlist for this week's salon are "One Voice" by the Wailin' Jennys, "All Will Be Well" by Meg Barnhouse, "Brave" by Sarah Bareilles, "Allegria" by Cirque du Soleil and "Give us room to roar" from Ruth Mackenzie's Kalevala: Dream of the Salmon Maiden.

A quick reminder
As noted, the basic thing here is 'leave the conversation better than you found it, or at least not worse'. The FAQ has more help with your choices for comment (DW account, OpenID account, or anonymously) if you need a hand. Or ask, and someone (likely me, but maybe not) will be along to help. We'll work everything else out as we go.

Comments

[ilyena_sylph]

I love lifehacks. I have been trying to figure out mine for a… good long while. +grins+

Stuff I do…

I am fantastically lucky on the topic of clothing, because I can live in jeans and t-shirts unless I need to dress up for an event. I work with glue and crumbling paper and sometimes chemicals all day, dress code does not apply. The jeans give me pockets for phone and wallet, beltloops for my key-carabiner, and generally don't take a lot of thought.

We have glass glasses, pottery mugs, wineglasses, and others in the house for when we're being various levels of formal, but mostly we – and _definitely_ I – drink out of those gigantic plastic things with lids and straws and rubberized grips. Or Coke bottles. We have a cat, and we are mostly clumsy as hell with stupid medical foo on all parts. The lids mean that we don't spend half our evenings mopping the floors – or at least have to mop less!

The biggest thing for the four of us (they can name themselves or not) is that we all have serious communication and memory issues. Therefore, we have whiteboards in the kitchen, a physical calendar in the living room, google Calendar synched with each of our accounts, a locked DW community for 'hey, y'all it's 3am and I'm awake and I'm gonna forget if I don't say this now' or 'hey, y'all, I'm 500+ miles away but y'all need to know this' that also has static reminders of holidays and when one of us is going to be gone. We also use twitter as a slightly more temporary 'ohshit, plans changed, gonna be [x] til [$timeofday]'

Also we each have a googleDoc of 'stuff [x] wants' that is shared with each other and with various others on-request, so that we don't have to try to remember the random mentions from four months ago when we're scrambling for ideas for gifts. That may be one of my favorite things we've done to make life easy for each other.

I've tried at various times to do 'care and feeding' posts, but the urge only strikes when I'm feeling incredibly defensive and then when I read back over it I sound like a total bitch, so I delete it. *wryface*

[jenett]

Weirdly, I find I'm *more* clumsy with the giant plastic things. I have no idea why. (Well, maybe I do: I have very small hands, so smooth round cylindrical things that don't have handles are hard to hold.) Also, I have always had the kind of cat that considers that kind of thing fair game for exploration and rubbing against.

There's also a certain amount, at home, of "If I use a mug that only holds two cups of water, I will lever myself off the couch and out from in front of the computer slightly more often than if my mug holds more, and this is probably good for me."

I hear you on the defensive. I find I do best writing them when everything is going okay but when stuff has been sorta dire recently enough that I remember which bits are currently an issue. I do a lot of editing on them, too.

[ilyena_sylph]

That makes sense. My clumsy means that I am unlikely to have them fall out of my hands but I am very very likely to have liquid everywhere if I have something that doesn't have a lid. +wryface+

Heh. That is a VERY clever lifehack, and go you for coming up with it!

Aren't brains just such fascinating things?

[sanacrow]

Got you on the stupid medical foo. I think we still have some glass wineglasses around here somewhere, but we use the pretty melamine ones. I can't do the pottery mugs because weight is a big issue for my hands, and I don't trust myself with glass most of the time. So most of our "glasses" are plastic/melamine, or aluminum thermal. (I also can't hold anything very hot or very cold, so I adore having lightweight thermal tumblers for my ice drinks and thermal mugs for my hot tea or coffee. I also have a water bottle with a loop handle for my backpack at school. I haven't dropped it in ages!