A Not So Close Shave

...log and our books? How many times have I presented some neatly tied up homemaking*]}*/gardening tip when the actual results were more ambiguous? Or, to go deeper with this, how often have I presented a “failure” as a kind of false modesty? At the risk of doing the latter, and via a long winded media theory laden introduction, permit me update my ongoing struggle with shaving. Most folks don’t know that, long before the advent of social media deep in t...

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A Better Garage Organizational System

...anges to the workshop I made in order to make it more useful for furniture making such as being sure that I could access my workbench from all sides, as well as improvements to the dust collection system. I can detail these changes in a future post but I’m more interested in showing that a well organized workshop can benefit any activity from sewing to gardening. Taking the time to plan a workspace makes work go much easier. Aesthetics are importa...

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On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

...which you were paid to do the things you like to read about on this blog: gardening, beer brewing, jam making, beekeeping etc. Or how about a world in which teachers, nurses and caregivers made more money than tech CEOs? Sadly, we don’t live in that utopia. Instead we have an economy that often rewards people who either do nothing all day or whose work degrades our lives. Anthropologist David Graeber takes up these questions in his book Bullshit...

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Saturday Tweets: It’s 2017!

...y @bramble36 https://t.co/bWFTOcHVk5 pic.twitter.com/cTOIyap8tz — Guardian gardening (@guardiangardens) January 6, 2017 $100 for a tablet and foldable wireless keyboard https://t.co/9sKiq88hv3 — Root Simple (@rootsimple) January 6, 2017 Love this project! 100% increase in both landscape #biodiversity and residential population #density can be achieved https://t.co/PJwlCZFBTy pic.twitter.com/KE9NWqLqWN — Thomas Rainer (@ThomasRainerDC) January 5, 2...

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Everything Must Go: Tidying Up at the Root Simple Compound

...oint we remembered a book one of our readers mentioned, and which has been making the publicity rounds of late, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by the tidying consultant Marie Kondo (aka KonMari–her method is called the KonMari Method). She’s from Japan, where people have the same hearty consumerist impulses as we do here in the U.S., but considerably less space for storage. When I first read about the book, I understood the gist of it, but...

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