Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up

...praise be–diagrams of her arcane folding techniques. These things made the book worthwhile for me. The book itself is interesting as an object. It’s smallish, and pretty. Inside, the illustrations are Japanese-cute line drawings. It doesn’t look like any cleaning or organization book I’ve ever seen, and that is what makes it special. Kondo understands that tidying is a spiritual activity, not an organizational activity. The same week we got this b...

Read…

Start Your Urban Homestead for One Dollar

...The Lyth Cottage in Buffalo, purchased for $1. Photo: Buffalo Rising. Want to move to Buffalo, New York? If so the city has an Urban Homestead Program where you can get a house for a $1 plus closing costs. The rules–you’ve got to: Fix code violations. Live in the house for at least three years. Have $5,000 in the bank for repairs. Too cold a climate for me, but you can read more about the program and see some success stories at Buffalo Rising....

Read…

Urban Chicken Enthusiasts Unite!

...hicken keepers. And we often meet people who would like to know more about urban poultry. So I’ve decided to create a group of L.A. urban chicken enthusiasts. I used meetup.com to create the L.A. Urban Chicken Enthusiasts group. I like Meetup because the point is to organize face to face meetings. Our group will get together every month or so, eat eggs dishes and talk about raising chickens, local food and sustainability. The L.A. Urban Chicken En...

Read…

Urban Farm Magazine

...elly Yrarrazaval of Orange County. All of these fine folks have repurposed urban and suburban spaces to grow impressive amounts of food, a common sense trend popular enough to have spawned this new magazine. Editor Karen Keb Acevedo says, “Urban Farm is here to shed a little light on the things we can all do to change our lifestyles, in ways we think are monumental as a whole, yet at the same time, barely noticeable on their own.” The first issue...

Read…

My Morning Routine: Tarrying With the Negative

...has created his own version of Good Reads using Airtable to track all the books he digests. I won’t be offended if you skip these reviews or feel they are “off topic.” And a disclaimer: I’m an amateur and I don’t necessarily endorse an author’s entire work because a review appears on this blog. We begin with Slavoj Žižek’s Tarrying With the Negative, but first . . . What I’ve learned about difficult reading Tarrying With the Negative is not a bea...

Read…