Learning The Lessons of Nixon

Because what I really want — is a robot dentist. I really don’t mind the pain associated with the dentist, and I don’t feel afraid that it will hurt.

I really do mind feeling ashamed every time I go to the dentist (which has nothing to do with the dentist’s demeanor, really).

Yes, I know, I am a little neurotic. And yes, I know the Internets still love me. (You know, the Internets have real potential as a higher-power substitute for atheist web nerds. You just hand over all your issues to Ceiling Cat).

Yesterday’s post on saving money in the big downturn reminded me of one more thing I started doing this summer — I started cutting my kids’ hair.

Prior to that, we’d been going to a chain of kid-focused hair salons called SnipIts. They had kid-sized barber chairs, things for kids to look at while getting a haircut, and went to a lot of effort to make a kid’s haircut fun and fast.

Plus, I didn’t feel like I had to apologize too much when my kid yelled his head off; judging by what I saw at the other stations, they were pretty used to it.

But when they came to visit me in Colorado, boy, did they need a haircut — and I didn’t really know where to take them. Off to Target, and $7 later I had a pair of hair shears, and cut their bangs. Trimmed a little elsewhere.

Honestly, it wasn’t any worse than they were getting at SnipIts (the best hair stylist in the world can’t do much with someone who won’t sit still). And aside from the cost of the scissors, it was free.

We do also have a pair of hair clippers, but after trying them a few times, I could not figure out how they worked. You’d think clippers would be simple, but you would not believe the instructions that came with ours! If I ever figure it out, I’ll be able to give them pretty professional looking haircuts, even in the back.

Tags: economy, frugal, kids, haircut

My friend and partner in crime business Susan Mernit wrote a great post entitled Advice for the Recently Laid off #2: How to save money. Susan once worked at Yahoo, and still has lots of friends there; last week, rumors circulated that the company would cut anywhere from a few hundred to over 3,000 jobs. Several of my own friends here in the Boston area have lost jobs, and it seems like every time I make the rounds of the blogs I read, I hear about companies cutting back or people who have had their jobs cut back. Evan and I are still working, but even in the best of times, technology is a boom and bust business. Big company, small company, good times, bad times, they all have the average structural integrity of a wet cardboard box, and the fact is that at some point all of us are going to get thrown to the volcano gods. It seems prudent to cut back now, before we need to, especially if I can identify things we don’t really need.

So I’ve been thinking about that for awhile, and Susan’s post made me go out and do a little trimming of my own. I canceled my subscriptions to a number of online services, and went hunting around for Halloween costume components. I was sure I wouldn’t be able to find them, but I did, saving us about $20. That $20 is non-recurring savings, but the $70 I saved on other things will be $70 that’s not going out every month. I won’t say which services; the fact is that if I got out my credit card at all in the first place I was pretty impressed with the work they were doing, and I don’t want to depress them or discourage anyone else from using them.

Susan’s post also reminded me of a post I did for Kevin Kelly’s excellent Cool Tools during the last downturn. It’s about using a little manual plastic adder while grocery shopping, as a way of staying mindful of price fluctuations on common items.

Handy Adder
Austerity Measures with a Smile

Mindfulness is the beginning of all change. And nothing says “Change Ahead” like an experience like last week’s: the company my husband works for announced that all the development on the product that he and his co-workers make is being sent to India. They got handed a box and told to pack up their desks the same day.

Fortunately, I come from a long line of women whose lives were one long austerity measure, and I understand a lot of the basic principles: save cash, spend downtime increasing household efficiency, make your own stuff, and hang tight.

But it can be hard to change any habit, including habits about how we spend money. It’s easy to slip into a rut of buying the same stuff all the time at the grocery store without noticing weekly price fluctuations. Using the Handy Adder is an effective and weirdly fun way to reconnect your attention with every item and not get hosed or miss big price increases. It’s the grocery store version of Be Here Now.

If you look closely, you can see this week’s total for groceries for my family of four. Onward, Mighty Bargain Hunters!

– Lisa Williams

Handy Adder, $4.99
Link to the product page at The Five and Ten: Handy Adder
Austerity Measures with a Smile

Handy Adder, $4.99
Link to the product page at The Five and Ten: Handy Adder
Also available at The Museum of Useful Things in Cambridge, MA, for $3. See The MUT.org.

I did one other writeup for Cool Tools, on fetal dopplers which allow you to hear a baby’s heartbeat in utero. I was thrilled when Kelly, the original editor of Wired, called it “well-written.”

[Originally posted at People’s Software Company Blog. PSCo is a joint venture between me and my friend Susan Mernit. We’re making lightweight mobile calendars to make it easier for you to actually show up places you’re supposed to be. Fabulous! This one’s about what it’s like to work at a startup, or more generally to be a person who Makes Stuff].

When people ask me what TechStars was like, I’ve got a line — because I’ve always got one. I say, “It was like sticking my head in an active washing machine — again, and again, and again.”

So as long as the drive from Boulder to Boston was, I was glad for it. (Okay, I could have lost the last 500 of those 1,982 miles). I was glad because creativity isn’t an industrial process; making software isn’t an industrial process; teambuilding isn’t an industrial process; growing a community isn’t an industrial process.

My lesson about all of these is that you can go fast — but you can’t go fast with all of them all of the time. At a recent coffee with a friend, I said that trying to rush teambuilding was a bit like watering a plant three times as much while yelling “Go FASTER!!”

I sat in my car, going point to point from Boulder to North Platte, Nebraska; from North Platte to Davenport, Iowa; from Davenport, Iowa, to Erie, PA; from Erie at last to Watertown, MA, the Boston suburb where I live with my husband and two kids.

And I’m proud to say I didn’t have a single idea the whole time.

Well, okay, I’m fronting a little. A lot. It bothers me to have an empty head like that. It’s not normal — it just feels, well, wrong. It feels wrong even though I know it is normal — because it’s part of the normal process of Making Stuff.

I am an irrepressible Maker of Stuff. I left my old (beloved) job at Yankee Group, where I ran a division of analysts who wrote, talked, and studied the enterprise software market to slow down when I had my two sons.

About five days later, of course, I was bored (yes, you can love your children and be bored. Don’t look at me like that). I had…projects. Hobbies! Yes, let’s call them hobbies…until two of them turned into startups (okay, that look, I deserve it).

The think about the process of Making Stuff is that it’s not a nice even ramp where you start out with an idea and progress smoothly towards your goal in a state where you’ve spent ten percent of the time you’ve got and you’re ten percent complete.

Instead, I find that there are three phases of the cycle, and it’s a wheel I turn over any number of times while I’m engaged in a given project. They are:

1. Invention
2. Production
3. Rest

Invention is the most magical period of the cycle — it’s when I have so many ideas I can’t write them down fast enough. It’s the part where some fundamental insight strikes me, and then the fun part is rolling that out, elaborating it, seeing where it could go and what it could do.
Production is figuring out HOW to get those ideas into reality. In its own way, it’s just as creative as invention, because ideas don’t generally come with a neat how-to laying out simple, easy to follow steps. Often the quality of an idea is determined not by its beauty or scope but because it comes with an entry point — something simple but effective to do to get started, and an iterative strategy for inventing what the next steps are when it’s not clear, exactly, where to go. And then there’s the doing; ah, the blissful doing. (Except when it’s your turn to shave the yak).
Then, at some point, the progress slows. I put more effort in, and less comes out — or the whole process suffers some sort of unforseen crash and it’s not clear how (or sometimes if) I can get it started again. Then comes the part I like least: Rest.

I hate resting. I’m allergic to it. I think it literally makes me itchy. I’m not proud of that. It’s just that I want to keep going, and the real world, unlike the creative process, is a smooth linear machine — one hour later is one hour that’s gone. From the outside, it just looks like you’re slacking off, or that you’re a complete flake. But that’s the way it is — it would be nice to have new things appear as regularly as widgets drop off an assembly line — but that’s just not how it works.

I’m always the most impatient with the rest cycle, but in my experience it takes as long as it takes. It worried me a little bit when I arrived in Boston with my head still feeling like a goldfish bowl without any residents, but looking back on it, I shouldn’t have been surprised. In general, the longer or more intensive a production phase is, the deeper the rest cycle is.

My advice for Makers of Stuff reading this is as follows: Use your Rest Cycle to clean up your mess. Yeah, you know, those parking tickets you let pile up, those un-returned (and perhaps not listened to) voice mails, those connections you let slide. Do your laundry. Slay the recycling monster. Yes, you really should visit the dentist once a year, now’s a great time to make all those appointments. Take a look in your wallet. Oops, did you forget to renew your drivers’ license? Ummmmm….maybe time to do it is now, ‘mkay? A little friends and family maintenance is probably in order, too.

So now, my house is clean, I’ve had my cholesterol checked (very good, thank you for all the healthy food, Boulder) my children have school clothes, I’ve actually unpacked.

Hey…wait a minute…I have an idea! Okay, gotta go — talk to you later! (Don’t take it personally if I don’t get back right away, ‘k? See you around Twitter!)

Tags: startup, PSCO, susanmernit, techstars, creativity, software, makers

And it doesn’t even involve unicorns!

While I was out in Boulder for the summer, Evan and the kids came to visit me for ten days.

One morning we went out to the coffeeshop to pick up some coffee and pastries, and he looked at the front of the Denver Post, which carried a story about the (then) upcoming Democratic National Convention.

“What’s that?” he said.
“It’s about a political convention.”
Rowan loves, loves, loves for you to talk to him — I’m convinced you could read cereal boxes to him and as long as you were talking to him, he’d be thrilled. So, political conventions. What six year old cares? Him. He says, “Tell me more.”
“It’s about the Democratic National Convention. It’s a big party where the Democrats, our party, get together to decide who they want to ask everybody to vote for for President.”

Now, the night before, we took a few of the big picture books on architecture from the shelves of the house I was subletting for the summer. One, by Rem Koolhaas, had a long segment on the vast improvised shantytowns that ring many major Southern Hemisphere cities like Lagos and Rio de Janeiro.

“Everything is all broken!” he said.
“Well, everybody has to make their own house, and they don’t always have good tools. Look at this one, it’s pretty clever. I don’t know if I could make a house that good by myself.”
“Yeah.”
The next page featured a long shot showing thousands of improvised houses stretching to the horizons.
“Do you think they have a school there?”
He looked at me in horror. “Kids live there?!”

One of the great things about Rowan is that he’s shocked and pained when I tell him about racism, sexism, poverty. He thinks it’s outrageous, and he takes it so personally.

So we’re sitting there in the coffee shop and he says, “If I was President I would build schools in Africa.”
I said, “Hey, you have a foreign policy idea. Do you know what foreign policy is?”
“No, what is it? Can I have a donut?”
“Yes, you can have a donut. Foreign policy is when countries have ideas about other countries.”

I’ve been thinking, maybe we don’t have to wait for Rowan to be President to build some schools (or, maybe, buy some school uniforms, or, roofing material, or…). I was thinking I’d ask Ethan Zuckerman, whose work at Global Voices Online I really admire, what kind of things a kid could do that would be useful and nonharmful to help kids in Africa. So far, I’ve got him collecting cans around the house and from a neighbor to raise some cash.

Ideas?

For a few years I had a regular open dinner at my house on Tuesday evenings called Family Dinner. I got busy, my kids got to the ages where it was hard to manage them and a houseful of guests at the same time, and I dropped it.

On Sunday, I returned from three months away from my husband and kids; I spent the summer in Boulder, CO at TechStars a startup incubator and mentoring program. See the People’s Software Company blog for the story of that adventure.

I returned home, and Wow. The house was immaculate, there were flowers everywhere, everyone had a haircut, the dog was groomed, the lawn was mowed! It wouldn’t be any better prepared if they had been welcoming Barack Obama. I felt like an honored guest from a foreign land. I was also completely beat after four days where I drove nine hours each day. So we got some takeout.

So the next day, I decided, I will make everyone dinner. I will make everyone Family Dinner! Just us, though. And so:

Demi-ficelle bread and sheep’s milk cheese
Pan seared New York sirloin
Baby fingerling potatoes pan roasted in the juices
Fresh escarole and spinach braised in pan juices with garlic and salt
Curried rice
Dessert of burnt-caramel ice cream and apricot hamentashen

It was pretty good. The curried rice was actually the product of the previous evening’s takeout at Cafe of India, our favorite local Indian restaurant. And…well…Boulder got to me. I admit, the vegetables were…organic. And the beef was, um, grassfed. Okay, okay, Susan was always buying this organic stuff, and, well, it tasted like it was probably actually good for you (although organic toaster pastries just can’t hold a candle to the totally built-in-the-lab and extruded-from-a-nozzle glory that is the Old Skool PopTart). There, I made my gluten-free confession.

It was a good dinner. We are happy.

Tags: familydinner, cooking, food, techstars, PSCO