I’ve never been much for mobile games. I’ll get into one for a brief window of time (see: Words with Friends), but then my interest will wane precipitously. I’ve played Angry Birds once on Andy’s phone. I’ve never played Candy Crush.

Recently, though, I was introduced to Trivia Crack, and I’ve been in the “mildly obsessed” phase for a few weeks. (I think I’m approaching the Cliff of Losing Interest, though, as I’m starting to realize that most of the questions are pretty dumb.)

When you win a game, the final screen that pops up gives you the option to share that you’ve won on Facebook or Twitter or to start a new game.

And here’s the part where I realize I am a neurotic introvert.

Should I start a new game immediately?
What if they’re upset that I won?
What if they don’t want to play me again?
Does it look too needy if I start another game right away?
Should I wait for them to start a game?
What are they going to think of me if I start the next game so soon?

Seriously, Laura, it’s a game. If they are so upset that you beat them that they don’t want to play again, they have bigger problems. Also, if they don’t want to play you, they don’t have to accept the game. The game is meant to played. It says nothing about me if I start a new game when I’m presented with the option.

And yet, there my brain goes.

Now that I think about it, what does it say to my friends if I HAVEN’T started a new game?! That is probably a more worriesome sign to them. My NOT starting a game might send them down the pathway of self-doubt, if they’re as neurotic as I am.

…but they’re probably not.

The story of this week in Atlanta was threatened snow and ice that never came! I holed up at home for a lot of the week anyway. I’m finding that even though I’m working from home the majority of the time, I don’t really get cabin fever. I’m such a homebody that I actually really like it! I have enough out-of-the-house activities every week to keep me acclimated to the outside world, but I get to stay in my cozy cocoon often enough to satisfy my introverted nature.

Although, this week’s snippets are rather cat-heavy…so maybe I am becoming more of a cat lady than I’d care to admit.

• This is a little late for Valentine’s Day, but how cute are these tiny hamsters?! It’s worth going down the rabbit hole (hamster hole?) of watching the other Tiny Hamster videos while you’re at it.

On a related note, Andy and I had a lovely Valentine’s Day. I actually needed to do some work, so we went to one of our neighborhood coffee shops for the afternoon and drank good coffee and ate scones. Then we transferred to one of our neighborhood pubs and had drinks and burgers. It was super casual, no pressure. We ended the evening at home with pink champagne and Valentine’s Day on Amazon Instant Video. A simple day, but lots of time together, which is what counts.

• 50 Shades of Grey Cats
  Much cuter than the book.

• The Schedule Very Successful People Follow
  I’m well aware that I can be super productive if I roll out of bed and get to it, and yet more often than not I fritter away that first hour or two scrolling through social media, cleaning the kitchen, or eating breakfast. I’m more satisfied with my day even if I just spend that early morning time reading and drinking a mug of tea. I think being mindful is the real trick.

The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else. ~ Eric Hoffer ~

• Mindfulness in the Empty Minutes

It was less about making room and time, I realized, and more about recognizing the room and time that I already had. Those empty minutes. While waiting for the pasta water to boil, while waiting for boys at practice, while waiting my turn during a board game, and certainly while listening to the audio book after I’d slid into bed at night. Receiving the calm I needed from contemplative, creative, repetitive movement. Pause the brain, and let the body hum.

• The Privilege of Pursuing Financial Independence
  This post really resonated with me. It was something I thought about pretty often when I worked at a non-profit that served low-income folks, but I hadn’t thought about it in awhile. It’s true–the ability to save, to shop mindfully, and to imagine complete financial security is quite a privilege.

• This cat loves the snow
  (P.S. Have you seen this one? Andy’s off to the arctic of New York City this week; I hope that’s not how he has to get into his hotel!)

• Let’s be real here, I’m undoubtedly going to make this cake for Kira at some point.

Apparently I had time management and cats on the brain this week. Seems about right. What’ve you been thinking about lately? How do you make use of your empty minutes?

Fire extinguishers are a must-have in any home (and I even have one in the trunk of my car!), but they don’t last forever. Last year, I somehow managed to inadvertently discharge the one under our sink, and I learned that, after any use, a fire extinguisher needs to be re-pressurized in order to work properly. It makes sense: fire extinguishers rely on pressure to shoot out the fire-supressing stuff, so without that pressure they’re pretty useless. I called around a little bit to try and figure out what to do with it (could I get it recharged somewhere?) but to little avail. Luckily, at that point we lived in an apartment complex, so we just paid to have maintenance take the old one and bring us a new one.

photo credit: CWCS Managed Hosting

Fast forward to our new home. We’ve gotten a couple of new fire extinguishers to stash around our bigger place. Imagine our surprise when we got a notice from Amazon that the models we had ordered were part of a product recall and needed to be disposed of! The manufacturer shipped us replacements, but we were still left with the old ones to trash.

What do you do with a fire extinguisher that doesn’t work? I took to Google, of course, but there’s precious little out there with much detail. “Contact your local fire department,” a lot of sites suggested. “Follow your community’s guidelines for hazardous waste disposal,” some others cautioned.

And this gem from the county fire and rescue service was particularly helpful:

Should you have the typical multi-purpose residential extinguisher, it should be discarded after use.

Discarded after use? Great! How should I do that?

I emailed a representative at the city fire rescue department, and she responded surprisingly quickly with the name of a company that would take our useless fire extinguishers and dispose of them properly. Typically companies that handle business fire supression systems will know what to do. The only catch was that this company is located in a far suburb, and it didn’t seem worth my while to drive all the way out there for that. (Ironically enough, the next night I found myself sitting at a red light behind a service van from that VERY company! I wished I could hop out and ask the driver to take my fire extinguishers!) The only other such companies I could find were also headquartered far out of the city.

So I called my local fire station and asked if I could drop the extinguisher off there to be disposed of. Nope.

I had reached an impasse. It seemed like such a small thing: my fire extinguisher does not do its job as a fire supression tool, and I need to get rid of it. Yet there were no standard procedures in my city, or really anywhere on the Internet, for my situation.

I found a website from a city in Pennsylvania that instructed citizens to simply disharge the extinguisher (read: squirt the powder) into a trash bag, and then dump both the bag and the spent extinguisher into the regular trash. Apparently the contents are not actually hazardous, and neither is anything inherent in the metal can. It’s just the pressure that can be dangerous and requires you not to throw away a fully charged fire extinguisher. So Andy and I were readying to have a fun moment shooting off our fire extinguishers. But I still felt kind of guilty thinking about that metal canister sitting in a landfill forever, so I tried one more thing: the Keep Atlanta Beautiful Community Recycling Program.

Fire extinguishers weren’t listed under the items they accept, but I emailed someone through the website and got the response: yes, they would take my fire extinguishers, as long as the pins were in place! I clarified: did it need to be discharged? Nope! We could just bring them as they were. Woo hoo!

So last Saturday Andy and I drove over to the school parking lot near us where they hold monthly drop-offs. It’s quite the operation! They have trucks and bins stationed in an orderly manner all around the lot, and they direct you to the approrpriate one for the type of recyclable you have. We pulled up to the “metals” station and handed over the fire extinguishers. The rep there asked if they were discharged, and I said no, and he said, okay, thanks. And we drove away. I felt like I should have gotten my picture taken shaking the metal guy’s hand as I relinquished the small bane of my existence.

It was the end of a saga that seems like it should never have been a saga in the first place! We all have fire extinguishers, and it’s a known fact that after they’re used they need to be disposed of, and yet no one out there seems to have good instructions for doing so.

I’m sharing this as a PSA in hopes that it might help one of you. This took up way too much of my brain space for way too long. I sort of wished I could go back to ignorance and just plop the fire extinguisher into the trash can without a second thought. But once you know too much, there’s no looking back.

Don’t throw your fire extinguishers away fully charged. Look for a community recycling program in your area that might take it, or else discharge the contents and pressure and toss it in whatever way your city lets you toss metals. Try searching for commercial fire service companies like this one, and maybe you’ll be lucky enough to have one close than an hour’s drive away from you. It shouldn’t take you as long as it took me to do the right thing. And make sure you replace it! You’d hate to reach for a fire extinguisher in an emergency situation and not find one there, or find one that didn’t have enough pressure to get the job done.

It’s no secret among us bookish folks that we like big books (and we cannot lie). There’s just something so delicious about the heft of one in your hands. We’ve embraced the scarcity culture, and it’s like we can’t believe that there will ever be enough words to consume. C.S. Lewis said it best:

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”

The Kindle has relieved some of my book anxiety. As a child, I practically had to bring an extra suitcase to hold the books I thought I would get through on a given vacation. I’m pretty sure I brought at least three books on my 4 night honeymoon. Yet with my digital libary at my fingertips, I know there’s always more to be read, as long as I have WiFi.

But there’s still the allure of the epic, the all-consuming book that you nibble away at. The first for me was Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I had a hardback set of all the books, and they felt ginormous in my little hands. (I’ve re-read a couple recently and discovered that they’re only so large because the text is huge!) I felt so proud of myself for being able to read such a long book.

Sure, I’ve encountered some giants that I haven’t been able to crack. Middlemarch comes to mind, and Look Homeward, Angel. I slogged through American Gods and Man Booker Prize winner Wolf Hall. I was one of like five people in the universe who wasn’t blown away by The Goldfinch. I’ve never attempted Infinite Jest and I’m not really sorry. Not to mention, we know how I feel about the classics, which leaves out an entire swath of eligible biggies.

Others, though, have sucked me in. I’m genre agnostic when it comes to my big book loves. Right now I’m floating in the middle of the ocean that is The Emperor of All Maladies, a non-fiction biography of cancer. (Ironically enough, I’m reading this as my “micro”history for the Book Riot #ReadHarder challenge.) The last several Harry Potter books apply, as well.

A few that I’ve loved:

I know it seems cliche, but it’s sold so well for a reason. I spent one summer at home during college, feeling adrift, anchored only by this book.

The beautiful thing about North and South is that it’s the first of a trilogy. The only thing better than one big book might be three. I had to take long breaks in between to recuperate emotionally, so I still have the third to conquer.

See what I mean about being genre agnostic? Whoda thunk I’d have Stephen King on any list of my favorite books.

A holdover from my days of Christian fiction reading, this one’s a love story for the ages. Somewhat similiarly, check out Roses by Leila Meacham.

There’s a time and a place for the easily digestible book, the quick read, the fluff. I love a book I can devour start to finish on a Saturday. But then there are the books that make you slow down and savor them. The big books. And I do love big books.

What are your favorite epic reads? What’s the longest book you’ve ever read?

links are my Amazon affiliate links and help support my blogging habit

This week I signed up for BuzzFeed’s Week in Cats newsletter, and I feel no shame. I also ran a blog challenge over at Desk PM, met with a new client, and went out for drinks like a grownup!

I also got this new cabinet at Ikea, and I think it’s just about the final touch on our no-longer-so-new-to-us house.

I got this pink cabinet at IKEA today and I'm kind of obsessed with it.

A photo posted by Laura L. (@lclindeman) on Feb 1, 2015 at 5:30pm PST

Now to organize what should go into it…

• From the Storyline blog: You’re never going to be fully ready. I’ve been realizing this very quickly this year as I’m embarking on my freelancing journey!

  …it’s the paddling that keeps you on the board. It’s the forward motion that gives you the stability you need. Sometimes we just have to pick a direction and start pulling that paddle through the water, and along the way we’ll get the stability and confidence we’re looking for. But you’ll never find it at the beginning, standing there, waiting for the waves to stop shaking the board. The waves never stop shaking the board.

• I’m not sure my book club has all 11 of these types, but this was funny to read.

• People got obsessed with the sharks from Katy Perry’s Superbowl halftime show, and this little flip book is pretty good.

• You’ve probably heard about this one: a Detroit man who commutes 23 miles each way to his job, mostly on foot. I could barely believe it was true as I read this story. It’s heartbreaking and heatwarming at the same time.

  At the end of his 2-10 p.m. shift as an injection molder at Schain Mold’s squeaky-clean factory just south of M-59, and when his coworkers are climbing into their cars, Robertson sets off, on foot — in the dark — for the 23-mile trip to his home off Woodward near Holbrook.

• I’m sort of intrigued by this Uber Frugal Month challenge (no, not Uber like the car service!).

  If you know what you’re saving for and what you want your life to look like down the road, it’s not hard to give up lattes, fancy dog coats, and video games in the short term. Having a financial destination makes these immediate sacrifices much more tenable. It’s about structuring your life so that giving these things up doesn’t feel like a sacrifice. It’s about cutting back to a life that fulfills you and only spending money on things that bring joy and value to your life.

• I’m glad to read someone else in the coupon world agreeing with me on credit cards.

• A good reminder, whether you live in a tiny space or not:

  If you’re not going to take advantage of the special functionality of a piece, consider whether it’s worth trading out what you already might have and love for something new.

• How could I resist this re-write of Baby Got Back?

  But, you know, who understands those book nerds anyway? They only read because they’re like total dorky intellectuals. I mean that book, it’s just so hefty, it’s like, a door-stopper, I mean – gross. Look! They’re just so… THICK!

I know you’ll enjoy your Sunday afternoon with THAT in your head!

Some posts here you may have missed: Valentine’s Day Gift Guide (there’s still time!), my January reading recap, and why working at a coffee shop isn’t free.