Over the weekend I read a great post from one of my favorite bloggers, Laura Vanderkam, entitled “How to Score a Better Rhythm for Your Days.” She says, “Time management isn’t just about the management of hours. It’s also about managing energy. Some activities feel more energizing than others. Some are draining enough to require downtime afterwards.”

I hadn’t thought about it in precisely that way, but she sort of hit the nail on the head about something I’ve been feeling lately. Sometimes recently I’ll get to the end of the week and feel like everything I did all week was just things I had to be doing. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy some of them–in general, I like cooking dinner–and that’s also not to say that I don’t take satisfaction in being efficient and having gotten things done–I do. But when all I do every day is go to work, keep the kitchen clean, put food on the table, do the laundry, maybe watch a few TV shows, and sleep, it doesn’t feel sustainable. It starts to feel like I’m on auto-pilot. At this point I can recognize the feeling, but I haven’t exactly narrowed down how to avoid it.

Vanderkam’s approach is highly logical: keep track of your activities and give each of them a score on the scale of -5 to 5. Activities that you label with a negative number are draining, and activities that you label with a positive give you energy. “Think of energy as a pot,” she says. “Some activities pour energy in. Some pour it out.” It’s okay to have SOME negative numbered activities in your week. There are obviously some things that as adults we just have to do that we may not find energizing, but the key is in finding a balance. I touched on this recently when I proclaimed that I would try and do one thing every day that I didn’t have to do. While I still like the concept, I haven’t been great about keeping this resolution. I think my problem lies in not being able to come up with things that do give me energy. So I guess all the more reason to try and pay attention and keep a running list this week!

I do know that I am happier when I’m in the middle of a book. When I have a few minutes of downtime and I can pick it up, it makes me happy. If I have downtime and no book going, I feel adrift! Or if I’m reading a book and not enjoying it, and it’s NOT what I want to turn to when I have time–that’s a problem too. I really can tell a difference in my happiness level depending on having a book going. I like watching TV, and at times I turn to it more than to a book, but in the long-run I enjoy reading more. That’s something to keep in mind.

Being too engrossed in my phone or computer tends to drain me as well, I think. I think that checking Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest and Instagram all. day. long. is something I want to do, but sometimes I find myself sitting there refreshing it just to refresh it. There might only be 3 new tweets since the last time I checked. When I’m absentmindedly picking up my phone and scrolling through Twitter during the commercials of a TV show, that’s draining to me. Times I’ve been away from social media for extended periods (i.e. camping)–I haven’t truly missed it that much. So I think I should be more intentional about creating that space sometimes and not falling into the trap of doing it just because I can.

On the balance scale, I’d say I had a pretty nice weekend. In fact, I think I’m pretty good, in general, at making my weekends (when I’m at home) a good mix of draining and energizing. When there are more hours in the day where I’m left to my own devices it’s a little easier to do, as opposed to during the week when many of my hours are taken up with work. (Again, not that there aren’t things I enjoy at work, but on the whole I’m not able to craft my day precisely as I might like.) On Friday evening I tried to convince myself to go to the gym, but I just couldn’t muster it. But I knew I wanted to do something, so instead I played Just Dance on the Wii! I burned some calories and had fun. (I am NOT a particularly good dancer, but I enjoy it.) I enjoyed spending the evening with my husband and even stayed up a little late sans guilt (usually I feel bad about staying up past my self-imposed bedtime) to watch an episode of a TV show I’ve been enjoying. I slept in a little bit on Saturday but then went to yoga, which was great. In the afternoon I interspersed cleaning up the kitchen, cleaning the bathroom, and cooking dinner with more fun activities like reading and watching “Orange is the New Black” on Netflix. Sunday I served as the volunteer operations coordinator at church (draining!) but then got to read and clip coupons all afternoon before meeting some friends for dinner. We shared delicious tapas and two bottles of wine and it was nice to start the week having not had to cook dinner! On the whole I felt rejuvenated by my weekend, so I must have gotten the balance on the positive side.

I’d love to know how this plays out in your life. What activities energize you, and what activities drain you? Do you try and balance the two out?

Okay, so, my dad sent me a link to this video (Dan Pallotta, “The Way We Think About Charity is Dead Wrong”) in, um, May. And I am notoriously bad at watching or listening to things on the internet. But I was tired of having it lingering in my inbox and finally decided to watch it. And it was 18 minutes of my life well-spent.

I work in the non-profit sector. I honestly didn’t consider working anywhere else out of college, mostly because I had fallen in love with some inner city kindergartners and knew that whatever I wanted to do needed to be for their good. I’ve been satisfied with the jobs I’ve found, but I know that’s not always the case. And it seems like I’m reading more and more about our society treats the non-profit sector like a redheaded step-child, thus hindering us from enacting REAL social change.

Dan Pallotta opened his TED Talk by talking about some developmentally disabled adults that he works with. He said what they really want is to be loved, and in his eyes, “Philanthropy is the market for love. It is the market for all those people for whom no other market is coming.”

Yes and yes and amen. That’s why I do what I do. So without further ado, the talk: (More comments from the peanut gallery below.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=bfAzi6D5FpM

A few things that particularly struck me:

• Because of the outcry against high salaries for charity CEOs, it's cheaper for a Stanford MBA (who could make $400,000 a year at his/her job) to donate $100,000 a year to a hunger charity than it would be for him/her to take a job as its CEO.
• Charitable giving has been stuck at 2% of American GDP since 1970, with 80% of that going to religious and educational institutions (i.e. not health and human services organizations).
• "We're dealing with social problems that are massive in scale and our organizations can't generate any scale. All of the scale goes to Coca Cola and Burger King."
• Our ideas about charity go back to Puritan times. The Puritans were hardcore capitalists who wanted to make a lot of money, but they were also Calvinists who were taught to hate themselves and feel guilty for doing well. So charitable giving was basically their penance for making money.
• Overhead is no an enemy to the cause! In fact, without being given the freedom to spend on overhead, charities can't grow.

Another great resource on this topic is “The Looking Glass World of Nonprofit Money” by Clara Miller.

If I didn’t work in this realm I’m not sure I would give these issues a second thought, and that’s exactly why we’re still in the bind we’re in. People have unspoken expectations of what nonprofits should be accomplishing, but until we start addressing the issues in Pallott’s talk, I don’t think much is really going to change on a large scale. (Sure, plenty of grassroots organizations are doing awesome things in their communities, but I’m talking bigger picture.) What do you think?

Several of my favorite bloggers post a menu plan every week, and for whatever reason I find it fascinating to get that little glimpse into their lives. Since I already plan my meals every week I thought I’d give sharing them a try!

For all I love couponing and finding a good markdown at the grocery store, I’ve honestly found that planning my meals out for the week makes the biggest impact on my grocery budget. I sit down every weekend and look at our calendar for the week to figure out if any of our meals are covered by an event or gathering. I also take into account what I have going at work or otherwise in the evenings when I decide how involved of a recipe to choose for a given night. Then I take stock of what I’ve got on hand in the pantry, fridge, and freezer and see what ideas I come up with. Then, I check out Pinterest and my recipe binder to fill in the blanks. With tabs open to every recipe, I make my grocery list from the ingredients, using this time to also double check if I have any required staples (flour, various spices, etc.) This is backwards from how most couponers will tell you to do it (make your plan based on your grocery store’s weekly ad), but it works for me.

You’ll notice I’ve only planned out dinners. After years of breakfast ADD, I’ve settled on a bowl of cereal, a hard boiled egg, and some type of fruit every morning, so I just make sure I have all of those things on hand. Andy eats breakfast at work. Lunch is usually leftovers, but if I know I’ve got a dinner planned that won’t leave much for the next day, I make sure to have bread and lunch meat around.

So, without further ado, this week’s plan!

Sunday leftover chicken enchilada casserole sliced avocado steamed broccoli via Live Better America

Monday sesame tofu green beans sauteed chard (The chard has just looked so beautiful at the grocery store lately!) via Use Real Butter

Tuesday white bean burgers with creamy cucumbers* frozen mixed vegetables

Wednesday loaded potato soup (Imagine Brand, found on closeout at Kroger) stuffed mushrooms (leftover from a recipe last week) cut up vegetables

Thursday “souper” pork chop in the Crockpot* (with one large pork chop that I found on Manager’s Special) brown rice salad via Plain Chicken

Friday frozen fish on cheese grits (recipe courtesy of Brad Chaires, aka Daddy…his handwritten recipe proclaims, “These are great grits!” and warns to add the grits slowly as they will speed O2 release causing a rapid release of bubbles - i.e. will boil over!) succotash with frozen corn and lima beans

Saturday cheese quesadillas Southwestern chopped salad with cilantro dressing* via The Garden Grazer

P.S. An asterisk indicates a new recipe for me. I tend to rarely make the same thing twice! P.P.S. Pictures not my own. Credit for the picture and recipe indicated in link below each one.

So there you have it! A week’s worth of at-home eating. Let me know if you like this feature and I’ll try to do it more regularly!

Some years ago, I went to camp in Idyllwild, CA. If you’ve been paying attention to the news lately, you might recognize that name as the name of a town being threatened by a wildfire. There was a fire the second summer I was there, but it was farther down the mountain and didn’t force us to evacuate as they’ve had to this year. Still, I can remember the faint haze of smoke in the air, the sting of it in my eyes, and the fire trucks they brought up to the campus, just in case.

I hadn’t thought about Idyllwild for years, but seeing the name on the news the other morning made me start to remember it. And memory is a funny thing. I can remember numerous quirky details from the two camp sessions I attended there. I can remember a few names of people who became important to me there, but no faces, really. This was pre-Facebook, so I can’t look back at my pictures and statuses to decipher the facts. But somehow I can remember the feeling of being there. I have a deep nostalgia for it. I remember the paths, and the auditorium, afternoons at the pool, and the teenage boys with skateboards. It’s all wrapped in this haze, as if it happened to someone else, a lifetime ago, and I watched it as a movie once. But then the random details are so vivid, I know I must have lived it myself…

I found Idyllwild because I was granted a scholarship from the theatre department at my school in 8th grade. I attended APAC in the Jackson, MS Public Schools from 4th grade through 10th grade. APAC was a unique program that allowed students to test into advanced academic classes and audition for an art “major” to do as well. In 4th and 5th grade, you attend academic classes in the mornings and your art major in the afternoon, all on the same campus. In middle school, you attended your art in the morning and were then bused to a different school for your academics. And in high school, you attended academic classes at one high school all day and then walked down the hill to the other campus for your art. The scholarship to Idyllwild was a coveted award that I was ecstatic to receive. My parents flew out there and dropped me off, then took a drive up Route 1 for their own vacation. They sent me a postcard with an otter.

What I mostly remember about that first year was that everyone was enthralled by my supposed southern accent. Southern Californians evidently didn’t encounter too many people from Mississippi, and so I became known simply as the name of my state. We stayed in cabins segregated by girls and boys. There was a drought that summer and signs in all the bathroom stalls admonished, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.” As girls are wont to do, our extracurricular hobby seemed to be lurking outside the boys cabin, teasing and being teased. I was doing the musical theatre camp that year, and our play was based on the non-fiction book The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio. I can’t remember much about the play, but I could still sing you several of the songs. The mother in the story wrote jingles to support her family, and in fact the jingle we sang for Tetley Tea goes through my head just about every time I make a cup. I wore high heels for the first time as the aunt-character I played, and I remember a heel getting stuck in a crack between slats of our outdoor stage as I was trying to come on for the curtain call. I came out barefoot. I made friends with a boy named Ari from Marin County. Some nights a group of us played spin-the-bottle in the woods. On the last night of camp, several of us decided to sleep on the deck of our cabin and look at the stars. I tried to take a picture of the sky but my little point and shoot camera couldn’t do it justice at all. I missed the first week of high school while I was out there, because schools in California start much later.

I loved Idyllwild so much that I went back the next year on my parents’ dime. This time I had “aged up,” so our accommodations were more dorm-like. I roomed with one of the scholarship recipients from my school that I didn’t know well, and it was odd being together in such a non-school setting. When I got to camp my name tag said “Laura Chaives,” because evidently my adolescent r’s looked like v’s. I took the poetry workshop that year. Our classroom was a treehouse-like cube on the outskirts of the camp, nestled amongst the trees. I made a friend that year named Hannah. Our poetry teacher called us Mutt and Jeff, based on an old cartoon, because I was tall and thin and she was short and round. Hannah had diabetes, and since it was cheaper to buy one big drink from the snack counter and share it than to buy two smaller ones, I got hooked on the Diet Coke she had to drink. We also loved the cheese fries you could buy there, and Luna bars from the bookstore: Chai Tea and Lemon Zest. I had one just the other day and remembered sitting outside at a picnic table, making Hannah laugh so hard that Diet Coke came out her nose. I also made friends with a boy doing the jewelry workshop, and he forged me a ring. There was also a boy named Lori (if memory serves correctly) who played the cello, and I remember listening to him play and falling into the waves of music from that beautiful instrument. I’m not sure I’ve specifically heard a cello since then. One night walking back to the dorm I was convinced there was a bear in my path, but it turned out to be a boulder. This was the year of the fire, and I was amazed at how nonchalant all the Californians seemed to be about it. I was quaking in my boots. I remember going to the theatre performance at an outside amphitheater and being so scared to be out there with a fire raging somewhere nearby. That year the actress who played Matilda in the movie was a fellow camper, but she didn’t want anyone to know who she was. I recently read her article for Cracked about being a child star and I thought about the small part I played in her trajectory by being at camp with her that summer and knowing her “secret.” On my birthday Hannah bought me one present for every hour of the day.

I wrote poems that summer–the best poems I’ve ever written and probably will ever write. Having the structure of a workshop forced me outside the realm of teenage angst poetry in a way that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to muster again. My aunt and uncle, who live in Southern California, came to our culminating reading and I remember feeling a bit embarrassed to share my rawness with them there. I wore a blue spaghetti strap top and a dusty mauve A-line skirt with blue flowers from Anthropologie for the reading. I’m not sure why I remember that.

Camp relationships are a funny thing. Hannah and I, inseparable for those two weeks, kept in touch with letters from awhile–maybe a year or so. We were on the cusp of adolescence and I think we both had rough 10th grade years. Pen and paper couldn’t convey what we were going through very well and so eventually we fell out of touch. I can’t remember her last name to look her up on Facebook. Ari called me once or twice after that first summer of camp, back when calling long distance was still a big deal, once right after he had broken his wrist playing hockey. I hadn’t even known he played hockey. You get to know someone so deeply by spending two weeks practically living together, and yet in most of the ways that matter you still don’t know them at all.

And all this from a wildfire that put the name of a small mountain town in California in the news…

I just finished reading a book called The Astronaut Wives Club by Lily Koppel. I saw it in at least one magazine, if not multiple magazines, as a “summer” book suggestion, and I uncharacteristically added it to my Amazon wishlist before it was even released! I don’t have a fan girl personality and I’m usually late to trends, but I love a good historical nonfiction account. I resisted buying it the day it came out, but a few days after, when I found myself without a book to read, I snagged it for my Kindle and dove in immediately. However, just a few pages in I was already disappointed.

The concept is fascinating: the true story of the wives behind the famous astronauts. For real life, they created an actual Astronaut Wives Club. Having come mostly from military backgrounds, they were used to the structure of the Officers’ Wives Club. Plus, given that they were essentially thrust into the national spotlight as soon as their husbands were selected by NASA, they needed a strong support group. AND, they were dealing with highly stressful situations while the men they loved were, you know, blasted off into the ether on experimental rockets! So needless to say the club was super important to them.

The book lacked any structure at all, though, and I kept losing track of which wife was being talked about. The chapter breaks seemed completely arbitrary, and the author jumped from subject to subject with every new paragraph. She tried so hard to cover the entire span of the space race that no one incident or character was explored in much detail. The recounting was done in a totally summary manner, sans emotion or fluff. I felt almost like I might as well have been reading a Wikipedia article!

It also felt like the author had decided ahead of time what she wanted to say, rather than doing extensive research and letting that shape the theme of the book. I really appreciate a well-researched nonfiction book, even if it’s not on a topic I necessarily care that much about. The details, when it’s clear that the author has worked her tail off to include them, draw me in. Not so with this book. It seemed like she wanted it to be a book about feminism, and the changes that took place from the 1950s in the ’60s, and then from the ’60s into the ’70s. And since the space race spanned just about that time period, she tried to force the wives’ stories into a book about feminism. But it wasn’t working for me. As she arbitrarily dropped in snippets about what was happening in the feminist timeline, it made the descriptions of the wives’ “stereotypical” roles feel demeaning and forced. If she was going to paint them as stereotypes, I would rather read the original Life magazine articles that described them that way! It felt unfair the way the author described them, when she was supposed to be taking a sympathetic stance to tell their stories for the first time.

Furthermore, something about the writing was just off. The sentences came across as juvenile, and there was no flow. But even though it sounds like I’m telling you very clearly what I didn’t like about the book, I have a hard time pinpointing exactly what it was that didn’t work. I felt the whole time like I wanted someone else to read it and help me figure out why I thought the book was so bad!

So there you have it: an invitation. Sure, I’ve just slammed The Astronaut Wives Club for over 500 words, but I’d love for you to read it. I’d love for you to read it and help me decipher why, exactly, it didn’t live up to they hype. And who knows? Maybe it will for you. Maybe I am overly critical and too harsh a judge of language. I finished the book in spite of all this, but I feel like it only whet my appetite for wanting to know more about these women, and about the space race in general. Any other books you can recommend on that topic? Not like my to-read list needs any expanding, but it never hurts to ask!