Decraphobia

I diagnosed myself in a doctor’s waiting room. I have decraphobia. 

Don’t worry - I’m OK.  This happened many years ago. I was waiting for my annual eye exam, leafing through Better Homes and Gardens in the waiting room. One of the writers was lamenting that she has had a fear of decorating - and she named it “decraphobia”. I immediately realized that I had it too!

The symptoms of decraphobia are:

-Fear of painting your wall any color other than off-white. 

-Buying neutral practical furniture and blah curtains to match because you’re afraid to buy the ones you really liked

-Buying something beautiful because it spoke to you (like a red and pink hand-embroidered Mexican poncho) and then getting home and being afraid to display it because it will look out-of-place.

One weekend you decide to overcome your fear and take one baby step:  you’ll paint a tiny space pale lavender and see what happens.  Next thing you know, you’re cringing at the awful purple walls - wait, maybe they’ll grow on me - uh no bit mistake - and now you’ve got the nasty chore of painting it off-white again. What’s worse than a boring off-white wall? Going back to an off-white wall. And another 10 years go by until you are brave enough to try another color in another dwelling. 

Having moved often in my adult life, it was easy to not decorate because why invest in a place when you know it’s temporary?  I also made enough mistakes buying something and hating it. I can’t really trust my own taste.  And what is my taste?  I recently took out every decorative item I have had packed in boxes and assembled them in one place and took a good look:  I have not been loyal to any style. I like too many things! And for those who say, your eclectic mix IS your style - trust me - this stuff really doesn’t work together. I am completely stuck!  I get it now!  Unlike my kids who fearlessly used fairy lights and friends' artwork to decorate their rooms much nicer than anything I ever did, I have no natural talent for this and I can’t afford an interior decorator. 

In other words, I’m going to have to find my own treatment and cure for my decraphobia. 

The journey has begun. 

I took the academic approach:  reading design how-to’s and subscribing to decorating blogs. I find Houzz and Pinterest too overwhelming and hardly use them. I went to the library and discovered The New Bohemians by Justina Blakeney which even comes with a workbook that I found useful. I’ve also gravitated to lessons on Hygge - the Danish way to make a home cozy. 

By coincidence, I started a new consulting gig recently where I have a big blank cubicle right when I had just made the big pile of all my decorative things. I followed the rules of Hygge and decorated the cubicle with a pretty rug, small lamps, fairy lights, a couple of ceramic bowls and baskets, a small sketch by my father, a few Indian fabrics and some green sprigs of rosemary and ivy in vases. And I added a coffee and cookies corner with cute little cups from Israel and a bag of freshly ground coffee. The result is very pleasing, a cozy homey little corner. You could almost forget it's an office cubicle. I did it!  

What I’ve learned is this:

-Find a style or two and be loyal to them. Craftsman and Bohemian are the most us.

-Go with things that speak to you, as long as they map to the style. 

-Have patience. It’s going to take years to curate and evolve your style. Don’t buy something just because you think you need it now. The right things will find you some day.

-Don’t wait 10 years to try another color of paint. 

-The Danish people got it right - you can’t go wrong with Hygge.  I really want to visit Denmark.

Decraphobia is treatable. It starts with awareness and learning, then building confidence. For me, decorating falls under “trying new things” - building a new skill that requires some rules and lots of creativity. I’m usually pretty good at that. I have hope!

Yom Kippur 1988 - Happy Endings

Back in 1988 I worked for a small medical company in San Diego as a secretary to the Vice President of Sales, Mr. Peterson. When hired, I mentioned to HR and Mr. Peterson that I would be taking days off for all the major Jewish holidays and of course, everyone said they were fine with that. 

Until the High Holidays. 

Giving a good 2 months notice, I informed Mr. Peterson and Darlene, the President’s secretary, which days in September I would be out. That’s when Darlene (Queen Bee) said I could not take off on Yom Kippur because the other two secretaries would be on vacation that day and there would not be enough coverage. I had never been asked to cover for anyone and no one had ever covered for me, so this was an odd excuse. 

I politely told Darlene that this is a major religious holiday, my boss and HR approved my days off, and I will not be at work that day but maybe they could not pay me and hire a temp instead. Within no time, things escalated and the President came to tell me that if I didn’t work that day, I would be fired. 

We had one other Jewish employee, an older gentleman and an executive, who took me aside and asked me to please come to work on Yom Kippur. “What’s the big deal? So you miss one holiday? You’re making all of us Jews look bad.”  It was one of my first experiences standing up to a superior at the office, and an elder, and saying, “shame on you!”  We were perhaps two generations apart in age which may have partly explained the difference. Before the law changed in the 1960’s, you could get fired for taking a religious holiday off without your employer’s permission. 

Being young and inexperienced, I called my synagogue to ask for advice. “Call the Jewish Anti Defamation League”. I did. I think I left a message on their answering machine (very ’80’s)

The next afternoon at work, the President came storming over to my desk and yelled at me in front of a room full of people: “If you think you’re going to intimidate me with some loud-mouth lawyer, you’re wrong, young lady. If you don’t work that day, I will personally fire you.”

I guess the ADL sent a lawyer, unannounced, to barge into the President’s office to threaten him. I never met the guy. 

I took the day off. 

There were several happy endings to this story. 

I was not fired. 

I resigned a couple of weeks later. 

Mr. Peterson and the secretary who replaced me fell in love, got married and lived happily ever after.

At a young age, I strengthened my convictions about standing up for my rights and what I believe in. When do you go along with things to make problems go away and when do you fight for what’s right?  I stood my ground in the storm which was really hard. I learned about egos and empty threats and about the concept of religious freedom. 

During the High Holiday season, I have found that the act of asking for the days off and letting managers and coworkers know when I’ll be out of the office and why is a ritual on its own. The ritual has its own phrases uttered, preparations, stories and repetitions. 

And after that comes the ritual of sending out Rosh Hashanah cards. 

May you be inscribed in the Book of Life.  Happy 5779!  

Proof that I'm Responsible

Why endanger the lives of others when an employees work on a spreadsheets?

Why risk health or injury when a team member schedules a meeting in a conference room or books a flight?

I spend my entire days at work sending Outlook email and calendaring meetings, adding data to Excel reports or editing someone’s PowerPoint slides for spelling. Sometimes I order office supplies or a catered lunch for a meeting. 

I was wondering why companies have been so trusting all these years that I could use these dangerous tools and execute such risky tasks without any sort of test. Today was the day their trust has finally ended. 

I had to take a drug test for my new job. 

I entered a very small room with a man. I was given a sheet with instructions of many steps of collecting my “donor specimen”. I had to empty my pockets, step away from my purse and my possessions, go wash my hands, listen to elaborate instructions that involved not flushing and then sign several documents. Then I was instructed to pick up the cup from that table, enter the restroom on the other side of this door, and I was given precisely 4 minutes to pee. Afterwards, I repeated the process in reverse, putting the cup back, washing my hands, signing, collecting my possessions. All while this man was watching me (except while I was in the bathroom).

This is where my newest employment situation has led me. I need a drug test to use Microsoft Office and sit in a cubicle with a laptop. 

It's been a bit of a journey getting here. 

In May 2016, I was part of a large layoff at a company where I had happily worked for 11+ years. Greg and I moved away from the lucrative but frenzied world of Silicon Valley to Sonoma County, where life is a lot quieter but there are few really good companies. I have developed a preference for working in publicly traded techy companies. There are very few of those in our new area. 

I began applying for Executive Assistant jobs at formidable companies in early 2017. There were very few jobs posted so I went to a classic “temp agency”, where I got an assignment for a small private medical company supporting the CEO. They made me an offer to hire me directly and I worked there for about a year. They had some financial challenges and laid me off in March 2018. 

Before starting a proper job search, I turned my LinkedIn profile to “available for new opportunity” and my phone started ringing daily. The tech companies have a new business model - they hire most administrative people through 24 month contracts through MSPs (Managed Service Providers).  The benefits are minimal and not really beneficial. Their health insurance plan is often higher than whatever you already pay on your own. You don’t accrue vacation days or sick days. 

A company posts a job requisition for a 24 month contract. All these MSPs rush to find candidates to submit and win the contract. They are extremely aggressive and pushy. They want you to reply to every request in the next 5 minutes. They call, text and email incessantly until they hear from you. 

In May I started to work at a great company with local headquarters on a contract as an admin assistant. I settled in quickly and enjoyed the work and the people and they have been happy with my work. Then I got an offer from another great company, at a much higher rate. Although my nature is to be loyal and continue where things are going well, I can’t turn down the higher pay when I’m not receiving any benefits. 

The goal is to get hired as a direct employee. The business model of hiring contractors is difficult for employee and employer. As an employee, just after I got trained, I am moving on to start all over again elsewhere. My employer is sorry to see me go and they have to start all over again to find a new person and train them. 

That’s the job climate now. The economy is good. Companies are hiring but fewer direct employees. There is a shortage of skilled experienced employees like me. Yet it’s really hard for employees to find a full time direct hire job with benefits. 

So in addition to the routine background check, I took my first ever drug test to prove that I am responsible. If I pass, my new employer can feel secure knowing that I won't come to work high and injure anyone with my mouse or show up staggering drunk and send a ridiculous email.  

Happy Birthday!

No matter how many times I say that my birthday is just another day, I can't help it, when I wake up in the morning of July 6, it still feels special. 

Having a birthday so close to a major national holiday, it often falls on a vacation. As a child, we celebrated my birthday party with friends in early June, before school was over and everyone was gone for the summer. My family usually went on a little getaway for the long holiday weekend. My memories of childhood birthdays are of places like Atlantic City,  by the beach, salt water taffy, small amusement park rides, skee ball, and having fun times with my parents. Wonderful memories!

As an adult, it's often a day off from work. Now that's a nice birthday present!  But even when it's not, no one in the office knows so I have never had to suffer the "surprise" cake in a conference room. It's the only day I don't have to think to remember the date!

It's funny to do some ordinary little errand that requires a clerk to look at your ID. Suddenly there is a change from the bored required glance to "Oh, wait, it's your birthday! Happy Birthday!"  Yay!  They noticed!

No doubt about it, there is something about birthdays that brings out the child in me. If you have happy birthday memories, you wake up remembering them and anticipating nice things to happen all day. Thank you to everyone who has made those memories for me!

I am now going to work where no one knows but I'll probably be texting and smiling a lot. 

It's a Jungle Out There!

It seems like only yesterday that I had small starter plants all over the garden and it was so easy to pick off a few dead leaves and clip straying branches. Now you wouldn’t recognize the place. Despite my pruning every few days, a few tomato and cucumber vines have taken over the raised beds, covering all the other vegetables and flowers in their path. The bean pole, eggplant, peppers and leeks are fighting to get past them and it’s all a big tangle. Vines have gone down the sides of the raised beds and continue down the path. It’s a jungle out there. 

With 1000 cucumbers soon to ripen, what are my options?

Make pickles

Pro:   Holiday gifts will be ready early

Con:  House will reek

Hang a “You Pick” sign out front and charge $$/basket

Pro:  Make money and work less

Con:  Pickers will leave trash and traipse though the house to use our bathroom

Give them away to the food bank and friends

Pro:   I’ll feel good

Con:  Can’t think of one!

I found it hard to come up with a blog chapter in recent weeks because I couldn’t find a way to write that wouldn’t sound like an activity report. We’ve been very busy with many un-sexy household projects to improve the infrastructure of the new house. We had the entire electrical system upgraded, we had central heating and air-conditioning installed and next week a contractor will convert a closet into a powder room. 

The house has a lot of old appliances too and things are breaking faster than we can replace or fix them. Although the inspector’s report said the house is solid, it feels like everything is held together with duct tape. The previous owners was a fix-it-yourself guy and things are patched together. On the positive side, I am learning a lot of new vocabulary; words like: flashing, epoxy and p-trap. I’ve actually used the Santa Rosa Tool Library. I checked out an Orbital Sander and made a big mess resurfacing the butcher block kitchen island. 

I suppose I am suffering from "decision fatigue". This is the home in which we plan to grow old and these projects are things we will use daily for decades. You want to get it right. Eight weeks ago our bathroom contractor said "just find a toilet and a sink." But a bathroom, no matter how small, has a sink, faucet, toilet, flooring, baseboard, paint, lights, and eventually towel rack, toilet paper holder, mirror and storage. Starting to look for these items will take you down aisles of Home Dept you never knew existed. Your neck hurts from looking up at displays - rows of faucets mounted 6-12 feet above you. There are limitations to the size of what will fit into what is about the the size of an airplane lavatory.  Toilets come in so many shapes and sizes, flushing technology, water usage, seat height and length - and prices! 

There is little time for reflection when you’re shopping for toilets or interviewing HVAC vendors. I would like to say I stopped to smell the roses but the truth is, our rose bushes got black spot right after we moved in and I began spraying them every day with Neem oil and carefully picking off the diseased leaves. They’re better now.

While most infrastructure projects are not very exciting, there is one I must rave about, something that gives us great delight and was not a decision we had to make.  Our new heating and air conditioning system is on wifi. That’s how they're made now. So we have an app on our phone and we can change the temperature before we get home. Heading home from work….oh, it’s over 80 in the house…let’s bring it down to 72. Such magical power!

I also started a new job recently. I was laid off from the small medical company a few months ago and I’m now at a local tech company. The people are great, the pace is sane and I’m quite happy there. After spending nine hours at the keyboard, I head for the garden as soon as I get home and consult with Greg about whatever house project we’re working on. 

Of course, we could have left all the old things as they were. We could have blown a fuse every time we made toast. We could have left the old floor furnace in the middle of the living room and escaped to the coast during every heat wave. We could wait and take turns using the one bathroom. And I could just put in a rock garden and I'd have a lot more free time. But what fun would that be?

Trying New Things - Part II - One Thing Leads to Another

They say the garden is a metaphor for life.

I'm convinced that pie was invented by a gardener who had too much ugly fruit about to spoil. 

Last summer, I planted three tomato starters and finally had success. I had an abundance of cherry tomatoes at my community garden bed and a coworker who brought shopping bags of her tomato harvest to the break room. We also started to have heat waves of 110 degrees and I began to wonder: how do you sun dry tomatoes?  Next thing I knew, I was watching YouTube videos of handsome Italian chefs preserving tomatoes many different ways. I experimented with some of them. Them meaning tomatoes...not Italian chefs. 

My preferred method was to dry my tomatoes in the oven overnight. They taste like candy! Once I learned that dehydrating is so easy and brings out such intense flavor, I started to dehydrate everything. You almost can’t screw it up.  It’s a great way to not waste fruits and vegetables that are starting to wilt. And the flavors are much better than packaged store-bought. 

Once I had all this dehydrated food, I looked for ways to add them to recipes. My favorite recipe was to sauté zucchini, peppers and garlic, then put them with the dried tomatoes and a little olive oil into the food processor. 

Then came the office plants. Mid-summer, my desk moved next to a window in the office. The first thing I did was to  buy a few indoor plants. This was new territory for me. At first they all thrived, then they began to fail. To save them, I clipped a healthy part and stuck it in water. Roots sprouted quickly and suddenly I had new "free" plants! This is propagating - another new thing! The minute I discovered free plants, I began to carry scissors in my purse so that I could take clippings of anything I wanted along the road or from other people’s gardens. 

If you can picture me collecting clippings everywhere and sticking them in yogurt containers and empty bottles, you may wonder: what will you do with all these plants? Rogue gardening. I will stick a plant in the ground anywhere to see if it will grow. You can fill in empty little spaces with cute plants. You just have to be OK with going out of your way to water them and to experience a lot of failure. 

And then....somewhere in the middle of all this propagating, planting and harvesting, we adopted a load of carnivorous plants when Greg’s niece and her husband moved out of state and had to leave them behind. We had no idea what we were taking on. We got two trays of plants, books and a shopping bag with accessories (magnifying glass, watering bottles, misters, etc). We immediately learned that these sensitive plants don’t like the chemicals in our tap water, so I buy them filtered water at the grocery store. They want to be misted as often as possible and they are the thirstiest plants you’ve ever seen so the filtered water goes fast. 

Fortunately Liane worked with these plants at the Conservatory of Flowers and gave us lots of good advice. The plants are doing really well, which is ironic. I quickly killed the hardy indoor office plants that supposedly needed little light or water. But these sensitive high maintenance carnivorous plants are very happy. We are doing our best to give them a rain forest environment in our dry California living room. 

Yes - I shop and water and mist so that Larry, Moe and Curly can enjoy a spa and gourmet meal every day.  I don't have a spa. I don't even have a bathtub in our new house, just a shower. Technically we do have a bathtub, but it's outside in the middle of the garden near the hose. Wait...my tub is outdoors but my plants get to bathe indoors. Something is wrong!

So the garden is a perfect metaphor for life. You start with one plot with a few outdoor plants and next thing you know, you've got plants and food all over the place and all kinds of things that keep them alive or make them taste good. One thing leads to another. Some things thrive, others wilt. You tackle the pests. With stupidity and perseverance, you move the same compost pile four times to get it to the right spot. You try to control the weeds which will never be under control. You pride yourself on growing the best tomato you've ever tasted and you realize you just killed your cucumbers. And you can't wait to start all over again. 

Patience and Fortitude

If Lon Chaney, Man of a Thousand Faces, was worthy of a Hollywood movie, then I get a movie about me too. I am Woman of a Thousand Projects. 

We are settling into the Decker house. Who knew that Projects have children and grandchildren! You start one and it gives birth to more but without the nine month waiting period. You unhook an old washing machine today and you need a bucket now and a plumber tomorrow. 

Luckily we have a miracle called YouTube. I don’t know how we got things done before YouTube. You can learn anything!  Today I watched videos on planting strawberries and how to harvest the artichokes that are just reaching full size in our new garden. We’ve met new neighbors who gave us advice on solar panels. I enjoyed a free lunch at Meyer’s Restaurant Supply and got a tutorial on induction-ready pots while I shopped their biggest sale of the year. Then Vonnie, the sales lady at Ace Hardware, patiently recommended garden tools. When she heard I was replacing tools after my garden bag had been stolen, she gave me a personal gift - little pruners she bought at the Dollar Store. I’m grateful that people are so kind and enthusiastic to be helpful.

If you followed that last paragraph then you realize I will be using a new garden tool to cut artichokes for the first time and cook them in a new pot on the intimidating “professional” stove.  I watched a YouTube on that stove too…which is why I’m afraid of it! I’ve cooked on open campfires, electric and gas ranges, but don’t ask me why I have "high performance" anxiety about this stove. Maybe it's their choice of words? Or that I had to get new pots because the old ones from Target could melt on this thing? Or that large fires belong outdoors, not in my kitchen?

Have you ever seen the stone lions in front of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and 42 Street?  I went on the library’s free tour last week and found it fascinating and inspiring. Of course now I want a room at home to look like the Rose Reading Room. I can dream! 

The lions were installed in 1911 and were given people-like names to honor the founders. But in the1930’s, the mayor re-named them to qualities he felt New Yorkers would need to survive the economic depression. I think they are qualities one must have when faced with a Thousand Projects. The lions are named

 ---  Patience and Fortitude ---