Walk in the Glow of Each Other's Majestic Presence

As my regular readers know, I've recently started making ice cream and sorbet on a fairly frequent basis. All the containers I've tried using have cracked from the whole freezing-and-being-poked-with-spoons process.

So, what do you store your ice cream in?

A few weeks ago, an interviewer asked Jonathan Carroll to pick the one book he would give to aliens to explain humanity and the human condition. You can read his answer here.

What would you pick?

So, a friend would like to buy shoes for his husband and asked me for advice. I don't have any, so I turn to my widely knowledgeable friends for help.

Now, my friend has a very simple approach to shoes. About once a year he goes to Payless and plunks down $19.99 for a pair of black lace-ups and wears them until they get holes in the soles a year later, when he repeats the process. His husband has a similar process, but doesn't like cheap shoes. So he goes to Bass or Timberland or wherever and plunks down $100 for a pair of black lace-ups and wears them until they get holes in the soles a year later, when he repeats the process.

The question is, are there actually men's shoes of sufficient quality that they would not fall apart in a year or so of constant wear? Can one plunk down $200 or $400 or whatever and actually get shoes that are better?

Any suggestions?

I have a shelf-full of stuffed animals (soft toys) collecting dust on a shelf in my workroom. Can anyone suggest a good way to dust them? I had thought of putting them in the dryer for a few minutes, and then someone said "use low heat!" and, well, our dryer doesn't have a low heat setting. No, really--the only variable setting is time. Would putting them in for, say, ten minutes be useful and reasonably harmless, y'think?

I have a very good memory. It's not perfect, it's not eidetic, but it's very good. This can occasionally create problems: because my memory is usually good enough to keep track of my social engagements, I don't calendar them very rigorously. And then, once in a while, something does manage to slip my mind. Like now.

I know that there are two things I wanted to do tomorrow evening and that it seemed plausible to me that I might be able to do both. There are several things going on that either aren't of particular interest to me, or that are implausible in combination with the stuff I want to do. The most frustrating part is that I remember thinking earlier this evening Oh yes, that's the other thing I wanted to do tomorrow night! Good thing I remembered it!. But apparently it's very slippery, because it's gone again.

So if you know what it is that I can't remember, let me know. (Or if you're muffyjo and I happened to say it out loud when I remembered it and you happen to remember what I said, speak right up.) I'm going to screen comments so that if it's an invite-only kind of thing, you needn't feel shy about it.

Drat! I hate this feeling.

I've been having a productive morning. The laundry is sorted and the washer and dryer humming madly. I've cleared up the mess of coke pallets in the laundry room, breaking them down for recycling pickup tomorrow. I went through all the mail, shredded the garbage with numbers on it, recycled most of the rest, paid the bills and put a new pile of catalogs in the bathroom for Christmas shopping.

While all of this has been going on, I've been thinking about a conversation about goals and priorities that I've had with a friend over the past few years. He rarely makes the same choices that I would and vice versa and at one point he revealed that he is occasionally nervous that I think the less of him for that. I responded that after years of puzzlement, I had finally figured out that, unlike myself, he's not optimizing his life for happiness. He's perfectly willing to be unhappy with a situation rather than upset the balance of his life. Some people try to maximize money, or fame, or professional success, or creativity, or altruism.

So that's my question today--what are you optimizing your life for?