New flooring in the works

Now that we finished painting in our living room and halls, we are hoping to install new flooring.

Vinyl plank flooring might be a good option. It is water proof so it can be used in the kitchen too. Since the kitchen and living room and hallway are sort of a continuous open loop design already, I want the same flooring throughout. It seems like it will feel more open and larger and less chopped up and cluttered than the way it looks now with brown carpet in the living room and halls and white-ish tile in the kitchen.

We haven’t finished painting the kitchen yet though. Maybe we need to hold off a little longer until we get that done. But meanwhile we are looking at samples.

I’m disappointed with the limited color choices for vinyl planking I’ve seen so far. Dark and especially gray tones seem to be the preference among the designers.

Gray has been a popular color for a while now. It started with stainless steel fridges and stoves, then gray became a popular wall color and now even furnishings and floors are gray. If you are tired of that though, the new color in fridges is black!

An article I read on flooring trends said that hardwood is the in thing. And apparently it has to be very dark so it won't be "dated." Maybe I should say, dark fake wood. Everyone wants their house to look like an old barn or something. Or is it an old farm house? But, if you don’t happen to live in a house like that, we don’t, you can get vinyl flooring that looks like wood. I used to like the wood-look flooring. But after looking at all these samples I am getting tired of it a little. If we have to get fake something on our floor why does it have to be fake "wood"? It reminds me of all that awful dark brown “wood” paneling that was so popular in the ‘70s. Now no one wants that. In a couple of decades all this dark fake wood flooring will probably be just as passé. If everyone decorates the same way for a while then in a few years it will become "dated" no matter how popular it was or maybe because of how popular it was once.

I don’t want to live in a black hole. I need brightness and light. Maybe I have SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) but I would be sad for sure if everything in my house was dark gray or black. We don't get much natural lighting in our house so I have been trying for almost 25 years to lighten things up. Dark gray floors is going in the wrong direction!

Purse downsizing -- is it life changing?

Tuesday morning I got inspired to clean out and declutter my purse after reading “10 Life Changing Minimalist Practices” by one of my favorite YouTube vloggers, minimalist Shannon Torrens. In it she wrote, among other things, how much it helped her to downsize her purse and that she didn’t even miss the things she removed.

I already wear my purse across my body like she recommends because that is better for my back and shoulders. But mine has gotten too heavy even so and gives me pain where the strap rests on my shoulder at the base of my neck. I could get a back pack style that would distribute the weight more evenly. Though I am concerned that would not be secure enough. Experts recommend carrying them in front which seems awkward.

I dumped all the stuff out of it onto my bed and started sorting. I was surprised how much junk there was. I didn’t think to weigh it until after I discarded the junk and removed a few extra hankies that were in there but they were light so it wouldn’t have made much difference. The total weight of the purse plus contents, was 4.2 pounds (1.91 kilograms). My empty purse weighs 1.2 pounds. That means there were 3 pounds of stuff in it (that is almost one and a half kilograms.)

I looked it up and the average woman’s handbag, including contents, weighs 5.5 pounds according to one article, and 6.27 pounds according to another. But the "ideal" weight, according to the USDA, is no more than 2.2 pounds. (I wonder why the US Department of Agriculture is studying the weight of women's handbags?)

Anyway, I separated out several things that I don’t need very often but I keep in my purse “just in case” and put them in a Ziploc bag to keep in the glove compartment in my car for when I need them.  I was amazed to discover that my little coin purse weighs 0.482 pounds (7.712 ounces). That is almost a half-pound of coins that I almost never need. I put it in the “just in case” bag as well. The total of all that stuff is 0.6 pounds (9.6 ounces).

That reduced my purse to 3.6 pounds. But I wanted to do better.

I weighed my wallet and keys since they seemed a little heavier than necessary and I thought I could reduce them a little.

The wallet was 0.820 pounds (13.12 ounces). After removing unnecessary business and "reward" cards and filing receipts I got the wallet down to 0.694 pounds (11.15 ounces). It’s probably heavier than average because it’s leather. (I got fed up with how quickly cheaply made wallets fell apart so I splurged.)

The keys were 0.422 (6.752 ounces). (That included a separate set for our RV.) That is too many keys! I decided to only keep keys in my purse that I will need when I am out and about. Other keys such as RV keys and ones I only need while at home--such as mail box and filing cabinet keys--I won’t keep in my purse. Hopefully that won’t lead to too many frantic searches or confusion. I also removed all but one key tag/rewards card—a couple I put in my wallet in place of the full-sized rewards cards that I was also carrying. I may not even need those since just giving my phone number seems to be enough at most stores. All those changes brought the keys in my purse down to 0.178 pounds (2.85 ounces). That reduced it by 4 ounces.

That got my total down to 3.4 pounds (1.54 kilograms). So now my purse is almost one-pound lighter than when I started. I might look for a smaller purse to get it even lighter.

So will it change my life? I don't know but it was nice to have less weight to carry around yesterday afternoon when I was out for a few hours. I had less pain in my shoulder and it was easier to find things too. I showed my husband later. He joked, “but where will you put the kitchen sink?” I think he was impressed :-)

The American Way

I was shocked to read a couple of weeks ago how much the Chinese government is using technology to track and control their people. Some say that by 2020 there were expected to be 600,000,000 face recognition cameras in China—nearly one for every two Chinese people. They will soon record all public spaces in China. Every inch of every street in Bejing is already covered.

These cameras are also being forcibly installed inside church buildings, including over their doors, offering boxes, and Bible-selling counters. (Persecution against Christians in China is increasing. Their government says Christianity is foreign and evil.)

Last Thursday I visited our car insurance company. I wanted help to set up their “drive safe and save” app on my new cell phone. Drive Safe and Save is an app that is “paired” with a “beacon” --an innocuous looking little square plastic thing-- that we put into our glove box and it tracks how well we drive. The better we drive the more discount we get on our insurance.

My previous cell phone did not have a compass so the app didn’t work on it. But my new phone is more advanced and has a compass so John thought I could probably get the app to work on it.

I called them on the phone earlier that day to ask how to do it. But when I pushed the button on the beacon like the girl said to do, its little red light didn’t light up and the app on the phone didn’t do anything. So, I went into the office to see if they could make it work.

The girl kept pushing the button and nothing happened. She asked me to check the trip log in the app to see if any of the trips were mine. The trip log shows a map and the route taken for each trip, and the time, date and distance. It also grades the driver for acceleration, braking, speed, cornering and phone use. It doesn’t show which car was used though. So, it was a bit of a puzzle to figure out if any of them were mine. (They probably have that info somewhere since they know how much discount to apply to each car.)

After analyzing the log as well as I could I determined that it was only showing my husband’s car. Hmm, I thought, if I was ever suspicious, I could use this to check up on where he was going.

After what seemed an unnecessarily long time, while she continued to push the button and asked me a few more times if any of the trips were mine, she finally said the beacon wasn’t working and she would order a new one for me. She also said if it was working it would have shown my trip to their office.

Afterwards I thought, how ironic, I was shocked by how the Chinese government is tracking their people’s every move, but I just spent all that time intentionally to make sure that my trips can be tracked. All for a discount on our car insurance!

Anything to save money, I thought, I guess that’s the American way.

Yesterday after I wrote that, I thought more about why we are so trusting as to let someone track our trips like that. It’s not really because we care more about saving money than anything else. It’s because we trust that our information will not be misused. Why? Are we just all hopelessly ignorant and naive? Well maybe we are a little. But generally, it’s because we don’t expect our government to use our information against us because, unlike China, our government hasn’t made a habit of doing that. Why is that? I believe it is because our laws and society, for the most part, are based on Christian principles. Things like honesty, justice, "love thy neighbor" and "do unto others what you would have them do unto you." That is the American way. Long may that continue!

For more on persecution of Christians in China:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/13/china-christians-religious-persecution-translation-bible

https://www.christianheadlines.com/contributors/michael-foust/china-installs-surveillance-cameras-in-churches-to-monitor-christians.html