Things break. This is part of life, though always annoying to deal with. This week involved fixing several things.
Among them: the wallpaper in the dining room. When we renovated this house several years ago, I chose a lovely wallpaper for the dining room, little realizing that the front wall of the dining room was not particularly well insulated. This means that when things get very cold outside (and thus the wall gets cold) if the humidity is not perfectly calibrated in the house, we get condensation on the front wall and the wallpaper falls off. We thought we had cracked the code of exactly where it needed to be, and we made it through the very cold stretch, but then we decided to raise the humidity level a bit because we were through it but…one morning last weekend I woke up to the wallpaper falling down. Again.
So I searched in my inbox for my paperhanging guy’s email and sure enough, we last communicated on like Feb 19 2025 when it had happened before. Seems to be a recurring time of year thing around here! Fortunately last year I had already bought an extra roll of the wallpaper — just in case! — and he had a small spot in his schedule to squeeze us in. So that got fixed Wednesday.
(Yes, I have debated just tearing it all down and painting that room but…it is pretty. And maybe it won’t happen again?)
Also on the list this week: My 2011 car. The “check oil level” light would come on (with an annoying ding) every time I turned sharply or went over a bump. While the oil wasn’t at a low enough level where it would actually require immediate changing, I guess it was sloshing around — probably a result of things not working perfectly right because the car is just old. With all the potholes we have around here right now the thing was dinging a dozen times in a short drive. So I brought that in to get fixed. I am just shy of 100,000 miles (I only drive this car locally – we use the van for family trips – though did I mention I dinged the passenger door of the van two weeks ago?) and I talked with them about the recommended maintenance for 100k miles and the stuff involved would basically be more than the car is worth. So, debating that. I really don’t want to go buy a car.
Sadly, bodies require maintenance too. I realized that a lot of my annual check up stuff was in March last year which means theoretically I should be scheduling all that again too. Was it really a year ago? I made two of the kids’ well visit appointments. Eventually I will get to the two others.
In the meantime: this week’s content! Over at Before Breakfast I interviewed Farnoosh Torabi, host of the So Money podcast, and also the co-host of a new hyper-local podcast all about Montclair, NJ. Local journalism is staying strong in a new way, which I think is very cool.
In the short episodes, I talk about how to “Make your own magic” — you have the power to create whatever fun you want to see in your life — and about “One way to make your inbox more fun.” Sending emails to people you like is a good way to get nice emails back!
Over at Vanderhacks, my Substack newsletter, I am writing about how to “Calm the chaos” — 9 little strategies to make a schedule less stressful. I’m also writing about how to “Keep people from misspelling your name” (a perennial issue with a name like “Vanderkam”). Behind the paywall I wrote about “7 small wins you can achieve by Sunday night.” People often bite off more than they can chew on weekends, but it’s fun to hit the end of the weekend feeling like you have actually accomplished something.
Thank you for supporting my work! A quick reminder that Big Time will be out in less than 3 months. Pre-orders are helpful for showing booksellers that people will want to read this — so if you can pre-order from your favorite retailer that would be amazing. If that’s not in the cards right now, please consider asking your library to order the book. Patron requests influence how many copies any given library will buy (plus if you request it now you may be able to get in front of the queue to check it out, depending on how your library hold system works). Thank you!
Photo: Still snowy mid-week, but almost all of this is gone now. Though we might get more Sunday…
