Kondo is the spritely Japanese organization guru who encourages her clients and readers to only keep objects that “spark joy.” Watching the show, you realize there’s no one-size-fits-all joy.

One episode features a woman who collects holiday nutcrackers (though not all Christmas-themed) that sprawl across her basement family room. Banker’s boxes containing her husband’s baseball collection fill her bedroom. As a viewer, it’s easy to look at someone else’s stuff and yell “toss it all!” But as they say, one person’s trash is another person’s treasure.

If white knight Kondo showed up on my doorstep with her black squire translator, she’d find our treasure/trash on our bookshelves. MJ and I read a lot. Always have. And though we pared down our books dramatically when we downsized, we keep reading.

Built-in office bookshelves overflow with research and reference books. The kitchen bookshelf is crammed with cookbooks. A large wooden bookshelf in the living room holds novels, poetry, piano books, and display-worthy design books. (Though many live on the floor behind the sofa.) Books are piled so high on our bedside tables they threaten to topple over and bury us in the night.

One woman’s second copy of Middlemarch is another woman’s Darth Vader nutcracker.

I recently Kondoed my night table by separating the books into categories and placing them in boxes in a little bedroom alcove. But MJ’s pile still loomed large. For Christmas, I gave him a white Story Bookcase from DWR. It stood unopened in our garage until MLK Day weekend when it took up residence in the same little alcove as my boxes of books. Empty, it looked like the spine of a small dinosaur.

I was on the road to recovery and  MJ was home from work, so it seemed like a good time to Kondo his night table books. Kondo says to tap books in order to “wake them up” before you begin sorting. MJ didn’t tap them so much as toss them from his night table to the floor. But maybe that helped, as it wasn’t too painful to sort them into “giveaway” and “keep” piles. By the end of the day forty books and a dozen literary journals rested on the new bookshelf’s vertebrae. Looks so good in our new library alcove, I’m tempted to buy another bookcase for my boxed books.

Only one P. G. Woodhouse volume—the one he’s currently reading—remained on his night table. The next morning he woke up energized by the transformation. But he also dreamed he’d slipped out of bed without the book stacks to bolster him.

Kondo says you shouldn’t keep more than thirty books in your home. We’re a far cry from that. But at least we own thirty fewer books.

Of course, new books will always call to us. This weekend we’re looking forward to the International Antiquarian Book Fair happening here in Oakland. On our last visit I snagged a 19^th century anti-Mormon novel with a salacious embossed spine showing a man lashing a whip over a woman coerced into polygamy. Given that my own novel explores 19^th century polygamy, that sparked joy!

Has Kondo’s book or television series inspired you to tidy up?  How do you stay on top of your books?

They say this will be the last super hot weekend around here for awhile.  Which makes sense, since we’re having air conditioning installed on Monday.

Until it—and the fog—arrive, we’ll be hydrating like crazy. And thus, today’s Friday Things topic: Plastic Tumblers.

We own a range of nice drinking glasses—everything from the now vintage olive green goblets we got as wedding gifts in 1980 to sleek, contemporary (and easily replaceable) old-fashioneds from Crate & Barrel.  But none of them really hold the amount of ice water/lemonade/Diet Coke that a tall, plastic tumbler can.

For years we had kid-friendly Tupperware tumblers in bright colors.  But it seemed like it was time to class up the everyday glassware  a bit.  I spotted some elegant straight sided clear tumblers on the end-of-summer sale table at Pottery Barn and snapped them up only to find that they couldn’t survive the dishwasher (ahem, not disclosed when I purchased them).  They ended up streaked and cracked and basically useless after a few washings. (See above left.)

I took my search more seriously and finally settled on the Valencia Tall Tumblers from Williams-Sonoma.  So far they’re holding up just fine.  They’re sturdy, the rim is nicely rounded so they’re comfortable to drink from, and they look like running water—a cooling visual effect. Also, like something my Grandma Loosli would have owned.  I’ll let you know how they perform on this last big weekend of icy beverage consumption. In the meantime, here are a few other things I test-drove this week:

Commiseration for those, like my daughter Sydney, who aren’t so happy about fall. (Not me, I can’t wait for it to cool off around here!)

A spooky fun October/Halloween decoration project.

A peek into this SF cookbook author’s kitchen–love the washi tape labeling idea.

The fuss about how women speak.

One person’s meditation about finding his faith (which happens to be my faith.)

This waving Solar-Powered Pope Francis.

My sister Michelle LOVES and heartily endorses the soundtrack to the Broadway production of Hamilton. Can’t wait to give it a listen.

In the meantime, I’ve been listening to Irish singer songwriter Glen Hansard’s new album “Didn’t He Ramble” all week and enjoying it very much.

Happy Weekend All!  Stay cool.

Over the holidays I discovered that I am was a sock torturer.  M.J. broke the news to me in bed by reading aloud from a book I’d given him for Christmas called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing  by  “tidying consultant” Marie Kondo.

“This lady says to ‘never, ever ball up your socks,’” he said,  glancing at me sideways as I dozed off over a copy of Wild.  “They should be resting right now and yours are doing anything but.”

The book has already sold 2 million copies in Japan and Europe so perhaps you’ve picked up your own copy and have already been admonished by Ms. Kondo to stop folding your socks into misshapen “potato-like lumps.”

If so, you’ve read how your socks “take a brutal beating in their daily work, trapped between your foot and your shoe, enduring pressure and friction to protect your precious feet.”

You probably already knew that the time they spend in your drawer is “their only chance to rest,” and that if you ball them up, they are in a constant state of tension when they should be “on holiday.”

Chastened, I decided to follow Kondo’s advice and take all my socks out of my sock drawer, discard the ones that no longer “sparked joy” and then carefully fold the rest before standing them on end in the drawer.

If you dare, look closely at my sock drawer full of misshapen sock balls in the Before photo above. Then take a gander at the neatly folded socks in this After shot.

After discarding nine joyless pairs (while thanking them for their years of dedicated service), I was left with 35 pairs of colored socks and 9 pairs of white sport socks.  As Kondo predicted, my newly folded socks take up half the space and are all easily visible.  Everyone/thing involved is breathing easier.

Kondo promises that once sorted and organized, your clothing will stay tidy with minimal effort.  Is her approach to clutter life-changing? We’ll see.  But for now at least, finding a pair of socks in the morning is pretty magical.

Does January find you trying new organization techniques?  If so, what and how?

This past month I’ve been playing a complicated game of hide & seek hoping to find just the thing I needed without unearthing too many other objects that would make the hunt harder. With each passing week more things have found like things and I can now go to the closet where I stashed pillows and blankets or the cupboard that houses red wine vinegar and soy sauce and find guest bedding or marinade makings. Some of the open shelves–like these at the entrance to the laundry area–are filled with artfully arranged objects.

Others, like these utility shelves off the laundry room, still need a little work. This weekend we unloaded boxes of kitchen and craft supplies onto these sturdy Uline shelves. Here’s what they looked like before we unloaded the boxes.

Here’s what they look like now.

It will take a few days to gather the fine china into a corner, cake pans into another, spools of wrapping ribbons onto one end of a shelf and jamming jars onto another, but at least I know these second-tier essentials all have an accessible home.  I’m almost the master of my little domestic universe and that feels So Good.

One thing that’s become clear in all the sorting is how vertical and varied this house is.  It tumbles down the hillside so gracefully that at first you don’t realize how much elevation you’re covering as you move from one level to another. Then, at the end of a long day of unpacking, you understand why you feel like you’ve hiked a mountain or two when you collapse into bed.  In describing the house we say there are three levels—the master bedroom on top, the public rooms in the middle and the guest bedrooms below—but there are actually six levels that we use every day.  Along with the main three there are the street entry level, the laundry/storage level and the large storage room/crawl space on the way to the guest bedrooms.

Then there are the many decks—one at the front entrance, two off the kitchen/dining room, one off the guest room/office, and three others before you make your way down to the back garden.  Entering from the back and taking in all the decks surrounding the central redwood tree you might think you’d stumbled onto the Swiss Family Treehouse North. (Really, we need a rope bridge or two and we’d be set to charge admission.)

For a relatively small house (2200 sf), it’s a lot to decipher. Given all these different, modest spaces, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what things should stay and what should go.  For the interiors, that’s meant some serious editing–furniture and rugs that don’t work with the style or scale of the house have been relegated to the garage and I’ve been judicious about what new pieces are allowed in.  The style differences aren’t so pronounced outside so for the decks I’ve been able to use a mix of refurbished and new furniture supplemented with old and new pots and plantings. (In case you haven’t noticed, July is a great month to pick up deals on outdoor furniture and accessories as stores make way for fall merchandise.) For example, here’s how the two decks off the kitchen are shaping up. The southwest deck showcases all new furniture and pots from West Elm–a good resource for this modern house.

The east-facing deck is anchored by two old Adirondacks from the now defunct Smith & Hawken outlet in Berkeley. We painted the chairs the same grey that we used for the living room bookshelf and added two more West Elm clearance pots to hold shade tolerant plants. These two decks were recently rebuilt to put the house on the market and we’re expecting the wood to darken up within the year.

I love how these little seating areas visually extend the interior spaces. Even if we don’t spend much time resting from our unpacking adventures—it’s mentally refreshing to see that we could.  This is all by way of saying Home Making can be challenging—at least when you’re getting to know a place–so it’s good to pace yourself and provide some rest stops along the way.

Oh—and yes, the refrigerator was finally installed.  It’s so beautiful it makes me almost forget the hassle it took to get it up and running. Even without any rope bridges to navigate.