"Will a tidy house make you happier?", asks Leah McLaren.

It's not that I'm not good at it!

Today is my birthday, and I just got my first gift: Leah McLaren's hilarious article Will a tidy house make you happier? in this morning's Globe and Mail. When I read her intro: "A tiny perfect 29-year-old Japanese woman has arrived in the West to explain how we can all fix our lives from the outside in.", I knew I was in for a treat. (Update March 4, 2016: Leah just published a new and hilarious article in the Globe on the two books by Marie Kondo, Japan's Queen of Clean.)

Last week, a friend casually commented that I'm not good at housekeeping. It occurred to me as a curious comment. Who is not good at housekeeping? It's not rocket science. I could beautifully clean up my whole house with a box of Q-tips if I wanted. But I don't. 

I thought that pointing out that I choose to do other things (more interesting to me) would not be gracious so I let it go. As I'm writing this post, I'm surrounded by post-tax report piles, last weeks' visitors bedding has not been put away yet, I see lots of finger marks on the wall by the computer and I can barely see through my windows.

The thing is, who am I to judge how people spend their time. I'm hoping people who are "good" at cleaning get more pleasure out of it than I do.

Spoiler alert
Leah McLaren ends her article with the McLeah housekeeping method. "First you look around your house; second, you lower your expectations; and third, you select a book from a random pile and read it." What's not to love about that woman!

My own version would be:"First you look around your house; second, you lower your expectations; and third, you call a girlfriend and go for a walk."  What would be yours?

Excerpt from Leah McLaren's second article on the subject
One of the six fake TIPs she created in the voice of Marie Kondo:
2. Imagine your ideal lifestyle
"In your mind's eyes, you are a tiny, flawlessly dressed Japanese woman living in a 600-square-foot Tokyo apartment who eats a small bowl of fish and seaweed each night before retiring in silence to her tatami mat to count her enormous book royalties on a paper-thin smartphone."

 

The Last Hunt: The future of books?

My next project as an author will certainly be an eBook! In the Globe, Simon Houpt told us about this new form of interactive production by the NFB: The Last Hunt. It made we wonder if this it the future of books?

Not long to watch and a perfect activity for a short coffee break, The Last Hunt takes more after books than films, presented as a gorgeous animated photo album, with music in the background. You're not told the story, you have to read it. As you scroll down, some images in the text get animated. (The photos are by photographer Montreal-based Alexi Hobbs accompanying his grandfather to his cabin.)

I don't know how much it costs to produce such an "eBook" but I could see it changing the way we read books in the very near future.

Fun fact: When you google "the last hunt", the first website that pops up has nothing poetic about it! It is a bargain website, featuring a polar bear's head with the tag line "Hurry up before they disappear!".