In May, my husband and I went to the Rock Shoppe in Plymouth, Michigan to find some stones for the edging of the pond in the back yard. It was a sunny spring day and we were wandering the extensive grounds looking for just the right thing – kind of greenish slate tiles. We went into a more remote fenced area with less foot traffic, and an insistent bird got our attention. He was on the ground near one of the bins of rocks, maybe 10 feet away from us. He chirped at us, seeming to stamp his foot to tell us to move along. He stood his ground, staring at us.
CVNP – Killdeer Protecting Nest, originally uploaded to Flickr by Andrew 94.
Both the male and the female kildeer incubate the pair’s eggs. According to this description from Audubon, only the female tries her classic wounded wing act to distract us from her nest. The male exhibits more of a stay-and-fight defense. As he stood there, glaring, I was able to spot the nest of spotted eggs in the gravel road of the rock yard, a few inches from his toes (this is not my photo, but it is a nice one!).
I thought about how ridiculous it was. A 6-inch tall bird was having a face-off with two 6-foot humans! We meant no harm, but it is possible in our obliviousness we might have blundered into the nest. His chirp was a clear warning, and he seemed fearless and confident. How apt is his Latin name Charadrius vociferus.
We turned away, and as we left, he settled back on his nest.
Papa kildeer – may your babies be as fierce as you and live long.
Zappos.com CEO Tony Hseih has released Delivering Happiness: A path to profits, passion, and purpose. I have followed Zappos CEO and several others Zappos team members on Twitter for a while now, and I’ve enjoyed learning from him about his studies specifically on happiness. Since my title at my day job is Director of Happiness, it seemed a matter of professional commitment to keep up with Hsieh. By following him, I learning of The Happiness Hypothesis and commented on it here in my blog.
My Review
Delivering Happiness cover
I enjoyed the book, which was a mix of autobiography and riches to risk to riches business story. Apparently he was a born entrepreneur: resourcefully avoiding piano and violin practice while starting several small businesses with his parents’ blessing – worm farm, button mail order business, magic tricks, and more.
Yet, what makes the book valuable for the rest of us is where he details moments where he failed and what he learned. Critical to Zappos success, it seems, was what he and his partners learned from an early failure hidden inside a success – the loss of culture that occurred in the growth of their first successful venture – LinkExchange (eventually acquired by Microsoft). He and his partners vowed not to grow Zappos that way, and Zappos has created and maintained a strong culture that they feel is critical to success of the business and maintaining it as a place the founders and the employees want to work.
And, everyone knows that their Las Vegas customer service team is amazing. In this book, he helps us understand how that evolved and what Zappos does to support that WOW culture. It has been codified into ten core values (Zappos website page on the core values), but what is obvious from the book is that the culture predates the values being crystallized. I participated in the session to draw up the core values for my current employer, and I admit to being more than a little jealous of Zappos’ core values. They are inspirational and wonderful. My favorite Zappos core value is:
create fun and a little weirdness
It just seems to recognize that teams are built by people being themselves (a little weird), through bonding events (by definition, these events stand out, so are also non-normal), and by laughing together.
Another critical learning was not to outsource key components of their business. The Zappos team outsourced their warehouse logistics in Kentucky, and then bore the brunt of dissatisfied customers and reinventing the warehousing operation to solve the problem (taking it back in house).
What impressed me about the book is Hsieh’s (and partners’) open leadership style, and his openness in sharing internal Zappos communications and their core values with the rest of us. The book reprints emails sent at times of stress and change, including a note from around the time of their layoffs in 2008, and then the one announcing acquisition by Amazon.com in 2009.
Well, in true Zappos “Deliver WOW through service” style, they sent not only my advance copy, but an extra advance reading copy for me to share. If you’d like my giveaway copy of the book, please leave a comment on this post or on the Facebook note where this blog will be syndicated. I will choose a commenter at random on June 15 and award the book!
If the award period is past, if you didn’t get the book I’m giving away, if you prefer hardcover, or if you dislike commenting on my blog, of course it is available at Amazon.com/deliveringhappiness and at the book’s website DeliveringHappinessBook.com.
I just finished Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front. It’s at least in part an eco-survivalist guide to finding your way in peak oil, climate change, and the forecasted hard times that will come from energy crisis. I don’t agree with it entirely, I have to say that I’m not as doom-and-gloom as she is (perhaps just my denial kicking in), but I appreciated several sections of her book.
One section which inspired me to rethink was her description of the mobility of Americans – apparently we move once every five years on average. Given we’re transitory and perhaps expect future transitoriness, we don’t consider our relationship with our own yards in the way we might if we anticipated a lifelong relationship with the place. Just using the word “yard” seems less intimate and less nurturing than using the word garden, even though these two words have a common origin. Yard seems to be about what it stores (brickyard, lumberyard) where a garden evokes what it grows. Garden is clearly more creative and sustaining in my mind.
That struck me as a strong contrast to, say, a book I read last summer, The Lost Upland: Stories of Southwestern France, in which the first story chronicled someone weeding and reclaiming an ancient garden plot, thinking of the folks who gardened there before. That whole book seemed permeated with a longstanding relationship to the land, though it in part elegized it.
One of the reasons I stopped writing about being green was because I was moving to a bigger house on a bigger lot. And, the other day, when I came out the side door and encountered a bed of peonies in full bloom that I didn’t plant, hadn’t tended, and didn’t even notice in bud, I said to myself “what have I done to deserve this.” The peony blooms shocked me. And I was grateful to the previous owner (not sure which, the prior residents were there for only one year) who put that in for me to enjoy today.
Although there was a fair bit of doom and gloom in the start of Astyk’s book, the depletion part, she did have a clear vision for abundance. Astyk advocates adapting in place, avoiding the cost and waste of razing the current infrastructure, by retrofitting our homes for increased energy efficiency, planning for intergenerational and more collaborative living, and cultivating gardens to increase our self-sufficiency. She’s envisioning a future of suburbia filled with familes and neighbors cultivating the eco-equivalent of Victory gardens. A sweet vision.
So, maybe I don’t have to feel quite so terrible about the lovely garden and the land we’re enjoying. I benefitted from the past investment of the prior inhabitants of my house. For our part, we’ve put in a small garden bed holding lettuce, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli, and shallots so far. We will add additional kitchen garden terraces in other years. Next, we will invest in longer term items such as fruit- and nut-bearing trees and bushes, inspired by a visit and a rough plan by Nature and Nurture. I’d like to stay where we are for a long time, and plan for abundance.
Yet, Facebook is where my friends and family are, so I go there to hang out with them. Since I do not do a lot to maintain my Facebook presence, I pull in feeds to it from several places. I do pull items in from my Flickr account and from this blog.
I have mixed feelings about the broadcasting I’m doing on Facebook via the blog. I like it that my friends engage with what I write – leaving me their reactions or just an “atta girl”. Yet, by feeding the blog into Facebook, I’ve let Facebook capture the interaction on the blog post. So, instead of comments on the post, I get comments on my notes in Facebook. One level away.
I like this less than comments on the blog itself, but most of the kind folks who comment on Facebook would never encounter the posts except as notes on Facebook.
A conundrum indeed. I value the interactions more than comments in “the right place”, so I’ll continue to do this. Unless, that is, Facebook drives me away…
Dave’s dad likes ponds. He put a pond in the backyard of the house where Dave grew up.
We got a small man-made pond when we bought our house. It was at the edge of a slate patio in the back yard, ringed with a kind of perplexing boxwood hedge that blocks the view of the pond from the house. The pond is a graceful figure eight shape. It has aqua concrete walls, cracked now. It was lined with black plastic, held at the edges with loosely placed (unstable) slate tiles.
The pond was the project Dave spent the winter planning. In the early spring, Dave pulled up the black pond liner, finding several garter snakes nestled into the cracks in the cement underneath the liner. We suppose they overwintered there…!
Under the black liner was a clear indication that the pond had previously been fed by a spring coming out a few feet north of it. The spring came out of a pipe, from somewhere near our foundation (or from the other side of our foundation).
If we reinstated the flow through the pond, instead of a stagnant pool full of water striders, leaves, and a few frogs, we could have something more lively and fresh. And, we’d get to engineer a waterfall.
The planning began. Dave’s dad Nate, similarly inspired, booked a trip to visit from out east. Dave worked to get the end of the spring pipe excavated so that the pond work could begin in earnest once Nate arrived.
Nate and Dave chipped away the concrete edge where they wanted the waterfall and created the waterfall and streambed using pond liner, river rocks, and rocks from the garden. They endured a false start where they filled the pond and it started leaking back up along the piping, re-designed the flow into the pond, replaced the liner, and finally got to enjoy the waterfall after three days work and many trips to the hardware store. My contribution was putting in my calla lily and voodoo lily bulbs near the spillway. Otherwise, I did other weeding and garden work while Nate and Dave reconfigured the pond and the liner and the piping..
We watched the water flow into the pond this afternoon with our neighbors, and then once the pond had filled, we watched the overflow start to spill down the waterfall. There’s still work to be done – pond lining to trim, slate to arrange at the edges, landscaping to do, mulch to spread, and weeds to pull, but it’s flowing nicely across the pond and down the rocks and then back into its old streambed. Cool!
Things have been tense, and when they’re tense I’m drawn inward, away from the stress and complexity of other people.
I feel like every where I turn I am hearing someone talk about writing – friends are turning towards writing books, I’m picking up books published by friends, a quick trip in my car gives me an opportunity to hear an NPR interview where a writer discusses the transformative value of fiction in our troubled world, a man pays to translate an Israeli autobiography into Arabic to honor his son, mistakenly killed in the conflict. Everywhere I turn, it seems, there is a theme of writing, of transformation. Writing underscores our common humanity by letting us into each other’s minds and hearts.
Yet I’ve resisted the aloneness that writing requires, and I’m not sure if it is for me. I did have a chance to be a more solitary scholar after my dissertation, and I found it too solitary and too abstract.
With this spinning in my mind, I attended a recent reading by Jeffrey Eugenides in Detroit. He’s a creative writing professor at Princeton University, my alma mater, and the local alumni organization invited him to speak. He read a few passages from Middlesex and told a colorful story of the diversity of disciplines housed at the Princeton University Lewis Center for the Arts, including creative writing, dancer, visual art, and theater.
His story was vivid and wry, and the playful contrast he drew between the writers (whose work was dragging them more deeply into their interiors and removing their social graces) and the dancers (whose work was making them even more beautiful than they already were, bringing a flush to their cheeks) only reinforced that impression.
In the question and answer period, when asked about his writing process, Eugenides said that he was not particularly talented (tho I might disagree) but he was stubborn. He said that the only thing a writer needed was sitzfleisch, the skin you keep next to the chair to keep writing. Of course, the dancers have their version of sitzfleisch, it just doesn’t keep them attached to a chair. He said writing teachers know which of their students has talent, but not which will succeed, because success takes (superhuman, in my opinion) persistence.
All (all!) it takes is the capacity to sit and stare at the computer screen, or typewriter, or legal pad, and tell the story. Middlesex took nine years.
Typewriter Hammers, originally uploaded by sgrace
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