Bed

I must admit when I first heard the phrase, log bed, I thought it had something to do with a place where you put logs, using the word bed as you might in flower bed.   Nope, wrong again.   (Story of my life.  Has brief moment of self-pity.)

Log beds are, of course, beds made out of logs.  Not big logs, mind you; little manageable ones, like those in the picture of the rustic bed on the right.  Log beds don't have to be rustic; the wood can be honed to a less natural shape.

I've just been searching through my cuttings to see what other articles I had that mentioned beds in any way.  Such is the nature of the search engine on Evernote that beds featured briefly in several items, such as a man who'd had a stroke struggling with words like bed or blanket, but being able to use words like postillion or tardigrades, or Peter Bregman writing about motivation and saying that if you want to go to the gym it's a good idea to leave your gym clothes by your bed so you get into them first thing in the morning. 


But bed picked up and turned up as part of bedevil, and bedeutung, and stabbed, and described, and slubbed, and bedraggled, and grabbed, and the discovery that bed is one of the words you should avoid in tweets.  It will get you nowhere.  


Slubbed, incidentally, for those who don't know the word, means:  of textiles; having a rough surface; "a sweater knitted of nubbly homespun yarns."   Which introduces us to nubbly, which apparently means much the same as slubbed.   Trust English to have more than one word for the same idea. 


You could use the words slubbed and nubbly about the bunk beds in the photo, couldn't you.  They have a rough surface, though they're not exactly made of textiles, I guess. 


Well, enough rambling for one day.   Onto to do the ironing.  

Slow down...

We've got this fascinating present we're living in, and we can't seem to be present in it. We're so worried about either not having lived the last moment well or not living the next moment well that we end up missing the current moment entirely.

Peter Bregman: Not Enough Time? Try Doing Nothing (Read the whole article Even if you don't agree with the idea of meditation - and Bregman's version of it is extremely low-key - what he has to say about breathing instead of reacting is worth picking up on.)

And another of my favourite writers, Seth Godin, on Demonstrating strength.

He provides nothing more than a list - 54 words in total. It sounds suspiciously like the Christian way to live, as much as the way a marketer should behave....!

Here are the first two lines:
Apologize
Defer to others...

Mis-communication

Peter Bregman writes regularly on the Harvard Business Review online.    He does so with humour and an ability to see his own shortcomings, which makes him somewhat different from most of the writers on this site, where the talk is usually about business, business and more business.  

In his most recent article, 'How to avoid (and quickly recover from) misunderstandings,' he shows how easily it is to overlook another person's needs, and equally how easy it is to mis-hear what they're really saying.  

I'm not going to quote from it, as it needs to be read as a whole, but let me suggest that most husbands need to read this piece.   I need to read it....again. 

I tried to put a photo of Peter Bregman in this post, but after checking through hundreds of photos from the Picasa web albums that supposedly relate to my blogs, I still can't see one of him - though there should be one there.  Unfortunately there are no names and no order to the photos!

Peter Bregman, iPad and addiction

I've quoted Peter Bregman's articles before - mostly on the Mission Resource blog that I also write. I like his self-deprecating humour, and his good sense. I'm not going to quote him this time, just tell you that you need to read the article entitled, 'Why I returned my iPad'.

Why do I think you need to read it? Because in it he tells us what the value of returning the iPad was as opposed to keeping it. He doesn't say there's anything wrong with the iPad itself, but there was something wrong with him.

Substitute 'iPad' for any one of a hundred other addictive things, and you get the idea.

By the way, his use of 'boredom' might be questioned, and is questioned by some of those who comment. A better word might be found....

And some of the very negative comments show that there's a need for this way of thinking. They're far more vicious than anything else I've seen on the Harvard Business site