I sometimes feel ashamed if I spend too much time online

A script would make you sound automatic. Jardine adores Siddhartha and antique pocket guides to wildflowers, or vintage skateboard magazines or Vogues from the 1980s. Amanda gives her favorite copy editor's guide to navigating the beauty of language, Dreyer's English. When Jardine sent her a gift card for a juice shop, Amanda made it a new tradition to share a mango clementine juice with her son before dropping him at school. These parcels are more talisman than merchandise, so a handpicked apple will do, as will a used Dusty Springfield album, a Jackie Robinson postcard with congrats scrawled to commemorate time achieved. And we believe in giving yourself presents too. At a Tennessee writers' retreat, Amanda's room had a claw-foot tub and a metal tray for resting a article. It was so decadent that she bought a tray for her tub at home. We don't give gifts to keep a person straight or pressure him to stay clean--everyone is on their own path. Passive aggression could slip into showing support, and while it's really nice to have company in sobriety, no one owes us that. This often comes up when a group decides to take a month off and only half of them make it to the end. But, acting on a hunch, he invested his time, energy and a considerable amount of money in lovingly restoring the old timber cinema seats and the artfully decorated foyer. Just so we're clear, he didn't update the cinema to conventional modern standards, but rather to its original condition from in its heyday. In a world where big chain cinemas dominate the industry with a model designed around Saturday nights (the biggest movie-going night by far), where they cram people in and run as many ads as they can before people will walk out, this looked like madness. We did none of that. We put in the most amazing chairs we could. We choose the films we show and we serve the community and the customer first . The Secret Life of Pets was launching and the team and I were brainstorming ideas on how we could do something creative with it. We came up with the idea of letting people watch the movie accompanied by their pets. Of course, there is an inherent problem with having animals indoors for a 90-minute session, as you may have already guessed.

But where most people would look for all the reasons why they couldn't do something, Smith and his team embraced the problem and looked for reasons and ways they could. Gently release the practice and allow your breath to flow naturally. Spend a few minutes discussing what came up for each of you. Close your practice with a hug. Be gentle with the process of finding your way to the breaths flowing in sync. Sometimes this happens quickly and other times it takes a while. Stay present with the journey of meeting each other where you are and trust that the process is unfolding exactly as it needs to. This is an excellent practice to do with partners, friends, and children. I suggest this practice if you're feeling isolated, if you're in an argument with your partner or friend, or when two children aren't getting along. This practice is a great connector and a wonderful way to drop into your body and get to the root of what's happening emotionally. The Connection Breath is also known for bringing up our work around giving and receiving. I'm quite calm, I replied. It's my dog who wants to tear your leg off. He proceeded to get even with me, telling me his grandmother had grown roses where I had gravel and his grandfather had an orchard where I had grass. Most of our descendant visitors are kinder, and recently several thanked us for taking good care of their grandparents' place. The owners before us (who were not Weiricks) lived here only three years and did not remodel so much as redecorate the house, and we spent our first ten years redoing what they had paid incompetent contractors to complete. We replaced the house and barn roofs, both furnaces, and the shower; I spent many hours stripping purple, iridescent green, and flowered wallpaper from living room, master bedroom, and study walls while Clarke read aloud to me. I had learned the technique of stripping wallpaper from our first house, also a fixer-upper, in Granville, in Licking County, but had not been prepared for six layers that I removed from the back staircase of our present house. It was worth the work, but to this day I cannot look at wallpaper anywhere without wondering what poor person will be stripping it off after twenty years.

Realtors advise buyers of old houses to expect to spend another 40 percent of the purchase price on upkeep, an adage which has proved in our case to be accurate. Just talk to them. She hung up, and I sat there shaking my head. How had I fallen into this again? I didn't want to do this business and here I was doing it! I wadded the sheet up, ready to throw it away, when I remembered that I had to pay my dad back. I hesitated, then remembered that I had lost 18 pounds in my first three weeks--that was all that mattered! I smoothed out the paper and called the first number. An older woman answered. Wow, really? I'm just getting your name and number because the woman that ran the ad is so overwhelmed she couldn't get back to everyone. Live and let live, and take care of our own agenda--we keep that in mind. Amanda's grandparents knew how to par-tay. Hosting a bridge (or dominoes or canasta or mah-jongg) party, in their honor and in their footsteps, might fall into the so-uncool-it's-cool camp. Unearth your grandmother's tablecloths and re-create centerpieces of irises or mauve roses. On chilly afternoons, Amanda's grandmother served pots of hot tea with sugar cubes and lemon, and on summer days, she made lemonade or homemade fruit punch with canned pineapple cubes floating at the top. Focus on foods someone can eat with one hand--nobody wants to stop playing. Amanda loves Wonder-bread pimiento-cheese or egg salad or cucumber-and-cream-cheese sandwiches. As a nod to Nantucket friends, Triscuits and cheddar on a tray. Inspired by friends in the Deep South, fried okra, pickled shrimp, and little chicken-waffle sliders.

Miniature anything, in fact: tiny cheeseburgers, pigs in blankets, cake pops. The thing that would have stopped every other cinema in the country (and perhaps the world) was that the pets might relieve themselves on the carpet or on the chair. But that was worst-case. So what would we do if that happened? We realised we would have to clean the carpet. Something we do anyway. They're constantly being stained with wine, beer, soft drinks, ice cream anyway! This problem solving mindset permeates Smith's business. Not only are Smith's customers loyal, but the cinema punches far above its weight on the fame front too. After hearing about the lengths The Sun had gone to for the premiere of The Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino, Samuel L Jackson and Kurt Russell crashed the launch and did an impromptu Q & A with the audience. Unsurprisingly, Smith is also the kind of person whose story should be up on the big screen at his own theatre. I've taught this practice for years in groups, and there are always some students who talk about their feelings of inadequacy, judgment, needing to be in charge, or resisting leaning into the other person to find the flow. This is a very powerful practice that needs to be done with care and respect for ourselves and our partners. Working with your dreams is a very informative way to connect to the subconscious. Certain breathwork practices naturally lend themselves to working with the subconscious. The Dreaming Breath is a gentle practice for the evening that can be a fun way to release residual stress in the mind and body, and direct or engage with your dreams. I had a boyfriend out of high school whose father had been recording his dreams for over twenty years. I remember being in his home library one winter looking at stacks of notearticles in which he had recorded his dreams first thing every morning. While I didn't start a dream practice then, though I wish I had, that experience stuck with me, and later in grad school I started writing down my dreams and diving more into my own subconscious. Dreams are often thought of as our minds' burning off the stress of the day, which is why they can often be stressful.

When we work through major life transitions, like moving, switching jobs, or ending relationships, our dreams tend to be fast paced and involve running away from something, escaping situations, or any myriad of anxiety-provoking activities. At the same time, well-maintained older houses tend to hold their value longer than newer ones. I feel that the house talks to me, telling me what it needs to stay sound, but not always in language I can understand. It resembles a living thing for which one change affects all other parts. We discovered, for example, that leakage into the second story had been caused by water vapor condensing not on the roof, as in the old days of coal-burning furnaces, but inside the chimney because newer, more efficient gas furnaces do not lose as much heat as older ones that would have forced humid air outside the chimney. Birds had also built nests inside the chimney, eventually blocking some ventilation. We solved the problem first with chimney liners and later with a high-efficiency furnace vented out the side of the house, but when I tried to discover why the leaking had not happened when the gas furnace was first installed, no technician could answer. A colleague of mine who teaches philosophy and who has worked on his own house asked what else we had done that might have caused the condensation. We solved the mystery: by replacing the old windows we had eliminated air leakage on the third floor which had previously carried away the water vapor. Technicians provided the solution, but it took a philosophy professor to explain the reason. The garage has undergone a transformation as well as the house. Not taking a breath, I continued, I called off this very same ad and I was really skeptical. I had tried everything to lose weight and lost my money on things that didn't work, but this stuff is so incredible that I felt it the first hour--and I lost four pounds my first week, second pounds the second week, then two the next week, then seven pounds the fourth week. I had been depressed, I felt awful--couldn't get off the couch--and now I have energy, I feel great, and I look great! Taking a breath, I was ready to continue when she interrupted me. Look, you talk so fast that I don't even know what you just said, but whatever you're on, I'll take it! Looking at my reflection in the apartment's big picture window--eyes wide, mouth open--I jumped up and down and did a little dance. I explained to her that I didn't have a merchant account to take her credit card, and she promised to put a check in the mail that day. Shaking, I sat back down and called all the people on the list. Out of 12 names I reached 10 people and sold 9!