Here’s the brief clip and some challenges Tom has posed to us:

Power Off Weekend BBC Scotland Tom Morton

Tom, here’s answer #1:

Simply crank the handle and you've got electricity-free radio!

No worries, Tom. We’ll simply crank the handle on our handy-dandy wind-up radio, and we’ll be able to listen to BBC Radio Scotland all we want.

As for your other worry that without electricity, we’ll all be crashing into one another…hmm. I think we’ll be just fine with the lantern and candles — and of course the lamps made from scallop shells.

Our scallop shell lamps in December, last Power Off Weekend

Others are using torches (that’s flashlights for the Americans) and some may just prefer the light of the moon. Whatever works.

Never leave a naked flame unattended, always have smoke alarms, fire extinguishers and never put things like candles directly on top of flammable surfaces like plastic or wood. Accidents happen if you don’t make it safe.

One risk we will not be exposed to is electrocution, so we’ll be listening to the radio in the bath, with romantic candle light.

Hope that puts your fears to rest, Tom, and thanks for mentioning us on your show.

The Power Off weekend is 48 hours, from 11pm on the Friday night to 11pm on the Sunday (19-21 March 2010), without electricity.

Playing board games by candle light, surprisingly wonderful fun!

Power Off is all about having time to have fun, play games, talk to people, have friends and neighbours round, spend time with your children – and all the other things that suffer as a result of 24/7 computers, emails, TV, games, chores, noise, 24 hour bright light and one endless season inside your artificial world, called home.

It is also a wake up call to how much we now use electrical items, how much we rely upon electricity generated far away by carbon guzzling technologies, how heavy our footprint and how little time we have left.

Keeping warm and reading by daylight, mid December Power Off

Power Off weekends are like mini-holidays at home. There are so many things you cannot do (and you might initially twitch at the prospect) but once released from their continual demand you are free, on holiday. It is fun, different, memorable, challenging, good for you and good for the planet.

Everybody’s situation is different – where you live will determine weather, alternatives (wood burning stove, summer in the southern hemisphere), support (neighbours) and limitations (like living in a block of flats in a city). However, this makes everyone aware of their relationship with electricity (especially those things hardest / impossible to give up). That is no bad thing.

Best of all, everyone who has done these before has been glad they did it, for some of us it is now a regular thing.

Our temporary kitchen and heating during the Power Off

So please, why not join us? It feels great to do this with like minded people, all over the world. Together in spirit on an adventure in our own homes.

We are aiming for at least 200 people to sign up.

Even if you cannot do it yourself, please forward this to everyone you know, sing its praises and maybe join us the next time, or just think of us on the weekend – March 20-21.

To sign up either email us at malcolm@touchwoodproject.com or go to our Facebook event and group for the Power Off Weekend and sign up there! Tell your friends, local media, and help this grow.

To find out more about previous Power Off weekends, discover hundreds of suggested things you can do, FAQs and lots of pictures, go to our earlier Power Off posts - and don’t miss the Radio interview!

Power Off Weekend - March 20-21, starts 11pm on the 19th

That’s why today I want to have a little creative fun while looking at the 4 categories of strengths in StrengthsFinder and how to use your type of strength to help you be an effective leader and be part of a successful team.

StrengthsFinder for volunteer groups and families

Understanding your strengths is relevant not just for your working life whatever its shape, but for volunteer activities, organisations and even relationships.

My family did Strengthsfinder and it’s helped me understand and appreciate them and how we function together. It’s one of the core ways Malcolm and I run Touchwood, so I’ll continue to write about it for others out there looking to take more of a strengths-based approach to life.

I’m assuming you’re already familiar with the basics of StrengthsFinder, which is a tool that helps you identify your top 5 strengths from a list of 34. Now it’s about developing your strengths further and learning how to play your totally unique role as well as look for others to complement you.

How to be a great leader or part of a great team

To be an effective leader or part of a team, you need to 1) focus on your area of greatest ability then 2) build a team with complementary, very different strengths to yours.

Let’s start with you first.

The 4 types of strengths

Chances are, your strengths will fall into one of these categories: (These are my colourful intrepretations of the 4 types, complete with little icons and colour coding. I love designing this kind of stuff.)

OK, go find your strengths report and look up your strengths again if you’ve forgotten them. Ready? Now, let’s start with the first set: Strategic Thinking.

Strategic Thinking strengths

So far, I think everyone I’ve ever had take StrengthsFinder — which is about 35 people — has had at least one strength in Strategic Thinking. I love thinkers because you know, like attracts like and all that.

I mean, if you’re not into pontificating, analysing, discussing, then chances are you haven’t bothered to read this post. Because you find something as abstract as personal development boring and pointless.

Strategic Thinker: Does this sound like you?

A strategic thinker tends to love to read or discuss things, to learn.

They observe the past to learn its lessons, or live in the future. They assess something and find what’s wrong with it and then can come up with 50 ways to fix it.

They can also be accused of not getting things done, living with their head in the clouds, being procrastinators. Malcolm and I were both Class A procrastinators growing up — schoolwork wasn’t worth doing until the last minute.

Strategic Thinkers help the team make better decisions by analyzing information and thinking about what could be.

All five of my strengths are Strategic Thinking, which worried me at first, but I’ll get to why being so one-sided can also be a very good thing later.

On to the Persuaders, the Talkers: Influencers.

Influencing strengths

Obama is the guy I think of when I think of Influencers. Someone who likes people, working with them, speaking to them.

President Obama - a master Influencer

Influencers: Does this sound like you?

President Obama knows how to persuade people, to woo them and inspire them. The strength “Woo” cracks me up just for the name, but I knew someone with this strength and she was a master at getting people to do things. She just charmed them into it. She was very self-deprecating, so you don’t have to be flashy, you just have to enjoy being around people.

Influencers help you and your team reach a broader audience.

Since Malcolm and I are both Strategic Thinkers, we’re starting to look for an Influencer or two to help us better communicate what Touchwood is about. Someone who can help us distill our million ideas that make perfect sense to us and likely no one else, and tell a story that’s compelling and easy to understand. That’s what many Influencers can do, easily.

Relationship Building strengths

My Nana is a Relationship Builder. Her strengths are: Adaptability, Connectedness, Relator — all Relationship building strengths — plus Intellection (loves to discuss) and Responsibility (takes responsibility for what they say and do, as well as for other people).

Relationship Builders are the “glue that binds the team together,” as Strengths-based Leadership puts it.

Boy is that true! Nana is the matriarch of the DuBois clan, holding us all together through to 2nd and 3rd cousins all over the place.

Nana holding us all together in L.A.

She checks in with us all, keeping us up to date with what everyone else is doing. Because of her efforts, we DuBoises have a strong sense of family identity, despite the fact we all live very far away from each other and can only visit maybe once a year. Hard for me to say how much that sense of connection means to me and I know I have her in part to thank.

Executing strengths

Executers get things done.

For some mysterious reason, Executing types (Executioners?) rarely like taking StrengthsFinder. Or maybe I just don’t meet them. These strengths have only come up a handful of times so I know them the least. I also respect them enormously.

Executers: Does this sound like you?

One of our former Directors, Jenni, had Discipline as a strength. She loved To Do lists. Made them all the time, and then faithfully crossed items off the list as she completed them. We ribbed her about it but we also let her know how in awe we were of such organisational ability.

Executers are a definite essential to a project’s completion.

Executing strengths are like the complementary opposite to Strategic Thinkers. We ponder, they do. Incidentally, you might think doing is better, but I’ve seen plenty of botched jobs done by the Executer person who was so impatient to finish something they didn’t take enough time to think through the process. So we need each other.

Next time

More on developing your leadership style within your category of greatest strength.

A key point: the best leaders don’t try to be anybody else but exactly who they are. So stop thinking you need to be like Gandhi or Obama or Churchill to be a leader — you are one, you may just not know it. Yet.

What are your strengths?

Please post your strengths if you’ve taken the test and want to discuss them further. I find this stuff utterly fascinating and like nothing better than to hear about what people find easy to do and love doing.

For more info, check out Strengths-Based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams and Why People Follow, which is what this article is based on, as well as the other articles about strengths and StrengthsFinder. Also check out Sam Radford’s Awaken blog where he’s been profiling different strengths.

Till next time.

Malcolm and I are sitting in the conservatory waiting for the sun to dip below the clouds and treat us to a rare sunset over the water. For the past several months, the sun had hidden behind the peaks of our neighbouring island, Hoy, and only for the next few weeks would it set right on the horizon before wending its way north to hide again, this time behind the slope of Stromness.

Dispelling a fuddy duddy image

I took the moment to explain to Malcolm my conundrum: how do I write about how fantastically fun spinning can be, how surprising and imaginative and even countercultural, when most people find it boring?

Hence Malcolm’s comment about little old ladies. Commiserating.

I cast about for a way to describe the kind of spinning I’m doing and what I’ve encountered in the research I’ve been doing on the subject and voila! Punk spinning was born.

I couldn’t find a photo to illustrate this idea, so played around in Photoshop to design this little logo. I should screen print a bag with this on it to hold my spinning stuff (feel free to grab the logo and use as you wish).

Punk spinning is about sheer joy

Punk spinning is about spinning for the sheer joy of it.

Punk spinning breaks the rules, grabs crazy things like nettles, or fabric scraps or copper wire and gleefully spins that. Pluckyfluff creates all kinds of madcap, sublime yarns and is excellent inspiration.

Pluckyfluff's "Posie" yarn

Punk spinning tosses in ornaments and dolls:

Little dolls are actually handspun into this yarn.

It’s about being messy, deliberately imperfect, and generally playing around.

One of my favourites. I'm learning this technique next!

Getting in touch with what makes you feel free

It’s yet another way to tap into what makes you feel free, excited and in flow and I hope you’ll consider giving it a try if you haven’t already. Chances are, someone has a spinning wheel they’d be happy to lend you to try out. Or you can find a class.

Once you’ve got your hands on a wheel, here’s a great beginner’s tutorial. She’s got several more video tutorials to help you learn all about spinning.

Get the right soundtrack

Oh one last thing: a soundtrack is all important.

To keep me from getting too caught up in spinning the right way, or feeling it has to be perfect, I enjoy the not-so-dulcet tones of Rage Against the Machine, or The Rapture, a band I found thanks to the TV show “Misfits”.

Misfits, about a group of screw-ups doing community service who unexpectedly develop superpowers, is also excellent spinning background. Here’s a clip: (Thanks to Channel 4’s shortsightedness, I can’t show a clip so never mind. Grrr, greedy copyright sticklers drive me nuts.)

But find what works for you. And let me know if you go for it.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I wanted to create a yarn that captured both the colours and feel of this photo:

The lone house waits for the storm to come

I decided to divide the colours into two: grass and sky. My idea is knit it up as a tapestry that will hang from the homemade knitting needles I’ve started doing. This is what the grass looks like so far:

The Coming Storm yarn knitted up, on the bobbin and in fleece form

I’m going for a deliberately very textured look because it shows the colours best and the texture is way more fun than your usual simple yarns. When I first spun it, I had real trouble and it looked messy and like exactly what it was: my first attempt at spinning this kind of yarn. I thought it was a dead loss.

But I’ve started knitting it up and I’m really enjoying it. Since this week I’m doing an exercise from Go Put Your Strengths to Work (more on this once I’ve finished the week and can report on it) where I record every time I’m doing something that makes me “feel strong” — i.e., happy, relaxed, like I could do this forever — I’ve noticed that seeing the final result put together is something I find enormously enjoyable.

I didn’t particularly enjoy almost every other step of the process though, which means I don’t think I’ll be doing a lot of this, at least not everything all myself. But I do know I love the finding the photo and story and mood, selecting the colours, and carding just the right combinations together.

I’ve switched to the sky now and here’s what that looks like in progress:

Adding the sky

What a blast!

When I’m done, I’ll be sure to post a photo so you can see what I mean by a tapestry.

How does anyone make a living from this? Even remotely?

One thing I will say is all the work and the expense brought home to me how enormously difficult it must be to make a living from doing crafts in general, yarn making in particular. I estimate it took me 80 hours to make this yarn and knit it up for a single tapestry so far, so let’s say it’d take me 90 hours all told to make maybe 6 of these things.

Let’s imagine there was a market for it, that people coming to Orkney or who are fond of it and want to be reminded of it and this tapestry strikes a chord for them. What would they realistically pay? £30? £40? And that’s retail. With all the packaging.

If I were lucky enough to sell all 6, I’d make at most £240. For 90 hours of work. Minus the £20 for supplies. So about £2.50 an hour. That just depresses me.

But it’s only a hobby

I know creative types complain about this all the time. Maybe you have to be a genius to get paid well, or be an excellent marketer.

Seems to me most people say “Well, it’s just a hobby.” But let’s face it, money is one of the ways we measure success. Okay, it seems to be one of the ways I measure success, now that I’m thinking about it.

If someone isn’t willing to pay for it, they don’t want it enough and therefore it’s not as good as you’d like it to be.

Money = success

It’s not that I want to be paid for something I do as such, though that’d be nice, I think it’s that I’d like the recognition that someone else thought it was worth something, that it was worth more than the tatty Made in China stuffed puffin toy or plastic Viking cap they otherwise would buy.

I make these yarns and this tapestry because I want to share how these scenes, this mood of calm, of transformation, steals over me by living here in the way we do. And I hope it invokes a similar feeling in the person who has it. That it reminds them every time they look at it of the magic they experienced in Orkney (or imagine when they dream of it).

I used to hear from Malcolm when he would do his driving tours of Orkney that his guests were always looking for souvenirs to buy but not always finding something that really captured how the place really felt to them.

So I wanted to try to make something that does say Orkney to me and that, at least for people who like wool kind of stuff, appeals. And somehow just making it for myself, while fun, isn’t quite enough. But as soon as I imagine going down to the local shops and seeing if I can sell it, I just envision a lot of work, not being paid very much, and the possibility that no one will like it anyway.

Oh no, is this something as cliched as a fear of failure?

Huh. I can see I’m going to have to ponder these things this week and see what solutions I can work out. Well that’s something to look forward to.

My wedding dress looked like this. All I need now is the hat.

Getting started with spinning

When we moved to this house, our landlandy generously left behind her spinning wheel to use and it’s been beckoning to me since then. Problem was, it didn’t seem to be entirely in working order and I didn’t know enough about wheels to know how to fix it.

Then I heard from my friend Victoria about this spinning class and the instructor, Jan, generously came over with her husband Andy to chat with us about spinning and take a look at the wheel. She then took it home with her and gave it a complete overhaul so it could be used. When I offered to pay her, she brushed it aside and it was clear it made her happy just to have the wheel in working order and ready to be loved.

We finally agreed that perhaps I could barter something in return, and I had one of those moments where I reflected on how much I enjoy life when you don’t just pay for everything. You end up having the most amazing interactions with people and doing things you wouldn’t otherwise.

A few weeks on, and I’ve fallen in love with spinning.

So much so, I’ve become obsessed with a new project for Touchwood involving creating my own tweed yarns based on photos of Orkney.

An example of tweed yarn

And not just any tweed yarns, but ones that tell a story. A good yarn, as it were. I’m calling the line “A Tweed’s Tale”.

A Tweed’s Tale: the magic of a good yarn

I love stories, especially imaginative, magical ones, so it only makes sense to combine that with my love of all things wool, of colours and how they work together to create a mood, our vast collection of Orkney photographs, and Malcolm’s knowledge of folklore and history (for those of you who read the Ideation post a few days ago, this is another example of Ideation in action — linking up different ideas to create something new).

The inspirational photo

So I’m taking this photograph as my first inspiration:

The lone house waits for the storm to come

I took it this summer and it’s our view to the southeast (the sea is to the right, out of picture). That house in the distance is abandoned — it’s the grand old house of a great Arctic explorer, John Rae. I can never quite capture the full vivid richness of colour, but at the time I was struck by the powerful mood.

The ominous, forceful rainclouds form a canopy over the cheery, unflagging wildflowers in the meadow. I’m going to call the tweed “The Coming Storm”.

Getting from photo to wool colours

To get from photo to yarn, I first used software called Color Schemer Studio to select the colours I wanted (slightly different photo but same colours):

Sampling colours

Then I take primary colour dyes by Landscape dyes and mix them together to match as closely as possible the photo’s colour. I used a great tutorial to teach me how to do this. So far, I’ve been working on the paler, more subtle colours and have produced these:

Some of the colours for "The Coming Storm" ready to be blended

(That’s snow on the wool, by the way. I got hit by a freak snow shower just as I started to take the shot.)

Uh oh

I’m a bit disturbed because I felt dizzy and nauseated my first night after several hours of dyeing and I think it must be coming from the fumes. I did it in our kitchen with the doors and windows closed because there’s snow outside and (I thought) a girl has to stay warm.

But I was determined to press on, so for the last two days I’ve turned the heat off in the house completely and had the windows wide open. I think I’m getting the hang of this no central heating thing. Copious cups of hot tea, two hot water bottles, and staying as active as possible seems to do the trick.

Coincidentally, I heard from Malcolm this morning as he’s down in Aviemore teaching firemaking, and he spent last night sleeping out in the snow. So we both get to feel we’ve had a memorable experience with managing the cold these past few days.

Chemical vs natural dyes

It makes me worry to use anything that might be making me feel ill. I’d already researched long and hard about the pros and cons of different dyes, natural vs synthetic, and had concluded that it wasn’t necessarily far more eco-friendly to use natural dyes because you have to use such vast quantities for one, you can need chemical mordants (chemicals that fix the colour to the wool and doesn’t let it bleed out) and some dyes (like that which produces red) come from South America and so you’ve got a big carbon footprint.

Of course, my dyes come from Australia, so who am I kidding? At the end of the day, chemical dyes were easier and I could create far more shades more quickly. But now I’m thinking it’s not worth saving some effort at the expense of health, so I think I’ll try natural dyes next.

Going local with Shetland wool

Some friends of ours, Chris and Howie, have a farm and even produce their own yarn. When we were doing the Power Off Weekend in December, they kindly brought over a whole bag of Shetland fleece for me to play with. Isn’t that great?

Since Shetland is just the next island up from us, it’s a pretty authentically local kind of wool to be using. I washed that (which took ages), then carded it, and then put it in the dye pot.

More yarns to come

I already have two other yarns I want to do: “Midwinter’s Tale”, which is based on Malcolm’s photo of the Ring of Brodgar in the snow and the story of the Dancing Giants of Brodgar, and “The Seafarers”, which is based on his photo of the brightly coloured fishing/diving boats in Stromness Harbour.

Since I’m using so many colours, and also still learning how to spin, it might take me a bit longer to get the finished version done, but I’ll get there.

Knitters and spinners, your thoughts please

I’m thinking of doing a super bulky, thick thin yarn because I had in my mind to do scarf kits, and I certainly found that learning on Colinette’s Point 5 yarn was a delightful and easy way to learn how to knit.

If I did ever decide to do more of these yarns, for sale or gifts, what weight would you think would work best? My concern with doing lighter weights like aran or DK — say, 4mm to 6mm needles — is that you won’t see the colours as much.

Perhaps it’d be better just to do the batts/roving?

Any advice and thoughts most welcome.

I’ll post again as soon as I have a more finished product…

Today I’m writing about something pretty specific: how to develop Ideation as a strength. If you don’t know about Strengthsfinder, it’s a fantastic personal development tool I’ve written about before.

Strengthsfinder has fundamentally changed how I live and work, helping me see what’s unique and wonderful about what I can do. In the past, I dismissed the very things the test identifies as my biggest gifts, and I see a lot of other people do that too, which means we work with a fraction of the enjoyment we could have if we do what we love doing — and are best at — every day.

My top 5 strengths

But just taking the test isn’t enough. It’s about figuring out how to continue develop your abilities day after day, and understanding how to work with other people’s talents.

So, today I’m talking about Ideation and how to develop it.

Strengthsfinder strength: Ideation

Ideation is about loving ideas and making connections between often very different ones.

For me, that’s expressed in loving to read, and in discussing philosophical or social issues. I love to look at what other people are doing and then see how I can apply that idea to my own life to make it better.

For example, with the eco lodge idea for Touchwood, I’m taking inspiration from sources ranging from Tribe Wanted, which is the island in Fiji where if you pay £200, you can volunteer for a week to help build the eco resort there, to Frontier House, where modern families go back in time to 1850s Montana to live as frontierspeople did.

Frontier House: modern day families go back in time

I’m pulling key concepts from those sources and reshaping them for Touchwood.

I grab many other ideas and, thanks to Ideation, it all sits in my head, comfortably connected and making perfect sense.

Now to the downside of Ideation.

Ideation: The drawbacks

The problem with easily being able to link disparate ideas is that most people don’t see your connections. They don’t understand what you’re talking about, and can be very skeptical when you present your ideas. Instead of the enthusiasm and praise you were expecting, you can get blank stares or even withering criticism.

I’ve had all of those experiences, and it was partly the skepticism from one or two people I faced early on with Touchwood that caused me to retreat from my bolder plans last year. I thought maybe the ideas were the problem. They weren’t; it was how I was expressing my ideas that was the problem.

How to make your ideas work

Strengthsfinder warns you of this gap between you and other people and what you need to do about it.

In Strengths-based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams and Why People Follow, the sequel to Strengthsfinder 2.0, Tom Rath talks about how to lead with Ideation, saying:

Make things simple. All your ideas, possibilities, and tangents can be confusing to some people. You see the simplicity of the underlying principles; articulate that to others so that they can see it too.

The clearer things seem to people, the more certain they can be that you are doing what is right and makes sense. Help people make connections between what is and what can be.

You need to connect the dots of your ideas

Tip: Pick just one idea

One way to keep things easy to understand is to pick the one idea you want to focus on and exclude everything else.

This blog post is just such an example. I started out wanting to talk about other strengths, what’s going on with Touchwood, but realised that, while all those ideas are interconnected and clear in my head, it would be just too overwhelming to talk about them all here. So I tried to pick one idea: how to develop Ideation as a strength.

Tip 2: Use pictures

There’s a reason I have a photo in almost every single blog post I do. It helps you understand what I’m talking about right away. It’s faster and more enjoyable than reading a whole bunch of words, so if possible, spend the time to find a picture to illustrate what you’re talking about.

Bonus tool: Made to Stick

Finally, it’s what I think of as the Bible for ideas people: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Fail and Others Win. It’s a book designed to help ideas people get their message across.

Made to Stick -- an ideas person's Bible

I have it as an audio book and months on, I’m still listening to it and trying to learn everything it recommends and incorporate it into how I write about my ideas (thanks to Darcy Prince for telling me about it).

Made to Stick comes from two experts who spent a lot of time investigating why some ideas persist and become popular, like urban legends, while others disappear. It’s not as simple as only the good ideas survive and the bad ones go — urban legends prove that point. I mean, where’s the good idea in the man found in the bathroom on ice with his kidney missing? Or that Kentucky Friend Chicken accidentally used rats in its chicken buckets?

Instead, they identify that there are actually principles at work that tend to make one idea fail and another thrive.

Six principles of a good idea

I won’t go into too much detail, but in essence, the principles that you need to follow if you want your idea to have a maximum chance of being understood and embraced are:

• Simple
• Unexpected
• Concrete
• Credible
• Emotional
• Stories

Full chart available on Made to Stick website

One example they give of this is JFK’s one-sentence mission of “To send a man to the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade.”

It’s simple, it was unexpected at the time in that it was considered highly ambitious, it was concrete in that you get it and it’s time-defined (end of the decade). It’s also emotional in appealing at that time to national pride over the space race with the Soviet Union, and to some extent it tells a story of a man going to the moon and back.

So I highly recommend investing in this book to help you with your ideas.

Putting my own advice into action

That’s enough from me for now. Earlier I waved Malcolm goodbye as he goes for 4 days to teach firemaking down in Aviemore, and I’ll be spending the time working on my own Ideation project: a presentation about the Touchwood eco lodge project.

I realised that even Malcolm needs me to explain my ideas more clearly, so this is a good opportunity to put the advice I’ve just given into action and really work hard at getting my ideas in top shape.

I’ll share that with you as soon as it’s ready, but now, breaktime for more Olympics!

I felt restless, cranky, worried in that intangible way that happens when I have too many things in my head and doubts that I’ll ever manage to get them all done.

When I get like this, Malcolm and I sit down for a cup of tea and I tell him all the things troubling me. As we learned from our Strengthsfinder results, one of Malcolm’s biggest strength is strategic thinking — in his case, he’s particularly good at looking at all the details of a situation, all the compicating factors, and determining a path ahead.

I think it’s his training as a mountain guide and navigator, where, when setting out for a hike in the outdoors with a group, he takes into account a million factors ranging from impending clouds and wind direction to the fitness levels and health conditions of the people he’s leading. He has to decide the direction he’s going to take and reassure all the people that everything’s fine.

That kind of skill comes in real handy for someone like me who tends to want everything perfect and therefore is overwhelmed when there are too many factors for me to cope with.

So, what did he suggest?

First off, a To Do list.

It sounds so unappealing doesn’t it? So tedious, so draw-within-the-lines.

But the act of grabbing two scraps of paper and a big blue marker and just writing down every single thing nagging at me, from finishing my income tax to dropping off the recycling on the morning bus run tomorrow, left my head clearer, my spirits a little less oppressed.

So now our To Do list is hanging next to the calendar, ready for us to cross items off as we go.

But that wasn’t quite enough, so the second thing I did was do some housecleaning.

Wow, To Do lists and housecleaning.

I’m really inspiring you, aren’t I? But again, picking a small task like vacuuming the living room gives me a sense of control in a world full of chaos. It’s a manageable task I can cross of my list and I can feel like I’m achieving something. It also makes the space more relaxing and pleasant to be in.

Invariably, one task leads to another and I found myself stringing washing on the line in the sunshine, an activity that always makes me feel quaintly back in time as if I’m living on the frontier alongside my ancestors.

Oddly enjoyable, hanging the laundry out to dry

Something about pegging up the clothes as the wind snaps the edges and straightens out the wrinkles, the birds fly overhead and the sun sneaks past the hulk of the house, and I feel a sense of something much more fulfilling than just doing a chore.

Job done and satisfaction restored

Finally, after all that palaver is done, I can drop onto my bed, soak in the sunshine streaming in the windows, and relax with a cup of apple tea to the BBC coverage of the Winter Olympics.

Hm, To Do lists and a quick clean — the oddest, smallest things can make the nicest difference.

I’m thinking about the often delightful responsibility of being a dreamer, a storyteller, and how you tell a story that’s both honest and worth telling.

A good story starts with the improbable or downright impossible

I think you start with attempting the impossible, which is why the quote above, which I discovered courtesy of Willy Wonka, keeps going through my mind. Here, take a look:

Isn’t it glorious?

The line is actually taken from a poem called “Ode” in a collection called Music and Moonlight — two of my favourite things and apropos since two nights ago we took advantage of a dusting of snow and bright full moon to go outside and waltz.

Impossible thing #1: Malcolm dancing

Dancing of any kind, much less the waltz, would probably have been on Malcolm’s list of impossible things to do up until recently. Even at our wedding, he refused to dance. But he’s always felt bad about that, so last Christmas my present was his promise to learn how.

We went to a few lessons of Scottish country dancing because that’s the closest thing we could find, but it still wasn’t quite what we were wanting.

Then the other night we were talking about it again and I finally thought to check YouTube, where I found a “Learn How to Waltz” video to teach us the basics. We then spent a goofy few minutes box-stepping our way around our kitchen.

We both felt so dizzy from turning around that we didn’t quite see how we’d be able to continue until I did some more Google searching (god I love research) and found you can avoid dizziness by looking at a fixed point in the distance.

So the other night we seized our chance and stepped out onto our gravel drive coated in a lovely couple of inches of snow.

The moon was full, the sky clear, and the light shone so brightly. I hummed off tuned-ly “Buffalo gals won’t you come out tonight…and dance by the light of the moon.”

I didn’t think to take a picture, and in searching around for a photo to best capture what it looked like and felt like, I found this one:

We too could hear the waves lapping on the beach, and while we aren’t actually Victorians, we felt like ones. Our house is the only one for maybe 1/2 mile around, and since we’re perched by the sea, half the view is ocean. That meant that once we stepped outside, the only illumination was moonlight.

But it was so bright you could almost pretend it was daytime, and I saw why there have been so many songs, poems, stories set to moonlight. With the snow reflecting the light, we could easily see our way through the steps and I felt a sense of timelessness and adventure.

Now before this gets too sappy, let me also say we looked a bit like those awkward teens at a school dance, less-than-gracefully shuffling our way through the “one, two, three, one, two three”s. Plus we couldn’t look at each other or else we’d get dizzy.

The point is, Malcolm put aside his self-consciousness about dancing and I put aside my lazy inclination to stay inside by the fire and we ventured forth into the improbable.

Result: a good story worth telling ourselves over the years.

The humble impossible

Doing the impossible or even improbable doesn’t have to be epic. It can be small, humble, silly. It’s a path to creating your own magical story, one you’ll enjoy telling yourself years down the line.

Now how to end this post? I asked Malcolm, and his answer was “by eating some soup.” OK then.

Since we’re such butter junkies — I’d guess we go through something like a pack a week — we thought finding this out would be be both fun and illuminating. In our case, is it worth dishing out the extra money for Lurpak and President over the cheaper ones? A blind taste test is the only way to find out.

Handily, it’s also a good excuse to eat lots of butter.

Butter taste test ready to go

Ode to butter

One of the great joys of Britain for me is their butter. Oh how I love it so. Having grown up on margarine (because we all thought it was healthy didn’t we?), I was a latecomer to the Way of Butter, but when I moved here I stumbled across all the different European butters right in the grocery store aisle. The love affair began, and to this day our guests at our table marvel at the thick slices of butter we cut as if it’s cheese.

I say, you’re missing out if you carefully cut only the stingiest bit of butter for your bread or porridge or crumpet or scone. And God help you if you’re still using margarine. Get thee to a creamery!

In any case, I highly recommend holding your own Butter Blowout. Here’s what you need to do:

Holding your own Butter Blowout

Stock up on your usual favourites and add the most high-end and cheapest butters.

The six brands

In our case, I usually beg to have Lurpak, which is Danish or President, which is French. We actually have a local butter, Walliwall, which I initially loved but had recently and didn’t like the flavour of. It’s unpasteurised, so perhaps I left it out too long. So we bought all those, plus Kerrygold (Irish), which I remember liking and Malcolm scoffed at, and Tesco’s generic. We threw in goat’s butter, which I’ve never had before, at the last minute for fun.

Malcolm did the preparing and lucky me, I did the tasting.

Yikes, too much salt

What amazed me straightaway was how salty most of the butters were. Three of them I pretty much dismissed because all I could taste was salt. My top 3 were noticeable in taste and my very favourite really stood out as by far the best.

My guesses

Malcolm had me try to guess which one was which brand. Here were my guesses of which brand alongside my rankings:

#6 (last place): Tesco Salted

#5: Kerrygold

#4: Lurpak

#3: Goats butter

#2: President

#1: Walliwall

Walliwall has a different texture — more like crumbly cheese — so it’s hard to disguise. It has a marvelous creamy, slightly sweet flavour with a richness I associate with Orkney Ice Cream. Yum. As I mentioned before, it’s unpasteurised and I think that might be partly why it tastes so delicious — you aren’t killing off the flavour through overheating.

But I got the butter brands wrong otherwise.

The actual butter rankings

Here’s what they actually were:

#6: Lurpak. Doh! All this time I thought it was my favourite, but it was just SO salty. Next time we’ll try unsalted.

#5 Tesco’s. Yep, it’s crap, as suspected.

#4 Kerrygold. OK, but still too salty.

#3 President. Yummy, but with a smell I didn’t like and not as good as…

#2 Goat’s butter. Delish.

#1 Walliwall. Superstar. Anyone with access to it simply must try it.

So that was fun. Walliwall is the hands-down winner and it’s local!

Next time…

We’re going to do it again but with less salty underpinnings, like water crackers instead of oatcakes. We’re also going to be a bit more aware of how much salt we’re eating since at the end of the session, I had a sore throat and 30 minutes on, I’m still feeling it. So we’re going to get the unsalted butters next time.

Let the buttery times roll…