Recommendations for you
The Grinding Wheel vol. 10
The Grinding Wheel is a semi-regular series featuring recommendations to sharpen your toolkit, broaden your thinking or lift your spirits.
The recommendations below are a few small things that I am thankful for this year and I thought you might also enjoy.
I have so much to be thankful for this year, including you. Thank you to the entire This for That community.
Laugh - I am embarrassed to admit that an instagrammer I discovered recently called Mom’s Dad Jokes makes me smile every week. Checkout her jokes and her delivery and you’ll see why. If you’re prepared to face some eye rolls, consider sharing some of her jokes at your next family dinner:
Want to hear a potassium joke? K.
What do you call a computer that can sing? A Dell.
I got a lot of jokes about retired people. But none of them work.
Low-cost luxury - I recently Marie Kondo’ed my sock drawer. I pulled out each and every sock and only invited those back into the drawer that I truly enjoy wearing. The others I tossed. That is when I realized something: I needed new socks. I conducted some research (“sock-search?”) and discovered Thorlo socks. They make my feet happy. And when my feet are happy, I am happy.
Lunch - I work from home a few days a week and for lunch I want something that tastes delicious but does not take long to prepare. This tuna mayo rice bowl is a meal I can have ready in 4 minutes. It is simple, delicious and healthy. Props to NYTimes Cooking (paywall).
Tuna: 1 can
Rice: I suggest 90 second Uncle Ben’s Coconut Rice (3/4 of a bag)
Mayo: 1 - 2 tablespoons
Sesame oil: 1/2 teaspoon
Soy sauce: 1 teaspoon
Sesame seeds - sprinkle on top
Optional: avocado, sriracha
Learn - There was an era of the internet when everything was free and easy to access. Sadly, those days are gone. Now, we live in a world of paywalls and registrations. I fear we are in the final stages of that free era of podcasts. But for now, here are a couple of my favorite podcast episodes from the last year. Enjoy them free of charge while you still can:
Invest Like the Best: Sean Feeney interview (March 26, 2024) - this is a conversation about art, commerce and service with a Wall Street trader who quit his job to help his friend, a world class chef, start her own restaurant. Sean has so much passion about re-thinking the restaurant business.
Today Explained: Why ‘Country Road’ Feels Like Home (July 3, 2024) - this episode explains the global popularity of a 50-year old song about a US state with a population smaller than Houston.
Love & Kindness - Loving yourself and others often involves facing difficult questions. There is no textbook with answers. But Cheryl Strayed’s book Tiny Beautiful Things may be the closest thing that I have found. Her collection of her “Dear Sugar” newspaper columns showcases a compassion we all could benefit from as we each navigate love, friendship and family. It is a book filled with tiny beautiful ideas. I recommend the audiobook read by the author.
