Man With a Van moving company, based in New Paltz, started small, very small, in fact, borrowing a friend’s beat up old van to move someone from one Manhattan walk-up to another on New Year’s Eve 1992. Today it has four employees, plus owner David Miller.

Buildings, like people, come with psychological baggage, which tends to accumulate over time. One need not believe in ghosts in a literal sense to appreciate the idea that the strong emotions expressed in a space – and especially any dire deeds committed there – might leave a lingering psychic impression, perceptible to sensitive types. Your living space may not be haunted by malevolent spirits, but if you feel “stuck” there in some way, you might, perhaps, be trying to move through someone else’s pile of clutter besides your own – as if your own weren’t enough, right? Exorcism is probably not warranted, but a periodic house-cleansing ritual might make you feel somewhat better.

Another day, another massive data leak. Someone with bad intentions now has access to one or more of your online accounts. You should change your password. Why not make this perennial inconvenience of modern life an opportunity for committing a few edifying lines of verse to memory?

I work from home, which is to say in a blurred and solitary world in which duty and comfort bleed together like a really sloppy Monet. There is a saying in football: if you have two starting quarterbacks, you have no starting quarterback. I propose that if you work from home, you have neither work nor home, really. Your days lack the essential subordinations and separations of which a modern life is built. Your peace is never complete and neither, oddly, is your stress.

For those who have trouble making their garden grow, a pH test could diagnose the problem.