Completing the Cycle

You know, I think what gets us into trouble sometimes is that some jobs have multiple steps - a cleaning cycle, if you will.

You don't just get to dump the clothes into the washer and be done with it. You have to wash them, dry them, fold them, and then put them away and if you skip any step in that cycle, you will end up with a wet, smelly, wrinkled mess.

Same thing with dishes - you can't just put them in the dishwasher, you have to put soap in, start it, unload it and then start a new cycle.

I think it would help us if we could think of our tasks in terms of the whole cycle instead of just one part of it. When you do laundry, make a commitment to complete the whole cycle. Make a plan, set a timer, delegate part of the cycle, basically do whatever needs to happen to make sure that the chore isn't going to get abandoned mid-cycle.

I know that we all have a lot going on and some of us (I especially mean me!) have some ADD tendencies. But that doesn't excuse you from doing what needs to be done, it just means that you have to work harder at it and that you need to use some extra strategies to make it work for you.

A lot of us like checklists. I know I do and I get a ton more done when I take the time to use them.

But the question is what do you put on your to-do list? Do you just put "Do laundry" and hope for the best?

Wouldn't it be better to put each step of the cycle as a separate but related task? That way you'll be reminded to complete ALL the steps and besides, then you get three or four check marks instead of just one! And we all know that more check marks are better than less!

Give it a try and then leave me some comments and tell me how it worked for you.

Be sure and come back next Monday and Friday for the next installment in my Clutterbugs series. To see the rest of the series, just click the Clutterbugs tag at the bottom of this post and it will bring up a list of them.



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QuickTips for the Home

Here is a quick and easy cooking tip I learned from a book called Queen of the Castle. It's called Whack-a-meal. What you do is pre-brown your hamburger using your crock pot. You put a couple of pounds of hamburger in your crock pot and leave it for 4 hours on low - stir every hour or so.

You drain it and let it cool. Then put it into gallon sized zip lock freezer bags. Be sure to get it as flat as you can and get all the air out so it won't get burned in the freezer. When you're ready to use it, you just whack it on the counter a few times to loosen up the frozen hamburger and pop it into your recipe. Isn't that clever?

Here's a couple of tips I picked up from MeckMom.com. She has some wonderful tips. One of her ideas is to put a special hook in the bathroom or laundry room especially for wet bathing suits. How many times have you found a wet bathing suit lying on a bed, or getting moldy in a plastic sack somewhere? If kids have a specific place to put their suits, this won't happen as much.

Another tip of hers is for changing clothes from one season to another. Especially in a snowy area like Utah, changing around seasonal clothes is a big deal. What you do is to put one of those big Rubbermaid tubs in your laundry room when you are ready for "the change".

Then as you do laundry, you just sort the clothes and fold the out-of-season clothes into the Rubbermaid tub. This frees up space in your drawers and closets for the new season worth of clothes. In about two weeks, you're totally done. Easy peesey!

Here's a tip for dealing with sentimental clutter. If you have something that has a lot of sentimental value for you, but you don't really like it, take a picture of it. Put it in a scrapbook page, make a journal entry or whatever, but don't let something you hate remain in your house.

I did this with a dresser my Mom had. I never really liked it, but after she died, I just couldn't bear to part with it. It was just something that I always remembered from my childhood. I almost kept it, but then my sister suggested I take a picture of it, and that just satisfied that emotional need for me. Now if I could just find that picture....

Be sure and come back next Monday and Friday for the next installment in my Clutterbugs series. To see the rest of the series, just click the Clutterbugs tag at the bottom of this post and it will bring up a list of them.



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Friday Fragments 1/27/10

You know, I've found my favorite thing in the world to do. I LOVE to watch awards shows while I sit on Twitter snarking about everyone's outfits. Maybe I'm weird, but to me, that's just fun! I could care less who wins what award, but I love to see all the beautiful and bizarre outfits everyone is wearing, and all the weird stuff they do, like Pink turning herself into a human sprinkler right over everyone in their gorgeous Grammy outfits!

Speaking of glitter (nice transition there), I finally got my mother's ring fixed. My Mom has been gone for five years and she left me this lovely ring. It needed some repair work, so I had it in a drawer for all this time. I wasn't sure if it was really my style - it's a bit fancy for everyday (19 diamonds and 5 emeralds-sheesh. Mom was on a splurge that day!), but now that I've worn it for a while, it's definitely growing on me.

While I was at it, I also fixed this ring that my Dad gave me about a hundred years ago. The main emerald was cracked and needed replacing. Like emeralds much? Yeah, I guess. It's not my birthstone or anything, but I think I just like the crispness of the green emeralds and the white diamonds. Both my kitchen and my bedroom are in greens and whites too.

PS: Like the cut on my finger? I'm the only person I know who injures herself while eating at Red Lobster - I was eating my crab legs and I nailed myself!

Speaking of Red Lobster - the reason we were there is that Matt took us out to dinner with his first "real" paycheck. He said that he wanted to say Thank You for us pushing him to get through school and get his certification as a Medical Assistant. That was really special for me because it isn't often that kids take the time to say thanks to their parents.

Speaking of kids - Blake's Scout troop is so funny. Every week they pick a word and each Patrol has about 2 minutes to make up a little cheer centered around that word. This week, the word was Peanut. Here is the cheer that Blake's Patrol came up with.

"Blake's brain is the size of a peanut. Blake eats peanuts. Therefore Blake eats his brain every day."

You had a be there. Goofy kids!

Speaking of kids - I'm having a fight with my church. Well, more like a polite disagreement. We have been waiting for MONTHS for a new Youth Pastor. They announced on Sunday that they were interviewing people for the position, but due to budget cuts, they had cut the position back from 20 to 6 - 8 hours a week.

WhatTheFrack????

I don't think so. You have a church membership of almost 300 families and I don't know how many kids and they think that having someone in there for just a couple of hours a week is going to be all they need for the Jr. High, High School & College kids. Uh no, ain't gonna fly.

Actually I was really upset and I feel this is a real deal-breaker for me. After 12 years, this is the first time I've considered moving to another church. The one where Blake's Scout troop meets has a fantastic youth program and it's very hard to sit there and know that he could just walk in the door and be all set, when you're looking at our church doing such a poor job at it.

So, I wrote a long, very heartfelt letter to the church elders and asked them to reconsider. I know money is tight, but I also know that you always manage to find money for what's important and to me the kids are the most important part of a church. So we'll see.

Final note - at work I was going through some really old E-mails today. I mean really old - back from 2002 (yeah, I'm a pack rat that way). It was so interesting to see a snapshot of my life back then. The Olympics were on and I was doing my Volunteer thing with the Mascot program. It was like going through a time capsule.

I was still selling stuff on Ebay. Matt was in Jr. High and I was fighting with his teachers, Blake was just going into Kindergarten. My Mom was just starting to get sick and my best friend was still alive. It was just interesting to go through old messages from her and think about how much I still miss her. Eight years doesn't seem like a lot, but things have changed a lot since then.

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Drowning in Clutter?

Think about some of the words you use to describe your clutter. Do you ever say you are buried in junk, drowning in clutter, or suffocated by your stuff?

Why do we say stuff like that? It's not just a saying - that's the way clutter really affects us.

Besides being bad for your self-esteem, excessive clutter really affects your state of mind and adds to your stress level.

It's just impossible to relax fully when you're in a very cluttered room. Take a moment and look around the room you're in while you're reading this. Is it clean or cluttered? How does it make you feel? Take a moment and imagine how you would feel if it were more clean or more cluttered?

My guess is that you would be more anxious and stressed if it was more messy and more relaxed and peaceful if it was clean. Your mind just works that way. Your eye is always looking for clear and uncluttered surfaces to rest on and your brain is always subconsciously trying to remind you of tasks and chores you should be doing.

Is your peace of mind worth a few 15 minute cleanups? I would think it would be.

I know when I get on the ball and keep my house looking nice, I definitely notice an improvement in my mood and also in my family's mood. My kids tend to get along better, and my husband is less likely to be grouchy.

To me, that's well worth a few minutes a day of extra cleaning!

Be sure and come back next Monday for the next installment in my Clutterbugs series.



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Declutter Weekend

I had a very productive weekend! We were having a big party for my husband's birthday* - about 18 people, so went spent most of the weekend tidying up and getting ready for the party. In the course of doing all that, we ended up removing a TRUCKLOAD of unneeded stuff out of our house. Yes, a truckload! And when you consider that our house isn't really all that cluttered, that is quite an achievement.

* Note - this was actually about a year ago. But surprisingly, the movie and book shelves still look pretty much the same. Nice & organized.

Here's how we did it. First I organized all the movies. This project has been in progress for a couple of weeks. As we have been repainting our basement, I decided to switch my movies and my books.

Half our books were downstairs in our built-in bookshelf downstairs and half in a freestanding bookcase in my guest room. We had the same thing with the movies - half in the basement and half upstairs. So I decided to switch them and get them all in the same place, so it would make more sense. Here is the final result:


Here's is my husband's shelf. All pretty and organized.

Here's my shelf and all our millions of kid movies!

I sorted out all the movies by category and labeled each shelf to help keep them organized. There are chick flicks, kids movies, westerns (my husband has a whole shelf!), action movies, comedies, and dramas.

As I was doing this, I sorted out all of our old home movies and put them in a special place where they would be extra safe. I also weeded out a large box of VHS movies that were either duplicates, or ones we had taped off of TV. I made a list of those movies so we can work on buying them on DVD a few at a time.

I wish I'd thought to take a "Before" picture, but believe me, it didn't look all nice & neat like this. Movies were stacked up all over the shelves and were taking up a lot more room.

Here is the final result on the books:



Again, a great improvement, though I didn't actually get rid of very many books. I had already decluttered two big boxes of them before we moved into this house two years ago. So mainly, I was just organizing them by type and size and getting rid of a few clunkers that needed to go.

Then I just tossed in a couple of boxes of too-small kids clothing and some toys and shooed my husband off to the homeless shelter. Voila! My house minus an entire truckload of clutter.

Be sure and come back next Monday and Friday for the next installment in my Clutterbugs series. To see the rest of the series, just click the Clutterbugs tag at the bottom of this post and it will bring up a list of them.



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Writer's Workshop - Best Advice

This is my MamaKat's Writer's Workshop prompt. This week I'm writing about good advice I've received.

I honestly believe in the power of words - I think they are literally the most powerful force in the universe. Sometimes that force can have a positive effect, sometimes it can have the opposite effect. That's why you have to be so careful with your words.

I have heard of so many people who have heard an offhand comment about them and it has totally destroyed their self-esteem. I did it to my own son, totally by accident. Years ago, we were talking about the difference between midgets and dwarfs, probably after we had watched Little People, Big World or something. I told him that a midget is someone of short stature, usually under 4'10". However, I left out one very important word - an ADULT of short stature.

Blake's always been a tiny kid - he weighs next to nothing and he's always been the smallest kid in his class. One day, he referred to himself as a midget and I told him not to say things like that. In all seriousness, he said, but I am a midget, I'm under 4'10". Broke my heart. Lord only knows how long he went around thinking he was literally a midget.

On the other hand, I had some good advice that totally shifted my perspective on something forever. A couple of years ago, I worked with a personal coach for a while. It was a great experience for me and I learned a lot from it. The one thing that helped me the most - whenever I was mad at someone or felt that someone had wronged me in some way, she would always have the same question for me:

How can you see them as innocent?

And she would make me stand in that person's shoes and see why they felt they needed to do whatever they had done. No one ever does something that they know is wrong or mean or bad. They always have some excuse, however flimsy, or some reason in their heart that they felt what they did was the right thing to do. You never know what is going on in someone's mind or you never know if someone had a rotten childhood, or just was never taught the right thing, or what.

So if you can give them that little benefit of the doubt, it makes it easier for you. It doesn't mean it's right or that you excuse them for doing the bad thing to you, but it does help.



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Guess What I Did???

Well, I went and did it - I signed up with Pampered Chef! Can you believe it? As if my life wasn't already busy enough. But I've actually thought about it for a long time. I really like their products and it seems like more income for a lot less work than Stampin' Up!

Don't get me wrong, I still like Stampin' Up! and I plan to continue with it, but it can take from six to eight hours to design, cut out and prepare the projects for an event. That's why it truly is a labor of love when I do a stamping event. My new team leader says it takes her just half an hour to get ready for a Pampered Chef show. Whoohoo!

But here's the *real* reason I signed up with Pampered Chef. Shhhh, it's my big secret - I don't know how to cook. Seriously. I am almost 50 years old and I never really learned how to cook properly.

It's not totally my fault - I was raised entirely by my Mom and she didn't cook either. We ate a steady diet of TV dinners, almost seven days a week. She thought they were the greatest thing ever invented. And like me, she had about 3 or 4 "go to" recipes that got her by most non-TV dinner situations.

And I'm fortunate enough to be married all these years to a man who likes to cook. He's much more interested in food than I am and he has always done most of the cooking for us. And if he doesn't want to cook, he's always willing to go out to eat, so I've rarely had to cook for my family.

So I went to this Pampered Chef party last night and I was so impressed. She showed us this fabulous recipe for chicken fajitas. And it was so quick and so tasty and it looked so easy with all the nifty little tools and things they have and I thought - I can DO this.

That's the way I felt when I first started with Stampin' Up! I made this cute little card at a party and I felt so proud of myself and I just wanted to share that feeling with my friends. And now I'm going to have a whole bunch of new stuff to share with all of you.

I'll let you know when I have my website all set up and am open for business.

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