a place for everything...

"Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk while it's still snowing."

Ever since school let out I have been in major cleaning and organizing mode...it's only taken me 10 1/2 years after the birth of my last child to pull everything together. I think I might actually be able to keep it together, too, which is thrilling. Hope springs eternal, at any rate.

The biggest help for getting my house clean (besides spending all day almost every day cleaning) it that I spent time getting rid of stuff. Half the messes were because we didn't have a proper place for things...either they didn't have a place or the place was so crowded it was hard to deal with it, so things weren't put away because it was such a hassle. So, a place for everything and everything in it's place...you can't have order if things don't have a home. I'm still looking for a home for my vacuum cleaner (besides the hallway), but most things are settled. It's wonderful.

I'm doing several things to help me get things in order. The FlyLady.net has been a big help. She divides the house into 5 zones and each week is for a different part of the house. This week's emphasis is the kitchen. Today I scrubbed down the stove top. She has you do most things for only 15 minutes so you don't get overwhelmed. I haven't been stopping at 15 minutes and so am making great progress.

I also do a daily challenge from a facebook group Refuge for the Organizationally Challenged. Today I spent 15 minutes in the game closet (and 15 in the linen closet which was yesterday's assignment).

On a different level, I am currently 2/3s the way through reading the book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen. It's more geared towards a business person, but can be adapted for home life as well.

The biggest help this has been a little trick that has helped my procrastination habit. The rule is, if it takes less than 2 minutes to accomplish a task, do it right then (barring other constraints, of course). Wow. So simple. But I was forever noticing something needed to be done (cobwebs, spot on the floor, food spilled in the microwave, etc) and moving on without taking care of it.

I set up my "tickler file" today...a way to remind yourself of future things. I adapted it for my less demanding non-business life and instead of having 31 file folder, one for each day of the month, I have only 1--one for each FlyLady cleaning week. We'll see how it goes.

There's still plenty to do, but I so enjoy having my countertops cleaned off and all the shoes in the closet and being able to take things out of cabinets without having avalanches.

craft closet before

one month later and it still looks good!

emergency preparedness-simple tips

some simple things we can do that will help us be ready for an emergency:

-keep a 72 (or more) hour kit in the car and also at work in case you can't make it home in an emergency and remember that the food and water in kits kept in your car have to be rotated much more frequently during hot weather

-think about upgrading your 72 hour kits to 120 hour kits (5 days) since it has been discovered that 3 days is often not enough time for relief to come

-make sure you have enough water with your kit, a can opener if needed, and a way to heat food if needed

-keep a flashlight by your bed and shoes under your bed in case there's an earthquake and there is broken glass all over your floor so you can get out of bed and see without cutting yourself

-don't hang pictures above your bed so they won't come crashing down on you if there's a quake in the middle of the night

-keep you car gas tank at at least 1/2 tank (remember, if the electricity goes out, you won't be able to pump)

-charge your cell phone every night and keep a charger in the car in case the electricity is out for a long time, you have a way to recharge your cell phone

-have an emergency contact person outside of your state whom you can call to let everyone know you are OK and call quickly after the emergency because sometimes the circuits become overloaded or are shut down

-have a prearranged time to make calls to family and friends during an extended emergency and only turn on your phone during that time frame so as to not waste your battery power

-keep lots of $1 bills on hand (quarters, too) since if the electricity goes out your debit and credit cards won't work and businesses may not be able to make change

-fill your bathtub with water as soon as you can since pipes sometimes break or the water is shut off and you won't be able to do it later

been reading a lot lately ramble

We ended our satellite TV subscription just over a month ago. Amazingly no one has complained. Not even a hint or a whine. And if anyone would whine, it would probably be me. I'm the one that talked Glen into getting satellite many years ago, but now with just about everything we want available on the internet, there didn't seem to be a good enough reason to pay $52/month to watch our shows.

The TV was the background noise to my life. I occasionally put in DVDs now, but it's not the same. I cleaned and worked on projects while watching (or just listening). I rarely just watched a show. I can do that. Glen can't. Even if it's just a commercial Glen has seen many times before, if the TV is on in a room he's in, he is put into a trance by it and can't seem to focus on anything else. I used to turn off the TV long enough to "give Glen his freedom" (he would escape into another room, then I could turn the TV back on). Seriously. The magnetic quality of the TV to Glen is something of a joke between us.

There have never been more than maybe 3-4 shows that we tried to watch in any season. Right now we watch Castle (ABC) and Psych (USA). And with Castle sometimes having inappropriate subject matter (and even Psych, occasionally), I wonder how long I'll tune in.

(and this brings up how sad I think it is when, like on Monday when the journal question for the reading class I was subbing in was "If you could only watch one show on TV, what would it be and why?", these 12 and 13 year old kids' favorite shows are things that, in my opinion obviously, they shouldn't be watching--things that I don't watch because of content...really several boys' favorite show was "Two and a Half Men" and "Family Guy" and "The Simpsons")

So, instead of TV, I've been doing a lot of reading...which isn't always as good as I can only read (can't get chores done at the same time as I did while I watching TV). In the past month, I have read 8 books (though some have been teen fiction, so aren't as long as some others I have read in the past).

The last 2 books I read, I started while subbing at the Junior High. Funny thing is that both books (Down the Rabbit Hole and Zach's Lie) deal with 13 year olds and have some theatre invovled )the first has an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland and the second is an adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera). I basically enjoyed them both, but have some reservations about 13 year olds reading them (due to some of the messages that might influence kids into thinking it's OK to have relationships at that age--of course I realize that plenty of 13 year olds do date, but I don't think that should be encouraged). I know I'm a lot pickier than some and silly things get me riled.

For example, in Down the Rabbit Hole, the heroine, 13 year old Ingrid, sneaks into a crime scene and takes her cleats out so no one will find out she had been to the murdered lady's house. After her grandfather gets her to essentially commit fraud (though I agree with his intent, if not his method for trying to save his farm land), she takes her grandfather's car out of his garage while he is napping. She drives it, at age 13 with only a few minutes practice driving a tractor, several miles down the country road to see the mother of the dead woman. Then she steals an envelope while there. She cheats on her math homework and then is all mad when the teacher thinks she cheated on her math quiz (even though she didn't cheat on the quiz there's circumstantial evidence to suggest she did). She also kisses a boy, who although the were raised in the same town it seems like she realistically barely knows the boy. Her older brother, a jock, punches her in the eye when he gets mad at her and that never seems to be addressed. She never tells anyone about it and her brother never apologizes or anything. And of course, she's lying left and right while she's trying to solve the murder so the police chief won't suspect her. I know Hannah really loved the book when she read it a year ago, but she says that she remembers almost nothing about it now.

Zach's Lie was a bit frustrating for me, but not in the same manner, although at 13 he does wind up with a girlfriend of sorts, though they never kiss. What drove me a little crazy here was the fact that I want my fiction to be real. This is really silly, I know, but on his first day in school in Elko he goes to PE. From PE he goes to homeroom. After homeroom it's lunchtime, for crying out loud. Even if he was on a block schedule it wouldn't work. Doesn't anyone read for logical flow of events???

One of my pet peeves in fiction (and I think Diane Mott Davidson has been guilty of this several times) is when they put on a pot of water to boil and -no kidding (like who would kid about such a ridiculous subject)--within one to two paragraphs of dialog not only has the water boiled, but they are drinking the tea already. Reality. I want reality. You are all thinking I need to get a life, I'm sure.

So, been reading a lot. It really is amazing how much time I seem to have now that I don't have to check with the TV all the time to make sure I'm not missing anything fascinating. (which reminds me, I need to look up NOVA so I can watch it online...)