100 pieces of crap

While I am not a Hoarder's level crap-keeper, I tend to keep stuff that I really don't want or need.  I think it is a combination of being cheap, broke, and having been a teacher.  Anyone who has even been a teacher knows you can find a use for just about anything, especially if that shit be free!

Yes, the teacher just used improper English.  While I can't stand it when people mix up the "your"s or write things like "breath" when they mean "breathe," I feel that it is perfectly appropriate to intentionally misuse words or play with language when you do it on purpose.  

Anyhoo, we live in 1500 square foot of crap avalanche potential.  I am sick of it.  

So I was reading one of my fave blogs and had a guest post regarding that blogger's 100 things challenge.  And I was all "Yay, I can do dat!" (Yes, again intentional.)

So we are, as a family, doing the 100 things challenge.  The idea is simple.  We have to find 100 things around the house that we do not want, need, like, or use.  Then we have to either get rid of it (trash or donation) or re-purpose it.  I can already anticipate that my cheap-teacher-hoarder tendencies will have issues with the re-purposing thing, because I can reuse anything.  Anything. I get twitchy thinking about throwing out potentially useful stuff. 

So knowing I needed to keep myself in check, and I have a thing for fancy forms and tables, I made this. 

I made a 100 Things chart for the house, and one for our backyard/shed because the shed is ready to pop.  Because I am a bit of a glitter-burping unicorn and am hopeful that 100 things will be easy in this house, I also made a "bonus" sheet, so we can document anything over 100 from either page.  

In addition, I'm a teensy bit OCD and love highlighters, so incorporated color coding: if you are re-purposing the item you write down it has to be highlighted yellow.  You must have an immediate purpose for it -- I am quite good at saying "I know I can use this someday."  I won't let that cut it.  Orange stuff is for donation, and it needs to be donated by the next weekend as things for donation tend to set up semi-permanent residence in my garage.  Trash stuff is trash, therefore it doesn't get highlighted because I don't want to waste highlighter ink on garbage.  Yes, I said I was cheap.  

But since I am inherently weak and have no self discipline to speak of, I am doing the color coding so that my husband can ride my ass.  Which he will.  Gladly.  Sigh.

I would gladly post a PDF of my charts were anyone to want them, but alas, when our computer got "fixed" the programs got erased.  This included our Microsoft Word, and we only have the "update" disk because the compute was originally Vista loaded when we got it.  When everything got erased we had nothing to "upgrade" and now I have some free word processing program, which works okay but I can't save as a PDF.  Anyone want to help a girl and give me Word or tell me how to save as PDF I'd love 'em for it! ;)

I will post an update once I break it to the troops we are doing this and that each of us has a 25 item minimum.  Mutiny surely will follow.  

lets try that again

Recall my post that was all back-patty goodness regarding my finally doing something that I found on Pinterest?  I was sooo happy with myself, until I realized that I had neither a place for the item in question, nor did I have the pen I needed to make it work.

Well crap.

It wouldn't be me if there wasn't some kind of face-plant-moment. Its not rocket surgery or brain science, but I have a tendency to go big go home/over think everything, so the end result is that I don't always know where I am going with my brilliant plans, but I am confident in their brilliance none the less.  That's optimism at its finest and most useless for ya folks!

While my "free" and "easy" project continued haunting my mind for a while I eventually realized that the only logical thing to do was to completely redo two walls in my house. This involved digging out frames I had stored for a day I would eventually need them (knew it would happen!), making a run to Hobby Lobby, and covertly asking the hubs via text where the level and drill where in the garage while he sat at work wondering if it was possible for me to put enough holes in the walls to impact the structural integrity of the house.  {Answer: Not yet dear!}

I also had to completely redo the "i love you because" picture I found on Pinterest because I needed it to hang vertically and it looked really stupid the way I had it.

The end result is that the "free" and "easy" project that was also so "quick" wound up taking a whole day, costing me about $30 and required the use of 7 different tools and my husband had no fewer than 5 panic attacks. This does diminish the bragging I was doing about how I had finally found and used a Pinterest idea so quickly.

Po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe.

Anywhoo, here is the new fangdangled "i love you because" picture in my completely re-done hallway, complete with our first lovey-dovey messages to each other.

Just beyond the Love You picture frame are my map pictures so the hallway certainly makes me look all sorts of crafty-clever-successful.  You'd almost believe I have my act together, but then you see the rest of the house ...

Pintercrack --er, I mean Pinterest.

I am not your typical bloggie. I have no earth shattering specialty knowledge or skills, don't homeschool, have no culinary skills to really speak of, have no mantle much less an OCD habit of decorating it and redecorating it every fifteen seconds to reflect the weather, upcoming holidays or my stage of PMS ... so really if someone were to ask me what this blog is about I'd probably have a real genius looking moment where I sound as intelligent as Homer Simpson ... uuuuuuhhhhhhh ...

But I try. Really I do. Between swear words, bottles of wine or beer, and continued therapy fodder for my children I do try. And like all mama's in the blog world I eventually had to cave and try crack.

Er, I mean Pinterest, I had to try Pinterest. Haven't actually tried crack, but I imagine its similar ... only illegal.

So I have like seventy gajillion pins already and not a lot to show for it. If I could become organized, cook well, or make cool shit via osmosis it would have happened already so I guess my virtual pin board is one part foolish hope and one part failure beacon. At anyrate, I have never in all my thousands of pins jumped up from the computer and said "ohmigowsh I am so doing that now." I have on the contrary said "ohmigowsh I so wanna do that ... someday ... eventually ... maybe ... better pin it JIC."

Then 20 minutes ago happened.

Yup, I pinned, did, then blogged. This has to be some sort of freaking productivity record for me.

I can't get a picture of the original on here, so you have to go to a content housewife's blog post in order to see it. Simple, yet all the cushy goodness that makes me keep up the pretenses! The original is adorable of course, and no, I don't have any flowers and the yet-to-be-posted-tutorial has zilch to do with their absence. They'd wind up looking like burlap poop in all likelihood if I tried, and with the boys and the dogs I can't help but develop nervous twitches at the thought of non-cloroxable-easy-to-dust-surfaces actually being present in my home. I only had an 11 x 14 frame on hand, so mine is bigger ... but so is my family, so I am up for pretending that was planned and intentional! Shhh ...

Yes, I even happened to have the same exact scrapbook paper on hand.

So, there it is, finished product. Except that in my zeal to finally do something on Pinterest so I could pretend I am cool like that I forgot that the non-hoarder I married made me get rid of all my teacher stuff when I became the stay-at-home-goddess so I have no vis-a-vis pens in the house.

Oh and I also have no idea where in the sam hick I am hanging this beast.

At least I have good intentions, right? Right?! {Sigh}

breaking the spacetime continuum ... in my kitchen

This is a two parter.  Part Two actually happened first but will happen second a-la-Star-Wars style, cuz I'm cool like that.  Confused yet?  Me too, but that's normal.

Anyhoo, I broke the space-time continuum.  Twice.  In my kitchen.

For realz, and I gots pictures to prove this!

Exhibit A

That is a drawer in my kitchen.  Now a word about my kitchen ... no, a few words: Its small as hell.  Actually, I imagine hell is a lot bigger, I haven't been there.  Yet.

You cannot simultaneously open more than one thing and still move through my kitchen.  Not possible, unless you can fly over everything because it does have a high ceiling.  I have a grand total of four drawers in the whole thing.  Exhibit A is one of them.  Not like we have lots of space, right?  Right.

So I was trying to get a chip bag clip out of this drawer and it was stuck.  Firmly lodged and pinned with other clips and  some other crap I could barely identify because I realized I couldn't actually open the drawer the whole way.  When I thought about it, I haven't been able to pull that drawer out more than a couple of inches in a long while ... please tell me I'm not the only loser who has epiphany moments like this?

I can't open a drawer because its full of too much shit.  

I haven't been able to open this drawer in ... um ... well ... its been a while. 

At the risk of fully humiliating myself (ha, you people don't actually know me!) it hasn't been truly, all the way opened since 2009 apparently.  I know this based on 2 of the contents I eventually removed from its depths.

Exhibit B

That was what was in this drawer.  Plus a tape measure.  I pulled the tape measure out because I wanted to measure this thing.  It is five inches wide, three inches deep, and sixteen-and-a-half inches long.  That is a grand total of 247.5 cubic inches (I can do math, as the blog points out its my domestic skills I suck at).  So Somehow we had fit the following in that narrow drawer:

• 3 Glade Plug-Ins plug in things
• 1 other Plug-In from Bath & Body Works (I think)
• 3 Plug-Ins from Target, but I don't remember the brand
• 1 LED nightlight
• 1 bottle 100 count Benadryl (for the dog)
• 2 bag "bottle" toppers
• 1 can-turns-into-bottle topper
• 1 huge strip of twist ties
• 1 pedometer
• 1 flip flop lighter
• 1 plastic bookmark
• 1 small pair scissors
• 1 strip of 3M sticky things ... not sure what for???
• 1 Scotch tape dispenser
• 1 pack of Trident gum
• 1/2 pack of Bubble Yum
• 3 business cards
• 1 glue stick
• 1 plastic thing that looks like it came out of a cereal box but I can't identify
• a shit ton of Post-It Notes in various sizes 
• 2 huge chip bag clips
• 6 small chip bag clips
• 2 small metal clips
• 1 broken mini-bag clip
• 1 dog tag
• 1 house key (?) still on packaging from store
• 1 how-to knot tying thing
• 1 really old tool that I can't identify
• 1 metal thingy I can't identify
• 1 ASU bottle opener that sings the Fight Song when used
• 1 AAA battery, probably dead
• 1 mint tin from a wedding (in 2009)
• 1 coupon for Clorox Anywhere Anti-Allergen spray (expired June 30, 2009)

That is 46 separate things plus "a shit ton" of Post-Its crammed into 247.5 cubic inches of space.

So I have managed to at least bend the space-time continuum all so that I could store a bunch of crap.

Part Two about my enormous scientific advances deals with my itty bitty pantry ...