its a passing phase

Productivity comes in cycles for me.  Sometimes I have like zero ambition, and that can even be an ambitious estimate, while others I seem to be a bit obsessed.

I have to make the most out of the obsessed times because they are usually short lived and often followed by stretches of lazy lostness.  Yes, I make one fabulous housewife.

At any rate, I've been more productive than usual.  I am referring to my in-person-life here because my blogging alter ego has been pretty much worthless lately.  In so doing, I have also developed an abnormally large sense of self confidence, which I figure will either translate to shit getting done or a whole lot of writing material.  I call it a win-win either way.

I have heard that in order to be really truly accountable you have to tell people what your goals are.  If you don't share them, then you never really need to admit you failed.  I usually have no problem castigating myself over my own failures, but what the heck, lets make a list here and see how I do with the public thing:

I have birthdays, summer, and in-law visits on my horizon ... I gotta get crap done ...

(in no particular order)

1. Clean ceiling fans, because I rarely have them off and notice how dirty they are
2. Organize the growing box pathetically labeled "pictures and keepsakes"
3. Finish the 11 year old's baby book *hangs head in shame*
4. Clean house thoroughly closer to visits, not halfsies clean
5. Finish the "measure the kids" ruler thingy that has been half-done for like a year and a half
6. Clean out Meatball's closet
7. Clean out the Bean's closet
8. Clean out toys ... purge the hell outta toys ...
9. Make a Goodwill and/or consignment shop run to ditch some crap
10. Make my kitchen cabinets look less blah
11. Make my/our bedroom not be the one with the door always closed in shame
12. Do something with the bathroom walls, b-o-r-i-n-g!
13. What are we doing for the Beans' birthday?
14. Hair cut, its pathetic and been like a year since I did that
15. Garage -- make the parts that are my problem look less like a bomb test site
16. Garage -- urge and support Paul Bunyan to deal with the rest of the garage
17. The backyard will only be a livable space for a couple months, make it look nice for them
18. Make my Command Center wall so I can at least appear organized!
19. Shave the dog.  Yes, I said that.
20. Come up with an item # 20 because you can't have a list of 19 things!!!

There, that is a start.  I have no real hope of accomplishing all of that in the ridiculously short time frame I am giving myself ... which is like 2 weeks ... but let's see what we can do, eh?

Insanity will commence in 5, 4, 3, 2 ... aren't you glad you don't live here? ... and 1 ...

when deal-getting goes wrong

The problem I have with couponing and other deal-getting-behavior is that I tend to do it a bit stupidly.  Like I have a coupon for buy five get one free and I don't need one, much less six, of the product anyway.  But I get the thrill of feeling momentarily like I might be doing it right so I get them anyway then wind up with six things I neither want, nor need, and less money.  Fail.

But sometimes you buy crap with the best of intentions.  

For Christmas the husband and I bought the Beans one of those foam floor alphabet mat sets.  He was starting to play independently and we had set up the Gulag (play yard) in the living room and I wanted something a bit soft on the floor of it because the child is convinced he is the human version of a pinball.  The big bullseye store had these for like $12 and another company (one that I had actually heard of) for $25.  We made the financial decision that the $12 ones looked good and at half the price who could really argue even if they were on clearance and from a company we'd never heard of.  Ever the broke optimists we bought them.

 Bad move.

The letters didn't really fit in the squares, so if you even thought about moving the foam square, the letter would spontaneously jumped out like a kernel in a popcorn maker.  If you tried to move them you had a foam alphabet soup on your floor and a really frustrated me on your hands.  So I resorted to this ...

Yes, I did that 26 times.  And no, one pass of the packing tape was not enough.  Most letters needed a tape X and some needed more of an asterisk to hold the letters in place.

Then the little perforated edges didn't fit together nicely, and the color "pattern" wasn't a pattern but actually changed part way through and that drives my OCDishness nuts.  (Check out the pattern from A to E then note what happens E through L.  WTF?)

I was pretty impressed at my self control because I wanted to spell out some special non-kidpropriate stuff by the time I was finally getting the damn things together.

And of course, the Beans wanted to take them apart and seemed to instantly know how to do it, tape or no tape.  And then he somehow hog tied himself with packing tape. This was the one time he played ON it and not WITH it.

And I was re-fitting them together daily if not more so the human bouncy ball didn't trip and kill himself.

So remember the 100 Things Challenge?  Guess what 52-pieces-of-pain-in-the-ass-crap is going in there?  Oh yeah.  

Lesson learned, if there are like 45 of them on sale and on clearance the product might just suck.

hallway closet crapalanche ... check!

So there once was a hallway closet ...

An ugly, frightening, stuffed to the gills hallway closet.  Small and over packed, it was difficult to find anything, and no one ever put anything back where it belonged.

And it drove me nuts.

When we got married and moved into this house we timed it well/horribly.  You see, ultimately to make a long convoluted story short and less boring, both sets of my grandparents were moving.  The process of moving into assisted living spaces meant that they had to clear out a ton of their things, and being that my husband and I were "just starting out" we were generously gifted with many of these things.  Problem was that only some of those things were the kind of stuff that make you go "oooh, this is cool" and the rest of it was just "old people's stuff."  But being broke has a funny way of equalizing things on the I Should Keep This scale.

Case in point, the hall closet.  I do not own a set of towels.  I own random, mismatched towels, many of which are older than my children (I have a ten year old, this is not a good thing!).  I have dish towels with flowers and geese on them, and I have like 40 of them.  I have more of those lovely afghans that grandmothers so lovingly knit than an afghan sweatshop. And somewhere in this closet there appears to also be a monster that eats flat sheets.  Because I can't find the damn flat sheets.

At any rate, I spent an hour pulling things out, throwing things out, and putting stuff in a box to donate (hellooo 100 Things Challenge!) and was left with less crap, but still crap.  But its crap I will use, as it is still useful and we can't go buy new towels for the bathrooms right now.  I did ditch the geese and flower dishtowels though.

If you use Pintercrack you may have seen this pinned at some point:

Its supposed to be this wildly simple-yet-oh-so-great way to store your sheet sets inside of the pillowcases.  Except I wanted to take scissors to the damn elastic thingies.  I wound up with this, after multiple tries.

And I was happy with that.

So after I had the closet all organized and cleaned out and tons of shit re-folded, I reminded myself that the last time I tried to straighten up in there it was a hot mess again in like 4 days.  So I decided to write a little love note to my family ...

Undoing over an hour of my time makes Mommy feel Stabby McStaberson, friends.  Lets keep that in mind.

Here is the oldest Minion reading the note .... he was appropriately alarmed.

So while it isn't "done" in the sense that I know it will be a mess again soon, it is better.  I think better is good.  I will need to come up with a better organization to it or just not allow anyone else to touch the darn thing (so not happening).

So on the list of things I want done around the house so I can feel like I am not a massive failure as a housewife I can scratch off "reduce crapalanche potential in the hall closet so I can get a damn towel out with out being buried alive."  Yes, it actually says that on my list.

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.