Wordless Wednesday: The Story of My Life

Wordy Wednesday: Get Rid of It!

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I'm still Looking

Five on Friday: February 13, 2015

Wow, this month is going fast!  I think my time in New York and then an 'almost-week' of dogsitting last week put me mentally behind. Plus I have another upcoming dog sitting 'gig'. Sadly, all these times with the dog are because of a death and a funeral. But that's life.

1. My ongoing clean out project seems to have stalled. I realized I was doing anything I could to avoid the sorting and purging so yesterday I finally got some things shuffled around so I could put the final bits into the red Christmas box that sits up on a shelf of other 'stuff'. That did make me feel good because those Advent wreaths were getting to me mentally. One small weight is off my shoulders.

2. I have only seen one of the Oscar movies, Grand Budapest Hotel which I found weird. I hope to see a couple others and hope they come out on Redbox soon because I think there are one or two that dh and I would enjoy. I am too cheap to see them in the theater and he always wants popcorn AND a drink which of course necessitates a bathroom break. At home there is the beauty of pause but not in the theater.  These are my top two. You can tell what kind of film I like!

3. Every other week or so, I try to send a postcard to my granddaughter. She is just at the age to enjoy getting mail Just For Her. It's a good way to use my postcard collection rather than just let it sit and age. Do any of you do something like this?

4. I finished up one book that I took with me for the dogsitting stay.  "Some Luck" by Jane Smiley. While I did finish it, all in all it was meh.  Ok, I don't have any interest in farming, the heartland etc but darn if even the parts of WWII and Washington DC, spies and the cold war were pretty flat. I cannot imagine two more volumes of this trilogy. ymmv.

5. One good bit of clutter and excess that is NOT growing is my digi stash. I give much of the credit to Lightroom which allows me to see just how much I have. I have also become tired of some styles and while there are other stores and designers who have caught my attention, I also realize I can make a lot of what I like.  Just like too many clothes in the closet, too many digi supplies leads to choice exhaustion. 


Today being Friday the 13th, I hope you have a super GOOD luck day and an even better weekend.  We're going out to lunch and then it's off dog sitting for me.

Five on Friday: January 9, 2015

1. Things I didn't know....re interstates. On the east coast we say e.g. I-95 (aka known as the road from hell) but in California they have unique ways of speaking of Interstate-5, a similar ubiquitous north-south road. In Southern California, they say "the 5" but I just learned that in Northern California, they say "5".  I don't know where their 'Mason-Dixon' line is for the change of speech because I don't want to sound like I'm ignorant when I next go to California.  Big problem, eh???

2. That great project of getting rid of clutter in my studio reminds me that there are always steps to do before the actual work starts. Trashing the surface crap is easy. But then there are the other things that require boxes etc. I mean what to do with the several older versions of say PSE software. I need a give away box, a big one, so that I don't have to obsess on where each item should go. So a trip to Walmart is in order and the weather is cold and I'm not overjoyed to go out again....Big Sigh.

3. Why is it that when a do a massive amount of cooking to stock up, mainly for him, he goes out for meals half the week? Time to pack the freezer with stuff I guess.

4. Less than happy with the display of the newer Instagram filters? Here's a way to arrange them the way you like. Click HERE

5. My dh made one of his halibut curry dinners for his guy friends and one of them brought a big bowl of salad. I was able to enjoy the salad leftovers twice this week with some TraderJoes shrimp. A nice almost ready meal for me and a big thank you to the wife of the guest. She actually made the salad.

Now go and have a wonderful weekend! and if you're in a cold snowy area, don't fall down on the ice!

Five on Friday: December 20, 2013

The cold comes and goes here. The sky is sunny or it's that certain gray the makes me think SNOW!! But I'm married to a man who used to work for the National Weather Service. No, he's not a meteorologist but he plays one. When he says precip, I used to say...Say rain, if you mean rain!  I stopped saying that because then I got the 'precipitation lecture'. Like I give a rat's ass... Anyhow, our one bit of snow cum sleet cum icy cold just kind of made a mess with patches of thick pebbled ice that lingered for a couple of days. A long couple of days. But I am digressing... on to The Five.

1. Our Cypriot neighbor gave us cookies and one type is covered in powdered sugar. He's eating those and leaving a trail of white powder hither and yon. But then I bought a German (marzipan! num num num) stollen at Trader Jo's and it's covered with...yep, powdered sugar. However, I cut a slice and mostly just shove the whole thing into my mouth. Unladylike but in the privacy of my own home it means no mess for me. Sneaky, huh...

2. Each day I look at the clutter in my studio, I think of things I'm willing to give away. However, that means boxing/bagging the bits and pieces up and taking them somewhere. I know most people and charities are not really interested in being bombarded with donations right now. I'm not looking for a donation receipt - esp with the end of year rush - so I suppose I'll just have to live with it til....2014. One batch did go out on Monday. Bit by bit.

3. It's been soup time again. Last Saturday I made Dutch pea soup with a hunk of ham bone I had in the freezer. I had to leave out the leek and substitute green split peas for the yellow. That bone had very little ham but I didn't care. I used the container of turkey broth my daughter in law gave me after the T-day dinner. Man,was that good stock! My dh had a look on his face when he saw dinner but said he never liked his mother's pea soup but that it didn't taste like this one. How did it taste? I asked. Not like this he said. That was about all I got out of him but I suspect he'd have liked a lot more ham and probably prefer if he never got this soup again. Actually, I found the spices a little odd. Perhaps they were just old. I can't think of the last time I've used allspice!

4. A funny line I heard on Joy The Baker podcast, a podcast about cussing and some ways to shortcut that habit, just use initials..."If your stuff is S, then F it!"  Podcasts are great for car drives I've found. (btw, check Joy's blog for some baking porn. I think I need to wait til February to consider baking again.)

5. I also had a chance to drive through some neighborhoods that are not far from me but in a  rather different world. How can you spot that at night?  The volume of Christmas lights goes way up! Sadly, the traffic was too heavy to pull over anywhere without some truck hitting me so there are no photos.  There were more colored lights, more flashing lights, more lawn decorations (lit of course), more mixtures of colored lights with blue lights and one of the strangest ones, to me, all green lights. Again, lots of lights and white lights rarely in sight. I suspect that if you were high in any way it would be quite the experience.

original

However, nothing quite compares to 34th Street in Hampden, Baltimore for glitz though! I hope we get up to see it again this year. And may your Christmas be as flashy as you like!

A step at a time, A room at a time

Now into the studio...where every scrap of paper tells a story



(Yes, that should be April 10 - 12 )


This certainly qualifies as ALL ABOUT ME because there is no one else responsible for this room but me!

Clutter begone!

After seeing the Simplify 101 online courses for a couple of years (?), I finally decided to take one as I knew I would procrastinate on clearing clutter post recent vacation. I really wanted to get to a state where I feel comfortable in most rooms of my house most of the time. I'm in the Quick and Simple Clutter Control. Most of the information I knew, but somehow paying some money and being accountable, at least on line, helps me really do what I know how to do. It's also the electronic kick in the pants to Do It NOW.

So far I've concentrated on my mess in the bedroom.







Now this sure makes me happy and I look forward to walking into the bedroom tonight, knowing that the clutter is just not hiding somewhere else. Tomorrow, maybe some time doing some of the same in the studio.

White Space

In this week's lesson at Cathy Zielske's DYL-Design Your Life class at Big Picture Scrapbooking , the subject of the week is White Space. In painting, the negative space. But negative tends to have a bad connotation while white is neutral or better at least. Empty space. Space where the rest of the design, the life can be viewed more clearly. Where what's important stands out, rather than being lost in a jumble, in chaos.

Cathy asked us to look for white space in our homes. Oh how I've longed for white space. It was one of my primary goals in renovation. The redesign of the kitchen to make it more functional and spacious was the immediate goal, but the underlying goal - for me - was white space, spaciousness.

I have it, as long as I don't jumble it up with more, more, more. I did very little decorating for Christmas, so it's not the dregs of Christmas that clutters up my space. It's the little things that I don't take time for. Time to put them away, time to throw them away, time to stop hoarding little things Just In Case. Here are two examples for the cloudy space made into white space.







Here is my kitchen island early this a.m. The things on it are left from last weekend's pantry reorganization. It was something I hadn't intended to do, but a shelf started falling so it had to be done. I've seen that if something irritated me I am less likely to finish it.










5 minutes of work putting things back where they belonged resulted in this.























I am always surprised how little work it takes to get something from a 'hot mess' to white space. It only takes forEVAH in my mind. Are you the same?

On my desk... April 2

On my desk... April 2
Originally uploaded by redazadi

Ok, this is part 1...lots of sorting out to do and today is the START. Maybe if I get on a roll, there will be a part 2, showing more skin...er wood. ;-)

More desks at Kootoyoo's list .

On my desk...March 12

I had thought about this meme from Kirsty at Kootoyoo. Last night, and woke up early fed up with the way the tables are. This is my first full year of using the room, and I found I could not reach the window with the table up against it. (i.e. in the side by side arrangement) So I had moved them apart and had my chair w/back between the tables. This worked ok, but I hated seeing the back of the well loved Imac as I entered the room.

There is ongoing clutter tho the shelves are pretty well organized - it's still the boxes that are still packed and the decisions of how to store things I have never used - or at least for a long time.



So shift and push and get the tables back to back - and look what I see while I'm sorting out.

But will you see the tables as they are now ???oh, no, because my new effin' card reader is doing nada. The blue light is on but nobody's home. Grrrrrr. But I am working on a project for dh...so shhhhh!

Next week...another view, and hopefully less crapola.