Thursday 13: Cats, Chickens, Flowers, Freezers, and Work

 It has been insanely busy at work this week, so I wasn’t sure I’d have 13 things for Thursday 13, but I do. 

1.    Part of why work has been so busy is that there have been some changes.  I’m working with some people I haven’t worked with before.  I’m an assistant, so I’m always working with someone else on almost everything I do.  So, I was a little nervous about working with different people. 

When you’re an assistant, the people you assist can be the difference between loving your job or hating your job.

I had a meeting with my boss and one of the people I’ll be working with now, and I think we’ll work well together.  I had a one-on-one meeting with another person I’ll be working with now, and I’m pretty excited about some of the projects I’ll get to work on with them.  I think we’ll work well together. 

The rest of the year is likely to be super busy, but knowing that I’ll work well with at least some of the people is a huge relief. 

2.    Mortimer was not the least bit concerned about my job stress.  Doesn’t he look so relaxed?

3.    The free-range chickens have still been coming over for their snacks. 

4.    The chickens next door arrived in two batches.  The original chickens have been there almost a year and the new chickens have only been there a few months.  The original chickens are the ones who run up to meet me for food.   The new chickens are starting to do that, too.  All of the gray chickens, except the front right one, are the new chickens.  It looks like they’ve caught on that I’m the snack lady. 

5.    The smallest of the new chickens still hangs back some, but I’m determined to win her over. 

6.    Feeding time is always a little bit chaotic in our house.  Most of the cats are on different foods.  ALL of the cats are positive that the other cats get better food, so there’s a lot of trying to eat each other’s food.  Charlie and Howard took it to a new level this week.

I’m not sure if Howard went under Charlie, if Charlie went over Howard, or if it was a joint effort.  I feel like they deserve major points for their efforts to eat each other’s food here. 

7.    We’ve had some slightly cooler weather this week; 70s and 80s, which has been a welcome change, but not cold enough to hurt the plants.  I don’t know what these pink flowers are (GrandDaddy (Nick’s grandfather) gave them to me for Mother’s Day), but I think they’re pretty, and I’m happy they’re still doing well.   

8.    The hydrangea is still doing well. 

9.    The roses aren’t in full bloom anymore, but we still have some roses to enjoy. 

10. The marigold is still doing well.

11. I’ve realized that it’s time to work on getting the freezers at least a little bit cleaned out.  Thanksgiving isn’t that far away, and we’ll need the freezer space for when turkeys go on sale. 

12. Right now, both freezers are pretty jam-packed, and I’m not entirely sure what’s in them. 

13. I thought taking and sharing pictures of them might help hold me accountable and get me to focus on working through what’s in there. 

So, here they are in their horribly unorganized state.  (I promise we don’t actually live entirely on junk food/convenience food; it just seems like those things work their way to the top whenever we dig something else out). 

Hopefully, there will be a future Thursday 13 about the progress I’ve made in cleaning out the freezers.

How has your week been? 

“How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind: Dealing with Your House’s Dirty Little Secrets”

I didn’t choose a theme for this year’s A to Z Challenge.  I signed up on March 31^st, so there wasn’t much time to choose a theme.  I’ve been trying to loosely plan out my posts, though.  Experience has taught me that it’s frustrating to “waste” a post on an easier letter when I could have finagled that post to work for a more difficult letter.  I still don’t have an official theme, but the closest thing to a theme emerging seems to be “things I meant to write a blog post about a while ago.”  I seem to write a lot of catch-up blog posts, so I guess it makes sense to have a month devoted almost entirely to catching up. 

I think the first time I mentioned writing a post about decluttering was back in April of 2019, shortly after we started trying to organize and declutter in earnest.  So, three years later, I’m finally writing one.  We’ve made a lot of progress.  It’s still not perfect, but it’s a lot better. 

I’ve tried and abandoned a lot of decluttering and cleaning methods.  I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no perfect system, at least not for me.  I have, however, found three that I like bits and pieces of and have combined into one sort of system/method that seems to work for me.  Even though this is the one I’m sharing first, it’s the one I found last and probably use the least from.  Just to be honest, I’ve only skimmed the book and read a few chapters.   But I still think it’s worth sharing.

“How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind:  Dealing with Your House’s Dirty LittleSecrets” is a book by Dana K. White.  She also has a blog; A Slob Comes Clean, and a podcast. 

I’d rather end on a positive note (remember I said I only used bits and pieces from each system), so I’ll start with what I don’t like. 

The parts I don’t like are that the tone can seem a little bit goofy, and there seems to be a degree of “oh, look how cute and funny it is that I can’t get my act together.  Isn’t it hilarious that I’m a grown woman who’s embarrassed to let anyone in her house?!?”  I realize this is 100% my issue, but I HATE everything about being disorganized.  It stresses me out when things aren’t put away, we can’t find what we need when we need it, or if I feel like things are too messy to have people over to the house.  It’s humiliating and makes me feel like the person who never gets anything right.  I see zero humor in it.  That’s me and my issues, though.  I’m sure for plenty of people, the humor works.  The other thing I’m not crazy about is the podcast.  I’ve listened to two episodes, and they both seemed very rambling and disorganized to me.  Again, for some people, the less formal approach may be more appealing. 

Now that the negatives are out of the way, here are the things I love about it. 

She focuses a lot on letting go of the fantasy and embracing reality or not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.  This is something I’ve struggled with.  For example, for years, our spice cabinet was an absolute disaster.  Finding spices was an exercise in frustration because everything was just crammed in there, and jars and pouches would come tumbling out more often than not when you opened the door. 

I put off organizing the spice cabinet because I thought it would be just perfect to buy identical jars with cute little labels and put all of the spices in those and then organize them alphabetically.  It was part of my perfect kitchen fantasy.  I did have enough sense to know that it was going to be a very time-consuming project, so I kept putting it off.  Life kept happening.  I kept not buying the jars, not implementing my “perfect” spice cabinet system, and getting frustrated every time I cooked or baked and it was an ordeal to find what I wanted. 

I wasn't able to find a picture of what it looked like before.  Believe me when I say it was very, very bad. 

Finally, I got fed up and decided that good enough might work.  I combined all of the spices that I had duplicates or even triplicates of because I bought more when I couldn’t find them and grouped them mostly by cuisine in baskets, with the most commonly used ones being on the counter in a spinning spice rack. 

My system is this:

The ones I use daily or almost daily are in the spinning spice rack.  The baskets have spices usually used together; for example, spices used in baking are in a basket, spices used in Indian-style food are in a basket, etc. 

Is it perfect?   Nope.  It’s definitely not a Pinterest-worthy “look how beautifully arranged my spices are” setup.  Is it better than it was before?  About a million times better!  I can find what I need when I need it.  Bottles and jars aren’t falling out of the cabinet, and I don’t feel like a disorganized failure every time I need a spice.

The other thing I really like about this system is decluttering without making a bigger mess.  It seems like projects always take longer than I think they’re going to.  I don’t know how many times I’ve started a massive decluttering project on a Saturday morning, being perfectly willing to spend the whole morning and even part of the afternoon on it.  I drag everything out, make an absolute mess, get in way over my head, and that becomes the entire weekend.  This means I’m not about to try to declutter anything for the next few weekends because I don’t want to give up an entire weekend again. 

So I finally decided to try doing the really obvious parts of a decluttering project first.  Our shed was the perfect place to implement this.  Normally, I would have hauled everything out, had it all over the carport and the driveway, and we would have been stuck dealing with it all weekend.  

This time, I started small.  There were lots of rusty old paint cans from before we even bought the house.  Those were easy.  We definitely weren’t keeping them, so I was able to get rid of them.  I didn’t have to find a place for them, and getting rid of them gave me a little more space to work.  

Next was getting rid of a few broken tools, then hanging the good tools up.  

It took some time, but I didn’t hate the process.  Now it looks like this.

Is it perfect?  No.  There's definitely still room for progress.  But it’s so much easier to find the yard tools we need when we need them, and it’s so much easier to put the lawnmower away, which, in a weird way, makes it a little easier to cut the grass. 

So those are the two systems/methods I found to be most useful from “How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind:  Dealing with Your House’s Dirty LittleSecrets.”

What about you?  Have you read the book?  Do you have a favorite organizational or cleaning method?  Is it a struggle for you to stay organized? 

Masks

I know this post is really, really late in the grand scheme of wearing masks, but it seems like wearing masks will be going on for quite a while, so maybe better late than never.  And I’ve seen a few other people post about their masks, so I decided to as well.

Obviously, we’re wearing masks.  North Carolina has a mask mandate in place, though it’s not rigorously enforced everywhere.  We’ve been making a point of supporting businesses that do enforce it, and not supporting the ones that don’t.  It’s something we both feel very strongly about.  

That being said, it took some getting used to remembering to always bring a mask, and some trial and error to figure out the best way to organize them.  It seems like it’s always a little hectic trying to leave the house, and we’ve learned to keep things we need to take with us near the door.  We hang our keys near the door, so we decided hanging masks near the door would work.

We put up this hook for them.  

It’s very sturdy, so whenever things are back to normal we plan to use the hook for things like bags of library books that need to be returned and other things that need to be taken somewhere else.

We have a lot of masks.  It took some trial and error to find the ones that are most comfortable.  And Nick hasn’t been able to work from home, so that’s a mask every day, two now that the CDC has started recommending double masking, plus additional masks for any time I have to go into the office, or any time we have to take pets to the vet or go anywhere else.  Since they can’t go in the dryer, I wanted to make sure we had plenty of extras for the times when we get behind on laundry.  So we have a lot of masks.

We’ve also been following the guidance to wash them after every use.  I feel like the guidance to treat them like underwear; don’t touch them/take them off in public, wash them after every use, etc. is pretty simple to understand and follow.  

We have this bag hanging near the door to collect the dirty masks.  It’s just a reusable bag that I used to take to Aldi. 

It’s washable, and I periodically wash it along with the masks.  I know we could just put the used masks in the laundry hamper with everything else, but there’s a lot of potential for the mask to be taken off and left somewhere else in the house on the way to the hamper.  Since there have been cases of animals getting COVID, we don’t want to risk Duke or the cats getting sick from a contaminated mask, so the bag near the door works well for us.  We come in, put the mask in the bag, and immediately wash our hands.  

All of the masks that we’ve bought say to hand wash or wash on the gentle cycle, so they all go in the washer on the hand wash cycle.  Early on, I put them in with other things that were washed on the hand wash cycle, but the masks tend to get caught up in sleeves and pant legs.  A few accidentally went through the dryer that way, and I felt like I had to throw them away after that.  I wasn’t sure if they’d still be  effective, so I threw them away.  After that, I started counting the masks and making sure I had hung up the right number of masks before I put anything in the dryer.  That kept me from ruining any more masks, but it was a pain, so now I just wash the masks by themselves. 

It was a challenge figuring out how to dry so many masks at once.  We can’t hang them anywhere within reach of the cats because Caroline and Mortimer will chew the straps.  And a mask with no straps is pretty much useless.  The best method I’ve come up with is using a straight plastic clip hanger like this, so I can put several masks on one hanger.  Then I put the hanger on one of the hooks we have over our bedroom and closet doors.  

The cats can’t reach them, and they get plenty of air to dry.  

I decided early on to get masks in cute/cheerful prints/patterns.  There definitely hasn’t been much joy and happiness during the pandemic, so I decided to put a little bit of happiness wherever I could, and cute masks make me a little bit happier than plain ones. 

 

I’m a Friends fanatic, so of course I have a Friends mask.

Nick is a huge Star Trek fan, so he has a Star Trek mask.

If you’ve visited much, you know I love to cook, so I  have a mask with a cooking print.  

Nick loves sloths, so he has a sloth mask.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that most of my masks have butterflies.

Unfortunately, Nick’s job doesn’t share my view that cute masks bring a little bit of happiness, and they have a policy of solid color masks only.  They adopted that policy fairly early on, so Nick only has a few masks with prints.  We have a lot of solid colored masks, since Nick has to wear masks a lot more often than I do.  I’ve bought masks in pretty much every possible shade of blue since that’s Nick’s favorite color.  I refuse to give up on trying to squeeze a little bit of beauty and happiness into wearing masks.

My job, while being very strict about enforcing the mask mandate, has said we can wear any kind of mask we want as long as it’s not offensive.  So I still get to wear my happy masks whenever I go into the office.  Most of my coworkers have opted for solid colored masks anyway, but I don’t think it surprises anyone when the person with the pink office shows up in a mask with butterflies or rainbow hearts.  

So what about you?  Did you have a hard time getting used to remembering to bring a mask?  Do you prefer patterned or solid color masks?  

Thrifty Thursday - The Decluttr Edition

One of the things I want to do this year is finally get the clutter in our house under control.   We’ve been making much more of an effort not to bring in things we don’t really need, and to get rid of things we aren’t using.

However, books are a major weakness for both of us.  Nick and I are both readers, but we don’t read the same things.  I mostly read fiction, and a few biographies.  I also have an addiction to cookbooks.  Nick mostly reads non-fiction.  He enjoys reading textbooks as well.  We’re both suckers for a good book sale, which our library has yearly.  Needless to say, the book situation in our house was getting out of control.

Movies are another weakness of ours.  When we were first together we didn’t have cable (still don’t) or any streaming service, but we did have a Blockbuster membership.  We usually bought a few movies a month.  The used ones were always pretty cheap, and we’re both homebodies.  A quiet evening on the couch with a good movie makes us both really happy.  We’d also each get several movies a year as Christmas gifts, so our movie collection has grown quite a bit.

We decided it was time to seriously cull the books and movies.  It was that or get more shelves, which we don’t really have room for.  We each went through our books and pulled out the ones we’ve read and won’t realistically read again.  We also pulled a few that had been given to us that we didn’t have much interest in reading. 

We also went through all of the movies, and grouped them by type.  We pulled the ones that we’re highly unlikely to watch again.  We pulled a few that only one of us like.  Nick got rid of a few horror movies, and I got rid of a few romantic comedy movies. 

By the time we were finished we had amassed a large pile of books and movies.  We were also able to fit the things we kept on our shelves. 

One of my coworkers is beginning to downsize, and told me about Decluttr.  It’s a site where you can sell your books, movies, CDs, and some tech gadgets online.  You can download an app to scan bar codes (I didn’t because there wasn’t room on my phone) or you can manually enter the numbers (I did that, and it’s really not hard).  The site tells you right away if it’s something they’re buying, and what they’re paying for it. 

It works kind of like reverse online shopping.  You scan or enter all of your barcodes, and it puts everything they’ll accept in a cart.  Once you’re finished with that, you process your order.  They pay the shipping, you just print out a packing list, shipping label, package it all up, and send it to them.  We opted to be paid via Paypal since I already had an account, and we received the money in less than a week both times.  We’ve done two shipments to Declutttr.  The first time we received exactly the amount quoted.  The second time we received about twenty cents less than the amount quoted due to a quality issue.  They didn’t specify which item, but I really didn’t think such a small amount was a big deal. 

Selling books and movies to Decluttr is about the fastest and easiest way we’ve found to get rid of the ones we don’t want anymore.  A few thrift stores in our area won’t take them anymore, and it’s kind of a hassle to drive around to different thrift stores dropping different things off.  I like one stop shopping, etc.  I suspect if we had been willing to invest the time we might have been able to sell at least some of the books and movies for more on Amazon or Ebay, but I didn’t really want to take the time to take and upload pictures, and create listings for dozens of books and movies.  For us the goal was more to get rid of things and reduce clutter than to make money.  We did earn enough from our Decluttr payments for dinner out, and to buy our favorite sauces from the restaurant to use at home, so that was definitely a nice perk. 

In case you’re wondering, Howard has not been deemed clutter in need of being shipped off to Decluttr.  Pictures of boxes of movies and books or bookshelves are pretty boring, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to share Howard’s latest meerkat picture with you.  I think he’s adorable in it.

So what about you?  Do the books and movies get out of control at your house?  Do you have a system in place for limiting the amount of books and movies you own?  Have you sold books and movies online?

No Kitchen Sink, But Part of the Shower

I’ve been accused of carrying everything but the kitchen sink around in my purse, and in moments of total honesty, I will admit that there’s some truth to the accusation.  I carry a big purse, I rarely clean it out, and I tend to use it as storage.  We’ve weighed my purse a few times (don’t judge, we don’t have cable, okay?) and it very often tops 10 pounds.  It has inched closer to 20 pounds before. 

I almost always have a book in my purse.  I have a Kindle, but we don’t get along, so I need a purse that has room for a real book.  You never know when you’re going to end up waiting for someone or something, and life is just too short to waste time when you could be reading.  I usually carry around some kind of notebook.  I also carry a paper calendar that I love. Technology and I aren’t the best of friends.  I like this calendar, and I’ve been using this style for six years.  It isn’t broken, so I’m not fixing it.  Then there’s the usual assortment of “purse stuff” – keys, makeup, gum, pens, receipts, etc. 

Yesterday, though, I think I pulled the weirdest thing yet out of my purse; a shower faucet.  Yes, a shower faucet.  The shower faucet broke on Sunday.  Nick is currently working nights, and I felt bad enough waking him up to turn off the water, so I went to the hardware store to buy the new faucet.  I don’t have the best record for getting the right thing at the hardware store, so I put the old faucet in a plastic storage bag and took it with me to compare to the new one.  I just tossed the old one in my purse when I left the store and didn’t think about it again.

Until yesterday, when I checked out at the grocery store.  I pulled out the shower faucet in the process of getting out my debit card.  That got me a few strange looks.  The cashier actually asked if it was part of the shower.  Yes. Yes, it is.  No kitchen sink, but I do have part of the shower in my purse. 

So what about you?  Do you keep your purse nicely organized?  If so, HOW?  Or what is the weirdest thing you’ve pulled out of your purse?