Oh, folks. That poor kitchen of ours was in dire need of attention. Not that the REST of the house doesn’t need a bit of it, too, but the kitchen? Scary.

There was SO much stuff in there that wasn’t ours — stuff left behind by the previous tenants that was ‘gifted’ to us. Most of it was in iffy condition, and has been clogging up the cabinets to the point where we don’t have room for any of it anymore. Or, for that matter, stuff we DO use.

Add to the problem by making the cabinets sit there in various stages of disrepair and grime, and you’ve got a recipe for Crazy Wife, which is never a good thing.

So last night, I tackled one of them. I got the biggest box I could find, and dug into this:

That’s the left and right sides of just one of the cabinets near the floor next to the oven. The bottom of it is disgusting and still needs to be lined (possibly with something totally antibacterial….I mean…LOOK AT IT…ick!), but, after getting rid of everything left there by the previous owners, or anything of ours that was beyond saving or was missing parts, and voila:

Three items left. THREE. (The stack of plates is being washed and will be in with our plates, but I moved them after this was taken.) And one of them, the bowl in the upper left, is iffy. It still might go. But it’s all 1960’s fantabulousness and has an avocado and blue handpainted flower on the bottom, and I kind of love it a little, in that I-heart-kitsch kind of way.

Scarier still is the stuff we got rid of:

Those boxes weigh around fifty pounds. Seriously. Probably more, even. Two sets of mismatched dishes. Old tupperware. A non-functioning crock pot. A food processor that’s missing a crucial part. An old blender that hasn’t worked in more than fifteen years now and lit on FIRE when we tested it. THREE DOZEN teacups of dubious origin. (Don’t worry — I checked ebay first. Nothing in that box was selling for more than $2 a set.) FIVE glass pie plates. FIVE. Even I do not eat that much pie, and I LIKE pie.

Of all of it — only the food processor was ours. Everything else was already here when we moved in. And now we have at least one cabinet that can breathe again, and I’m starting to get motivated to fill up the dumpster before tomorrow’s pick-up.

I’m trying to get rid of as much as I can, and I’m aiming for 50% — meaning that I’d like to get rid of half of the items we have in the kitchen right now, since we really, REALLY don’t need as much as we have. There’s just too much, and most of it is non-functional. I’m thinking that with about half of it gone, I can actually store things in there, or *cook*, go figure. Plus, it means there’s open space for us to buy things WE like, rather than just whatever’s in there.

Which kind of leads me to “G” on that alphabet meme that I’m going through slowly here: Garbage. Technically, it’s “garbage disposal”, but since I don’t have one of those and haven’t really missed it all that much, I thought I’d talk a little about garbage for a second.

This is going to make me unpopular. I know it already. But all this stuff? Totally going in the dumpster. (We have a commercial dumpster since this is technically commercial property.) As much as I’d love to recycle it or take it in for donation, the fact of the matter is that if I had to wait to schedule a pickup, it wouldn’t get done. It would all sit here, eventually moved to the side and ignored, and probably end up in the Garage of Doom. Right now, it’s more important to me to get it out of here than it is to worry too much about the plates in the garbage.

I’m offsetting the environmental impact of my cleaning by buying an insane percentage less than I did before, since I know what I have already (instead of accidentally buying multiples, which I’ve done), and because I don’t want to clutter up the now-with-breathing-room cabinets again. I’m reducing not only my own consumerism, but helping to avoid unnecessary packaging that would normally also go in the dumpster. So I figure it’ll balance out. And I’ll plant some trees or something when the weather’s not so…uh…weathery. (It’s snowing here. Again. It’s getting old.)

I did order a few books on housewifery, and they should be here tomorrow. So my next entry will probably include a review, if they’re worth even mentioning. (One of them I got last time? “How to Not Be a Desperate Housewife” by someone or other. And it was horrible. I mean, not even worth the trees that died to print it. Stereotypical, and in places, downright offensive. I was really thinking that this woman should probably stick to the laundry, but then I realized that she’s probably got someone else doing it for her. It was frustrating, but at least it was short. It’s gone now, thankfully. I didn’t even want it in my house.)

But to end on a positive note: I LOVE that the kitchen’s getting some attention now. And I got a bolt I needed to start biking on the bike trainer again, so that’s going to help my overall energy level….which means I’ll be able to get more of the housewifey-stuff done, too.

It’s amazing to me how everything affects everything else in this life.

Off to watch movies with my man! (He’s watching some horror movie that I’d never watch if he wasn’t there. :>)

As in, “what’s in yours?”

I’d love to say I’m one of those people who has a bunch of Emergency Food all saved up and regularly rotated, just in case there’s a six-foot-of-snow blizzard or a massive flood that keeps us from the grocery store, but sadly, I’m not.

Right now, in my freezer(s), since we have two refrigerators, both of them old as dirt and not even remotely enviromentally-friendly, there is:

• One full bag of ice, and one nearly empty bag.
• One bag of chicken breasts, partially used.
• One 3-pound pack of hamburger
• One frozen partial can of tomato paste, since martha said you can freeze it.
• two boxes of pop-tarts (my husband’s)
• two bottles of vodka
• and two pounds of coffee.

I know. I’m not in the candidacy for Housewife of the Year. *facepalm*

One thing I’m doing in 2008, though, is trying out Once A Month Cooking — where you take one day and chop things and season things and put them all in baggies and end up with 30 meals, just waiting in your fridge for the morning you want some real food without all the mess and hassle. I’ve done it once before, and while the Preparation Day was much more rigorous than I thought it’d be (I was figuring 3 hours of prep-time…it was more like 8.), it was REALLY nice being able to NOT worry about cooking, even on those days when I was really, really busy.

The downside is that you have to buy everything at once, and that much meat can be waaaay expensive. (I think our grocery bill was around $300 that week. Granted, it was cheaper in the long run because I was buying food in bulk quantities, but still….that was a choke-moment at the register.) And you do still have to go to the store every week, to get your side dishes, perishables, and breakfast/lunch foods, so you’re not saving a whole lot of time, for sure.

Still, for us, I’m going to try it twice more, to see if I can get us out of the habit of picking up fast food when life gets overwhelming.

For the record, I’m using this set of menus. It’s the Mega-Mailer stuff — and I have to say, when we did this last time, there was maybe one stinker in the whole bunch of them. (A lot of times, when I try to make menus untested, I have about an 80/20 ratio — out of every ten recipes, two of them will be hooboy I’m not making THAT again for sure recipes. With Mega-Mailer, we had one out of thirty, which seems like pretty good odds to me.) It’s less than $12 per mailer, and she gives you side dish ideas and nutritional info in there, too. AND there’s a vegetarian AND a low-carb version, for people with special diets.

So there’s my pontification for the week. I’m not affiliated, I’m just a fan. (I’ve had the regular menu-mailer for about six years now, too. Helps IMMENSELY in meal planning.)

This week, I’m planning on trying out the Real Simple Speed Cleaning plan. Or at least trying to start it — I plan to do it for three weeks, just to see if it works for us and our lives. It doesn’t cover any of the deep cleaning, but I’m thinking it might help for the day to day stuff that I tend to…uh…forget. My poor husband is about to choke on the dust bunnies and the mud, so it’s time to start *something*, at least.

I’ll keep you updated.

I am obsessing.

And what I’m obsessing over isn’t even something all that important, since I have one of these already, just not this brand or type.

Oh, but seriously. I’m obsessing over a Typhoon Vintage loaf pan, after seeing a similar one on a blog I often read. And since I got a set of pink mixing bowls as a wedding gift (of this same brand and color), now I really, really want the loaf pan.

See, one of my goals for this year deals with learning to make bread. By hand. Not in the bread machine, since that’s kind of cheating, but honest-to-goodness, kneaded and loafed-up bread by hand. Because no matter what anyone says or doesn’t say, homemade bread is one of life’s great pleasures. It’s like alchemy of a sort. There’s the flour and the salt and the water and the yeast, and miraculously, through workings of your own fingers, bread emerges.

And ooh, is it ever tasty.

So why not make it myself? Learning how seems to be worth the final result. And I think buying this pan (which isn’t all that expensive, really. About $20 or so.) gives some added form to the function.

I think I just talked myself into it. I’ll beg my husband for valentine’s day, maybe….

Now, onto the weekly meme. We’re up to “E” for Everyday. It asks the question, “What do you do every day?”

I’m a big stickler on beds. I really feel like the beds need to be made. And there’s a practical reason for this, other than just the fact that it makes the bedroom look about seven zillion times better.

See, I have this husband. And this husband has the bizarre tendency to turn himself into a pretzel while he’s unconscious. And since he’s most often unconscious in bed, there are covers to contend with. Which means that by the end of an average night, we end up with a LEGENDARY tangle of covers.

And by “we”, I really mean “him”, because usually, by the end of an average night, he is wrapped in a twisted pretzel burrito of covers, and I have approximately four inches of Sheet Triangle with which to keep warm. Add in the four dogs, most of which are large and wait for us to fall asleep before assaulting us with their furry, sleeping selves, thus binding up even MORE of the covers underneath an 85-pound labrador retriever’s ass — well, you can see where I’m going with this. I either make the bed every morning, or when I get into bed the next night, I will have literal centimeters of a single blanket, and it’s six degrees outside. Six. Which means inside temperatures at this place sometimes hover around 60 degrees farenheit. And that’s too cold to be sleeping without toasty blankets.

By making the bed every day, I’m able to keep the burrito thing to a minimum. They’re still burrito-wrapper covers when I get into bed with my unconscious husband, but usually by the time I collapse, he hasn’t had nearly enough time to be wrapped double in them, and I can grab a corner and yank hard enough to actually get enough of the blanket to stay warm. For a while. All bets are off around four a.m., but by then, I’m out cold.

I swear, if he wasn’t so gorgeous, I’d kick him out of bed entirely.

The other thing I’m endeavoring to do daily, soon, when I get that far down on my list of oals for this project, is to follow Real Simple’s Speed Cleaning Guide for three weeks to see if it works for our family.

Have you seen it? It’s supposedly a miracle-worker. Much like the whole FlyLady thing, but more spread out over the whole house. Though I can see the wisdom in doing both — you can’t really clean clutter, you just have to get rid of it so you have the space to live within. But if you’ve been doing the whole Flylady decluttering bit for a while, I think it might be the simplest 19-minute-cleaning system I’ve ever seen.

Granted, it’s going to take me longer than 19 minutes, to be sure. (There are three bathrooms and four bedrooms in this place, not including the laundry room and the studio, both of which get horrendously dirty from time to time.) But if it keeps me from having a house that kind of looks like a small tornado might have hit it and left dirt in its place? Totally worth it.

I really should take some before-and-after pictures for posterity’s sake. It gets so bad in here — so cluttered and wrong, that I fully expect an episode of Cops to be filmed here sometime soon. Jimmy Hoffa’s probably in one of his parents’ junk closets in this house.

Anyway, that’s my Everyday. Make the beds, do the dishes, try to do some laundry. I’ve added “cook dinner” to that list on every day but Thursdays (evening meetings), and I’d like to add more than that, just as a pre-emptive strike against the Crazy that is our house’s clutter.

We’ll see how it goes.

(edited to add this:)

OMG…I just clicked on the comments at the Real Simple site (where the 19 minute speedclean thing came from), and the comments are making me gag a little.  Like this one:

miss clean
These SIMPLE solutions are for someone with NO children, NO pets, and NO husband. What size home are we cleaning here. A box. It takes my maids (3-5) approx. 6 hours weekly to clean my house which is 4000sq. ft. I pick up daily, work at home, with one 16 year old child, and NO husband. NOT possible. Is this a joke? This is the most insulting thing I have ever seen in print. Who ever wrote this needs to get a different job. 11/27/06

*blinkblink*

The “most insulting thing I’ve ever seen in print”??

How about having three to five maids for six hours a day for a four thousand square foot house, and then BITCHING that someone else’s plan is oh-so-wrong?

I am suddenly reminded how spoiled we are, as modern women, and how screwed up our society is to think that we *need* four thousand square feet of space to house all our crap, requiring three to five maids to service our posessions.

I think my new prayer will be to ask God never to let me have so much stuff that I have to employ five people for six hours a week to maintain it all.  The *only* reason we’re in this house is that it’s company housing, and I didn’t have a choice.

It all makes me just a little sick of heart.

Is this meme food obsessed or what?

I figured, since this is pretty much a yes or no, have you made them/no I have not answerable question (to which the answer is yes, by the way, I have, on several occasions), I’d expand this a little bit to kitchen gadgetry.

And the reason this leap in logic was spawned?  Finding this under my kitchen counter, left here by the previous occupants (who happen to be my in-laws).  Evidently, they didn’t make donuts very often:

In the box is the stick-free donut oven which looks like it just might have seen better days, and a recipe booklet for about eighty-seven-bazillion different kinds of donuts you can make with the aforementioned “factory”.

I haven’t tried to use it yet.  I’m a little scared of the electrical cord, which is the part of it that looks the most worn, but I may have to dig it out, throw on an apron, and try a few of these one day soon.  I figure the most I’m out is some flour, spices, and time — and while time is premium around here most days, it might be kind of fun to see what I can whip up.

I’m not a big gadget person, really.  I like the IDEA of most gadgetry — make your life simple with a wafflemaker!  Easy clean up with this new tabletop grill!  Feed your family with healthy smoothies with this new feature-filled blender! — I just can’t see the sense in buying a lot of separate gizmos to take up storage space where one tool that’s not as “featured” can do the same.

I’ve got the wafflemaker.  And we use it a lot.  And the crock-pot, which I see as more of a staple than a gadget.  A breadmaker that’s used less now that I have the other staple — a good KitchenAid mixer with a bread-hook attachment.  A blender.  That’s really it.  None of the food processors or tabletop grills, specialized nutcrackers or grinding tools, hand-held blenders or one-cup coffeemakers.  (Well, an espresso machine, but it gets used DAILY, if not more often than that….)

Oh.  And a donut factory.

It’ll most likely be cut in the next trip to goodwill for donation, since a nice little pan of oil will do the same work and probably taste better, even if deep-frying is less healthy than a non-stick pan.  (Though I’m not sure about that — did you hear all the flap about the DuPont Teflon factory workers coming down with rare cancers?  I’m a little wary of cooking things in chemical carcinogens.)

Got a favorite gadget you can’t live without?  Share — tell me about it.  (Not that a lot of you read this blog, but if you do, I’d love to know.)

So I was minding my own business today, when the new Sundance Catalog arrived.

I’ve talked before about my insane love of this catalog.  Not that I order from it very often, since I’d probably have to take out a second mortgage on my kidneys to get what I want, but I’m inspired — a LOT — by the style in those pages.

I found this inside:

It’s a set of draper’s cabinets for some insane price (like Used Car Insane) that I can’t afford at this time, but what got me wasn’t so much the cabinets themselves (though those had me drooling a little bit, too), but the display.

Do you see those books and magazines?

They’re all backwards on the shelves.

Now, I know this is fully impractical.  I mean, searching for a book when you’re not looking at the spine is like trying to remember what all’s in your refrigerator with the door closed.  You’re going to have some issues with retrieval.  But the look of it… with the much more uniform-of-color page-sides out… is much less cluttery feeling than a whole lot of books tend to be.  My collection (which is still insane, by the way), is pretty eclectic, both in size and color, and I’m thinking that something like this, for the shelves with the most often-used stuff, that is, might not be a bad idea.

I might try it with a few shelves and see how it works for a few weeks.  If I forget what I have, I’ll turn ‘em back around.  It’s a quick fix.  (And if I forget what I have?  It also probably means I have too many books, but that’s beside the point.)

So we left off the A-Z list with my baking Issues, but C…  C is always for Cookie:

I’m all about the cookies.  As anyone can probably tell by looking at the size of my hips.  But cookies are THE ONE THING I can bake relatively reliably.  Sugar cookies, snickerdoodles, bar cookies — I usually don’t screw those up nearly as badly as I do cakes, pies, or breads.

That said, there’s usually one batch in there somewhere that comes out like little brown hockey pucks.   And I’m okay with that.  Means I’m human, right?

My favorite all-time recipe is one that I got from my mom’s Better Homes and Gardens Cooky Book (the one I recently re-found in the bookstore, rereleased for this new generation of bakers).  It’s the “Mary’s Sugar Cookies” recipe, and it’s in there, if you have that book.  (Since it’s re-released, I’m probably not going to list it here, just to avoid copyright infringement.  Not that I’m above using excerpts for review purposes.  I’m just sayin’.  It’s BH&G and they have Big Hairy Lawyers.)

Actually, that whole book is nothing short of fabulous, so if you’re looking to have more cookies in your life, pick it up.  It’s cheap and great to use.  And it connects you with generations of women who have gone before, making cookies for families before we were born.  I like that.

Off to see if I can’t make the bookshelves prettier, if not less functional…

Yes, I know it’s been awhile since I managed to update.  Christmas totally whipped my butt there for a while.  And not because I was doing a whole lot of Christmasy Fun Stuff, either.

No, it’s because I foolishly thought that it would be a fun idea to handmake all my holiday gifts this year.

*facepalm*

Y’know how there’s that saying, “It seemed like a good idea at the time…”?  Um, yeah.  When you’re a knitter, primarily, let me just say this:  That time had BETTER be sometime in JULY.  Because if it’s after that?  You’ll either a) not make it, or b) give yourself lobster claws where your hands used to be from the insane amount of stitches that fly off your needles for the four weeks preceding Christmas.  Seriously.  Ow.  My wrists still hate me just a little bit.

But I’m not here to bitch.  Really, I’m not.  It was a fabulous holiday, and all the gifts (other than the husband’s, which he knows about and knows it’ll be probably February before he receives it/them…it’s a big honkin’ project that he’s going to love, though…) were done by Christmas Eve.  I really can’t complain.  Everyone loved everything, so all’s well in Wifetown.

So I’m getting back to this Alphabet meme, with B is for Baking…

I am a fabulous cook.  No, really.  That’s not ego talking, that’s just a fact.  I can rock me a pan on the stovetop and find dinner in a bare cupboard full of shoe leather and old barbie heads, as long as I have spices.

But baking…?  Not so much.  Part of it, I think, is that our oven here is inconsistent at best (it’s propane, not real gas).  The other part is that I *suck*.

I can take foolproof baking recipes and be fooled.  Seriously.  Things from a BOX die at my hands, much less anything mixed up by me.  Remind me to tell y’all sometime about the time I tried to make blackberry cobbler without flour.  You may die of the giggles.

That said, I’m finding that practice, while not making perfect, is making passable.   I have a few recipes that I don’t screw up 90% of the time, so I make them over and over.  I’m working on expanding my repertoire a bit this year, but still?  Those same six recipes are pretty much the only ones I don’t hose up on a regular basis.

I figure I’ll keep trying as long as J keeps eating my mistakes.

And for getting this far and still being here, despite whining and long blogpauses, this is the best. soup. ever.   I thought I was going to have to extract the crock pot from my husband’s head, he was so into it.  (And I really wish I was kidding about that last part, too.)

Cheesy Potato Soup

serves about a billion (or 6 with good appetites)

16 oz. sour cream
2 pounds of potatoes, peeled and diced
3 cups of cheddar cheese
2 green onions
2 cans of cream of chicken condensed soup
1 can of cream of mushroom condensed soup
1/2 lb. cooked ham, diced
3Tbsp chives, chopped.  (Or 1Tbsp dried chives)

Cover the potatoes with water in a saucepan and cook them until tender.  Meanwhile, throw everything else together in the crock-pot and stir it well.  When the potatoes are done cooking, pour the potatoes AND the cooking water into the crock pot.

Cook on high for four hours or low for six.

Serve with fresh-ground pepper on top.  It won’t last long.

Happy New Year everyone!

This is a bad picture, I know.  I apologize, greatly.  The midwest has been under a ginormous cloud for about the past week and a half, and I was getting tired of waiting for sunlight to take pictures, so the picture above was taken without flash under a whole lot of indoor lights that make it look all kinds of crazy.  But the intent’s there, and you can kind of get the gist of what I’m talking about here.

See, over on Ravelry.com, there’s this fabulous group I think I mentioned before, called “Reclaiming the Home”.  (If you’re a knitter, don’t skip Ravelry because you think it’s too trendy or too much of a timesuck.  I mean, it IS a timesuck, but some of the gems include a whole lot of organizational tools and groups like RtH where you can get TONS of information on things that you wouldn’t really associate with knitting per se.  Sooooo worth the wait for an invite.  Seriously, people….)

On the RtH group, someone posted this fabulous meme, full of questions about homekeeping and wifely goodness.  I thought about posting it intact, but many of the answers deserved their own entries.  So in an effort to post more often, I’m going to go through them here, and try to incorporate some new habits in the process.

 Question A:  Aprons, y/n?

I love aprons.  No, seriously.  But I love them on a kind of abstract level.  Like, I love the IDEA of aprons.  I love the function of an apron.  I really love vintage aprons, especially the ones intended to be used on a daily basis, and the ones for showing off when company comes over.

I don’t USE aprons, though.  It’s kind of sad, really.  I have this collection of vintage aprons, some from my mom’s mom, and some from various flea markets and thrift stores, and they’re all sitting in a drawer, folded nicely and waiting for me to get my head out of my tail-end.

The problem is that I’m not a small girl.  So while the ties fit, the waist-aprons (the kind I have) cut me off right in the middle, and hang down all funny, like it’s just shade for my legs.  It’s the same reason I don’t wear full skirts — just either short ones or pencil-skirts that cling to me from the hip down, since my hips and legs are pretty darn good, but that belly has to go.  That kind of thing.

The one in the picture up there is my favorite “for showing” apron in my collection.  It’s sheer-ish.  Chocolate brown.  Long ties that hang off a decorative bow in the back.  (For me, it’s off the back.  For skinny girls, it’d probably wrap around back to the front and tie, to be honest.)  The band of cotton in the front has five rows of rick-rack — three chocolate brown to match the rest, and two contrasting bright aqua strips.  And I *love* chocolate and aqua.  My whole house would be some variation of those two if I could get away with it.

Starting tomorrow, I’m going to try to use my aprons.  Not this one, since it’s for company, more than utility.  But one of the 1950’s cotton ones that are obviously well-used and were well-loved while in other hands — those would be practical.  And since I’m doing a fair bit of baking tomorrow, it seems like an apt time to try them out, both for nostalgia and for practicality.

So I guess the answer to the meme question would technically be no, I don’t wear aprons.  But I do love them, and WILL be wearing them, so I’m good with a tenative yes.

Somewhere, in the middle of the most reptilian part of my brain, I’ve got a notion of the Ideal House.

Most of the time, that notion is relatively well-behaved.  It realizes that I only have so many hours in each day, and that if I have any hope of ever finishing any project EVER, I’ve got to prioritize those projects.  (Sadly, I keep letting my job get in the way, but that’s another struggle for another day’s blogging.)  It waits patiently, and lets me coo little platitudes at it.  Things like don’t worry, I can create you one little bit at a time…, or if I just made some time to do this thing or that thing, then I’d be able to bring you to life…   My notion goes on with its notioning (whatever it is when notions do when you’re not actively working on them or with them) and I go on with the INSANE CRAZY THAT IS MY LIFE SOMETIMES.

Every now and again, though, my Notion gets all capitalized and uppity.  It refuses to sit quietly in the back like a star pupil, but instead becomes the village know-it-all and sits in the front lobe of my brain, waving its hand and grunting that IT KNOWS THE ANSWER!  PICK ME!  CALL ON MEEEEE!

Apparently, my Notions are seven years old, and well-read.

Anyway…

The holidays are a catalyst for my inner uppity Notion.  Add to the holiday idea that I just had a giant success at work.  Like, giant, giant.  Huge.  One that will mean a lot more money for my family.  A good thing, at least for a while.  So I have even less time to devote to this Notion Of An Ideal House than I did before.

Oooh, the Notion…   The Notion did not approve.  The Notion has been trying to catch up on her blog reading today, and has come away thinking that if I can just finish this gift for my in-laws, I could TOTALLY make a bunch of holiday ornaments, garlands, an advent calendar, pick up some festive lights and a real Christmas tree this year (we have only a small little 3′ thing that’s totally not in-scale with the rest of our house), and make all my holiday gifts.  And with my free time after that, I can read all those books I’ve been saving (and collecting.  let’s be honest here: my yarn stash is nothing compared with my book stash, which is hideously insane and almost obscene.), AND make a bunch of cookies to hand out.  Oh, and whip up some holiday cards with handwoven pins as the front image.

Um.

Notion?

YOU ARE KILLING ME HERE.

I’m back to the issue of Balance in my wifely pursuit now.  I waste a lot of time every day; I know this.  But I need that creative recharge time to, well, creatively recharge.  Or my brain implodes and I become one of those Scary People you see wandering the malls at closing time, staring blankly at anything with a price tag and trying to rationalize giving her mother-in-law a belt sander for Christmas because the sweater she was trying to knit for her just wasn’t happening.

I’ve been collecting Housewifery books for a while now, and all of them tell me that I need to put my home and marriage (and children, were there any) first, and worry about everything else second.  And I can see that.  I can see that there are major changes ahead if I continue on the course I’m on.  (In the new year?  I’m finally quitting smoking.  I bought the patch already.  I’m serious about it this time.  And I’m picking up a bike trainer.  If I can’t be back home in the Northwest, I can at least bike in my living room and pretend.  It’s time to do something about the fact my pants no longer fit.)

And I think the biggest change is going to be allocating my time more toward my uppity Notion.  Building my house the way I want it, to facilitate more Calm and Peace here (instead of “Chaos” and “Dog Hair Encrusted”, which it kind of emanates now.).  That means my job is going to be taking a bit of a backburner, in a sense, but in a way that will allow me to complete the essentials and still focus on Other Things.  (Right now, it’s all Job, literally all the time.  Soooo not working.)

Looks like I may have finally called on the smart kid in the back of the room.

I’m still not sure about the tree.  We’ll see.

I know it’s been a while. November is a traditionally-hectic month for my family. It’s the one time of the year where I’m making preparations for the holidays so that I can enjoy my December without that pressure to get everything done ALL AT ONCE.

So I do my holiday shopping during November, preferably BEFORE Black Friday (when the rest of the known world goes all crazy with the Visa), so at least my non-handmade gifts are all done and wrapped, and just waiting for the Season to arrive.

Whew.

What this also means is that I’m doing a whole lot of Project-ing that I can’t document publically. Unfortunately. Lots of presents on my knitting needles and flying through my sewing machine, and not a single one has a digital picture taken of it. I mean, in this day and age of Google, it’s may be unlikely that a giftie recipient would find it, but you never know.

Now, all excuses for radio silence aside, there’s a Thing that’s been going on here in my crafting room. (And soon to be followed by the rest of the house.) Some will think I’m insane, given the time of year it is. Some would probably be right — it IS insane.

Lately, I’ve been feeling like we have too much stuff. I think I talked about this before. If not here, than on a few of the message boards I’m on. I’m to the point where even my hobbies are starting to make me feel guilty, because there are Far Too Many Projects(tm), and not enough time in the average lifespan to ever get to them all. My biggest offenders? Fiber and books and fabric. And art supplies from my former life as an artist that I can’t let go of. (My life has taken me in an altogether different direction, and now I’m trying to focus more on my home and family rather than a career in general anyway.)

I have this Scarcity Thing(tm) going on. Like, when I find something, I tend to buy as much of it as I can, thinking that someday, I might not have the money or the availability to it. Which is ludicrous, especially when we’re talking about things like sock yarn or spinning fiber. There is a TON of it on etsy alone, not to mention sites like The Loopy Ewe that consistently get in all the yarns I like. (And they’re about to carry spinning fiber, too, if Sheri’s blog is any indication! That noise you just heard? That’s me, falling over with glee.)

So why is it that I feel the need to cocoon myself in a giant puffball of fiber and yarn and fabric and books!? My studio is a huge room — I mean that. We’re talking right around 30 feet x 20 feet. Giant. Humungous. Very, very large. I’m blessed. I know this.

BUT…and this is a big BUT….it’s full. Full of stuff. Granted, some of it is from my other business, which is fiber related, but oh. mah. maude. It’s obscene.

Last night, while lamenting the fact that my house is still, after several months of trying to make healthier, cleaner routines, and cleaning things out several times before, a giant Ball of Chaos and Crazy…I had this sudden, undeniable urge to get rid of ANYTHING that I’m not currently using, do not love, or that I love and won’t use because “it’s too good”. I mean, there are yarns in my stash that I love so much that I don’t want to knit with them, because it might mean that they’re then gone, which, really, is kind of the epitome of Crazy.

With an iron fist, I made a pass-through the stash, culling out anything that’s just slightly not my style anymore. I filled two baskets. I announced to my local stitch & bitch girls that I was having a clear-out sale on December 1st, and that they were invited to paw through the stashness. Energized by the response and the thought of being free (how sad is it that a stashless — or greatly stash-reduced — state would be considered “free”??), I made a second pass, this time with a giant red pen, slashing out the things I love TOO MUCH, and the least favorite of my favorite dyers. (I let myself keep a bunch, but told myself that things? They had to change. And there are some that I, honestly, like better than others, even from my favorites.)

When all was said and done, with my books, my fabrics, my art supplies, my yarns, my fibers for spinning….the pile looked like this:

Forgive the nasty flash picture.  It was midnight by the time I was done.

Two baskets, a rubbermade bin (one of the big ones), a full tabletop (and it’s a 12′ table!), and a spinning wheel.  I kid you not.

Anything that doesn’t sell to the girls will end up going on etsy or ebay.  I’m determined to hold the din of clutter down to a dull roar.  I still have a fair bit left, but the amount that’s left over seems like a walk in the park — carefree, and without guilt.  It’s an amount that makes me a little anxious (what if I run out!? keeps going through my head — a scenario so unlikely that it’s probably MORE likely that I get hit by a bus in my living room.), but it also makes me feel like I COULD go through it all.  That I COULD get everything done.  That I COULD, in theory, knit and spin and make everything I want to make, and still have time left over to play with other stuff.  It makes me undeniably happy.

Of course, now I want to play with everything I have left, but THAT kind of pressure I can deal with.  It’s now a reward for housekeeping — do 15 minutes of work, and I get to play for a few minutes, instead of dragging my tail to the studio and wondering where to even start.

I love that.

Two little hints of note:

1.  I found this little tidbit from the Happy Slob about cleaning out your dryer lint-trap, since dryer sheets can actually damage your dryer over time.  Interesting!

and,

2.  If you’re on Ravelry, there’s a group there called “Reclaiming the Home” that’s run by the girl from this site.  She’s doing recaps of the discussion on her blog, and it’s turning into a great resource to read through.  The crock pot recipes have me dancing in the aisles.   It’s actually a discussion on this board that got me going with the stash clearout.

Random aside:  While doing the stash clearout, I also got rid of some old momentos from a previous relationship.  (I’m a widow, now remarried.  Yes, I’m only 36.)  I didn’t even look at them.  Just tossed them in the trash.  It was a giant milestone, since I’ve been lugging them around for ten years.  It was awesome, and added to the feeling of Finally Free.

I’m home alone again at the moment.  J’s been gone for just over a day, and luckily will be back tonight.  Which, of course, means I need to feed him, and I’m just NOW getting my tail into gear.  I’m smelling a grocery-store run in the very near future.

For the record, we’ll be out of town this weekend, so I haven’t wanted to battle the grocery store when we’ll be gone for four days anyway.  Plus, the past two days, we’ve been dealing with a lot of stuff with our little visitor-dog.  Apparently, she’s microchipped, but the owner?  Total garbage.  Said he was coming to get her and didn’t show up, and since she was injured last weekend and needed vet care, this was A Very Bad Thing.  According to the laws of the land, apparently, if we got her vet care, not only would we not be able to recoup our losses if the former owner DID show up, but we’d also be open to being SUED for doing anything to his “property”.

What kind of world is it when you find a creature that needs help, get them help, and lose your pants in a lawsuit?  So not fair.

So we are going through the proper channels to make her ours so this never happens again.  She’s at Animal Control right now, and in five days, we pay the ransom..er…fee, and pick her up again.  Her microchip will read *us* as the owner then, rather than the guy who obviously dumped her off.  At least we’ll know she’s safe.

And it’s another step on the road to becoming a ginormous pack of dogs in general.  Four??  Like I need more dog hair around here.  My husband sheds badly enough….

I’m looking forward to three uninterrupted days in the hotel, though.  I have some knitting I want to get done  (I knit.  A lot.  And I’m a joiner, obviously, so I’ve now joined two different shawl-knitting challenges.  Two.  Because I have eversomuch free time.), and I plan to, well, do some planning.

Over at this new site I found, Reclaiming The Home,  she’s posting her to-do lists.  (She’s also a knitter/creative type.  I like knitters.  And creative types.  They’re just my type of crunchy granola with a side of wool.)  I’m still planning on posting mine over under that “About the Project” link, when I can sit down for three minutes and come up with one.  Possibly tonight.  And there may be a few posts in here tonight, as well, when I can locate the camera cord.  I’ve been a nutjob for work the past two days, and haven’t had much of a chance to do the things that I WANT to do for my home and family.  I really need to re-examine my priorities, I think.

There’s a cold north wind blowing in, so I should let the furchildren inside and close up the house.  (I was airing it out — it gets very musty in here, what with it being a giant metal box and all.), but there will be more later.

I’m really, really enjoying connecting with all these people who value the home and family as much as I do.  I was beginning to feel just a bit like an isolated breed when I started this blog.