Joan's randomness: April 2009 Archives

So, as a result of spring cleaning, it's like we live in a different house. Seriously.

Some of the changes:

1. We now make our bed each day. And you CAN make the bed, because you can get to the bed!

2. My daughter can actually find everything in her room and playroom. Oh, and there is enough room for her to PLAY in the "playroom." How about that? Before, the hideous pink carpet wasn't even visible. Which I guess is a good thing AND a bad thing.

3. I can find my books on my bookshelves. (Click this picture to get a very dorky detailed view with stuff labeled.)

4. We got rid of A LOT. Tons. This was just one part of it. We also got rid of some large items, like a treadmill, two totes full of stuff from my part-time job that I no longer needed to keep at the house, a bunch of food for the food bank...

5. And, finally, the part I'm proudest of... my closet! I got rid of things I no longer wear, and I got everything sorted out by color (pants/skirts at left, shirts by color at right.) Shoes on the shelf.

In doing this, I got rid of about a third of my clothes. I'm someone who hangs almost all my clothes, so what you see here is just about the entirety of my wardrobe, unmentionables aside.

Before doing this cleanout, I had more than 100 shirts. 100!!! Who needs 100 shirts? How wasteful. I still probably have more than I should, but at least it's better. (And doing my closet qualified me to enter Organizing Junkie's closet cleanup roundup, so that's good too. I needed that extra motivation!)

Anyone else have any spring cleaning accomplishments to report? We're still finishing everything up, but the hardest part is definitely over!

From last Friday's Page-A-Day calendar comes a wonderful and demeaning exercise designed to see if you are faster than a digital sheep:

Go here and try it out - it takes less than a minute.

Then come back and tell me what you are. On my first try, I only made "ambling armadillo," but my second one was just slightly better. Rose actually got worse on her second try, because she started trying to tranquilize the sheep before they ran! So don't do that - there's a time penalty.

C'mon, anyone out there have a reaction speed above "snail?"

Last Thursday, my daughter's school had its "science, art and curriculum fair," where you got to go see the kids' best work displayed all around the school.

Sarah really loves anything creative, and she had a lot of great projects, but this was my favorite, so I thought I'd post it as a tribute to spring ... and to creative writing! Hope you enjoy.

I've been back on the diet-and-exercise wagon (yes, again) and in 10 days, I lost 3.6 pounds (yes, again.)

Despite it being, as I told one of my cousins, the 27th time I've lost these 3+ pounds, I'm super-excited. And hoping to keep it up!

On the exercising front, I've been helped immensely by my chiropractor's recommendation to get new sneakers. He even sent me to Irving's up on Route 30 so I could get fitted and measured and all that good stuff.

Here are the comfy new "New Balance" wonders:

(Yep, I'm that lame. I take pictures of my shoes.)

Anyway, on the food side, today is our scheduled grocery-shopping day, which always makes it easier to eat healthier, because I can make sure I have lots of good food around. And no chips.

Boy, could I eat some chips, though...

But I digress. The bottom line is, miraculously, if you eat fewer calories and exercise more, you lose weight. Isn't that something??? :)

Yes, I have some good news to report.

Easter dinner was excellent. The car is at the garage today, hopefully putting an end to my scary noise. And we did even more spring cleaning yesterday. I wish I had taken a picture - we gave away a vanload - literally - of my daughter's outgrown toys, stuffed animals, etc., to a woman who does child care. And Hubby and I are tackling our bedroom - holy cow, we had a lot of junk.

Since I didn't take a picture of that, here's something cute, from Let's Be Friends, which was my Page-A-Day calendar Web site from Tuesday:

Stay tuned tomorrow for Easter dinner redux.

So, here are some things that happened this week, and please insert requisite apology for not posting here.

1. Spring cleaning is going really well. In fact, as of today, we have a drum set, at least three boxes of books, a massive graveyard of computer parts, and about a third of my clothes (I'm not kidding) out of the house. The Girl is going through her room and playroom too, and we've got another large - like huge Rubbermaid tote plus a bunch - lot of her stuff to get rid of so far. So that's good news.

2. Work is going well. The book I edited last year, about York County's one-room schoolhouses, won an award as the best niche publication in our circulation category in the Keystone Press Awards.

3. I'm going to visit family for Easter and really looking forward to it.

4. For all those good things, something bad had to happen. And oh, has it, in the form of our car (which Hubby and I share, given our two-block commute to work). I'll start by saying that noises like this should not come from under anyone's car hood, ever.

After having it in the shop about four times since October, they were finally, this Monday, able to diagnose the noise as having to do with our air compressor. This will cost about $950 to fix, and that's after the four new tires I put on last month, and the radiator hoses before that, and the cabin air filter, regular air filter, oil change... oh, and the inspection that's due before the end of May. Yeah, that.

Well, we took the car to the shop on Monday, because after I made a trip to Hershey, it was not only making a terrible racket, it smelled sort of burning-like. Hubby took it over and walked back to work, and eventually, they were able to call and tell us what was up. I promptly told Hubby, we had a moment of near-weeping (OK, that was more me than him), and we told the guys at the shop that we could in no way do this work now, because of the cost. They assured us it would hold up for at least a while longer, though no guarantees on how long. So, at that point, I thought Hubby would go back and get the car.

At 7:25 that night, I realized that I had to leave RIGHT THEN to go get Girl at Girl Scouts. Go over to Hubby. Ask for keys. Blank stare, followed by painful realization. Car. Shop. Oops. He runs - literally - two blocks or so to the garage. Guess what? Yep, they'd closed at 7. Car locked inside garage bay. Calls me on his cell phone and we start thinking fast. My mom is at a meeting at our church. (Oh, and her cell phone hasn't worked for about a week.) Hmm...

Enter the lovely Cathy, our business editor, who drives me up to pick up Sarah at Scouts. That's great, and at this point it's mostly amusing, so no big deal, right?

Go home. Have a sinking feeling as we pull up to the house. House keys... with the car keys, at the garage, locked in the shop. And could this be the night Mom forgot to leave the door locked behind her? No! Of course not! So after trying all four outside doors, it's back in Cathy's car, and back to the office, where Sarah and I sat and waited, calling the house every so often to see if Mom had yet arrived home.

Around 9:15, she did, and came to get us. Here's the weird part. She swears the front door was unlocked when SHE got home.

Only thing I can figure, the VERY LARGE, HEAVY dog might have been laying against it (he does that), preventing me from getting in. Otherwise, I blame poltergeists with a really mean sense of humor!!

One of our family's favorite pastimes is to go to open houses on Sundays. Usually, we don't have any intention of moving, but hey, you never know.

Plus, it gives you a chance to think differently about how you organize and use your own space.

Well, today, we saw a condo that we really, really liked. Brand new. Almost as much square footage as our current home. (We tend to look smaller, rather than bigger. Hey, the economy is tough!) Anyway, the thing is, it's almost all "open" space. Not a lot of rooms that could become the "junk room," not a lot of storage space for the eight million Christmas decorations, etc.

So we started talking, and came up with an idea - why don't we spend the spring, and some of summer, "pretending" we're going to move? We'll go through the house, and if we wouldn't move it or couldn't find a place for it in this hypothetical new house, we won't keep it.

Maybe that's obvous, but it was a new way of looking at things for us, I think. So we'll see how it goes!

If you're interested in spring cleaning, some of my favorite sites for getting and keeping things neat are FlyLady, I'm an Organizing Junkie, Unclutterer and, of course, the local organizing super-site, Virtually Organized!

And, just for fun, here's some fun people on the Exchange with a new take on spring cleaning.

I was doing soooo good. No one had pranked me, and I'd almost forgotten what day it was.

So imagine how amazingly shocked I was when I read that Google had created a high-functioning Artificial Intelligence project named CADIE! I called my daughter in from her homework, was telling her all about it, talking to my mom and Hubby... Hubby was honestly getting concerned with the level of cognition shown by this thing. Edited: He says that's an understatement. "I was not opposed to packing up the family, putting us in a Winnebago, and I guess trying to find a remote locate in the Midwest," was his quote. He also suggested paddling to Tahiti.

Aaaand, then Chris stops me and says, "Come on. What date is it?"

Ugh. I don't remember the last time I felt so stupid!! I'm just glad I didn't call my friends at the paper (I'm off today) to see if they got it on the front page. Wouldn't have lived THAT down for a while!