Things to do: January 2009 Archives

Remember that I said I'd discovered Scrabble Cheez-Its at Weis?

Well, you might also remember that I've talked about Buffy, our features editor. Buffy is a faithful reader of this blog (thanks, Buffy!) and decided to have a little fun.

She bought a box of the Cheez-Its and took it to the features department staff meeting. Just like in Scrabble, she gave each person seven "tiles," and they had to make a word out of them. Once they did, they had to brainstorm a possible story idea based on that word. A couple of them that they found were "wry" and "grin."

I did hear, though, that some people had a real shortage of vowels!

Well, I wanted to play, too, so Buffy gave me some Cheez-Its. Here are my first seven:

Not sure if either of those words give me a blog post idea. Wavy. Hit. I could post about... people I'd like to hit? I'm guessing no one wants to read that list. :)

Anyway, it was fun. Thanks for playing, Buffy!

If you know me in person, you know I'm a study in contrasts. At work, I'm super-super organized. Heck, I have my paperclips sorted by type. You think I'm kidding? I assure you, I'm not.

At home... well, not so much. My house generally has what I like to call that "lived in" look. You know, it looks like a whole zoo lives in it? My cooking skills include immense drive-through knowledge and the ability to go an entire week on microwaveable dinners.

All that said, some of my favorite Web sites deal with homemaking and organization. I guess because I really want to have a super-nice house and make special dinners for my family. In fact, my deepest desire is to have a husband who's NOT the sports editor, who invites his friends over to watch the Super Bowl, so I can make little football-shaped hors d'ouevres. Seriously.

Some of my favorite sites include I'm an Organizing Junkie, The Hyper Homemaker, Flylady and Unclutterer.

But those are all national sites. And while they're cool, nothing beats hearing from someone with a local perspective. One new favorite locally is Mrs. Nicki S. Ordinary, written by a former coworker of mine who's gone out from newspapers to make her way in the field of special education - and who loves to share frugal tips and homemaking tips.

Another is one that just relaunched - local professional organizer Debbie Jordan Kravitz's Virtually Organized.

Not only is Debbie's site cool and locally focused, but I'm shamelessly touting it because she's giving away a $50 gift certificate to the Container Store to one lucky winner, and one way to earn chances to win is to blog about her relaunched site.

Hey, we (sort of) neat freaks have to stick together, right? :)

Any other house/organization/homemaking sites I should check out? I'm always looking for new ones.

I've got one New Year's resolution, and along with it, a new favorite Web site.

Mint bills itself as "refreshing money management." Basically, it's great if you are someone who manages your credit cards, bank accounts, 401(k), mortgage, car loan, etc., online. It's free; you put in all your logons (don't worry, it's super-secure), and then Mint brings up a ton of information, from your current balances, to a list of specific transactions, to a breakdown of the categories in which you've spent your money.

My biggest expenditures came in... wait for it... FOOD! Big surprise?

Hubby and I are spending 2009 trying to get our finances in order. We've set up a budget, and though we're only a couple weeks in, it seems to be working well. Mint is nice because we can both log in and see where we stand on all our accounts, where before, Hubby always had to come find me and say "Do I use this account? Do I use that account?"

I know some people wouldn't feel comfortable putting all that financial info into one site, but it doesn't bother me. Among other things, I'm so broke that if the people at Mint were looking for identities to steal, mine would NOT be one of them! :)

Did anyone else make any resolutions? My sister Louise said she's going to try to focus on the moment and the positive more, which I think is great. Anybody else have one? (If you have any finance tips to help me with my resolution, post those too. I could use them!)