FlyLady

Road to a home... sorry no pix this time.

2014-10-18T02:58:32Z

So over the course of the week's worknights, I plugged away. Probably too much because I'm tired.

Maintenance: Dishes put away & done again. Laundry sorted, helped my daughter put hers away, more done & in the drier. Boxes from the no-longer-new computer broken down & in the recycle.
Project: New hanging lamp hung up. And my husband noticed --hurrah for recognition.
Me time: Reading....yes, under the lamp. Had to celebrate.

Next target...Hazmat Pickup day tomorrow. Now where did I put those hearing-aid batteries my mother gave me... oy. But at least the flourescent tubes will be gone from my back porch.

What about you?

Road to a home.... is anybody out there?

2014-10-14T02:36:08Z

Wow, more than a year since I visited this site?? Funny though, I wanted to share today's success with people who'd understand my "YAY ME!" And unfortunately my FB feed has an awful lot of people who wouldn't understand. Born organized to say the least... and judgemental to boot.

Road to a home = Maintenance + Project + Me time... so here it is.

1. Maintenance - I did the Flylady hour and a few "top of the hour" challenges.

2. Project - I made space in my life for music! We have a tiny little place and I've been sad that I don't have a music room. Today I realized that cleanup efforts elsewhere in the house gave me space. So I tackled the nasty pile o' DWIL (Deal With It Later) and carved myself a music area. I've been afraid things would get bumped right by the front door -- but maybe people are trained because big fat boxes have been there so long. And I'm using the hand weights to hold things in place, clever that.

BEFORE: One of the triggers for this was that my 7yo has finally decided to let me donate that 1960s-ish toy piano...because we have something better to put there.

AFTER: All the things that have homes have been put in their homes. Some has been put onto the back porch where I made space a week or so ago. And some.... ah some has come into its own. There's even a home for the extra kitchen chair. So what if I still don't like the carpet...because WOO HOO I have space to play the keyboard. Next task will be to make space for the music books so they don't clutter up the 7yo's launch pad.

3. Me Time - Can you guess? Yes! You're right -- I spent time noodling around on the keyboard!

New resolve

2013-07-31T16:13:16Z

Hey folks! Flylady helped me develop at least some housekeeping habits, though I don't 'fly' religiously. I've found it particularly useful to keep not only my kitchen sink clean, but also the stove. But lately I've been feeling like a slob again, and realized I need to add a new "kitchen sink": the toilets. I clean the bowls pretty regularly, but am terrible about wiping down all that porcelain, plus the seat. So, beginning today, my kitchen sink, stove, and TOILETS will be clean!

Does anyone else have an extra "kitchen sink"- type thing that they need to keep shiny, when all else goes to hell?

Oh where o where has the time gone?

2013-06-18T17:54:52Z

Is anyone still around? Has anyone found another place to play or just stopped?

Missions!

2013-04-02T14:36:33Z

April's habit is making the bed... Did you do it?
I did...Not to Martha Stewart standards but the comforter is flat and my pillow is back up off the floor where I push it in the night and that is what counts!

This week is Zone 1 Entrance, Front Porch and Dining Room. Today's mission is hotspots in those 3 areas.

http://www.flylady.net/c/sp.php

I don't have a dining room, and my front door opens directly into the living room...but I do have a couple of DWIL boxes (deal with it later) on the small shelves I set up for my daughter to use for her school stuff. So that's what I'll be doing after work tonight.

Now back to my sponsor...

flylady @ 2013-02-27T20:16:00

2013-02-28T02:15:28Z

https://www.facebook.com/groups/430148793728031/

I wanted to let you know about our new Flying Facebook group. It's called A Clean Slate. It's a closed group so whatever you post is not visible to your other friends. It's only seen by those in the group.

We have three rules:

1. No politics
2. No religion
3. Treat each other well

It's a diverse group of women that encourage one another to complete daily tasks, keep up with Fly Lady’s routines and zone work. Please join us.

More edge nibbling...

2012-12-15T11:29:03Z

Another small corner of chaos and STUFF gone forever!

This morning I collected up all the discarded clothing lolling about in heaps waiting to be sorted and put it in a hold all for the charity shop.
I dumped the bag of cloth scraps from the sewing in the hall by the front door...
I moved all the surplus bed linen from the box in the bedroom to a plastic sack for the charity shop and dumped that beside the door...

Himself and t'Stapping Lad(TM) shifted the bags out to the car when they took t'Stapping Lad(TM) off to do his shift in the pub.

That's a whole cubic meter of stuff I never need to deal with again! Yay!

And earlier in the week I'd dumped two large boxes of packing materials from things I bought on ebay in the car and they took them down the dump!

Himself did all the backlog of ironing, so we don't have Ironing Mountain leering at us from wherever.

I made them deal with their crates of shoes! They are no longer in the conservatory needing to be Rubiked every time w try to do anything. I have some customer fabric to deal with, and then the customers projects can be wrangled with a lesser degree of Rubiking. NOT looking forward to ironing 10 meters of linen for period shirts and chemises, but it needs to be done.

Today I am hopin to tackle the filing cabinet: I need to get it moved down next to my desk, so I can file the home and business stuff and get rid of the heap beside my desk. Once that is gone, I can clean out the little chest of drawers and trundle it through to the dining room and fill it with the herbs and spices. This will make them much more accessible and easirt to use than in the stacking boxes they live in now...

And I need to make marzipan and start decorating the Christmas Cakes!

Why does it take all day...

2012-12-10T19:16:00Z

To clean a bathroom less than six feet square???

Well, that's how it feels...

Mind you, energy levels have been down and pain levels up, so that may have had something to do with it. And I wasn't cleaning all day: I did it in three sessions. It just felt like it took all day!

Still, now I have an all shiny scrubbed to death bathroom! How long will it be after the teenager gets in that I'll need to wipe the loo seat, and the floor, and change the towels? Sigh...

Guerrilla campaign against the mess!

2012-12-08T17:29:00Z

I have not had time or energy to post in aaaages! Sorry about that! Things have got a leeeetle crazy round here with masses of work for Musketeers (freform LARP in February).

Meanwhile I have been fighting a guerrilla campaign against the hordes and hoards of mess! My son's new room is almost done (I need to get the curtains hemmed and up), we are almost ready to do the work on the office for Himself, and most of the sewing kit has moved into the conservatory. The books are all in the lock-up, along with a lot of sewing kit, all the costume stuff, and most of the sewing machines! Customer projects all have boxes, and we are well under way with their stuff.

Todays little campaign was against the mess on the work surface in the dining room. A few weeks back I bought some new-to-me storage jars on ebay.

There was a mess...

It gor ORGANIZED!

Himself is going to add a shelf so I can stack some of the jars above the work surface and make room for the coffee machine and grinder. Hopefully, as the space will always be in use (we make 2-3 jugs of coffee per day, grinding the beans for it each time), it'll remain reasonably clear and the STUFF won't stack up in teetering heaps!

Well, I can dream! Meanwhile, I need to find homes for the stuff off that bit...

Road to a home: starting back up.

2012-11-17T12:44:10Z

"Road to a home" is something one of our list people came up with. Her idea was to make a list every day -- one maintenance job that needed attention, one task towards a long-term project, and one thing to do for herself to help improve her moood.
It was helping me a lot... I'm going to try it again. But I'm adding

MAINTENANCE:
1. Catch up on laundry & folding.
2. Empty the perilously high-piled dish drying rack.

PROJECT: Shed purge! Give away the old singer & the microwave from Rob's office (the one that got re-orged out of existence by the governor). Find the box of winter bits ... somehow I seem to have one of every glove, but no mates to any.

ME TIME: A nap before taking my daughter to her friend's birthday party. Since she had us up at 5:30 this morning, I may even try to get HER to take one too.

THINK POSITIVE: I set up coffee before coming down to laundry&LJ; my husband's making breakfast...and I think it smells ready. So glad to have a washer/drier in my house so I don't have to lug all this to the laundromat!

Anybody home!?

2012-11-12T02:29:51Z

Hurricane, job crazies, nor'easter, a cold (flu?), and technical difficulties have kept me off-line and I am surprised to see so few posts!

My old second-hand roomba died. Three months after my birthday and 1 month after my anniversary, I decided to give up on waiting for the husband to make time for us to go shopping for a replacement wedding ring for me as we'd discussed. And I ordered a new roomba. It got here yesterday, I put it into action today and... I'm so delighted with the way it's cleaning that it's sort of icky how poor a job my little vac was doing. I've got long hair and apparently the little vac wasn't getting it. But Roomba's the robot who could. Yay Ruby Roomba. This one has the docking base and everything.

Tomorrow I have to get back on the wagon, keep up with more than dishes & laundry.
Does anyone know what zone Flylady is in? LOL. Yep, I've been that disconnected.

Durham

2012-09-30T18:02:21Z

Durham CT is nothing that impressive.... a nice little New England farm town...but it's biggest claim to fame is a really big fair in late September. Some pictures scroll through on the town website. http://www.townofdurhamct.org/

As it is the autumnal equinox...

2012-09-21T13:38:37Z

...I have changed the decorations in my porthole window from summer ones to autumn ones.

Before.. Ivy garland and dragonfly stained glass

After.. Sticks, berries and ivy garland and autumn oak stained glass

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

WOW

2012-09-20T22:42:46Z

Well, after some really crap news yesterday, today is off to a much better start. I got all my little jobs out of the way before nine and then came to play on the computer and found this new version for LJ. I have to say, I really like the look of it. Lets see how we go.

In other news, the kitchen cupboards are just about done, three quarters of the wardrobes/drawers in the Master have been culled (I never knew there was so much space there). Lucky the local church is having a fair in a few weeks and we have a whole bunch of stuff to donate to that.

Garage has been cleaned out by DH and the kids are doing a challenge a day and hopefully their rooms will be looking good soon too.

flylady @ 2012-09-12T19:38:00

2012-09-12T23:38:10Z

-No more progress on the pink panther princess playhouse.
-I washed the bathtub last night...and my daughter promptly covered the walls with "paint" (colored soap).
-I emptied the dish-drying rack the other night while R&I cooked dinner.
-I found Roomba and can't get the battery to take a charge -- it was fun while it lasted, now I need to go get a real one.
-I went into the shed and pulled out the roof of my medieval pavillion, folded it & put it away properly. I'd pulled it down alone as a serious thunderstorm was threatening, but that was well over a month ago -- oops. Next stage - stow the ropes properly.
-I pulled out the bits of the bike trailer, pumped the tires, and took my daughter for a ride. If I can get her up & ready by 7:30 tomorrow I'm going to try taking her to daycare* by bike. (*her little-kid daycare is now her before/after school program AND they bus her to&from school)
-Groceries run, another to come tomorrow (the hidden hazard of having two chain stores nearby...they carry different brands of GF and lo-so and lo-sugar so we now have TWO stops to make.)
-Dishes out, dishes ready to go in.
-Wet laundry into drier this morning, new load in. Not-quite-dry laundry restarted in drier a few minutes ago and I'll be checking it shortly so I can put the next load in. (I love our suddenly cool nights!)
-Unfortunately I still have to log in to the office to do 2 more hours of work... or else work Saturday. Hmmmm.

Oh and some ultra-cute news. We did go to the Bethlehem Fair over the weekend -- and my motherinlaw had entered some of V's veggies in her name. She helped dig & plan & plant and she watered every time she was up at the farm and... she won a red ribbon and two blues! My MIL says the under-12 entries are judged on their own merits, not compared to who else entered -- very very nifty. I also picked up a $10 stainless steel ring wtih a pretty blue CZ that fits my bigger-than-I-was fingers -- when I fit my wedding ring again, I'll let V have it.

Forgot to order my flylady calendar... and AGH today's Wednesday which means I missed the PTO meeting.

Annnnnnd.... there goes summer.

2012-09-07T10:48:14Z

Random thoughts...I'm too tired to make it logical, but I wanted to get this down as a progress report to myself.

First grade started, so summer's gone.
Friend's retirement, family wedding, and a funeral attended.
Appropriately fitting clothes acquired for all 3 family members. (The child got taller, but the parents got wider more's the pity.)
The is-it-celiac blew up this week so I'll be skipping the Bethlehem Fair this weekend to finish my work week. Only good thing is that makes a diet easier to stick to....not much fair-fare is wheat-free.
Play house isn't done, but it's close and has an anti-rain tarp on it so it actually contains some toys. (If it weren't for the funeral, I think we'd have finished -- that was a 3-hour drive away.)
Laundry's caught up on.
Dishes are close enough (just don't bump the drying rack, it would cause a plastic avalanche.)
Paperwork has gone nowhere for a month except the obvious bills. (Bad Mary, no cookie...not even wheatfree.)
Vaccuuming is a total loss -- as in, I don't know where Roomba was when its battery lost power.
I cleared & cleaned the stove, since it's finally cool enough to cook indoors. And I got the replacement part for the campstove in case we have another heat wave or power failure...we won't be restricted to grilling.
Job's tedious and too far away and my migraines & could-be-celiac are driving me to distraction.
Best news? My daughter's been dry 3 nights this week. We're all a ltitle tired from extra getting-up with her, but she has even now once gotten up on her own so there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Hallelujia, pass the champagne.

Oh, and I spotted my next-year's carry-it-with-me calendar which reminds me it's time to go order my fridge calendar from flylady. In the meantime it's time to start the day. Coffee.....

Rubik's House!

2012-08-06T12:27:36Z

Things are still in a state of flux. It's gone a bit RAF in corners!

f it moves, salute it!
If it doesn't move, MOVE IT!
If you can't move it, paint it white!

Except that in the last case it gets stuffed in a box and gets something thrown over it as a disguise!

We had to stop Rubiking to complete the wedding gown, and then there was some sensible clearing of the living room, which looks fairly respectable today. Trouble is, some of the clutter has just waltzed back out into the conservatory! I need to get some tidying up done out there...

The Evil Bag Mountain had been packed away in two flappy top crates. It's still behind the mirror, but at least it isn't threatening to avalanche and engulf the sofa!

The ironing heap has been reduced a bit, and is at present lolling about on my cutting table. The coathanger box is under a sewing table. They need to be dealt with (Himself's duty!)

My old desk is now in bits and packed away in the shed, along with the old printer table. The tower computer is in the process of being decommissioned. It too is on the cutting table while we copy off anything required for archiving and then flatten the hard disk prior to disposal of the parts...

The new desk is fully loaded and working. I'm no less in the doorway, but the set-up is, on the whole, neater. After we set it up and everything on it was clean and tidy, the GMNT said: Your corner of Tranquility! Just don't turn round! The rest of the room looked like an explosion in a furniture factory, and the carpet didn't need hoovering so much as excavating! An hour or so with the help of Himself and the GMNT yesterday more or less sorted that.

My pink boots are now...

2012-07-26T18:03:38Z

...Medical Problem Brown!!

OK, I did spend the weekend playing LARP stuff in a swamp, so there is some excuse. Oh, and I failed miserably to get Trench Foot, even slightly, so there was win along with mud.

Got back to All the Washing In England!

Duvet cover, sheet and pillowcase
Mufti clothes and undies (2 loads)
Lady Prudence's dresses
Lady Prudence's Elizabethan shirt and egregious chemise dress!
The linen underpinnings and towels...

I have two 12' by 18' groundsheets and 4 doormats still to go.

I dyed some stuff saffron yellow for a customer!

Himself collected my ebay win sewing tables while I was away, so I have been transferring sewing kit and machines as part of the Great Room Shuffle. This evening I am going to waltz the tables round, move the Ikea storage units, and start dismantling the old treadle machine that has to go to a museum...

All the camping stuff and LARP kit, except those two groundsheets, has been dragged up to the shed on the trundle truck by my own fair hands, and stacked away:

1 Quecha Base 4.2 tent, with added air bed, blow-up chair, and dustpan and brush! Must put the mallet back in beside it...
1 4m gazebo
3 small crates of china and Family Silver
1 large Crate of Everything Else (from bread knife to sun screen! All the comforts and cooking kit!)
1 Chilly Bin of Awesomeness!

(Yup, that's my cool box!)

I also managed to post out my ebay sellings: I sold some stash fabric! yay me!

Then some friends dropped by on their way home from holiday, and stayed for dinner: saussages, salad, fresh rolls - fast food Kate style! And it was so nice that we ate in the garden. Dusting off the a garden table and a few chairs was easier and quicker than making the dining room habitable! Cheating? Naaahhh... :D

So, so far, not a bad week. The house still looks like a cross between the white knight's pudding and a furniture warehouse (there are bits of New To Me table lolling about in an unnecessary manner!), but I look at my list of DONE! and am content.

END OF PART I

2012-07-16T10:57:26Z

Or is it Part of One End?

Whatever... I have the Horn cabinet wrangled and the room fit to sew in for this week!

I wrangled the Ikea storage bins and tucked the ironing board in at the far end. It used to be at the near end by the door, and was forever falling over, threatening to break the glass in the French doors to the living room! Not so good...

The shoe rack and the clothes rail have been replaced by the Horn Cabinet and two crates of boots: one is Himself's, the othe the GMNT's. Mine will all have to live upstairs. For now, anyway...

Without Bernie, the table feels a lot less cramped. There is more room for the projects to pile up!

Even with the cabinet open, the cats can get in and out! And the cabinet opens nicely over those two crates of Man Boots!

The cabinet opens up nicely. There's easy room to swing the chair round from table to overlocker. And now Himself has fettled the cabinet, the machine sits down so the surface is level with the table top: no projects dragging at the needle!

From the other end of the room it all looks a lot more spacious! Partly this is an illusion, as I don't suppose (stray boots apart!) there's any more exposed floor area. It's just that without the boots and the rail covering the window, it's a lot lighter. Eventually, when the boots get a proper home, I'm hoping to put a small (two shelf) bookcase for the sewing books where they stand. We shall see.

I have my eye on a large shed - actually a 10' by 20' summer house! Part of a cancelled order! - to make into a workshop for Himself. We need to get a base down for it, and get it sorted, and then secure storage for all the DIY stuff and power tools will mean that they can move out of the conservatory and leave me cupboard space for the sewing kit. Yay and woot!

The second load of washing is getting to the end of its cycle. The GMNT needs to sort his stuff out and bring down another load.

We're getting there, as they say! And I have placed a bit on a sewing table solution...

And Lo! There was Space, and Order!

2012-07-15T10:38:06Z

If only in one small corner of my life so far!

Behind Nia and me, the shoe rack and the old museum piece treadle: A little fuzzy, but you get the picture!

Next to it, the clothing rail... You can see it here behind my sewing partner. It stood in front of the catflap.

I have taken all my shoes off the rack and sorted them: charity shop, ordinary shoes, and LARP shoes, which have gone in a box. I shall toss all the GMNT's boots and shoes in a box and he can deal with them later.

The clothes rail has been dismantled. There are several reference garments that will go into storage (my dad's uniform and some Victorian chemises and bloomers, for example), some customer projects on hold that will go on the door rail upstairs until that room gets sorted, and some old toiles that will get tossed.

Yay! Kitties can get in and out without marking garments!

Once I get the shoe rack out, I can trundle the Horn cabinet in.

I'll update when it's all sorted out.

Weekend Flying

2012-07-14T23:24:29Z

Sorry that I haven't been posting! We lost internet for a day, and then I had a bunch of other stuff going on. I've kept trucking away at it though. And I'm getting acclimated to a new morning routine, since Friday several friends and I started The Artist's Way. It's a 12 week creativity course (one that I've tried but never gotten all the way through), and I'm serious about getting my writing published and getting out of a rut, so I'm excited to be starting that – and having so many people doing it together. Please feel free to jump in with us if you want. The more, the merrier!

Ta Da!

A.M. routine for me & baby
Made bed
Washed laundry
Wrote morning pages
Took down/folded laundry x 2
Put some diapers together x 2
Caught up lj comments
Hung laundry
Did dishes
Took a nap (omg!)
Packed diaper & snack bags

We're off to see Brave at the drive-in now. This will be our first trip to a drive-in! I'm excited. Our redheaded archer daughter has been begging for this movie. This is also our first attempt at a movie with the baby (10.5 mo). I hope she mostly sleeps through it. There are two playing (also Snow White & the Huntsman) if we can stay out that late, but it doesn't start until dark, so we'll see how the kids do.

Lego-a-Go-Go!

2012-07-14T18:02:00Z

Lego on the march!

A couple of Larp friends and their adorable cherub came over today and picked up a car full of Lego! Yay and woot! Four crates of Lego will never darken my door again! And the GMNT is a pony better off!

There were these four crates, filled with kits and bricks in all those Lakeland plastic boxes, plus two buckets and three larger kits still in their original (but now crumbling and grubby!) cardboard boxes: the Harry Potter castle, the Viking ship, and the larger Life on Mars spaceport. There was also a 4" lever arch file of instruction booklets.

OK, we could have got more for it if we'd bothered to sort all the kits out into full kits, bagged them up with their destructions, and shoveled them off on Ebay, one kit at a time, with the mixed bricks in half kilo bag-fulls. But to do that we'd have had to spend days sorting it, photographing it, and putting it up there. Not worth it. We need the space a lot more than that, and a great deal more urgently!

Somewhere down behind the tumble dryer and the cupboard that are lurking at the near end of the shed there's at least one more crate full of Lego, containing I dunno how many Bionicles and the Gungan sub kit. Those will get passed along later.

The other thing I need to get organized is the new-to-me Horn cabinet for the overlocker...

It's quite small and neat.

Inside the door is one useful caddy thing and a couple of useless thread racks that will just annoy me. They can come off and be replaced by something more useful. The wouldn't come close to holding all our threads, and they don't hold the 3000m overlocker cones anyway...*

The cabinet needs a little bit of fettling to make it perfect for the overlocker. Some of that is easy, like unscrewing a nut and shifting a bracket, and some requires the use of a power tool!

Bernie the Bernina 1150MDA sits quite happily on top of the lift, but in flatbed position, the middle bracket needs moving about half an inch down, and for storage the bottom bracket need to go down a bit too. But to get him up and down, we need a teeny bit more cleaeance for the thread stand, so Himself is going to rout out a bit, and then sand down those chips round the hole so the don't catch on things like fine silk chiffon.

Once inside the cabinet, the door closes and it's just a neat box on wheels! Now I just need to make room for it in the conservatory. The rail and the shoe rack (which is kinda busted anyway, being plastic and not man enough for the job!) will have to move. Most of the shoes will end up in one of those crates. Another will probably contain all my LARP shoes. And I may never need to buy boxes for small sewing supplies and single portions of freezable foods again! :D

*All our threads don't even fit in this! There are over-spill boxes...

Update!

Himself has routed out a tiny bit at the back of the cabinet machine hole and shifted the clamps. He has also smoothed off the chips round the hole so they won't catch on delicate fabrics. Yay! I can now give it a bit of a clean (It's rather dusty!), and put it to use. Bernie has a proper home!

Iz chuffed.

Winning - slightly!

2012-07-10T23:38:05Z

Got four loads of washing done! Yay!

Tidied up a heap of sewing stuff... Heap no longer on floor in conservatory!

GMNT took a stack up to the shed.

Sold the Wii fit plus that came as a free gift with my phone on Ebay! Putting it in the post in the morning... Sadly, I'll have to go up to the village PO for that as Parcelforce online doesn't work with OSX, it only supports Windoze...

Bought a small Horn sewing cabinet off ebay for the serger. Yay! That saved over £250 on a new one!

Su got the corset pattern altered and we cut it out. I drafted the jacket sleeve pattern ready for tomorrow.

Did some cooking.

Need to plan cake-baking! And quiche and other nomables for the 'wedding' in our LARP game.

Tuesday Fly-stravaganza

2012-07-10T16:05:10Z

Pardon me in advance, but...

I will kick my house's ass today! This is it. Duel to the death. One of us will come away victorious. I can only pray that it is me.

Yesterday was a hard day. Very bad day. Started with breaking my coffee pot before I got even a drop of coffee, and it just kind of got worse as the day progressed. The only thing I really accomplished was going out to one of the bigger towns for shopping. I did a HUGE shop trip. Now that my girls aren't in dance anymore, I don't have an hour and a half to run to walmart every week while we're in a real town (I am about 30 miles past BFE), so I'm trying to stock up for the whole month. Our local/close store sucks, especially their veggies and meat, and they're a lot more expensive because it's the only grocery store for 65 miles. I'll be able to pick up milk & bread there, but hopefully I now have everything I need for this month! Had to have a talk with the fams, too. Last time I attempted this, everyone was pretty much all, "Hey! We have lots of drinks/sodas! Oooh, look, snacks! *nom nom*", and then two weeks later, "Oh, hey, we're out of food. Oh, and you've already spent all the money. We're hungry!" So we had a big talk about "budgeting our food" now that I've stocked up. If they run out in a week or two, they're out for the month.

So today is a big day around the house. Nothing got done yesterday. Well, I did do a half-hearted clean on the fridge before putting everything away. That's it. Didn't even have time for laundry. I was literally gone from 8:30 – 5:30, then I had to nurse the baby, clean the fridge out, put away two overflowing cart-fulls of groceries (took a while), heat up a frozen pizza, and put my kids to bed and hour and a half late. So I got no laundry done (that was my 'shiny sink' project from this reboot post a few days ago). Right now I am 0/2. Hope to be 1/3 by the end of the day! I also have two days of dishes to handwash, and more freaking mouse cleaning, since we apparently have another one. Just days after I cleaned up from the first attack. I found one IN my silverware drawer. Soooo gross. So more cupboard scrubbing, and now I have to rewash all of the silverware and the insert. My kitchen will never get reclaimed ever again. I keep one-step-forward, six-steps-back-ing it. *sadness*

Today is proving pretty stressful for me already as well. I'm going to keep deep breathing and keep pushing through.

Today's goals:

* Get dishes all caught up

* Re-organize baby food (we get WIC and exclusively breastfeed, so baby is OVERFLOWING in baby food. It was taking over much-needed space in my cupboards, so I'm going to attempt a new storage technique today with reused pepsi boxes. We'll see if that works.) May or may not start restocking when I get extra room, but I suspect dishes will take longer than I want.

* Make a menu plan – yes, I probably should have done this before going shopping, but I stocked up with sales + coupons + price matching. Now that I'm all fully stocked, I'll figure out a good week's worth of mostly-cool meals. If anyone has any good cold/crock pot/not a lot of cooking or baking meals/recipes, please let me know! With no AC, I am redoing my cooking habits this summer. :/

Ta Das!

A.M. routine for me & baby
Made bed
Took care of chickens
Hung clean diapers
Got girls ready for camp; made it on time today (yay!)
Cleared out all old emails from Flylady email. Kept morning missions & testimonials that seemed interesting to me based on subject. Deleted ALL missions except for this week's. Will tackle reading & catch up later.
Visited Josh at lunch
Vacuumed
Washed a load of dishes x 2
Started a load of laundry
Water break
Hung laundry

Time to get started on the kitchen. Here it's gotten hot already. I hate the new morning routine since Josh had to start going in at 6. He takes lunch at 10 now, and with taking the girls to camp, I just don't have time to do my morning laundry load, and knocking out the dishes really quickly to run while we leave doesn't work without a DW. I never get started on real cleaning til 11 at the earliest anymore. Ugh. Need to get a better morning schedule, although next week is the last week of camp, so I guess it'll settle down after that.

Escuse me a moment...

2012-07-09T11:20:17Z

AAARRRGGGHHH!!!

H'm. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

It's a case of 'you can't get there from here'.

Looks like we have to shift three-quarters of the contents of the house round, like the Mad Hatter's Teaparty to accommodate the now student GMNT and the sewing. He just doesn't have room in the space he has, so I have to give up the sewing room, and we all have to give up the conservatory. As I said, ARGH!

Meanwhile, along with listing all we need to do, and pricing things up (scary: we have a total budget, for shed, furniture, paint, etc.) of about £5,000, which isn't a lot with which to completely rearrange your life!), I have been trying to keep up with the ordinary stuff. So far today I have managed to get up, dressed, take my pills, eat breakfast, down several mugs of tea and coffee, and sort the washing. Load 1 of several dark loads is in the machine now. I'll have to dry most of it in the dryer as it's too wet to do it outside, and I need the inside space for sorting out STUFF.

I have also been on ebay and sourced baggies for posting out the GMNT's Playmobil kits when we sell that. And I've contacted the bloke that was interested in the Lego as a job lot.

Is it still morning?