Holiday Prep

Is it that time again? Yep! It’s actually a hella late start for me I try to start my holiday prep in January so I can pick away at it all year. That is a habit born of being broke for several or more years of my adult life. I would shop all the crazy after Xmas sales at Michael’s and Jo Ann’s and snag craft items I could whip up for the next xmas, or decorations I could give as gifts or add to our collection. (75-90% off was my jam) I also spent the whole year visiting tag sales and secondhand shops looking to luck out on clothes, books, toys, etc, that were in excellent condition and perfect for the people I was shopping for. Our Christmases were always pretty amazing despite the bad financial times. Anyway….

This year, due mostly to the pandemic, I am starting now in mid-October. Eek! We need to save money this year for sure. Everything is unstable at this point; jobs, the political climate, the actual climate, just everything, so we are trying not to spend too much, trying to build up a cushion in case we need it. In a shocking development, to me at least, I am pretty much forced to buy all our presents new. There has been no browsing the aisles at charity shops, no tag sales, nothing like that. I have to order everything online to be safe. So were doing a category thing:

One thing you Want
one thing you Need
one thing to Wear
one thing to Read
one thing to Eat
one thing to Drink
one thing to Play
one thing to Make

That seems like a lot until you realize that our ridiculous “normal” was 15-20 presents each thanks to my shopping strategies. So this is a significant cut back BUT I will be forced to get it all new so that kind of shifts the cost back up. I’m still looking for deals, of course, and I’m doing ok. The categories are mostly broad and a lot of the items will end up being cheap, like something to drink is going to be tea for a few of us and rootbeer for a couple, only my hubby will get expensive as he wants scotch. Something to eat is cheap too. I have requests for chocolate, pretzels, ‘fancy’ ramen, smartfood, and crackers so far. I expect my remaining daughter to request dill pickles. My son asked for underwear for something to wear, my husband needs jeans, one daughter asked for a jacket. I’d pay a lot less if I could shop second hand but hopefully the novelty of getting stuff brand new will make it worth it this year. Yikes.

Stockings will be stuffed with mostly practical items; hand lotion, toothbrushes, shampoo, etc, and food treats like cocoa packets, mints and so on. There may be socks, or gloves, probably a few homemade items. I love the stockings, I like to get creative and fancy with them, make them specific to the recipient and all, but this year will be a little different and that’s ok. We will be surrounded by all the decorations, and we will have our little feast. We will play games and watch movies, and read aloud, and it will be lovely.

Soon my son and I will begin planning said feast. He will peruse our Harry Potter cookbooks and surf Youtube cooking videos and come to me with suggestions. He wants me to make spotted dick for dessert this year, I suspect mostly because of the name, and I will. It has raisins in it and it sounds kind of awful but I’ll make another dessert as back up and it will all be fine.

Oh, I need to get holiday crackers, I need to put that on my list! I have a whole binder that keeps me on track for Yule/Christmas. It’s a thin binder, nothing overwhelming, I used to just use a few pages of a spiral notebook. For years and years I used a notebook and all I wrote in it was a list of gifts for each member of my little family and a list of their stocking stuffers. Since I shopped all year and hid things away I really needed those lists of I might forget which gift went to which person. It also helped me keep things even as far as number of gifts and $ spent for each of them. As each present was wrapped and tagged I would cross it off. It was really helpful for knowing if something was missing and I needed to hunt it up but as systems go it was very, very basic. In 2017, after visiting Diagon Alley in FL, I got it in my head to make us a Harry Potter Christmas and nothing was going to get in my way.

I made us all House Stockings and scarves and I made a bunch of decorations. Google search was my best friend as I looked for ideas on how to create this first themed Christmas. I cooked up a storm too, making a Hogwarts/English Christmas feast complete with butter beer and other such treats. It was all this crazy activity that lead me to improve my system. Instead of just present lists I needed to keep track of many projects I was working on and create a schedule for myself for both the crafts and all the cooking. It’s kind of funny, I used to stress out horribly on the big holidays and now I am relaxed and enjoying them. I am on track to be finished with all but wrapping and meal prep by the end of October!

A Decluttering Collapse

I got off to a good start but life like to give us the unexpected. I should have expected it. I knew we were going to have to deal with a ton of boxes from my husband’s work, I knew it was coming soon, yet when it arrived it derailed everything. He had to prep computers for something like 300 students? It might have been more. So all the computers arrived and all the computer bags arrived… at our house which is just a regular house, where we live and do stuff. I think we have 1700 square feet for the five of us which is normally ok. The boxes took over. There’s an office-type space in the kitchen and it was full, floor to almost ceiling, with big red boxes. I wish I’d snapped a pic but I didn’t. Here’s the point I remembered:

This is when there were only 8 boxes left. You can see the windows and everything!

So each red box contains a bunch of little boxes containing a laptop and assorted cords. We have other boxes that contain laptop bags. We unbox a red box of laptop boxes, unbox each laptop, scan it, label it, etc etc, and put it in a laptop bag which gets labeled, then re-box the laptops in their bags by dorm assignment. Then we tape up the big box, label it, and get it to the school. As we do this we are left with all the individual laptop boxes which must be saved to mail them back in like 3 years, so the amount of clutter grows and expands and takes over everything… until we box up the little boxes and get them to the school too. I have a pic, again not taken at peak-boxage:

The boxes are on top of the dog crate and they were, again, up to the ceiling. There are more on the shelf there and there were even more taking over the counter in the laundry room and on top of the pantry cupboards.

At the point that I took this picture we had sent back over 100 of these little boxes already. Also, as we fill the big boxes with laptops we move them into the front hall until we can’t safely put any more in there, then we have them picked up ASAP.

We can squeeze by the boxes so it’s ok! The lighter boxes at the back are the boxes full of boxes. It gets pretty hilarious at certain points, like when I tried to bring groceries in.

A small sample of the recycling. We went twice a week to drop off cardboard and that was pretty much ONLY the boxes the laptop bags came in because we reuse the others to send the computers to the school.

We’re almost done at this point, I hope, so I can stop treading water and get back to making some progress again. I’m reviewing Sink Reflections; by Marla Cilley in the meantime, trying to keep my mojo alive. Soon the last of the boxes will be gone and I will restart my decluttering efforts and get this place in shape.

Note: the banner for this post is by: “clutter” by Sean MacEntee is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Garden Goals

Since we’re so very indoorsy and don’t know how to do much yard stuff, and because I am a known even notorious crop-killer, I met with a woman who does landscape/yard stuff to talk about getting some gardens put in and some help/instruction around keeping food plants alive and hopefully getting them to produce, you know, FOOD. It was a fantastic meeting, outdoors in our yard, both of us masked and socially distant. I showed her all my spots of abject failure and semi-success and we talked about what it is we want to do and how to get that going. She was, of course, very positive and certain with the right help even I can garden successfully. I’m actually hopeful! We’re looking at having the existing ornamental beds cleaned out and possibly filling in empty spots with more productive plants as well as having actually food gardens put in and more berry bushes installed with some kind of actual plan. She took soil samples to be tested which is, apparently, step one.

Even though I’m sure it made me look like a total spaz I asked if all the mint I have so painstakingly tended, with mediocre results, could be carefully dug up and given a place in the new garden. She did try to warn me that mint is crazy but I pointed out that with YEARS of encouragement it has made minimal gains under my tender mercy so I’m guessing it will get it’s own little area which is fine by me. I have peppermint and spearmint growing and I love them. She says we can do an herb garden and a vegetable garden, a berry patch and so on, maybe fruit trees! It’ll have to happen in stages of course, she probably prefers to be paid and stuff. My art studio/hippy fort/shed is back-burnered for now because being able to produce some of our own food is just a bigger priority. Part of my childhood we had a nice garden and it was lovely to be able to run outside and just pick fresh veggies that immediately made their way onto our table.

I need to make a list of veggies, fruits, herbs and berries I want to grow and she’s going to help me make it happen. I warned her that I am going to go pretty mental and list a million things and she might have to help me pare it down to something reasonable and, especially, point out items that are hard to grow/easy to kill. I want:

at least one apple tree *
more raspberries and help keeping them “nice” *
lingonberries
mint
rosemary
dill
cilantro
onions
scallions*
garlic*
red peppers
broccoli
cauliflower
zucchini*
summer squash
lettuce
winter squash*
hot peppers
cantaloupe
tomatillos*
Pumpkins
at least one pepper tree
a nectarine tree
Potatoes
carrots
parsnips
beets
chickpeas
kidney beans
navy beans
green beans
long beans
maybe grapes!

I mean… obviously Not all at once… but I’d like to get at least some of this going and then build on it over time, build up to where we have a nice variety of veggies and fruit and such. I want to be able to say that we are not completely dependent on other people for our food. Ideally we will eventually have some sort of greenhouse, some chickens, maybe a nice little sheep or 2? We’re also looking at installing a hedge along the road. … … … man, that is a lot of stuff and it is the tip of the iceberg. I think this project in particular will be worth all the effort. I know it is a little crazy to pay someone to help with this, food gardens should save money and this one will take ages to break even, BUT I can’t do this without help, I’ve proven that over and over again, and this way I might actually succeed. Plus the goal isn’t precisely to save money, it’s more to have the ability to produce food. So, yeah, I think it will be a win if my blight druid tendencies can be conquered at last. I am so excited about this!

Balance in the Library

Years ago when I was asked to list my favorite authors I realised, looking over my list, that most of them were men. My list had writers like Tolkien, Guy Gavriel Kay, Christopher Moore, Neil Gaiman, H.P. Lovecraft, R.A. Salvatore, and loads more. There were two women on my list: J.K. Rowling and Caitlin R. Kiernan. I thought about what I read and reread and added Anne Bishop because how did I forget her? I read her stuff all the time! But still, I had at least ten male authors to three female and I wondered, why? Do I really prefer the writing styles/tones/etc of men? Or was I just not exposing myself to many female writers?

So I started consciously choosing to read fiction written by women. I found Gail Carriger, Mira Grant, Genevieve Cogman, and N.K. Jemisin. Lately I’ve discovered Diana Rowland, Brigid Kemmerer, Kira Jane Buxton, A.J. Hackwith, Angie Thomas, Ijeoma Uluo (nonfiction), Sherry Thomas, Cait Flanders and Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I gravitate toward books by women. If I’m looking at a book it is more likely I will buy it if the author is female. Not that I shun male authors. I’ve also found Chuck Wendig, N.S. Dolkart, Jim C. Hines, and James Lovegrove in recent years and I love them. My personal bookshelves are pretty egalitarian at this point. But I recently noticed that the YA Collection I curate is pretty slanted toward female authors so now I’m working on restoring balance. I’m scanning professional journals looking for male protagonists and male YA authors and it seems to me that there are actually a good deal more women writing YA than there are men, or maybe that’s just the releases of the past several months… I know for sure that YA is heavily tipped toward fantasy and it takes some effort to find other genres.

I want the collection to be balanced, to represent all the types of people that might browse it or use it. I want male authors, female authors, authors of color representing all the colors there are, and LGBTQIA authors. Stories featuring all types of characters, from all walks of life should be in the collection. And all genres, all interests… just a good variety, a good sampling of what is out there. Right now the YA collection is organized alphabetically by author and I would LOVE to organize it by genre and then alphabetically by author within those sections. We don’t even, for the most part, add gere stickers to our books, so it is really hard to help teens that just want to see a selection of romance, or horror, or sci-fi etc. There are some stickers but they aren’t used consistently. I really want to change that. Overall, I’d say now is the time to try to do it with the library not being open to patrons right now. I could take it all apart and put it back together… but first I should weed it. Goodness knows I haven’t properly done that yet. At the same time, we are busy, busy with phone calls and curbside pick up and trying to plan for next year.

Hmmmm, maybe I’ll just start with the “New” section… just organize that by genre and see how it goes? It would make things easier for sure if I could get it done. So many teens want a specific genre and it would be a huge improvement to be able to just show them the section so they could browse independently.

Decluttering Revived

After some very low-energy days I am back at it again. I baked a cake for my husband’s birthday yesterday, made french toast for breakfast and nachos for lunch yesterday as well. Today I have picked up the decluttering baton and worked on the front hallway. It was, of course, a disaster. I only snapped on pic of said disaster though so you will have to imagine the rest.

So, you have to imagine shoes Everywhere, dirt, sand, leaves etc. It was pretty bad.

Anyway, I spent some time picking up, sweeping, vacuuming, and setting aside some stuff to toss or give away, depending on the state of the item, and the entryway is improved if not yet finished.

The bags and boxes of stuff to give away is getting a little bit much. Also half the basement is full of foam computer bags connected to my husband’s work. It would be awesome to see all of it gone. There is just SO MUCH and a lot of it needs to go. Even all those damned shoes, we don’t need all of those and I’m positive that some of them haven’t been worn in ages and don’t fit anyone. Such a mess. I also need to sort through that basket of gloves, hats and scarves and get rid of the matchless, the ruined and the unneeded.

I let the dishes slip yesterday so I need to get back on that. I cooked 2 meals and baked a cake, prepped and ran The Slithering RPG for a bit of a celebration. The Fall birthdays continue! It felt bad giving my husband one skinny little book for his birthday, I think I will score him a bottle of the scotch he likes next chance I get.

My paints are all out in the shed and need to come back in the house for the winter. Bummer. I can’t let them freeze but I hate to bring more stuff into the house. In trying to get clutter under control I’m trying to use the library instead of buying books. It’s difficult. Books are my thing, my life, my weakness, my downfall when it comes to stopping spending. I’m doing fine at the moment, but I know there are books that I can get through the library and read and will still desperately want to buy anyway. Anything featuring both Sherlock Holmes and Cthulhu is pretty much already bought. Whether it is written yet or not even conceived of at this time, it is as if those volumes are already in my hands and on my shelves. I always have a short list of books I “need.”

Everywhere I look, aside from the areas I’ve recently worked on, there is clutter. It’s depressing, draining and sometimes feels insurmountable. That’s why I need to take it one step at a time. If I do this slowly, and correctly, I might just get this all under control and have the nice, clean, fairly orderly, homey home I want to live in. I’m trying. Day by day, I am trying, and I can’t really ask much more than that of myself.

All Outta Rooves

Today is another headache day which is tragic as I was hoping to get back on track today, things continue to slide. BLEH. I am actually sort of keeping up. My cleared spaces are remaining cleared and I’m keeping up with laundry and dishes. That’s just all I can ask of myself right now. I’ll have to make dinner and go get the farmshare as well so that is plenty to do when I’m feeling this way. I want to make more progress but I have reached the city limits.

For those that might not know, I suffer from frequent (almost daily) headaches and from mostly controlled migraines, I have been on daily medication to keep my migraines away (mostly) for YEARS. Lately I have been trying to fight my headaches without resorting to acetaminophen as much as possible because my liver has some sort of issue. I drink lots of water, sleep regularly as best I can, and use heating pads and ice packs. It, my life, used to be much worse. This morning I took some meds. They haven’t worked yet. I still attended the ComCat webinar and answered a bunch of work emails so Go Me.

We all have our burdens, am I right? Yeah, it’s tough getting through some days without going on some kind of pain-related spree but I keep trying. I wanted today to be super productive. I wanted to declutter one or two more areas, get some more regular chores done and spend time reading. I’m down to: maybe I can watch an episode or 2 of Vera tonight. I hope you are all having a better day than I am. XXOO

I’m GMing all Wrong…

Ok, last week I did pretty great. The game was high energy, lots of action, lots of laughter, just exactly the kind of game you want to play or run. Last night, not so much. Last night I was not in the zone. My players were kind of all over the place, which is, you know, players gonna play. The best laid plans of GMs are all undone by random player choices. It probably didn’t help that I had to take Benadryl right before the game. Oh well. I loved some of the choices the players made but I think I tend to reward their creativity too much. There was one fight in particular that I just let them side-step because the attempt was so out-of -the-box, plus the player rolled a natural 20 for a 40 total check… I mean, how do I not let that work? I’m realizing now that I should have let it work for maybe a round or 2, let them slip through that room, and then had the bad guys shake it off and come up behind them… damn. That would have been a challenge and been really funny.

There was an amusing little sequence where everyone except the 1/2 Orc barbarian and the Elven cleric made their saves and Orc and the Elf fell under the compulsion to raise a weird alien baby as their own. They had a lot of fun with that. It’s the gift that keeps on giving too since they brought it back home to the circus. The Orc is already trying to train the limbless critter to wield an axe. ^_^ Good stuff. Next week will be better. I just need to do a little more prep work so I understand the bad guy abilities more and have a notion of what they will do if the players choose to approach things in an unexpected way.

My Husband ran us in Age of Ashes today and it Rocked! We got to go home to our castle for the first time in a long time, we added a library, trained up our guards, visited with the townspeople etc. Then we went through another gate, possibly into the underdark. We saved a young red dragon from a purple worm. It was a little nerve wracking. Mallum got eaten by the worm but he cut his way out so, Yay! That’s it for gaming news. I’m beat and wishing for rest and nothing to do at this point.

XXXOOO

The Cake is not a Lie

My middle child has her birthday today so of course making the cake was a key honor and duty I had today. Triple chocolate with purple frosting. It seems to have come out alright. There will be ice cream and, I believe, Chinese food tonight after I get home from work. Happy Birthday, my sweet girl.

Of course I have also been cleaning. Laundry and dishes are caught up, our bed is made, cat boxes are clean, extraneous sensitive papers are shredded. I’m getting somewhere. Still busily decluttering and organizing. Today I cleaned off the heater in our bedroom and made a start at the disaster by my side of the bed. I’m a nester everything I use frequently ends up in a pile, or several piles, where I can reach it.

I’m working on getting us on an even keel again. It’s finally working because I am only shopping for really specific things that we have thought about deliberately and decided we truly want or need. It’s nice. Retail therapy is not a good thing. That little boost only lasts such a short time and the money is gone forever and there we are drowning in STUFF. I am really enjoying making our house, ever so slowly, into a soothing, serene home.

But I have to get ready and go to work! It really is very odd loving my job but hating leaving home to go do it. I’d much rather stay here and work on the house. It doesn’t help that work is So Weird with no patrons in the library. I can’t wait till tomorrow when we have our trial run of outdoor browsing. I’m not sure how we’ll enforce distancing and all that but hopefully it will go well. It would be nice to see people again. Oh, and I got a late b-day present from my husband. He forgot he’d pre-ordered it so it was a surprize for both of us. I can’t wait to read it!

Late Summer Declutter: day 2

Yesterday was a good day. I got a lot done and made a nice difference in the kitchen. It honestly gave me a little lift when I went down to make the tea this morning. So, I am going to assign myself one small area a day, on days when that’s feasible ie Not Saturday as I am working all day then running a game when I get home, and I am going to put in my best effort to declutter and clean that small area. Today will be the pantry area, a part of the laundry room with cupboard up and down that is just buried in STUFF. I’ll post before and after shots because that’s what makes it vaguely fun.

The pantry area Before shot. How did I let it get like this? That is a lot of stuff…

this is a better pic of where I started today.

I forgot that yesterday I dealt with all the mounds of plastic and paper bags that were jammed behind the sewing machine. Also, this 2nd pic shows all the junk on top of the high cupboards too. It was a disaster and a lot of stuff was pure junk. The teetering stack of photo albums has no home yet, I want to see if there is a better way to store all the photos. Damn, albums are huge and awkward space-suckers! Anyway, here is the after photo…

Look! There’s a counter there it must have been there the whole time but it was completely buried.

So decluttering is going pretty well so far. I’m considering doing two small areas today because Saturday is a no-go as I will have no time to myself at all. I like Fall cleaning better than Spring cleaning. Fall cleaning I do knowing we’re going into winter where we’ll be shut inside a lot and I like getting our home ready for those long months. There will be snow and sand and salt tracked in, ash from the wood stove everywhere, and that winter feeling that can either be “feeling cozy” or “feeling closed-in.” I do my best to try to make sure it’s the former. Spring cleaning is different, for me, it feels more like coming out of hibernation and sloughing off layers. It’s nice to deep clean and get ready for the higher energy months I think I just prefer the feeling of easing into the quiet dark of my favorite months. ^_^

The kitchen counter is still clear. The cat’s dishes are back, clean and shiny, and the crock pot is turning last night’s chicken bones into broth, but otherwise it’s clear. I feel like I’m getting somewhere at last. I wish I’d started in March and not waiting till now to make a plan. Oh well, this is where I am and it’s fine.

Housework Intensifies

Yeah, so, being home 24/7 for 3 months didn’t cause me to magically whip my house into shape. 3 1/2 months of just me leaving the house for part time work didn’t help me to magically whip my house into shape either. I have finally come to the conclusion that I may need an actual plan, I may need to make a schedule for various chores and even slot in some vague times of day in order to get things done. I made a list this morning of all the things I’d like to get done today and then I scheduled them throughout the day. So far today I have:

Made tea and breakfast
fed cats
changed our sheets
run a load of washing
filled out school paperwork for our son
rescheduled a dentist appointment ….And…
Written a sympathy card for my cousin

I still have to:

Plan dinner
water plants
clean cat boxes
pick up prescriptions
make lunch… And…
Hand a load of washing

For longer term/ongoing goals I Really want to declutter in a major way. We simply have too much stuff that is here for no good reason at all. Just so, so much stuff. I mean, the house isn’t like anything you’re seen on “Hoarders” but it’s cluttered and some parts are really disorganized. It’s tough to know where to start, really, but I think I might go back to basics and start with Flylady http://flylady.net/ again. It’s such a gentle system, starting out with just cleaning one’s kitchen sink and progressing from there. It’s helped me in the past when I’ve let things get out of control though I do tend to drop it after a bit when my inner whimsy balks at the structure. I find a lot of value in a few of her ideas:

You can do anything for 15 minutes. (set a timer and do a chore for 15 minutes, stop when the timer goes off and move on to something else. You can return to the original chore later.) Set a timer on the next chore for 15 minutes… etc.
The last 15 minutes of every hour are yours. Take a break! Stop and drink some water or tea/coffee, read or call a friend. Get back to chores when 15 minutes are done.
When decluttering there are only 3 options for each item: 1. Keep it (and put it away) 2. Give it Away 3. Throw it Away. Find a box/bin/laundry basket and sort all the items into them. (1 for each: Keep/Give/Toss!) Very helpful to sort this way and then… Follow Through!
Shun Perfectionism. Doing some cleaning is a lot better than none! So run your vacuum quickly over the high traffic areas and don’t bother moving the furniture if you don’t have time. Do half the dishes! Wipe the worst of the muck out of the fridge, fold the laundry even if you don’t have time to put it away! Basically, anything you actually DO will make you feel a little better and improve things a little bit so go ahead and do what you can manage, it will help.

Those are my favorite ideas of hers, probably imperfectly interpreted, please check our her website for the real information. There’s also the idea of ‘habits’ how getting into a routine or schedule gives one the inertia to keep going, cleaning chores become automatic. I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten to that point but it would be pretty cool if I did. Imagine the cleanliness. ^_^ I’m going to start today with one area and post before and after pics.