Life lessons

Last night I was just about to fall into bed when I realised I had yet to take off my makeup. And I wondered, why don't I ever take it off as soon as I get home? Instead, every makeup wearing night I ponder the actual harm of going to bed in it. And sometimes, even though I know better, I still do.

It got me thinking about other little life lessons I am still working on learning. Things I know I should do but am just not quite there yet...

Like:

Put it away once you're finished with it.

Case in point: look at all those things I hadn't put away until
yesterday when I cleaned my desk.

If you don't try it won't happen. 

Eat five serves of veggies every day (yesterday's pitiful effort was a big fat zero).

Everyone is neither talking about you or judging you.

Don't put off til tomorrow what you can do today.

Every hour of sleep before midnight is worth two after it. 

Exercise regularly.

Of course, after making that depressing list that makes me sound like a fussy make up wearing five year old, I had to counter it by listing the life lessons I have learnt... 

Appreciate the small things. 

Have regular conversations with your partner. 

Take time for yourself (I do this way too well). 

Do things you enjoy. 

Pity I still sound like a fussy make up wearing five year old (with a boyfriend). 

What makes your lists of still learning and achieved?

  

Wear, wash, iron, repeat

via

I have been known, once in a while, to insanely purchase clothing items that need ironing. 

I know, I know. 

I wear, wash, iron and repeat a few times and then I tend to get a bit stuck between the wash and iron stage of the cycle.  It's not because I hate ironing because I don't.  It's a much worse reason.  I am a bit of a lazy bum. 

This weekend I decided to do some ironing because MR needed a shirt ironed and I thought well, while I have it out I may as well do the rest.  There wasn't that much really.  Two dresses and a pair of pants of mine and six shirts of MR's.  And, wouldn't you know it, another pair of pants I forgot I even had.  I was ironing a pair of grey pants and tried to work out when I wore them last.  I think it was last Winter.  I thought to myself I should have bought a pair of these in black, these are nice pants. Continued ironing a couple more shirts and then what do you know, the next thing in the stack is a pair of black pants of the same style of the grey ones.

On the plus side, my work wardrobe options have just increased a lot more.




Are you a bit slack in some areas? Come on, make me feel like less of a lazy tart.

Many Good Things

Today is the first day of school holidays.

Need I say more about good things when the above is the case?

Not really, but I shall.

Not only was it the first day of school holidays but I also woke up to rain on the roof.  How good is rain of the roof when you get to stay in bed?

I am still in my pyjamas and it is 3:15pm.

I got to have yummy banana bread that I baked yesterday for breakfast.

The house is relatively clean because MR vacuumed yesterday.

I managed to find the energy to do a double batch of baking yesterday as well as go to Brown Owls, (amazing what you can get done when you don't need to conserve energy for a week of work) and so MR has headed back to work this morning with two containers of ANZAC biscuits to snack on (his favourite).  

I went to Brown Owls yesterday and had fun chatting and stitching away at this.

I have a $100 reward shopper voucher from Picnic/Hobbs and a $20 one from Myer burning a hole in my wallet for some retail therapy later in the week.

I have a massage booked for Friday.

I have a lovely stack of books from the library just waiting to be read.

My cold seems to be getting better.

MR and I went to Cirque du Soleil's Ovo show during the week and it was just as amazing as expected.  And the bouncing lizards?  Even more amazing!

My baking cupboard has been reorganised as well as finding enough space to have a dedicated pots, pans and frying pans cupboard.  (Today's job is to reorganise the plastics cupboard and tomorrow's job is the pantry)

We got our soil tested on the weekend and have started the steps to improve it so things will actually grow.

In the small area of the garden where things do actually grow, there are buds on my loquat tree for the first time which will hopefully turn into fruit.

And best of all, Summer seems to have finally ended, leaving Autumn a chance to shine (and pour, as it did all night and morning).




  


What is good in your world at the moment?

 

Falling by the wayside

A lot of things have been neglected in my world of late.  The blog, the kitchen, the tidiness of the house, friends and poor MR.

In fact, the only thing that hasn't been neglected has been my bed.  No more are the nights awake until 2 or 3am.  Now I am in bed and asleep by 11 most nights.  Sometimes even 10 or 9pm!  Unheard of, I know.  There has also been afternoon napping which hasn't at all affected my night time sleeping.

Starting back at work has been partly to blame, we're up to Week 8 of an 11 week term and Term 1 with Kindy kids is pretty full on.  I must admit though, I've got a really lovely group who are pretty independent and self sufficient for 3 and 4 year olds.  Three days of work a week is Most Definitely enough for me though, even with having a three day weekend and a day off on Tuesday I'm finding that if I do too much on the weekend I barely cope for the week.

Along with that I've had a week in hospital with a particularly nasty tummy bug back in Week 2 of term and I had Monday off this week with another one which was thankfully only a smidgeon as bad and managed to go away by itself. 

In much better and fun news, there has also been two weddings in the last two weekends.  MR's brother last weekend and the one before than his cousin (which also included a quick weekend holiday to Dunsborough for the event).  They have most definitely contributed to all the aforementioned neglected-ness.

Possibly the biggest culprit, although it is very hard to measure, is the increase of my Leukaemia medication five weeks ago.  It wasn't working as well as it should be and seeing as I was only on half of the recommended dose due to some issues with medication interactions and differing heart rhythms on ECG checks, they decided to put it up a bit higher.  I'm now on an almost 3/4 dose - 70mg of the recommended 100mg.  It's interesting how (in my mind anyhow), when I say I'm tired it somehow seems more lazy and slack than if I was to say I suffer from fatigue as a side effect from medication.  "Tired" is such a hard thing to measure.  I know that I am more tired than I was last year however, as I wasn't working this is not a good comparison.  I also know I wasn't this tired when I wasn't ill and was working full time and playing netball on weekends so therefore in my books that becomes "fatigue". 

After having a big sook the other night about how slack I have been at doing anything at all around the house lately and how everything is messy, how I am practically existing on fish fingers and a bit of salad for dinner when MR is away and when he is home he is in charge of all kitchen duties, how I am possibly the worst girlfriend ever and how MR should move on to happier and healthier pastures, I realised I needed to get over myself and sort my shit out.

I decided to reinstate my Twenty Minute Tidy sessions.  Once each day I do work and twice on days I don't will give me 2 hours and 40 minutes per week in which to tidy, clean and organise the house and garden.  My big goal right now is to do a bit more than than on the Easter weekend and get the house tidied up enough that I can get a new cleaner (our last one finished late last year), which will then decrease my stressing over a dirty house at least, if not a messy unorganised one. 

I've had two sessions so far.  The oven timer goes on for 20 minutes and off I go to work until it beeps.  After it beeps I dismiss all feelings of guilt over the state of the house and my lack of housewife skills.  I've unpacked and put away my case from my Dunsborough weekend a fortnight ago, picked up and put away all the clothes and other associated crap dumped on the bedroom floor, tidied out one drawer of my tallboy and tidied up and cleaned the bathroom basin.  Not bad for 40 minutes.  Today being a non work day, I'm doing 40 minutes - most likely in two 20 minute sessions.  I'm feeling better about it all already. 

Now I just need to work out some really quick and easy meals that do not involve fish fingers...

Working on a WIP

I decided, given my plan to be organised and finish stuff this year, that I'd best start off my creative year with the finishing off of a WIP. Particularly seeing as I have a couple of other projects that are about to be started in the next couple of days.

I plaited together what I've got so far and I think I like!

This project was started back in September. I saw a scarf on display at the Margaret River Wool Company and thought I might have a go at it myself. They had kits but I thought, it's a scarf, no need for a kit! Basically it is 3 balls of yarn, knit into long skinny scarves and then plaited together. It looked great hanging in the mannequin! However, it came to an abrupt halt after finishing colours one and two and ended up with two different lengths. Goodness knows why! (Perhaps i should have bought the kit after all!) I put it aside in a huff and then it got too hot anyway.

I've come back to it after some advice from MR's Mum who suggested a) it doesn't matter if they are different lengths b) she can help me to fix them to all be the same or c) I could add some tassels on the short one. I think I'm about halfway through the ball of peacock blue now, thanks to part 1 & 2 of the LOTR DVDs the past few nights and hopefully it'll almost be finished after part 3 tonight.

2013, the year of ...

Remember the lovely Maxabella's One Word for the Year, way back at the beginning of 2012?

Mine was thrive.

I think there was a bit of thriving.  Certainly as far as my health goes, I am a lot healthier now than I was at the beginning of the year.  And my relationship with MR stayed nice and strong but I don't know if I could apply the word thrive to it...

As far as the other stuff goes though - the garden, the house, my life.  Well, the fruit trees thrived.  Until a storm came and broke two branches off my beloved apricot tree.  It still is growing so that's the main thing but now it is very much up and not very much out.  The lawn is thriving away happily after we got it verdimowed a few months ago and having it so beautiful and green and unblemished at this hot dry time of the year when it is usually looking a bit brown and a bit patchy here and there is very lovely.  I'd show you some photos of the before, during and after but I can't find where I put my camera (yes, yes I know...)  The rest of the garden, not so much.  Still very much a work in progress.  And the house?  Well, apart from the beginnings of a study area there hasn't been much progress happening in there either.  And as to my life?  Well, going back to work was good, but really - it took me a bit of time to get there, much longer than I thought it would. Having my own class again next year will be nice though.  Apart from that, just general recovery stuff but nothing particularly stands out in achievements and thriving-type-business. 

So rather than being disappointed about last year's effort, I'll instead give myself a new word for this year, one of more measurable conquest I think (although I suspect this may set me up for greater failure).

I have run through a few words... create  -  do  -  achieve

I sat for a while trying to think of one word to describe the act of following through before resorting to the thesaurus.  Oh right - finish, complete.  No wonder I couldn't think of the right word, those things are foreign to me.  

And then I sat back and thought about what I really want to achieve.  Yes, I want to create more stuff.  Yes, I want to do more stuff.  Yes, I want to achieve more stuff.  Yes, I really, really, really want to follow through and complete stuff.  But really, want I want (and need) to do, which will encompass all of those things is ORGANISE.

You see, I am terribly unorganised. And I am even worse at FINISHING stuff.  So there are things all over the house in various states of unfinishedness.  I get all excited about a project but the execution of said project becomes too hard basket or not quite how I pictured or else sheer laziness comes into play.

So this year I am going to work at being organised.  It will be hard.  As I mentioned above, there is lots of opportunity for great big whopping amounts of failure because I have yet to have an organised bone in my body in all of my 31 years.  To help me along, I need to outline some specific organisational goals to go alongside the general goal of becoming a more organised person.


- organise the craft room :: I'm seriously tempted to hire some decluttering organisation expert to come and make this beautiful for me.  Is that cheating?  Everytime I try to organise this room I never get beyond getting it a quarter organised (with the help of my very organised sister) before it all turns to shit again.  This is the bane of my household, and MR runs to close the door at the first sign of visitors. For that matter, so do I.

- organise my classroom :: I don't want to have the stress of an unorganised classroom this year.  I am really good at the whole organising lessons and keeping kids work organised but my own stuff?  This year I'd like to be all organised so that if I do fall sick and have to have some time off, the person coming in to replace me can find everything and know where all the kids are up to with ease.

- organise myself :: specifically, some form of regular exercise.  I was good for a few months at the beginning of 2012 but then I got slack.  No more excuses!

- organise my home office and filing system (which is currently non existant) :: no need to say more.

- organise the finances :: So we can go on a holiday over east as well as do a couple of (small or not so small) renovations we want to do to the house and garden.  We finally got a bit of a savings account going in the second half of 2012 so hopefully this will stay on track!

- organise all the unfinished projects into boxes and then work my way through them :: or get rid of them, pull them apart, whatever it takes!

Any other organisational type things will just be an added bonus.


I also aim to...

- submit my picture book manuscript 
- write more often
- do the 5km Run for a Reason (at a quicker speed that 50mins) and raise money for the Leukaemia Foundation
- completely pay off my credit card (at least once)
- go on a holiday on a plane (I don't care where to, just out of WA)


I got 4 out of 10 of my goals and resolutions for 2012, let's see if I can get get a better result for 2013.



Do you have some aims/goals/resolutions/a word for the year?  Big or small, I'd love to hear them!

Getting ready for 2013

Continuing along with my current theme of I'm ready for this year to be over, I bought a nice calendar for next year to put on the wall.  Normally I go to the shopping centre and choose a pretty one from one of the numerous stands in the middle of the malls, usually one with photos of trees or waterfalls.  I never write on them though and often forget to change the month until it's already a week (or more) into it.  I really just use it to look at the date when I'm on my mobile planning something and can't use my iphone calendar.

So I thought this year I might go a pretty design on page style calendar.  I did have a look at the teatowel calendar designs on spoonflower but none grabbed me enough to buy one so then I turned to etsy.  And ended up with this one from once upon a paper.

Isn't it lovely?  The water colour dot on each month is the date of the full moon.  I figure that once the year is over, I can trim the calendar part off and have a lovely new piece of artwork too.


Next on the list is a diary.  I'm quite particular in what I want from a diary and I haven't found one that perfectly suits me yet.  Each year I try a different type.  This year I'm going to try this one from Delfonics.  I've just ordered it from Notemaker.

It's a weekly one (which I like because it's not too heavy like daily ones) with the week on one side and a lined page on the other for notes, similar to the moleskine style I think.  This one though has monthly views at the front of the diary which I don't think the moleskine ones do (I was originally looking at them).  I googled what the german writing means and it (apparently) says A story, a life.  And the small writing under that says a quote which means "For the lucky, the clock does not strike." which is apparently similar to our quote of "Time flies when you're having fun."



Do you have a diary that you like to get the same format of each year?  Or are you still hunting for that elusive perfect one like me?

Sunday snippets

It's been ages since I've played along with Tinniegirl's Sunday Snippets and seeing as I was a total instagram whore this week I might as well share some of my moments...

MR and I went down south for my best friend's wedding - note pinwheels
instead of flowers!

The groom is a cyclist so there was a bit of a bike theme, plus a special
thank you heart for me

Vanilla panna cotta for dessert, yum!

Retail therapy after unpleasant medical procedure

A sleepless night and a Meow ready for cuddles

Super wardrobe tidy out - look at all the empty coat hangers (that need filling!!)

Three bags of clothes waiting to be taken to the local op shop

Attempting a new Christmas decoration....

And some cross stitch chevrons which will hopefully also be a new Christmas
ornament providing the waste canvas comes out easily like it is supposed too...

A busy week for me!  Not so much scheduled for this week which is good because I need to clean the house ready to put up the Christmas tree and decorations.  Wheeeeee!

Today

Today has been a housey sort of day.  I've been quite busy this last week and things are getting a little bit untidy around here.  Even for my poor standards!

There's been some washing of clothes and dishes, a little bit of gardening and lots and lots of putting things away.  There has even been some craft room sorting.  The craft room is permanently the biggest pigsty in the world.  Every time I try to tidy it, it just seems to revert straight back to chaos.  You may think I am exaggerating, but I am most definitely not.  So today I took in some plastic boxes and starting sorting the piles and piles of crap all over the floor.  A box for paper craft stuff, one for embroidery bits, another for rogue ribbons that have escaped from my last attempt at trying to organise the craft room. 

Actually, I'm quite proud of my ribbon organisation. I saw the idea on pinterest to wrap ribbons around a popstick but I had a bag of dolly pegs lying around and decided to have a go at doing that.  I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.  I need to go and get another jar for some more.  The back jar is all my grosgrain ribbons, just clipped together with a paper clip and I left all my stuff on spools, on spools and sorted them neatly into a storage box. 

If only I could snap my fingers and make the rest of the room look this organised.


Another box I sorted holds a bit of a mish mash of items.

Some knitting I started with a scarf in mind until I decided that the ribbing was too tight for how I wanted it to look, as well as some buttons and some material scraps from my drawers of such goodies.  What for?

Well, every year (apart from last year) since I started blogging I've thought about making a softie for the Softies for Mirabel drive run by Pip.  And every year I fail.

This year I'm determined.  In fact, I want to make more than one.  I feel like I have catching up to do.  So this box holds the ingredients for the first one.  Thursday's creative space perhaps?

Now however, it is time to wade back in return to the craft room and try and get a few more little spots of organisation happening.

Wish me luck!

Missing mojo

I've lost my mojo lately.
Not just my crafting mojo, or my blogging mojo but all my mojo. 


I have a stack of overripe bananas that I should make into yummy banana bread.

I have an embroidered clock waiting for numbers and clock parts to be added.

I have a mosaic waiting to be grouted and then sealed.

I have many other unfinished crafty projects.

I have a garden filling up with weeds and not much else.

I have a very messy craft room.

I have tax that really needs to be done.

I have two ginormous stacks of washing to put away because thankfully I still have managed to find enough energy to do a load here and there this week.

I have a September One Task a Day calendar missing many, many ticks.

I have a get together to organise for my liver's first birthday.

I have downloaded some new music to exercise to but have not yet exercised to it.



The list is growing.
And I am completely uninspired to do anything about it.


How's your list looking lately?

Hello Spring!

Tomorrow Spring officially starts.  Of course, my garden has been telling me it is Spring for a good few weeks now, with (most of) my tulips happily blooming, the snowdrops have almost finished and the bluebells are just starting.  My apricot and nectarine tree are looking stunning in blossom and one of the three types of ground cover flower seeds I planted in Autumn (the only one to sprout at all) have started to flower as well. 

Apart from those little pockets of loveliness, my garden area is looking altogether rather dreadful (in my mind).  It really needs a major overhaul.  MR asked me the other night where I want to go for our next holiday and I said that apart from the two weddings down south we have coming up (November and March), I would rather spend the money and the time on making our garden a bit better looking, or on replacing our gutters and repainting the fascia (which we did plan do to before Winter), or on setting up a study area somewhere in the house and turning the junk room into a second spare bedroom like we had originally planned.  Another sign of Spring surely, when the nesting urges kick in over the holidaying ones? 

I'm determined to get a bit of organisation happening at home over the coming months, I'm getting sick of being disorganised and untidy.  I've got my September One Task a Day calendar printed off and ready to go for the month and I'm determined to cross off lots of stuff on it.  Maybe even all of it.  Although, we won't hold our hopes to high on that score, knowing me as we do.

You can join me and we can keep each other motivated to Get Stuff Done this September if you'd like.  You can get my calendar over here, a whole year's worth of not too big tasks to do each day. 

I'll be the first to admit, I only managed about three things off my August calendar so I need all the motivation I can get (and really, it's all uphill from there too!)  For some extra motivation, I've just started following Declutterhome on facebook.  She is having a 30 Days 30 Ideas to help your on your journey to a decluttered home.  


Wish me luck!

One Task a Day Calendar (for us Southern Hemispherians)

  

A little while ago I posted about my organisation/declutter/tidying calendar I was making up to try and get myself more organised (part of the neverending attempt).  There's loads of them around the traps but they all seem to be Northern Hemispherised and that just doesn't suit me!

I got all motivated and finished it off today.  Not only that but I worked out how to change it into a pdf and how to get it online and link it in my blog.  It wasn't that difficult actually so I don't feel too clever.  In fact, I actually feel a bit silly for not having worked out how to do it before.  Oh well.  Now I can share stuff all the time.  I can have my own little 'printables' label over there to the right.  How exciting!  Admittedly, the rest of my freebies will probably focus around school resources.  But I'm sure there's people out there who might like them too.

So, here it is in all its understated glory.  It is pretty basic, but we'll use phrases like 'clean lines' and 'easy to navigate' instead okay?  Sounds so much better.

Feel free to download, share, link back to this post, whatever you like.  I'd love you to keep me updated on how it's working for you (if you use it) and feedback is most welcome too :)

Thank you to those people who commented with ideas for my calendar too, they are all in there!


One Task a Day Calendar

 

Organising your life

I realllllly want MR to make me one of these door tidies for inside our linen cupboard!

So I've been wanting to organise my life for, well, pretty much my whole teenage and adult life.  It just does not come naturally to me.  My sister inherited all the genes in that area and I managed to get all of both Mum and Dad's clutterbug genes, Dad's especially. 

I've been looking at decluttering sites and organising sites, pinning ideas to my 'I need to get organised...' pinterest board (a lot of which seems to revolve around pretty ways to store my ribbon collection...) and generally just making many lists and checking them off - somewhat slowly.  But it is progress.

I've liked the idea of a declutter your home calendar which lists a task to do each day.  I could do that! But all of the ones I have found seem to aimed at the northern hemisphere and just don't suit our seasons!  So I've decided to make my own.  In fact, I started tonight while watching a dreadful movie, continued it while watching the next movie which was only slightly less dreadful and did some more after that while watching some Olympics.  I would say I have got about three quarters of 365 days filled.

Some of the tasks repeat themselves fortnightly, like 'spend twenty minutes in a room that needs attention' and 'clear off the dining room table', some appear monthly like 'sort through and file one stack of paper work' and 'catch up on some ironing or handwashing' whilst some only appear less often like 'go through a craft supply pile' (which in actual fact should probably appear a lot more regularly) and then there's a few that only make their presence known once or twice a year such as 'clean out the gutters' or 'clean the oven'.  I decided to extend my calendar to a Home and Garden organising calendar mainly because gardening is something I am still learning about and I need reminding when it is time to fertilise, prune, plant etc.

Now I must pay credit, a lot of my inspiration has come from this helpful lady and her decluttering calendar.  But now I am asking all you lovely people out there for your ideas.  Not your everyday cleaning jobs like vacuum, washing and so forth, more those things that keep on getting put off or fit more into a declutter and organise category.  Things that you look at and think, gosh when did I last do that?  Or if you are already an organised person, things that you schedule in to your Spring cleaning each year. 

Do you have any tips that work for you?  I have found that the twenty-minute-tidy works quite well for me.  I set the timer on the oven for twenty minutes and then tidy until it goes off.  Sometimes I even set it for a second lot of twenty minutes!*


I'm really looking forward to hearing your ideas!!





  
* I know, I know, even I astound myself sometimes!