On mornings where I don’t have a substituting job or volunteer work to go do, I come back home and turn on the Soundscapes channel on Music Choice, make a pot of hot water, and start making tea.
I have a little teapot that I make chai tea in, filling it half full of hothot water with honey and half with milk and then the loose chai I got in Gatlinburg last year. While that’s steeping, I use the bottom half of the pot (which is a giant cup) to make quicker-steeping tea. Then on colder days I go sit in my corner chair with the owl-pillow-of-love and stare out at the trees and birds. This time of year there are tons of black birds and robins out in the yard fighting for worms. I love hearing them fly off in an enormous whoosh when something scares them.
On warmer days I take my tea outside onto the back patio and sit on my rocker-bench and feel the breeze in my hair. I think about things I’d like to do in my yard later in the year when the kids are home for the summer and better ways to store all our outdoor stuff (I’d love it if my brain would turn off organizing things during my restful times, but it never does.).
Inevitably the phone rings and it’s back to regular life, but during these quiet moments all is right with the world and everything seems hopeful and lovely.
Listening to: “And I’ll Fly Away” by Anne Trenning
I’m finally getting around to the “Create more” portion of “Pin-free February!”
The first thing I’m trying to “create more” of is less chaos. 🙂 I know that sounds weird, but that’s the first thing on my list. So I’ve been emptying bins around the house and making sure that they are filled with what they’re supposed to be filled with and then I’m labeling them. I’ve also got a few new/new-to-this use bins and have been putting them into use.
New baskets for hats in the hall closetNewly labeled (but definitely not new) bins in the hallway closet.Reorganized & labeled kitchen drawers. I’m trying to teach the kids to be a bit more independent when emptying the dishwasher.Speaking of kids independence: kids bathroom drawer: now organized & with labels! (that black tray came from today’s kids meal – saving money FTW!)
I’m also trying to create more beauty in my house.
I bought a cheap garland at the dollar store and prettied it up with some extra fake flowers I had lying around. I looks a lot nicer in person, actually.Prettying up my laundry room shelf – I think I’m finally going to repaint it once the rain goes away.
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Later:
I spray painted the shelf pink, which is not a color you will really find a lot of in the house, and the picture frame I tried using a pinterest method that failed and I tried to decorate the other frame using a different pinterest method as well.Combo: I spray painted my red key holder to match the shelf and run and I also labeled the hooks once again. That space is awaiting a spray painted basket. 🙂 I wanted to make it green but I didn’t have the right shade so I once I realized it looked bad I decided not to hang it up until I got the color right.My new laundry room rug – see how it picks up the colors from the fairies & art on the shelf now? YAY! 🙂
David stayed home Friday, so we stayed home and I did some little things I’d been meaning to get to (photo editing, making appointments, etc.) 🙂
Greg helped Nick make dinner that night, which was super cute.
:)Then later Nick and I had a wine & cheese night. 🙂 It was lovely.
Yesterday was a church day, but today I got back to my little projects. I cleaned the front hallway closet, took out the hanging shoe rack thing since we haven’t been using it since we no longer exit out the front door in the mornings. I moved those items into bins on the floor of the closet (mostly spare hats & gloves, sunscreen & bug spray, and miscellaneous fun things we use mostly in the summer.) and threw out most of the junk that was in those bins previously.
Next up I’m going to cut the shoe rack into fewer columns of cubbies since the outer rows are broken. I’m going to move those into the garage for wrapping supply storage. Then I moved my purse rack into the hall closet because it was messing with the calmness of my bedroom.
After all that I put away my stamps & ink from last week and gave Greg the leftover bin for his science supplies.
While I was doing all that, my menfolk were getting the garden started for the spring.
Last week I was thinking that I’d love some kind of jewelry rack that hid my jewelry a bit more than what my current system did. By some miracle, I found just what I was looking for in the Family Dollar store:
I bought two, because I have a lot of jewelry. (I also got a cute rug for my garage entryway/laundry room, but I forgot to take a photo of that.) I haven’t filled them with photos yet, but I’ve been digging through Flickr looking through 2009 photos (because they were lost in the Great Hard Drive Failure of 2009) and I’ll have those printed tomorrow while I’m getting things ready for a Secret Project.
Speaking of projects, I also helped Ben with his Solar System project this weekend. He decided to make a mobile, so we made balls from Sculpey, baked them, & painted them today.
Now we’re having dinner and games with my parents. All in all a productive weekend.
It’s not just Pin-Free February, it’s also my month to test out nearly full time work and see if I can really do it before making a big decision. I’m thinking about going back to school and getting my master’s degree in library science. I have a totally busy month planned out, filled with lots of days subbing up at the elementary school, lots of full days of volunteering (field trips! teacher appreciation!), lots of full days just trying to get caught up on laundry & cleaning, and then a few days I’ve scheduled as full writing days because that’s not getting done right now what with everything else going on. We will see if I can do all that and survive the month. Who knows?
My friend Godiva and I are participating in Pin -Free February this month. We’re each doing it differently, though. She’s not going to Pinterest at all, but is still pinning things from her Pin It button. I, on the other hand, am not pinning new things, but am going to my own boards in Pinterest and am either reading-and-deleting pins or making-then-moving-them-to-finished. Some people are going all out and just eschewing the site altogether. Ha!
This morning I made two things from quotes I’d liked on Pinterest. One was this one:
…(I don’t know if you can read it. It says: “To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.”. -Audrey Hepburn). which lives on my front patio, and then inspired me to tidy my front patio area. (I want to get some flowers out there and for it to be sunnier before my big reveal.)
Then I made this sign for my dining room, using the frame that matches the outdoor one, but had no glass. I also used bits of paper from Matt & Heather’s wedding favors.
After that I ran off for my infusion & I wrote out some cards that are waaaaay past due, then read-and-deleted for an hour. Deleting pins is even more fun than pinning them! Who knew?!
So what craftiness are you getting up to this month?
I just want YOU to know, YOU, whoever you are, whatever choices you’ve made, whatever wrongs you think you have done, whatever you think you are to the world out there:
I LOVE YOU.
I THINK ABOUT YOU.
I PRAY TO GOD/THE UNIVERSE/WHATEVER THERE IS FOR YOU.
AND I AM WISHING YOU ALL GOOD THINGS.
I am not perfect. No one is. No one has the right to judge you, in your situation, for the things you have done or the things you intended to do, but didn’t.
KNOW THAT YOU ARE LOVED.
It’s all I have to offer. And I want YOU to have it.
I am starting to think that what I really need is a mental health blog. Or to combine all my little blogs into one big blog so I can stop repeating myself from different angles. Who knows.
A friend of mine committed suicide this weekend. We weren’t close lately, hadn’t been for a couple years, but once upon a time I lent her all my books about depression and gave her my number and talked to her about my experiences with therapy and brain chemicals that just don’t work right . Through her, I lent her husband the book “How to Help When Someone You Love is Depressed” that I’d gotten for my husband ages ago. She still had a few books that hadn’t made it back to me. I guess they never will. These aren’t the thoughts one generally shares, I know, but somehow they are the ones my brain is holding onto right now, instead of blubbering insanely about how sad it all is and how hard I tried to help her and how I failed to keep up and how I regret it and how I am never ever the person I mean to be when it comes to other people and how I should have kept up with her when she went silent. Because once I get started with them, the tears start, they don’t stop.
THIS YEAR. I CAN’T TAKE THIS YEAR.
One of my good friends from junior high died this last year: breast cancer. My ex-boyfriend from high school was accused of sexual misconduct with a student and I can’t quite bring myself to admit that I really do think it’s something he did, because then I’d have to admit out loud to my family and other people how awful he was (in college I had girls email me out of nowhere and ask me to join their therapy group because ….) and they don’t need to hear that. Then there was my mom and the hospital last summer. And another ancient friend’s husband died unexpectedly from pneumonia. Another one’s brother died and I somehow totally missed it and I feel awful about it, but don’t know what to say now. Another friends son had a terrible car accident months ago and is only now walking. And then the husband of a girl here in town that was one of those friends-of-a-friend that you always hear about that you feel like you know even though you’ve actually never met them? The one you’ve heard dozens of stories about? Yeah. Her husband died trying to save someone after a car accident. And now this.
I told my spouse that I needed a Self Care day. He was busy, of course, because we are NEVER not busy these days, and said the wrong thing and that made me cry more. He apologized and said the right things later but I ….well… I am broken at this point. And thanking God or the Universe or Whatever I’m Believing In This Week that I asked the doctor for those anti-depressant, anti-anxiety meds way back in October. Because I don’t know what or who to believe in these days, but SCIENCE seems like a good thing. Quantifiable, you know. I don’t, I just don’t know. Nobody is available on a Saturday to talk, so I’ve been making due with a bunch of movies (The Decoy Bride I need to own and Wild Targets I’m going to rewatch and A Good Woman I’m in the middle of, but it’s kind of bland so far despite good reviews – I’m thinking I just don’t like Scarlet Johanssen) and a bottle of wine and a box of chicken quesadillas.
Thank you for listening and thinking about me. I know we don’t see/know each other in person, but you mean the world to me, you really do. *big big hugs*
I’m adding to this post as I go on today. Seemed like fun!
My bedroom & bathroom before (the parts I’m working on today only):
9am
Bathroom before: the sink is rusting and I can’t figure out how to stop it from dripping short of a bathroom renovation. So I’m constantly having to wipe up down there.
The tall cabinets before: Not too bad, but could be better. The towels definitely need help and it’d be nice if my shelf were better organized.
Most of this stuff does not belong in my room, but it’s where stuff gets dropped when the kids can’t find other homes for stuff when they’re tidying other parts of the house. If I can’t find new homes for this stuff by end of day, I’m taking stuff to Goodwill on the way to pick up the kids.
After:
10am:
I took the old art bins to use as a cleaning bins for the bathrooms. I moved out the unnecessary sharps bin and extra cleaning supplies. Tidy!
I separated out mine and Nick’s hoards of extra supplies into two bins up top, then tidied up the other three shelves below. Then I put a different shelving unit in for the towels.
noon
My spouse is home for lunch, but he is very busy preparing things for dinner. Apparently it is multi-step and I will need to assist as well. Yay?
1:05pm
I just mashed potatoes for the first time ever. It was smushy. Then I added stuff to them. They smell good. 🙂 I am supposed to wait to eat them for dinner. Hmmm….
1:30pm
Look: you can see the floor! The stack of linen-filled hat boxes have been emptied into a basket and put in the linen closet. And the boxes of my grandmother & great-grandmother’s china from the top shelf of the linen closet got emptied into a cupboard in the kitchen and that cupboard in the kitchen got emptied into the donate-to-Goodwill box. I also drilled holes and installed the iron curtain tie-back things.
2pm
If you look back at the day I was working on David’s room, you’ll remember that his closet top was very full of mess. I cleared a bit out by moving stuff in the big bin into the little boxes that used to house china in the linen closet. Now it houses the pile o’ pants that used to be in that empty spot.
2:45pm
No before picture, sorry. I cleared out my magazine racks, filled them with the piles of Nick’s magazines from the floor, and put them on shelves. Then I cleared out the top shelf of the closet and put all the empty boxes from up there in the recycle bin. Don’t ask why I had empty boxes up there. I don’t know.
And last but not least, I started spray-painting Nick’s side table. It used to be blue and silver, but it was very scraped. I say “started” because I used to have half a can of that paint and when I started spraying I realized that someone else must’ve used it for something because it was mostly empty. *sigh* Anyway, I have a new-to-us alarm clock-and-Iphone-charger-player thingie to put on top of it. The younger kids are getting our old alarm clock-cd player and David is getting their old one, which doesn’t have readable numbers, but does have a CD player for him and then I’m going to hand him all the Weird Al CDs.
And that’s the end of that, because I’m having weird back spasms now. I have definitely overdone it today.
Lisa Holcomb 