Across and Inside my Universe

This n' That 6/30/12

Upon looking through a family Scottish cookbook, my daughter was reading out loud about Haggis.  I asked her, what does it say about it?  She said, "Haggis is a mixture of . . .EWWWWW!" and she backed away, as we all cracked up laughing for the next 5 minutes.

Apparently Haggis is a mixture of ewww.  I'd agree with that!

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After more than a week of no progress on the bedroom cleanout/organize project, I've made a leap or two forward by getting the area in front of the closet cleaned out.  SIX bags of stuff to go to the thrift store (toys, clothes, fabric) and four bags of garbage.  How did all that stuff fit there?  There'll actually be another bag for the thrift store after we finish washing the rest of the clothes to donate.

Progress is great!  Makes me feel good.

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We're trying to plan our Olympic meal/party for the opening ceremonies coming up.  We usually do a meal of a variety of appetizers, but this time we want British stuff, for at least part of it.  Fish and chips are the first thing on my daughter's list, and that sounds great to me too.

When I mention "spotted dick" to her, she screws up her face, says "ewww", and swiftly goes elsewhere.  I think she thinks I'm saying something different than what I think I'm saying.  It's a spongy sort of cake fingerish sort of thing, with currants in it I think for the spots.  So it's a wierd variation of a Twinkie, basically.

I just say it to tease her, though! 

I need some ideas for London food!  Welsh Rarebit is cheese on toast/bread.  I think.  I always thought it was a roasted rabbit when I was little.

See, I have Scottish, Britsh, Welsh, and maybe some Irish heritage too.  My maiden name is from a Welsh ancestor; means stone mason.  Which, funnily enough, my ancestors were, all the way down to my grandfather.

Oh, my married name, tradition has it, came from Ireland with a Mc in front of it.  Still not the easiest name to have, but I guess it makes sense.  So there's me some Irish (and Dutch Royalty too; if you go to St. Thomas or St. Croix, there's a Rum/sugar plantation and castle that's ours.  I mean, our Dutch Royal ancestors.)

*****

My therapist is back!  It was hard to prioritize what to talk about, and in fact it wasn't until a day after therapy this week that I remembered some of the important stuff I'd been going to talk about, and forgot.  I did pretty well though with what I did remember.

I'd been getting rather piled on by a variety of stuff, including one SIL who says I have a heart of gold but she doesn't want to be friends with me.  That was painful, but we're hammering out how we're going to relate to each other in the future. 

Part of me wonders, however, if I have a heart of gold, what's so bad about me that it drowns out the heart of gold?  But that's personalising; her choice is about her and what she wants in her life, and doesn't want.  It's hard to not take that personally, though.  It's sort of freeing to not be stuck in hurt at why she seemed to not give a fig about me; I can move on, now.

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A pet peeve of mine about blogs with alot of pictures, especially food and craft blogs; don't take 6 pictures from a zillion angles of your dish, cookie, necklace, scarf, whatever and post them ALL.  Really, one (or at most, 2, if one is a closeup or something) will do.  I know you're in love with how it turned out, and how well it photographed, but get over it.  Please.

*****

I tried a macaroni and cheese in a mug recipe that's popular on Pinterest.

Don't do it.  It sucks.

However, an Eggnog Pound Cake recipe I tried from Pinterest last Christmas, is now my preferred way to consume egg nog.  8^D 

Man, now I want egg nog, and it'll be months and months before it's available!

*****

Quote from Utah Governor yesterday, in regards to all the people rubber-necking the wildfires up by Herriman (and elsewhere in the state, like, 360,000 acres) and who are getting in the way of fire people getting to the fires:  "You can't outlaw stupid!"

You can possibly try, but you'll never get rid of it.

Bedroom Progress - Ribbons, Heroclix, Pandemic, & Neopets

Well isn't that an eclectic title!

One of my craft materials that needs much better organization are my ribbons.

So, I spent a few minutes pinning a whole variety of ideas to a pinboard for these ideas, on Pinterest.  Some are similar to each other, but there's some quite clever ideas in there.

See, I've realized that it's difficult or impossible to fully clean up the floor, without having somewhere in, on, amongst the cubes, shelves, and other parts of my craft organization "system", to put things that go there. 

Of course, if I don't have a place to put stuff after weeding, it's hard to settle on exactly what storage will work best, because I'm not sure what "space" it will "live in" once it's weeded and sorted . . . this is part of the problem in tackling this project, it feels like everything I do depends on doing something else that needs to be done, etcetera.

I'm not going to spend any $$ on anything organizational-wise until I have a better idea of what might go where.

AHHHhhhhh.  It feels like I'm stuck in a black hole, a vortex of doom.  What I need to remember is that's magnifying, that's catastrophizing, and if I take small moves, I can get this done.  No, thinking of getting it "done" is too much for me; I can make PROGRESS.  That is all I can think of.  Small moves = progress.

On the getting rid of my old Heroclix game figures front, I traded 2/3 of them with a fellow on Boardgamegeek.com for $80 worth of games that we wanted, and two that I wanted to try that take up no more space than a couple of envelopes (if I don't like them, they can be traded off just like the Heroclix): Pandemic, it's expansion On The Brink, and Alamo & Battle of 4 Armies.  These take up 1/4 of the space the Heroclix did.  If I can't find a trader for the balance of my Heroclix, then out they go, in the trash.

You can have BGG.com search for people who want in trade the games you have up for trade, while it also considers if they have up for trade games that you want in trade.  It's quite nifty, really.

On the Neopets front, we have some fond memories of the couple years my daughter spent on their site; we participated fully with her, as at that age we did not want her involved in anything on the internet without us.  We collected quite a few stuffed Neopets during that time, the bulk of which have been sitting in our bedroom in large bags for a couple years now.  All three of us collected; we each had our favorites.

Here are all the neopets we had, on my messy bed:

 

There are several PILES of neopets, 3 deep on there, so there's more than what you see.  On a queen-size bed. 

We weeded through our collection, with my husband keeping only a couple of Bruces; I kept the Shoyrus, the Flotsams, and one or two misc. others.  My daughter got rid of about 40% of her collection; not as much as I'd hoped, but enough.  Most of these Neopets, aside from my daughters, had been kept in a bag for their stay at our apartment; even out of hers, only two need cleaned.   Off to the thrift store with them.

What my spouse and I kept:

 

While it's embarassing to admit that we like Neopets; we're adults, after all, but they represent an age and time in my daughter's life that we all have fond memories of.  The ones we chose to keep also reflect our personalities; I like dolphins & strawberries, and the Shoyrus seem to be pleading to be loved.

What all three of us got rid of: 

 

Bedroom Progress - Small Moves, Ellie

I started in this corner of the room. Floor only, as I'm doing a mostly garbage pass, although if something's on the floor we'll put it to donate, chuck, or find a home or temporary home for it until I can tackle everything on top of everything, which is pretty much taking up the space that needs to be homes for (organized) things. These pics are the same as the previous post, pre-cleaning, but they're a visual aid.

I cleaned just about up to the small child's chair you see in the corner of the room in this picture; a bit over a quarter of the room's circumference. That small chair, by the way, was made by my dad for my daughter when she was THREE. She's in Junior Highschool now.

That may not sound like much to some, especially since it was just the floor, but I was dripping sweat after 20 minutes, and had filled a kitchen-size garbage bag.

As well, I've been struggling with just doing dishes and laundry (not even folding) on a regular basis, let alone most other chores; that's kinda one reason the place has gotten to this point. Yes, doing things consistently, or at all, is a struggle when I'm depressed, anxious, trying to distract myself from mania (although mania does sometimes result in a burst of productivity, which I'm afraid may be the impetus behind this project). Most of the time though I'm fighting the things mania urges me to do that aren't good; that means there's not alot of me left over for ADL's (activities of daily life, as they say).

Regardless of the reason for doing this, I'm hoping blogging about it will A) help me stay somewhat organized about it, B) help my sense of efficacy and build upon it as I can look at the blog and see the progress I've made, C) help keep me motivated and carrying on with this even if the urge of productivity should desert me, and D) maybe keep alive some unreal notion that my non-existent blog readers might be sending me thoughts of support.

Yeah, that last one, not gonna happen. I need to do this for me, anyway, and I recognize that. Support doesn't hurt, though!

So . . . small moves.

I've been feeling overwhelmed over the last 24 hours, just looking at the whole room. As Adam Savage of Mythbusters would say (and that's how I hear it in my head), "There's your problem!" I have problems with looking too far into the future, looking at problems upon problems (it's turtles all the way down), as if I was looking at the humongous pile of food you need to eat over the next month or year, and feeling overwhelmed by it all.

We don't eat all that at once. It's made up of smaller meals, and those are further broken down into food groups, or various ingredients, or various steps of the recipe.

You can make your moves as small as you like; moving forward, even if it feels equivalent to maybe one frog hop, is the important thing. Just because it feels like a frog hop, doesn't mean it IS one.

The first day, I made a list (a HUGE one), took and posted the photos, and blogged about this. The next day, I took one of the categories of items I needed to research selling/trading, and started that process. (I'll be trading some old collectable gaming figures for a game I want, that takes up less than 1/4 of the space the figures did; a win/win, there. Boardgamegeek.com is great for exchanging, occasionally selling, old or new games and related items.) So, a small move.

I did not beat myself up inside about how little that seemed to accomplish in relation to the whole; the urge to do that came to me as it so easily does, but I countered those thoughts with, "No, it's not too little. You are no longer stuck and you are moving forward. FEEL how good that feels after being stagnant for so long!"

And I did. Feel good, that is. I transformed my negative thoughts and feelings not just into banishing the negative, but I created positive thoughts and feelings to replace them.

My mantra going forward will be, as you may guess, "Small moves, Sara. Small moves."

(P.S. Who wants to watch that movie now? Me . . .)

What a Not So Beautiful Mess . . .

To riff off of a Diamond Rio song title . . .

I'm being brave in posting this. I want to track my progress on organizing this, although the rest of the house is a mess too (mostly not as bad, but this is BAD, so that's not saying much).

This is the master bedroom in our apartment. Much of the mess is craft items, information, patterns, and publications. There's a big variety of crafts and materials: Beading/jewelry making (including chain maille jewelry), knitting, crochet, spinning, and weaving (that's a four-shaft table loom under a makeshift dustcover), Rubber stamping, scrapbooking, and a variety of paper crafts, with a variety of die-cutting stuff (including a Cricut, a . . . robotic die cutter, if you will, for those who aren't familiar with this stuff), and a big wooden rotating tower of ink pads, reinkers, ink pens, and other things.

I have fabric in various places in the room, handed down from my mom when she was clearing it all out; I have no sewing machine though except a tiny one designed for stitching in scrapbooks and on other paper crafting projects. The fabric has come in handy for a variety of my daughter's school projects, though. I've even saved jeans she's outgrown, and jeans of mine as well, for a variety of recycled/upcycled craft projects. It's a good thing I saved some of my jeans that I'd lost too much weight for, because I gained the weight back and needed them. Lol. I'm working on losing weight again, though.

I have a couple drawers of adhesives, from a Xyron laminator/magnet maker/adhesive applier, foam tape, masking tape, double sided tape, photo corners, glaze-type glues, rubber cement, tacky glues, post it note glue, glue for metals, and a whole host of other adhesives for different purposes, materials, etc.

The thing about all these crafts, is, the last two years mostly doesn't count for me not touching them much, due to a year and a half of surgical recovery; with all the pain knitting simple garter stitch was the most I could handle, and I've picked it up now and again. Also, the last two years my husband's been either out of work, or at two couple months long temporary jobs . . . with jewelry making, buying the findings like jump rings, crimps, clasps, bails, etc. can add up, and so as with some of the other crafts, running out of consumables has limited those.

Also, I suffer from a variety of mental illnesses, disorders, etc. You'd think an OCD person's bedroom would look neat, but then there's ADD, bipolar with lots of depression, etc. and everything's overwhelming. These issues also lead to a lack of desire to do anything, including favorite interests and hobbies. My therapist has recommended I not ditch everything, since once (or if, in my mind) my depression improves I'll regret having gotten rid of everything.

SO. With that in mind, I'm analysing how often I've used stuff, over the last 6 years or so, and factors affecting that, in order to help with what to ditch and what to keep. The last couple years it's been mostly knit, with a little crochet and a moderate amount of weaving. A little spinning, too. The couple years before that, there were sporadic bursts of rubber stamping (often related to mania, but not always), mixed with alot of knitting and the like. Also alot of beading/jewelry making during that period. The couple years before that, was when I started the jewelry stuff, as well as the knitting/crochet/tiny bit of spinning. Scattered Rubber Stamping as well, with a year of digital scrapbooking. It's been longer since physical scrapbooking, but that's mostly due to organizational issues (ie, I can't find my stuff) as well as some money factors (do you know how much the scrapbooking and stamping industries make? It's ridiculous. TOO many commercial products, I think a simpler, less expensive approach will suit me better.

Still, at some point when you're in an apartment, you can't just leave all that space being taken up by stuff you don't use . . . I need to figure out where to draw the lines. It's gonna be hard.

I can do it, though, one step at a time. I have a budget of $200-$250, from birthday and special occasion money I've saved up for awhile. That doesn't seem like much compared to all the stuff in there; some small portion of which needs to go in other rooms.

There's SO MUCH organizing info out there, though, that it's overwhelming. I'm starting with a blog or two, like http://iheartorganizing.blogspot.com/, which has some great ideas and showcases a variety of organizing products, ESPECIALLY in use, so I can get an idea of what may and may not work for me.

Wish me luck? And also, that I don't get so overwhelmed I just quit.

No judging my mess. I should have an apron that says that . . . lol.

Next post on this project will be the list of stuff that I've come up with that needs doing in there. Although, with the rest of the house being a mess too, I'm not sure what I'll do with the stuff that gets kept but goes in another room, before I've cleaned and organized the room it goes in so there's a place for it . . . . it's like a Mobius strip. Or MC Escher stairs.