It's Come To Color Coding

Two weeks into the future is as far as the human mind can apprehend.

For a long time, I kept our affairs straight using my brain and the little calendar on my iphone. I still use both those things, but now I have these two whiteboard planners that I write on. One for this week and one for next week. Each member of the family has a different colored marker. We're in a pretty light period right now--there's not much ink on this week--but back in September/October, gah. At about 7:05 every morning, I would come stand over the whiteboards, scanning them and then visualizing the rest of the day in my head. In the dawn light, I would root out and resolve instances of magical thinking, impossible geographies, and optimistic double booking. It was cray.

Visualization is the key to success in all our endeavors.

And when I get through the week and we all did our activities and nothing is forgotten, y'all, I feel a sense of satisfaction. Like I've put a puzzle together.

Then, on Sunday night when I wipe the whiteboard for the previous week clean, I record in my paper planner what actually DID happen, i.e., how we deviated from the schedule and what other details I want to include. Things that would actually jog my memory about the actual living of those days.

When I first started this system, one night before I wiped the board off, I carried it to Matt and said, "Before I erase this, I just want you to appreciate it."

I'm crazy, I do know.

But he took it from me and said, "Let me see." Then he made a very good show of studying it, and then he said, "Nicely done. Good job."

Reader, that is all I need to hear. RIGHT?

What is your system? Have you gone to color coding? Do you need an audience for it?

PS: One day Hank wrote one of his appointments on the whiteboard, but he used a sharpie. So, permanent. But I found out you can just write over the sharpie in dry-erase marker, and it renders the sharpie dry-erase. And thus the cause of human knowledge advances.

I Mean Gah

Is anyone else like this? I just hate having stuff on my daily calendar, like things to do at pre-scheduled times. When I look ahead to the next day and there are several, like, appointments, it kills my joy a little bit, and I feel dread and assume that I will spend the whole day feeling harried and gritting my teeth. And it doesn't take much. I guess I am kind of a delicate orchid, 'cause like, three scheduled things in a twelve-hour period and I'm all I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS.

Today's agenda was...
Sleep late because Hank is out of school: This did not present a problem
Morningish: Get Laura a dress for her graduation
2:45: Go help set up the gym for the fifth grade dance tomorrow.
4:30-5:00 Hank swim lesson at our pool: this is a new thing this week and not assimilated into my routine
Clear dining room table of Legos for Matt to have a board game night with his buds
Prepare dinner?
5:15-5:45 Hank karate
6:00 play a tennis match
Laura swim practice, either at her swim club 5:30-7:45 or in our pool 6-7:  not gonna happen

Because every post needs a picture.

Okay, looking at that list, my stress could have been that lots of these things overlap or potentially would overlap if they all happened, and it makes me feel that I am not doing well with logistics when I can't be in two places or feel like I'm letting something slide. And some of the things are optional-ish, like Hank's karate and Laura's swimming. They just need to be done a certain amount every week, so every day I'm alert to whether we can squeeze those activities in or not. Matt helps with the kid transport some (he usually retrieves L from her practices) but 5:15 is a bad time to ask him to participate. Really the three things at 2:45, 4:30, and 6 were what was crowding my joy, but there was no problem with their overlapping or with the things themselves. All perfectly pleasant! And yet, seeing them in my calendar, I just wanted to take to bed.

So all day I'm twitchy and jumpy and I'm not sure when unscheduled-but-important things (shopping, cooking, cleaning) will get done. I asked Matt about taking Hank to karate and that was a non-starter.

Then later Matt comes to me and says, "About later, I need to go to a thing at 6, it will take an hour." And it's a thing that is kind of a fun thing, sorta, but also a work/networking thing. And I'm all instantly pissy, and I go, "Well I have tennis, what are you going to do with Hank?" (I am delightful.) And he says, "Can you really not take him with you to your match?" And so then I'm into a big thing of "Well I don't knooow, what if I take him and our match lasts three hours?" And he goes, "Well maybe you could take him with you and then I could come retrieve him," and I'm like, "I guess I could leave him here with Laura..." and we're into this sort of stand-off thing, and it's NOT EVEN A BIG DEAL except for the schedule! The SCHEDULED THINGS have got me all twitchy and feeling like we're all caught in a net. So then I sniff, "It seems like when YOU want to do something, I need to be super flexible, but when I want to do something, there is NO FLEXIBILITY." And Matt, with this tone of infinite love and patience, says, "Do you really think that is the truth?" And I realize I can't argue with him because it's not like he ever does anything except work his ass off. And I was like, okay I'll stop now.

So this is what the scheduled things do to me. The scheduled things!

And then, THEN, none of it amounted to anything! Unsurprisingly, I was able to do everything in sequence like a normal person and it all got done. Laura skipped neighborhood swim practice to stay home with Hank. (The game company boys were downstairs too.) And whereas I thought the whole day would be one long endurance test, I was finished with my match by 7:22. I arrived home to find Matt welcoming his friends, pizza ordered, and Hank asleep in a chair. Matt carried him to bed, there was tons of daylight left, Laura had her clothing plan for tomorrow's graduation all set, and I was like, "Oh." Then I drank a beer and watched Mythbusters with her. I am a crazy person, you have no idea.

Or probably you do.

I don't know. I mean, I have no problem having things to do. I am busy all day long. But as soon as there are certain times things must be done, I am like, FORGIZZLE. The kids' dentist appointments? Cast a shadow on my brain for days in advance. Just me? You?

I mean, praise be that I don't have an actual J-O-B. God forbid.

Smacks,
b

I Got A Box Full of Letters

Do you know that song by Wilco? It came out the year I got married. It has a verse I think is funny:

I got a lot of your records,
in a separate stack.
There's some things I might like to hear,
But I guess I'll give them back.

That says more about the end of a relationship than entire novels I have read. It's that word "might." Economy of language, friends.

Sunday before last, the kids and I got home from the mountains really late. As late as it was, Matt was down in the basement busily sorting and clearing out so that Larry and Darryl the basement guys could start the next morning. I wanted to just stare into his eyes and feed each other grapes, you know, but he had different ideas. He led me to four cardboard boxes. I tried to pretend I had no idea what he was asking, but his meaning was clear. I recognized the four boxes as things from my old room at my parents' house. Boxes that had come straight to our basement unsorted. Three of them were books, but one was a box full of letters.

Matt wanted me to go through them and decide what to keep and what to chuck, so I did. I was merciless on the books. Then I opened the last box. There were three strata: high school stuff with a little middle school thrown in, letters to and from college friends and boyfriends, and notes and memorabilia from my study-abroad time in Rome. I knew that if I'd had time and a more comfortable place to sit, I could have fallen headlong into a slough of memory and desire. But I was kind of efficient. When I found bits of an old journal, say, I didn't read it so much as take note of its existence and move on. This was all stuff I had wanted to save at one time. Now a good bit of it was garbage. I threw away a bunch of grades and official records/awards type junk. I kept a fair amount of high school writing, my own and others'. I kept anything that had been written by a friend I still have today. So if you are within the sound of my voice right now, and you knew me in high school, there's some poetry of yours that needs analyzing. I threw away my ACT scores but kept my SAT's, figure that one out. I threw away my notes from my Opera class in Rome, I kept the Art History ones.

The absolutely untouchable category was the letters. It's amazing to think now, but in the early nineties, we college kids wrote each other letters. Lots of them. I had a tight-knit circle of friends, and when we were separated by school breaks or study abroad, we wrote. Some long letters, some postcards. Now those letters speak of lazy summers and low-end jobs we had between terms. Who has time to do that anymore? It's odd. I think we had email addresses--I remember the school gave them to us, maybe--but we must not have used them? I know I never in college had a personal computer. Now, by early 1995 when my long-distance courtship with Matt was heating up, we were both on AOL. Then we emailed and IM'd and all the rest. But there are lots of letters between us from before the dawn of email. I felt pleasure pulling them out of the box. Something about that physical, tangible object. It feels like a gift from the letter writer, the letter is a gift to you of the time it took to write and send it.

Of course, at the same time, this is what my dissertation was about: letters and letterness, especially the way a letter's controlling fiction is that it's an intimate, true, "real" piece of the writer's presence. Once, in a class I taught, one of my brilliantest students was musing on the difference, in genre terms, between a letter and a postcard. She said, "It's like a letter presents the person and is all about closeness, and a postcard embraces the distance." And I thought, "I could put down my chalk and leave the room, 'cause they get it."

Anyway, so I was pulling these various letters from various people out of the box and exclaiming over them. I couldn't get into reading them because there were miles to go before we slept, and Matt and I hadn't seen each other in a few days and we had important chatting to chat. So I put them all in a safe keeper pile. I just don't have it in me to throw out someone's personal letter.

Which brings me to the funny thing that happened: down in the box was a pile of letters to an old boyfriend of mine from another old girlfriend of his, somebody before me. I never knew this person or laid eyes on her. There were ten or twelve letters on business-sized stationery. She had beautiful handwriting and she decorated the outside of the envelopes. Again, who has time to do this anymore? Reader, I don't know why I had these. Maybe they were part of some of his belongings that transferred to me somehow? We never lived together so I don't know. I didn't remember them at all. I don't know if I had once read them or not. It seemed an odd thing for me to keep. But there was no way I could throw them away.

So I messaged the old boyfriend on the facebook. We've always been on good terms; we have mutual friends, though it's been ten years since I saw him. I told him, hey, I found these old letters from your old girlfriend X, don't know why I have 'em. Would you like me to send them to you? I didn't want to throw them away, but if you don't want them now, lemme know and I will give them a respectful burial.

And he hasn't written back to me. That was a week and a half ago. I'm kind of surprised I didn't hear right back, one way or the other. He is married now, but I wasn't offering to send him naked pictures of this other girl. So I don't know. Maybe it just seemed like something he didn't really want to deal with? Or didn't want to make a decision about? If he doesn't ask for them (I don't know his address), I really have no reason in the world to keep them, except that it seems utterly impossible to throw out the work of someone's hand like that.

What would you do? What will probably happen is that they'll live in my possession for another fifteen years. And then I will be less sentimental and one day they'll get tossed. Or my heirs will puzzle over who are these people and are these now precious family treasures?

That was a nice night in the basement, even if we weren't feeding each other grapes. I thought about how much I enjoy Matt's company and who he is and our life together, and how sometimes I feel like life is rushing by and there might not be enough time to talk about all the things I want to talk about with him.

It's hilarious that I've had this blog for three years, because in all that box of letters, I didn't read anything that I had written. I put it all aside for some future time when maybe I can stand myself. You know?

Personal Organizer Secrets Revealed

Yesterday my interest was greatly piqued to find out that one of my acquaintances apparently has a personal organizer. Well, when she came to bring Laura back home, I would not let her go until she told me everything. The real picture is not as flossy as I was envisioning. I was thinking--and her little girl had made it sound like--she had a regular engagement with an organizer, and like you guys were saying, "Don't you need to fly on your own at some point?"

So this girl--who I've never blogged about before, but if I did I would call her Mary Poppins because she is Practically Perfect in Every Way, and I say that in love--told me about this website that has daily deals on different stuff, including lots of services like cleaning, massages, etc, geared towards whatever city you're in. Just glancing over it, it looks like a lot of restaurant discounts, but there are also some interesting housecleaning and spa things too. Anyway, she said that a deal popped up for three hours of organizing for $30, and she booked two sessions. Dang! I wish I'd seen that offer. I would have been like, honey, meet my garage. Usually this service costs $40 an hour, she said. The lady came and organized her junk drawers, her kids' art room, and her master bathroom.

So I asked what to me is the key question: was it worth it, or was it stuff you could have done for yourself? She said that it was a job she definitely could have done herself, and that she was a little disappointed because she thought that the organizer would bring more of a vision and a system that she could implement. I know what she means: I would love to have someone who is, like, a Theoretician of Organization come and help me set up a system for the paperwork, mail, and administrative tasks in this house. I need vision. I need strategy. I need strategery. Sounds like that's what my friend thought she was getting, but the person just neatened up. Still, she felt like a lot of the value was that getting this organizer person made her deal with these issues in her house that she wouldn't have made a priority on her own.

We talked about the fact that so many magazines and websites (not to mention The Container Store) have organizing as their focus, it's really something where the ideas are out there for anyone to grab and make use of, it's just a matter of having the gumption. I'm sure there are people who have some kind of genius for it though. Anymahoodle, if I had the disposable income, I could see having a one-time gig with a person to help, um, straighten me out. Someone who specialized in my special tastes and requirements. Because there are some things you can't ask your cleaning lady to do, right?

I Got To Get Me Some of That

I dropped Laura off at a friend's house in Fancy Land today, and the little girl said her mom couldn't come to the door because she was upstairs with her personal organizer.

And she meant a person, not a Blackberry. The way she said the lady's name, followed by "the person who organizes here," made it sound like a regular thing.

Well. That must be nice for her.

I came home and told Matt this bit of information, and he said, "Is that code, like, 'she's upstairs getting somethin' straightened out,' wink wink?" I said, "Honey, no, it means she has someone to help organize her house, which is way hotter than anything you may be imagining."

When she brings Laura home, I am going to get the deets, you betcha boots.

The Price of Disorganization

Last night Matt and I decided that it was time to tackle the mountain of undifferentiated laundry that had gone to our bedroom to die. Or, he decided it was time, and I would have felt ashamed if I didn't go along. We have a major problem with laundry. Every member of the family has too much clothing, despite the fact that I feel like we personally keep the Goodwill stocked with hand-me-downs. And while I'm fine with the washing, the drying, and even with the folding, I suck at the putting-away. The typical scenario is, there will be a load of clean clothes downstairs, waiting for me to fold it, and then when someone is coming over, I say, "Matt, quick, take those upstairs to our room!" And there it will sit, awaiting, I suppose, the sounding of the final trumpet, when all unsorted clothing shall rise up and fly into its proper drawer.

So last night we went up there and got cray-zay on the laundry situation, sorting and folding and cleaning the bathroom. Then Matt vacuumed the carpet, even moving the bed to vacuum under the bed. (Like, whoa, that's a little too tidy.) In that pile of laundry, we found $36 in loose bills. And Matt's wallet. Which had been missing for three days.

When we were finished, Matt brought up a pitcher of cosmos, and we reclined on the bed so we could bask in the fruits of our labors, as he put it. I was beat. But we soaked in the sight of our clean bedroom like it was Lake Como. The $36, and not having to cancel credit cards and go to the DMV, that was just a bonus.

I don't know a lot about feng shui or any of that stuff, but really I think there's something to the way a cluttered room, anywhere in your house, can kind of mess with your head. Do you feel that? But now the laundry is put away, and my chi is flowing, I guess. Here's hoping we keep it that way. Have a happy Friday, and I hope your chakras are wide open.

Coupon Shopping: Publix? Consider It Rocked

Hi friends. This NaBloPoMo 30 posts in 30 days thing is really something. I feel like I was just here. Are you sick of me yet? Don't answer that.

I wanted to share my fantabulous Publix trip from yesterday. I got more systematic about my couponing, and it made a big difference. A couple of things clicked for me. For several months now, I've been a more frugal shopper, but I've been kind of hit-and-miss with using coupons. I would plan grocery trips using Fiddledeedee and Bren and others, but if a coupon wasn't an internet printable, I was sometimes too lazy to go and find the right newspaper insert and cut out the coupon. Even though I might have the insert crammed in a drawer. I obviously need the remedial coupon class. I had not discovered Sharpie technology, and the fact that writing the date of the newspaper on the front of the insert makes this all much easier.

So yesterday I stood in my kitchen and went through about a bushel of coupon inserts that I had magically been storing in a tiny drawer. I wrote the date on each one, and made a pile of Redplums and a pile of Smartsource. Then I put each pile in a folder, and I sat down in front of the computer and spent just a few minutes with Fiddledeedee and Southern Savers. I remembered that my Publix doubles coupons of fifty cents or less. That means, I realized, that a newspaper coupon for fifty cents is just as good as an internet printable for $1. (Duh! I told you I need the remedial class.) So when an item is bogo, and I have 2 fifty cent coupons, that is a big savings. I knew my Publix doubled, but it never really hit me before.

Then I went on a delightfully child-free trip to Publix, and I spent $42.15 and saved $60.15. It was fun--lots of good match-ups. My store actually had those winter savings coupon booklets. Grab those and get the College Inn broth coupon and the Hunt's tomatoes coupon out of there. With coups, those 32 ounce cartons of broth were 40 cents each. Score! I got one of the Thai curry ones to try in addition to the regular chicken. Other highlights included those Bertolli pasta meals for $1.25 apiece. The bogo Nabisco crackers with coupons were like 40 cents each too. And I picked up some non-dairy creamer, the bogo canned tomatoes, and the Lysol wipes, among other things. The Last Tango peaches were 69 cents a pound at my store too. Ooh, and with the printable coups, the Stonyfield yogurt cups were like 16 cents apiece. Love it.

At CVS, I only did one transaction. Cassie at Envirosavings had custom-built a great CVS scenario for me, and I did the first half of it. I was pleased that my store had the Revitalift that paid $11.98 in ecb's. I basically rolled 10 ecbs into that. Joke's on you, L'Oreal! I am in a committed and serious relationship with Origins. Then, that store didn't have several of the things I needed to do my wonderful second transaction, so I panicked and bailed. I considered going to the other CVS, but to do that I had to actually drive by my house, and I realized I would only be going so I could use my $5/25 coupon that was expiring, and that it didn't really matter that much. So CVS was short and sweet.

Then, when Laura and I took a ton of clothes to Goodwill, we browsed around their kitchen section, and I found two Denby mugs and a creamer in the Potter's Wheel pattern, for fifty-five cents each. Like this:
The pic doesn't do it justice. I've been drinking my coffee from one of them today and loving the gorgeous texture of the stoneware. So that was it for my getting and spending. Hop over to Supersavers to see what the coupon gurus are up to.

Workin' on My Closet Organization, Yo

Today in my closet, I discovered that I own a special maternity shirt that's specifically for wearing underneath maternity overalls. Like, the shirt comes to just beneath the boobs, with a big cutout for the belly. Um, OMG what? Reader, I cannot believe that I: a) bought such a shirt; and b) that I ever wore or considered wearing maternity overalls. It was from that Motherhood store. In my defense, this dated from my first pregnancy, eight years ago, when I was clueless about most things.

I found the shirt in a sarcophagus-sized rubbermaid container in the closet. The sarcophagus was filled with clothes that I packed up in California, two and a half years ago, to move to our new house here in Atlanta. And then I never touched them again. There was some good stuff in there. And there were some not-so-good moments. The role of Tim Gunn was played by my mother-in-law. At one point this afternoon, I was modeling a J. Crew white brocade bubble skirt with inverted box pleats. I got it on super clearance, all right? She was studying me skeptically, while I said things like, "Is the length wrong?" and "Picture it with a different top!" She said, "It's just bad. Really bad. Bad all over." So into the donate pile it went, along with the Motherhood top, and a batik dress from one of the times I decided I was really bohemian.

Clothing storage and organization is not one of my talents, and knowing that the situation was reaching critical levels, my mother-in-law had offered to come down and tackle the issue head-on. She is a treasure. So yesterday and today, we went through all of the clothes in my closet, both hanging things and clothes stashed in the sarcophagus. Shoes too. I think I hit upon a way to keep this from being totally daunting and unmanageable. I started with a completely clean bedroom. (My mom had helped me put away all of the clean laundry that had been sitting around in my room, bless her.) I started at one side of the closet, and only brought out a handful of hanging things at a time. We assessed each piece, and put it in one of these piles: Donate, Ebay, Garbage, and WTF? Kidding, actually it was just Donate, Ebay, Garbage, and Keep. The keepers I just carried right back into the closet, and then brought out another handful. Then we did the same with the sarcophagus and with the Mountain of Jeans that was overflowing a laundry basket in the corner of the closet. These weren't even the jeans that I wear. These were strange, forgotten jeans from some other lifetime, or a parallel dimension. Does everyone have those or is it just me?

This afternoon I took eight green garbage bags of clothes to Goodwill. Not absolutely all of them were mine--one bag or so was baby clothes. And I feel as thought a great weight has been lifted from the house. I still need to organize the hanging things better, like by summer and winter, etc. But it helped me realize what I have a lot of--sweaters, cardigans, and jackets--and what I need more of--layering tops and good-quality tees. And it was great to take a real inventory of what I have, and know that there was nothing lurking in a storage bin somewhere.

Plus my mother-in-law kept the kids while we went out last night, AND got up with them in the morning, two mornings in a row. We BEG her to move in with us, but she insists on having her own life. Hmmph. Hope y'all are having a good Saturday!

We Got Hot Spots

Right after we put the kids to bed every night, I come downstairs and survey the wreckage. The supper dishes are still on the table, and the living room and sunroom are littered with toys, books, and dirty clothes. The couches are in total disarray, and often there's a makeshift fort that needs to be dismantled. The floor of the book room is usually covered with dominoes and puzzle pieces. Sometimes there's a special, awful mess somewhere, like when Hank pulled handfuls of gravel out of the fishbowl. So as I stand there taking stock of all that, I tell you, it is the dark night of the soul. I am trying, though, to practice the Flylady's teachings, and I've gotten the dark night of the soul down to about twenty minutes.

If you have not heard of Flylady, she is all about having systems and routines to make housekeeping and decluttering a normal and painless part of everyday life. (Kind of like the Home Comforts book I've preached about here before.) A few times over the years, I've signed up for the Flylady's email reminders. The website emails you multiple times a day with encouragement, tips, and little missions like, "Go organize your shoes," or, her rallying cry, "Go shine your sink!" So I never stay subscribed to the emails because it is a lot of email. But the underlying principles are rock solid. I love her site and the fact that it has gotten not one bit slicker in the last seven years. The only lesson of hers that I've really made a long-term success of is the before bed routine. I don't do it at my bedtime though, but right after the kids go to bed. Flylady's before bed routine is:

• Spend twenty minutes tidying the house, cleaning the kitchen, and clearing your hot spots. A hot spot is anyplace where clutter tends to gather, like a hall table--a place that, unless it is constantly attended to, will become a monster that eats your sanity.


• Think about tomorrow, check your calendar, start a to-do list, make sure kids have what they need to get out the door, lay out your clothes.


• Focus on yourself and your partner: do your nighttime grooming and bedtime thing.

And if that is too overwhelming, she boils it down to: clean your kitchen sink, lay out your clothes, and brush your teeth. I love that about Flylady--she never makes you feel like you can't measure up. So anyway, I can count on Matt to clean the kitchen. That leaves me doing the tidying. First I gather up the kids' clothes that have been strewn around, and start a load of laundry. It will be ready to fold when "The Daily Show" comes on. Next: toys. I grab this thing:

Unfolded, it is an awesome road playmat. It was a gift for Hank from my mom, but it costs about $15. Folded up, it is a roomy and perfect container for all toys with wheels. I chuck them into this thing, then stash it in one of the cabinets next to the fireplace. It really makes this part of the day easier. In the morning when Hank pulls it out, all his cars are ready to go. Then I pick up and stash all other kid stuff by category--books, art stuff, and tiny things.

Next I put all the furniture (!) back where it goes and straighten up the couches. (I like throw pillows, and Hank likes to throw them.) I start to enjoy the routine at this point, because the lineaments of my tidy rooms are starting to emerge. Finally, I put Laura's shoes, socks, and schoolbag all together and put her snack in her bag. I make her lunch if I didn't do it earlier, putting out not one but two reminder-notes that say, "Lunch in fridge." One goes on her shoes and one goes on the door where Matt will see it in the morning. Then I make a cocktail and sit down to catch up on the episodes of "Mad Men" I have tivoed.

So what is missing from my routine is any real attention to our hot spots. Sometimes I feel like our entire house and life is a hot spot. But we truly need a system to deal with paperwork and mail. Right now, the upper, non-food prep section of my kitchen counter is an undifferentiated pile of papers that are kinda important, or I haven't looked at them yet, or maybe I need to look at them again, or I need to do something else with them. I pay most bills online, many of them automatically, so this is. . .other stuff, I don't know. That's the system. I have an office--it is where paper goes to die. I could never put any piece of paper there that I needed to touch again, because the office is the Place of Forgetting. It doesn't look too bad in the office, but that's because the mess is in the kitchen. Maybe every two weeks, I make some progress with reducing the pile.

So, toy organization, I'm good. We can sit down at night for Adult Time without feeling like we live in a daycare. Paper system, sorely needed. I would love to know what y'all have got going on, or if everyone lives like this? That's where I'm at. Thank you for your time and attention.