Author Archives: serentipity

Favorite Organizing Blogs

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I’ve explored lots of organizing/simplicity blogs over the years and enjoy browsing their articles, but there are a few that I read consistently. I think what makes the difference for me is that their tips are practical and affordable. Their solutions don’t require I paint my house in chalkboard paint, buy a $300 labeling machine, and throw out things I love because they don’t match. Some of the bloggers I read have cabinets full of mismatched containers, and I love them for that.

Without further ado, here are my favorite organizing blogs:

unclutterer.
Summary: “Unclutterer is the blog about getting and staying organized.”
Sample post: Today’s How to Organize Your Pantry has really useful tips, although this one caught me by surprise:

Blue painter’s tape and a Sharpie are perfect for these tasks. You can stick a piece of blue painter’s tape to reusable containers and then write the information on the tape

I was so sure I had invented that one. :) No matter, it works!

Simple Organized Living
Tagline: “helping you create your best life”
Sample post: I read Organization Should Be Practical Not Always Pretty on the exact day I needed it. I was feeling a bit blue over my house as compared to the home magazines and showplace pins on Pinterest. Andrea’s post was an awesome reminder that those spaces aren’t always practical or realistic for day-to-day living, and that I need to organize my space for my needs.

Organising Queen
Tagline: “get organized. take charge. live purposefully.”
Sample post: 7 Secrets of the Super Organized seems so reasonable, but I’m still 2-out-of-7 on a regular basis. I need to print this and hang it on my wall. Neatly, of course. Not with my blue painters’ tape. :)

I’m an Organizing Junkie
Tagline: “Encouraging others to get ‘hooked’ along with me.”
Sample post: How I Get Away with Filing Once a Year is one of my favorites, mostly because it validates my own methods. :) I have to file 3 or 4 times a year, because my basket starts overflowing. Perhaps I should buy a bigger basket?

Small Notebook
Tagline: “Practical tips to simplify and organize your home.”
Sample post: How to Remove Wallpaper from an Unprimed Wall is a post that I’m hoping will help me with my kitchen remodel. The people who lived in my house before (or their heirs) removed the top layer of wallpaper and then painted on top of the underlayer. On top of all that is a border that doesn’t want to come off. I’m going to try my garden sprayer, and if that doesn’t work, I’m just going to re-drywall.

There are other organizing blogs I like, but if I spent all day reading organizing blogs, I’d never make any progress! If I missed one of your faves, sing out in the comments.

SIDENOTE: I have no idea why my blog is displaying all italics. I haven’t even touched it, I promise! (Or did I?) I’m working on a solution and hope to get it fixed soon!

Tippy Toe Organizing

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When it comes to my work, I’m very organized and methodical. At home? Not so much. I’m no candidate for Hoarders, but I definitely could use some improvement. Every year I resolve to get more organized at home and more importantly, to stay organized. I make progress for a while, but eventually I fall back on my previous disorganized ways.

In thinking about this over the holidays, I realized that this stop-and-start pattern was very much like the one I exhibited in my years on the “diet cycle”. I’d try-try-try, but at some point it would become too overwhelming or difficult to sustain, and I’d give up. Same thing with sustainable organization. I figured out how to lose 100 pounds, but I haven’t found the solution to my home organization issues. Isn’t it a pity I can’t use the same principles…oh, wait! ::Is the light bulb over my head hurting your eyes?::

tippy toe organizingFor 2013, I’m going to use the tippy toe approach to home organization. Smaller, consistent steps do add up, and I’m looking forward to applying the same methodology to organizing. I kind of have a head start, in that I’ve got the “small steps” locked up. I just need to connect them consistently. Here’s the starting plan:

  1. List the reasons why. It’s not enough to think them; I need to put pen to paper, list the reasons having a more organized home are important to me, and then refer back to them frequently to keep the momentum going.
  2. Break things up into manageable tasks. Rather than thinking of organizing the whole house, I’m breaking it into smaller projects. Really small. I’ve defined 16 areas, inside and out, and then further broken those into even smaller areas. As I (re)organize each area, I’ll define the process, or “rules”, that will keep it organized. My bookcases, for example, should only require a periodic weeding and dusting; however, I tend to stash small things in front of the books, which makes the shelves look messy. New rule: Nothing in front of the books, even decorative items.
  3. Set action-based goals. There’s an old saying that goes: People want to be rich; they don’t want to get rich. Meaning, we want it to magically happen without a lot of effort on our part. It’s the same with being thinner vs. getting thinner, and for me, anyway, it seems to be the same with home organization. Instead of setting a generalized goal of “being more organized”, which is the result I want, my actual goals require action.
  4. Give credit where it’s due. With the advent of Pinterest, it’s easy to get caught up in the beauty of other people’s organized spaces and to feel as though my own living space is somehow lacking. I need to keep my focus on my successes and to remember that the process is about improvement, not perfection.
  5. Have fun along the way. I don’t enjoy housekeeping so much, so a key for me is to find the fun in the process. With weight loss, I set silly challenges and rewards for myself. I suspect I’ll do the same with home organizing.

Any or all of the above is subject to change, of course, as I work my way through the process. I had success with tippy toe weight loss. Here’s hoping it works for home organizing.

In my next post, I’ll be sharing some of my favorite organizing blogs and websites, but I’m also interested in your tips and suggestions. How do YOU stay organized?

Great Holiday Ideas Courtesy of my Pinterest Holiday Board

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I’ll be spending the holidays away from home, so my normal minimal holiday decorating became NO holiday decorating. Fortunately, I can still “decorate” my Pinterest board.

I like this Christmas tree idea, even if it is Martha Stewart’s (meow):

I also love this smart Michael Johansson design:

But truth be told, this chalkboard tree is more representative of me:

This is my favorite kind of Christmas tree:

 

This is why I love Pinterest–I certainly wouldn’t have four trees in my house! Plus, “de-decorating” is a breeze. :)

I’ve also pinned some gift wrap ideas. First, some repurposing of food containers for gift containers:

Source: womansday.com via Cammy on Pinterest

This would be cute for giving someone a 6-pack of craft beer, and you wouldn’t need much in the way of supplies:

I laughed out loud when I saw this gift wrap pack on NotontheHighStreet.com. Out of necessity, I crafted a similar gift bag a few years ago when I ran out of gift bags for baked gifts. I used a pencil eraser and white craft paint to make the dots and topped it with a gold or silver foil star I had from a work project. I’d forgotten about it until I saw this product.

 
Don’t I wish I’d thought to package that idea and sell it for $11.95! :)

To wrap things up (hah-hah, Christmas pun!), here’s a great idea I found just today via Mel’s Kitchen Cafe:

Instead of giving a package of holiday cookies to someone who might be overwhelmed with sugary goodness, why not freeze the cookie dough and put it in a freezer-safe container labeled with instructions on how to prepare later? Genius! Especially, since I am super time-crunched just now, and this will save baking/cooling time!

Wishing you all a very safe and happy holiday!

 

Make Yourself at Home: Practical Tips for Entertaining Overnight Guests

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‘Tis the season for house guests. Not for me, mind you, since all my family is local, but I know that other people are suffering anticipating a houseful of company.

(Just for today, let’s pretend this is my guest room and not one I found on Houzz.)

As if the preparation for weekend (or longer) guests wasn’t exhausting enough, we’re bombarded with magazine stories and HGTV slideshows picturing “the perfect guest room” (like this one) along with tips to ensure our guests enjoy their stay. Some suggestions are very practical (like clean bedding and ample lighting), but quite often they include suggestions for items that are totally unnecessary. Over-the-top, even. Call me selfish, but if I don’t have a mini-fridge in my room, my guests aren’t getting one in theirs. Ditto their very own in-room coffee maker with a selection of gourmet coffees and a snack basket with nuts, cheese, chocolate and imported biscuits.

I prefer a much more practical approach to providing for my guests. These are my tips for making your guests comfortable:

  1. Yes, give the room a good cleaning, air the mattress, and add fresh linens.
  2. Remove any unnecessary items. For me, that would be the treadmill and my workout equipment.
  3. Put a few current magazines and books in the room.
  4. Pull out a season-appropriate extra quilt or blanket for the end of the bed.
  5. Forgo the room fridge, coffee maker, and snack baskets; instead, show your guests around the kitchen and encourage them to help themselves anytime, day or night.
  6. Keep a selection of extra toiletries in the top drawer of the bathroom vanity and let guests know where to find them.
  7. Locate (or have made) an extra key, in case your guests will be going out on their own. Area maps are also helpful.

Maybe I’m just fortunate, but anyone visiting me overnight is close enough to feel comfortable asking for anything they need. And with two grocery stores, a drug store, a Starbucks, and a dozen restaurants within a few blocks, we have easy access to anything I don’t have on hand.

A long, long time ago, I made myself crazy in the anticipation of guests. I scrubbed every inch of the house and fretted every stray crumb or bit of fluff the entire time they were in residence. One day while at an arts & crafts fair, I happened to see a little plaque that read something like this:

What a wake up moment for me (and a heads up for any unexpected visitors)! People were coming to visit ME, not my house! I still cleaned before scheduled visits, but I no longer worried (too much) about anything I might have missed. Instead, I concentrated on enjoying the visit. I think my guests enjoy the visit more, too. Andrea at Simple Organized Living had an interesting observation this week in her article, Why I’m Not Cleaning for Company Anymore: “[Guests] don’t like coming into a home that is perfectly clean. It’s less inviting, less people-friendly, less welcoming.”

I agree! I’m not sure I ever achieved perfection, but for a long time, I wasted a lot of time trying! Now, I just do my best to make it all comfy and inviting, and then I relax and enjoy the visit!

What do YOU do to make your guests feel at home?

Yeast Affection

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Sorry, I couldn’t resist. :)

I’m new to the world of bread baking, and I still have a lot to learn. So far, this is my most successful result:

loaf of bread

I think my biggest problem with this loaf was that my yeast wasn’t fresh. I’d had it on the pantry shelf for ??? years, after all. I recently learned that yeast can be kept in the fridge or freezer. You just have to bring to room temp to use. Guess where my yeast is now?

Another thing I didn’t know how to do–or that I needed to do it, for that matter–was how to properly proof the yeast, or to “prove” that it was ready to do its thing. It’s actually easy, according to a friend who knows these things:
1) Prepare a measuring cup with 1 cup of warm-to-the-touch water (about 90-100 degrees).
2) Stir in 1 tablespoon of sugar to feed the yeast.
3) Add the yeast packet and stir.

In 5 minutes or so, you should see something that looks like this:

YeastMixture

With the holidays approaching, I’m looking forward to baking some more bread. Now that I know a little more about yeast, I should get better results!

Do you have any yeast tips for the newbie baker?

A Visit From Posts of Seasons Past

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Holiday card set-upI love this photo by Revere J. This would definitely be my cat, if I had a cat. Or cookies. Or holiday decorations.

Anyway, the holiday season is getting into full swing, and I’ll have some tips to share in the weeks ahead. But first, I wanted to revisit a few posts from last season because I think they’re important. Think of it as a re-gifting, of sorts.

:)

Shop Safely During the Holidays (and Beyond)
These are good tips year round, but especially so at this time of year.

Christmas Tree Care and Maintenance
Tips for keeping your tree fresh, not to mention avoiding the tragedy of a fire.

Tips for Potluck Meal Success
Whether you’re the organizer or an attendee, this post contains tips to ensure that a successful meal doesn’t rely on luck alone.

Holiday Tipping Help
A little extra help during the holidays for people who provide us with great service could make a huge difference in their holiday experience. This post provides some general guidelines.

Give Generously…But Wisely
Charitable organizations depend on our help to do their good work, and the holiday season is all about giving. In this post, I shared some tips for selecting the organizations to which you contribute.

I’ll be sharing more holiday tips in the weeks ahead, but this is a good start. :)

Fridge Shelf Savers

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Do you loathe cleaning refrigerator shelves as much as I do? Cleaning them in place doesn’t always fully accomplish the task, and removing them is a big pain. So I avoid doing it until stuff starts sticking to the shelves. :)

I had seen a Pinterest tip suggesting using Glad Press ‘n’ Seal to line the fridge shelves. The idea is that when the shelves become dirty, you just peel up the liner and throw it away, which is easy but not exactly environmentally friendly. Not when there’s a better solution just around the corner.

Asia on It’s an Organized Chaos offered this idea:

Source: lh3.ggpht.com via Cammy on Pinterest

Use vinyl placemats, cut down to size, to line the shelves. When needed, remove the placemat, give it a good wash, and slide it back into place. Easy, peasy, AND it’s not wasteful!

With the holidays approaching and my fridge in dire need of cleaning, I decided to give this a try. I bought only one placemat this time, just to see how well it works. (And also because I didn’t truly love any of the patterns Target had on hand.)

I plopped the liner on the top shelf of my fridge, marked the edges, and cut away the overlap. The result:

placemat fridge liner

It doesn’t fit perfectly, but it should do the trick.

In further frugal news, the portion of the placemat I cut away can be cut down to fit a door shelf, which is another place that tends to suffer spills and drips. I’m also thinking the vinyl placemat idea (or perhaps a vinyl tablecloth) might be a good solution for lining cabinet shelves as well.

Heck, I might just wallpaper my kitchen with vinyl! LOL

Tool for Saving on Prescriptions

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I have “self-funded” health insurance, which roughly translates to “crappy coverage.” (Still, I’m grateful to have it, because I’d hate to lose my house because I tripped and broke my arm.) Needless to say, I’m always on the lookout for ways to save on health costs, and I recently discovered a great resource for saving on prescription drugs.

GoodRx is a website that allows the user to enter a drug name and zip code and then displays cash prices at area pharmacies. Prices are for uninsured patients; insured patients might pay less. Take a common antibiotic, Keflex, for example, which I had to get this week:

goodrx.com search results

Two things jump out at me:
1) the HUMONGOUS difference between the Keflex brand and the generic!
2) the not insignificant difference in prices among local pharmacies for the generic. That’s a $15 spread! For a one-time prescription, that wouldn’t be awful, but for maintenance prescriptions, it would make a huge difference. In my budget, anyway.

Here’s another example: a while back, I shared a tip for saving on “combo medications”, which I’d picked up from The Budget Diet. I learned from that tip that I could save money by having my MD issue my blood pressure medication as two separate prescriptions.

That was a good savings tip on its own, but by using it in combination with GoodRx to find the best area prices I was able to cut my monthly drug costs from around $60 to $8, for a savings of over $50 each month! I may be able to keep basic cable after all! :)

Funny side story: GoodRx has a disclaimer on their site advising that they keep the prescription prices updated to the best of their ability, but that there might be variations. That makes sense, but I’ll admit I was a little disappointed when the pharmacy clerk told me my cost was $24. But since that was better than $60, I sucked it up and managed a gratitude moment. And then she gave me my 90-day supply. I hadn’t realized the doctor wrote it as a 90-day prescription and the prices she was giving me were for THREE months instead of ONE. I was so happy I was almost in tears. LOL

Thank you, GoodRX and The Budget Diet! Thanks to you, I’m getting nearly EIGHT months of medication for what I paid for ONE month before.

Now, to get rid of the prescription completely and save myself another $8! LOL

(No affiliation with either of those websites, by the way! Just sharing!)

Quick Tip: Keep Cakes (and Other Baked Goods) Moist While Cooling

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I don’t bake cakes very often, but I do bake muffins and quick breads on occasion. The originator of this tip, BakedBree.com, says placing a slice of bread on top of cakes, muffins, etc. will keep them moist as they cool on the counter.

Source: bakedbree.com via Cammy on Pinterest

This is too easy not to try! Fingers crossed I get to bake a cake again sometime in my lifetime. :)

Tips for Separating Egg Yolks

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I don’t have many recipes that require only an egg yolk, but I have dozens that call for egg whites only. Since I don’t like to be wasteful, I generally keep pasteurized egg whites on hand for that purpose. (Supposedly you can freeze the egg yolks in an ice cube tray and then bag when frozen, but that just reads science experiment gone wrong to me.)

The other night I needed an egg white and didn’t have my handy carton available. Nothing to do but sacrifice a whole egg and then decide which method I wanted to use to perform the operation. There are several:

Old School Egg Separating Method

baby gunk.This one is super simple. I just crack the egg against the side of a bowl and use my thumbs to gently pull the egg apart, making sure the yolk stays in one side of the shell and allowing the white to spill into the bowl.

Swirl/slightly tilt the yolk side of the egg to push any remaining white up and over.

You can also pour the yolk from one shell half to the other, each time allowing any leftover white to spill out.

So simple.

The Professionals on Food Network Method

Another method I’ve used before is to crack the egg into my (clean) open palm and let the egg white spill between my fingers into the bowl. (I’ve seen the professionals do that on Food Network before, and it looks so…professional!)

The only problem with this method is that you have to stop to wash your hands, both before AND after. Bacteria, you know. (Not that I’ve ever seen the professionals wash their hands after doing it.

The Egg Separator Gadget in My Drawer Method

I have one of these gadgets buried in my kitchen drawer, but I don’t think I’ve actually used it in 20 years. I really should get rid of it.

With this thing, you put the egg in the holder and the white drips into the bowl via slots in the bottom of the gadget. Not messy, but then you have a gadget to wash.

The Funnel Method

I haven’t done this one before, but I’ve heard that if you pour an egg into a funnel, the yolk will remain in the wide part while the white drains out the narrow part. It might be worth a try, especially if you’re separating lots of yolks and whites.

The This-Might-Be-Interesting-AND-Fun Method

It’s a short video, in which a woman uses a water bottle to “siphon” an egg yolk away from the white. This would be super handy for those times when a yolk escapes the safety of the shell half and slips into the bowl. Usually I just slip a fork under it and lift it out, but this would be way more fun. :)

Those are the methods of which I’m aware. If YOU have other egg separating methods, I’d love to know them!