– flowers are good for drying and are nicely aromatic
– has a bunch of medicinal uses including fever reducer and, get this, can be used as snuff for a mild stimulant. heh.
– likes full sun, well drained soil and does not need to be fertilized
– spreads by rhizome
– can be propagated by root division
– attracts good insects,lady bugs and predatory wasps
– good companions plant for raspberries.

I think i will put it over by the comfy. the chickens are going to eat it, darn it. We really need to make the new coop but don’t have time until like 3 weekends from now. I really don’t know how to build stuff so i have to wait for Vim to do it. And i can only badger him so much. This makes me very nervous and makes me feel out of control of my own life.

Our coop idea has morphed into a coop/shed. i sketched up a design a few nights ago. It’ll go along the back wall and will be a very effective barrier between our yard and the post office truck parking lot and it won’t block any sun there either and will still comply with Oakland laws about chicken coops.

OR we could just spend 600-700$ on a coop that someone else has built… and then we will have to buy or build a shed. I’m not having one of those shitty plastic sheds.

We just spent some time flipping the grass and dirt in the front yard. the front yard dirt is interesting, the top 3-4 inches is a very loose combination of soil, dead and composting grass (some tallish variety) from several years and also several years worth of detritus from the weeping blue atlantic cedar that towers over our house. i love our tree. When you pitchfork and flip a patch over you can see how it is decomposing with the help of some mycelium and it’s easy to flip it.

why am i doing that? Well… eventually I am going to put in a native grass meadow. obviously I can’t spend time and money doing that until after construction on our house. Or front yard is small and I’m picturing massive construction machines, porta-potties and hunky sweaty half clothed men drinking diet cokes or shoveling dirt or whatever.

However, the front yard, being in the front of the house, is what everyone sees and comments on. There’s this guy that I really like that lives a block away and is a horticulturist and as i walk Jack to school he often accosts me and gives me advice about the front yard. Friday he told me i should do this pitchforking of the grass to help kill it off and make sure it doesn’t go to seed again. It sounded possibly like a satisfying activity and it was for about 6 sq ft. then i got tired and went inside.

I’m feeling annoyed and helpless and generally stupid because there is this pallet in my backyard that i have been trying to nail some boards into for like.. ever. Finally today I went down to the garage and got some nails, Vim’s nails ie not ones i would ever have bought or chosen to use, and they were too big and i couldn’t nail them in and the boards split and WTF. really, it’s just like 3 boards that need to get nailed! I decided to give up and ask Vim to do it. Now it is almost 6pm and i am finishing up my coffee from this morning. SMRT.

Do you like how i go from not posting at all to rampant posting about stuff no one gives a crap about? me too! Whee!

oh, one more thing. I am feeling proud of myself for not getting involved in someone else’s drama. I ALMOST let my self enter but this time I actually stopped and thought about how if I entered at all i would get sucked in and stressed out. So i stepped away even though it was kind of hard. I did my time and now it is someone else’s turn.

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stairs against house, a photo by Minnibird on Flickr.

This first picture is basically what the front of our house looks like now except with a 4′ extension to the garage with the mudroom extended along with it. you can see that the stairs are up against the house, the main difference with the stairs is tha there is a 3′ landing that is required by city codes.

Our architect thinks that this configuration is totally heinous. He hates the mudroom and thinks that the stairs and 3′ landing next to the front bay windows are a travesty to all that is holy in victorian houses. Our house isn’t a fancy gingerbread victorian it’s more like a big bare farm house victorian.

This is closer to what he wants us to do:

Now, I think this is totally weird. WTF with the 6′ space between the front of the house and the new stairs? I have never seen a house with this configuration and to me the space between the house and stairs is weird. Like it will be a meeting place for spiders and muggers. It will be SUPER shady as to the left of it is a huge-ass tree that shades the steps. also, the front porch in this pic seems pointless and crappy. AND this configuration makes the mudroom essentially a large hallway and that really reduces usable space.

I like our mudroom being a mudroom rather than a useless hallway. the front door facing sideways and not facing front doesn’t seem really weird. Also, even if the stairs a pulled away from the bay windows people coming up the front door are still perfectly able to turn their head and look in the window. amiright?

I don’t know, man. Working this out is taking too long. I was counting on getting all this work to our house done this summer.

Our architect is being REALLY pushy and it’s making this so hard. It’s making me second guess my feelings about the stairs and the mudroom. The other annoying thing about this is that the whole point of all this construction is the damn foundation/workspace we need to get fixed up on the house. doing that triggers some codes about the front steps (which r termite ridden anyway) and also our truck wont fit in the current garage which is actually an ancient fucking carriage house. Anyway, it’s annoying that something that isn’t the main issue is ending up taking so damn long to figure out.

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So far our hole is only like 1.5 feet deep and it’s a total clusterfuck. There are tree roots as big around as Jack down there and a sawzall only goes so far.

Freaking out. Pissed that digging a hole has to be so hard. Stretched VERY VERY thin right now. Have cooking I need to get done today or it will be too late. plus a meeting at 4 and a website i was supposed to have done last sunday.

fuck.it.

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I thought it might be annoying to not have a shower in the upstairs bathroom but it is actually very nice. having to have one of those giant all the way around shower curtains up there would just make the room seem cluttered and small. Now I can lie fully submerged in a giant claw foot tub (horribly painted gold on the outside and leaks) and that is nice.

I’ve been to Ikea about 40 million times and each time I buy more curtains and still I do not have enough curtains. Today I bought white velvet curtains. I don’t know what possessed me. Maybe I’ll take them back.

We just put our 10 foot old library table in my craft room as well as Vim’s old tool cart to be my cutting table as it is the perfect height for me. Vger is also camped in there. She’s getting much better at moving from craft room to my room to jacks room. She still cant make it down the stairs on her own but if I bring her down here she will sit on the couch with us to watch bad TV on netflix.

The kitchen floor turned out very nice and I want to take a picture of it but I swear the counter has not been clear of crap long enough for me to take a decent one. I can’t find the camera to computer connecter cord anyway.

I want to hang up all my paintings and prints and stuff!

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I like roses but I also feel like I want to get rid of them. They are so old and knobby that they are ugly. I can tell they were box pruned for like years and years.

Today I am losing my shit just a little bit. Lately I have felt like I am juggling too many things. It’s like the fucking temple of doom around here. If I forget one small well orchestrated thing the scythe will swing down and cut my head off. I skipped class today because the thought of sitting in class for 6 hours while I thought about all the other things I needed to be doing and then having to leave class and carefully orchestrate picking up jack with having to wait for vim to get home so that I can dash off to my meeting in the city made me freak out last night. I’m still freaking out.

Nothing is unpacked. I haven’t showered or washed my hair in like a week. The plumbers have been here for 2 days straight. i need to finish my leaf project. I need ot pick up my prescription because I haven’t taken my meds in over a week. <– obviously this is contributing to me losing my shit. BAD BAD OH SO BAD.

I still need to find a palmately divided leaf. I think I my have to just go to a nursery. WHEN will I do that?!

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Our absurd first time home owner dreams of waiting to move in to our new house until the renovations were complete were totaly horse shit as I’m sure season home owners knew. As if we could plan and coordinate like 4 million contractors all in 1.5 months. WTH? No. Basically we have compromised by getting most of the floor resurfaced and hardwood put into the kitchen. The LEAST crucial of any of the renovations but the easiest one to deal with.

We also didn’t realize how much we would want, nay, NEED to move in immediately. I love my new house.

As soon as the floors are all done we will hire some movers and whisk ourselves in there.

One of the weird things about the house is that the apartment building next door is like RIGHT THERE. It’s like 2 feet away and so you can hear people talking in their parking area or along the hallways and it sounds like they are in your house. So that’s kinda creepy. New insulated windows is the answer. also, privacy film.

BEFORE:

IN-PROGRESS

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I’m finding it difficult to get rid of anything. I have created a pile of ‘baby toys’ that I think can be separated out and either gotten rid of or stored away for a possible second baby. I have one bag of toys that I no longer want or are too gross to be played with any longer.

Toy categories:
puzzles and matching games
books
building – building blocks, alaphabet blocks, legos, bristle blocks, tinker toys
people and animals
vehicles – large and small
beads and lacing cards
tools
stuffed animals
dolls – doll clothes
structures – house, airport, train table
art supplies, paint, stamps, paper, playdoh, glue, scissors, crayons, markers
outdoor toys – balls, garden toys, sand toys, hula hoop, swords, bat
play kitchen – play food, utensils, pots and pans
misc.

These foul Montessori kids apparently put all their toys away when done AND while playing keep all their toys in one small area on a special play mat. Cleraly I need to go to IKEA to buy containers and some small mats. IKEA is always the right answer. They have hotdogs!

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In other news… I am CRUSHED. Our short sale house that we have been waiting for for like 5 months is mostly likely NOT going to happen. I feel like, for all this time I have been in a holding pattern. We didn’t make any travel plans, I didn’t bother organizing because why bother when you are moving into a new space that will have to be organized all over again. I didn’t buy a serger.

My dream of chickens and a clothes line is DASHED I say.

I’m depressed. I really loved that house. It was big, had nice light, a big yard and had a shoe store and a comic book store in sight from the living room window.

The house is not absolutely 100% gone. But it is very unlikely the seller will be able to do what the bank wants in order for the short sale to go through. Which means it would then go to foreclosure like 6 months from now and all the foreclosure vultures would pounce on it and we wouldn’t stand a chance.

OMG. Back to square one. Looking for a house in this area is CRAP.

So anyway. now that my dreams in that area are dashed maybe we should say fuck it and go to Maui for 2 weeks.

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A kid with a pail at the beach is always cute. I’m so glad we went yesterday because it is pouring rain today.

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The Lion the Witch and the Carseat. ahahahahaha. Via Free Range Kids. All these alternate kids book names are so good!

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I’m dying for a house but am trying to fight it as a totally irrational thing. I know myself well enough to recognize a little bit of that, “if i just have/do/see/remember this ONE THING then everything will fall into place. But damn! I want a house!

The other day I wanted to put my legs up the wall in a yoga pose and realized there there is no where for me to do that. An open floor plan means you lack wall space. I could have done it in the bathroom probably, I guess.

Cross your fingers for us.

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Besides the ukelele I have a few more plans for the new year. One is to start entering all books read into library thing. I wasted too much time rereading crappy old comfort books in 2009. So far this year I have read the Magic’s Child trilogy, The Thirty-Nine Steps and The heart of the Mirage and one other book I can’t remember already and forgot to enter into library thing.

I also am going to attempt to be slightly (<- note the vote of confidence here...) less of a flake. i.e. check my voice mail, respond to emails and phone calls in a timely fashion. (<-already a giant FAIL)

I'm off later this week to visit my parents with Jack. I'm not too worried about the plane trip. I'll have my laptop and Peep and the Big Wide World to entertain jack plus a new Richard Scary book. I have a crappy mystery novel and some Philipa Gregory shlock. I'm obessesing about packing as usual.

Oh the other thing I decided to do was enter all the food I am eating into The Daily Plate just so that I could see what the hell I am eating. One day, weirdly, like all my calories were from milk and kalamata olives. I was being pretty careful about my food intake until one day when I was hungry and said fuck it and ate a slice of pizza. I then proceeded to eat 2 candy bars and a bottle of wine and then stopped entering shit into the Daily Plate. Hmmm. Something is wrong here!

I need to get back to entering food. It's very interesting but kind of a pain in the arse.

That effing pacifier is going the way of the dodo on our vacation. I’m inspired by the twinkles experience. My favorite 70′s child rearing book recommends that you not bother taking away a kids comfort items as clearly they get over it themselves eventually. but I hate seeing him with it in unless he is sleeping.

I think I will go clean my craft studio. Imma gonna take some pictures so that I can horrify you all later.

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We bid on a house like a month or more ago and now our offer has maybe been accepted which, everyone tells me means NOTHING on a short sale. It’s all dire predictions and projected hassle. But WHAT ISN’T? I ask you….

The house is OLD. The bathrooms are a bit weird. Water pressure? Who knows. Foundation? Needs to be replaced pronto.

But, the house is cute and big for around here. It has lovely heard wood floors with inlay, a secret passage, and an updated and not hideous kitchen.

You would not believe the weird ass houses we have looked at. all the decent sized ones have been turned into janky duplexes. which makes sense because the only way people could afford their massive mortgages was to rent out 550 sq ft as a crappy basement apartment.

Anyway, I’m nervous. Real estate around here is scary and I don’t really get half of what is going on. I would love to have that house despite some of the things that are weird about. We could make a nice and cozy home out of it.

Although last week I started fretting about where I would put all my books. I need a book solution that is not getting rid of all of them and that is not cluttery and ugly looking. I am trolling blogs and magazines for ideas.

Also, the price is on the higher end for us. it’s a great house. but it would be sucky to have a stressful mortgage. i don’t want us to be overly stressed…

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None of that sounds horrible, in fact, I am living in a slackers paradise. I get some shit done occasionally and Jack and I pretend to be giants, or play train station. What’s not to love?

I FINALLY made a new pair of spats. It took me forever because in between sewing a seam I would have to field calls from our real estate agent and stress about this house which I am STRESSED about. why why why did someone else have to bid on it? it was on the market for a YEAR. All caps, take me away! Why did we bid 5000$ less? It makes NO SENSE.

Back to the spats. They are a new design. instead of buttoning up the side they zip up the back. I learned a few things while making this pair, mostly that I need to cut the spats taller.

In the above picture you can see my newly altered boots. I have lamented in the past that my calves are too big for standard boots. I bought these platform CECE Fluevog boots on ebay and I took them to my local cobbler and I asked him to make them fit me. I was thinking something like an elastic panel but he said no no we will put in a leather panel to match the rest of the boot. And he did! It worked beautifully and I am so happy! SO! If you have wide calves and are looking for boots to fit you should buy any old boot and then get them altered.

In other crafty news I have made a few bags and zippered pouches. Nothing exceptional. I also am in the process of making some cute cloth napkins with the on sale Moda fabric that I bought a few weeks ago. Now what to do with them? Christmas gifts?

Speaking of Christmas. I am doing Handmade Holidays this year for mostly everything except some toys for Jack that I can’t make. He needs a kitchen set, more toy tools, a dollhouse and a guitar.

Other Stuff
– Best plants to plant in fall if you live here in the western US from Sunset Mag.
– Also for if you live here in the Bay Area, Grant writing workshops and other workshops for artists! Check out the Foundation Center.
– And somewhat randomly… Vim and I have been watching the show Connections, which was filmed in around 1978, which is awesome for several reasons.
1. you can pretty much endlessly make fun of the outfit that James Burke is wearing.
2. It has that soothing quality that makes me fall asleep just like Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.
3. It’s very interesting to see all the amazing connections and how pretty much anything that happened in anytime leads up to an atomic bomb. Last nights episode had some great facts about pike warfare an the pike square that I really enjoyed. I always like nerdy battle formation info. We are getting the episodes from Netflix.

From Wikipedia:

It (Connections) took an interdisciplinary approach to the history of science and invention and demonstrates how various discoveries, scientific achievements, and historical world events built off one another in an interconnected way to bring about particular aspects of modern technology.

Here is Jack looking casual but dapper at the wedding this weekend:

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The house we bid on got another offer that is supposedly better than ours but still the bank hasn’t appointed anyone to look them over. We counter offered at slightly less than the other bid… So we will see. It’s at the upper limit of our price range AND needs a new foundation.

Jack is in love with Zombiegrrl’s baby who is one year younger. He has been talking about him nonstop. Thank goodness they got to hang out for a few days or I think Jack would have exploded.

I HAVE been doing some crafting but mostly I’ve been working on some stuff in Adobe Flex. It’s fun but hard since don’t know it really. I’m learning and I need to go out and get a book instead of depending on Vim to help.

I think I’ll post my crafting exploits in another post.

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I want a Rhode Island Red, at least one!

Check out this hilarious backyard chicken coop hat is disguised as a trashcan

I also like this movable chicken coop from My Backyard Chicken Farm.

GreenFoot has an article about a chook dome that you can make yourself from pretty cheap hardware store materials. This is the one I would want I think.

I’m pretty sure in Oakland and Berkeley you can have backyard chickens. I’m not sure if it changes by neighborhood though!

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On Friday we put in our first offer on a house and then waited around all Friday and Saturday to find out if it was accepted. By Saturday I was a ball of nervous and then I ate a cupcake and a half and we left to go fly kites. I had a massive sugar crash on an empty stomach and I though my head was going to explode with anger while I was driving around dealing with asshats on the road. I was muttering horrible things under my breath and wanting to rip my hair out.

A sandwich and a glass of wine later I felt much better but it was COLD over there in the far away land of Ocean Beach and Jack, while delighted to be flying kites, was also being a 2 year old and refusing to let anyone help him hold the ladybug kite in the gale force winds. I check my iPhone every 2 seconds to see if there was a call form our agent. Finally I broke down and sent him a panicked email. When we got home there was an email from him saying we didn’t get it because two cash offers beat us out.

I’m nightmaring about it now becasue I didn’t write a letter to the seller. Why didn’t I?!? GOD! Surely a seller would sell to a nice family that wanted to live there instead of a bunch of ass breathe contractors who are just going to flip it?! surely? I hate people.

Last night in my nightmare I snuck into the empty house and went out the back door and peeked though the fence and saw a beautiful wood with a playground for toddlers and a cluster of moms, all of them oddly looking like Sosuke’s mom from Ponyo, gathering around. But then I heard people enter the house and so I ran back in and tried to sneak out another door.

Now the other house we liked seems inadequate. It’s all shiney and new and I like old and decrepit better.
It has good things about it:
3 full baths, enclosed back and front yards, nice light, master bathroom kicks ass.

bad things: the person who finished it used some cheap materials. all the doors are cheap and so is the upstairs kids bathtub. It has nice bamboo floors but they were put in wrong so they squeak a bit.

*sigh*

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This morning before my coffee Jack stabbed me in the eye with a fork. Thank god it was one of those little kid forks.

We looked at bunch of open houses over the weekend. There were two we we were interested in but they are very different.

One is someone else’s remodel project. It’s pretty much done although I think they may have finished it off with shoddy doors and a crappily put in bamboo floor. It’s pretty big for the area with a big yard great for a garden and we can afford it.

The other one is HUGE for the area and wicked cheap due to the fact that it is a fixer. It’s old and has hilarious wallpaper in every room and all of it is peeling and needs replacing. It would be big project but it would be very gorgeous when fixed up a bit.

Reading disclosures and such is a bit stressful. It seems like so much stuff to deal with and then there are all the special taxes. How does one keep it all straight? Find contractors? Decide what to do first? Get a home improvement loan?

Do I want to move in to an easy already done house? Or do I want to fix up an older house to my own specifications? Or do I want to keep looking?

Jack’s imagination is killing me lately it’ so cute. He pretends to be a bear or a shark or a dragon. If he sees a picture of something he pretends to pick up the thing in the picture and do stuff with it. He pretends to be plane and his animals and dolls are having more complicated conversations around everyday activities like cooking or going to bed.

We play a ton of ‘sharing, standing in line, waiting, taking turns, no pushing’ games. I need to add in there ‘no grabbing toys from other kids’ games. I think its working as in it is giving him a vocabulary for all these actions and possible avenues of dealing to chose from. I still haven’t really figured out a consistent (or at all) ‘time out’ or other punishment type thing to do.

I shall leave you with this picture of Jack with a dune surf board.

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Now I need a house so that I can wallpaper it and then like 2 years later wonder what the fuck I was thinking.

When my mom was here recently she gave me endless shit (hi mom!) about how I do not look my age, i.e. all I wear are ratty old jeans and threadless t-shirts and it makes me, along with the acne and pink hair, look 20. THEN, earlier this week I went to see my dermatologist who I have only seen once before and at one point she causally says “so I imagine kids aren’t in your immediate future” and I say ” yeah well, one is enough”. and she does a double take and asks me how old I am and I say 35 and she says “you are SHITTING me, I thought you were 19.?!” and then I was all embarrassed.

I feel like I have been all through this before. I ask you, what else does one wear when all one does is grub around all day with a 2 year old? It’s not like I am meeting the girls for tennis and cocktails at the country club ffs. When I had a desk job I dressed slightly more nicely… although actually it went in phases.

All of this makes me have hives. On the one hand I do not give a rats ass what people think I look like. On the other hand, I like to be cute to the best of my ability. However, I am NOT going to put in a huge amount of effort see point A, not caring what you think. I think shows like ‘What not to wear” are horrendous. They take a perfectly normal looking person, tell them they are dumb, ugly and horrible and then buy them some generic outfits from the GAP or -insert other mall store here- and then tell them they are okay only if they spend a lot of money on clothes and waste tons of time, effort and mental energy making sure they look like other assholes on TV.

On the other hand, I love to go shopping and certainly don’t turn my nose up at mall stores. I like GAP jeans AND I like generic looking sweater sets from the Limited. So there you have it. I’m humped.

Also, I want these hilarious black and white boots. I would totally buy them if they didn;t have those crappy too high wedge heels. I’ll have to make myself some spats instead.

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Jack learned how to climb out his crib yesterday. I put him down and like 15 minutes later he ran up to me in the kitchen and I just about peed myself. He was SO PLEASED with himself. I was less pleased, “We are humped”, I thought. However, I did not react to it. i just let him have a snack and then put him back in. Then a few minutes later I heard a noise and peeked over and say him beetle across his room holding his toy mailbox. I deposited him back in his crib and he fell asleep.

So yesterday Vim took the side rail off his crib. It’s still higher than a normal bed but he can get in with a step. Of course that meant we had to baby gate his room again since it has no door. He LOVES it. Also, he can open the damn baby gate… I’m not sure what to do about that. This morning he got himself up, opened the baby gate and was hanging out downstairs when we got up. He napped himself this afternoon and he keeps screaming, “MY WROOOOM”. Just now he said he was fweepy and went and got in his bed and I can hear him in there talking to himself. SO CUTE. OMG.

Somehow the day I turned 35 I started thinking about having another kid. I had just been discussing it with a mom friend and we’ve been watching our other friends have their second ones. It sure looks hard. Now as we are house hunting I am evaluating each house for it’s potential to hold another kiddlet. Did anyone have to share a room when they were a kid? I didn’t and would have hated it if I had had to so I don’t want to make my kids do it. But at the same time I want to have a craft room and we live in the bay area where an average 2 bedroom 1 bath costs over 500k.

We looked at 3 open houses today, all very different.

First was a super cute craftsman with original details, 1200+ sq. ft., 2/1, garage and long driveway, deck, smallish yard, quiet cute street, near a huge lot that will be a park at some point fairly soon. It would need a bed/bath addition at some point. 547k

Second was 3/2, 1500+ sq ft., small rooms, ugly ass finishes, yard was weird but could end up okay with some tweaking, on a busier road, tiny horrid kitchen. 500k

Third was ultra modern house in small complex of houses. great finishes, great light, small rooms, 3/2.5, yard was cute but no privacy, was staged in a modern uncluttered way causing me and Vim to both wonder if we need so much stuff and if maybe we should magically morph ourselves in to the sort of high powered business people in power suits with no bookshelves who might own such a house. Vim really loved it. I liked it but felt distinctly uneasy as I knew the house could see through me into my cluttered, book, craft supply loving soul. 590k

I liked House One the most. Cute craftsman details are teh awesome even though it is only a 2/1. All we need to do is add a master bedroom and bath, I’m pretty sure there would be room and we could do our best not to make it janky. It would be a nice place to grow up.

My shoulder has gone mysteriously from bad to worse. I have a chiropractor appointment on Monday. OMG. Also, I have guests coming over and I totally forgot about my appointment. shit. 3 Tylenol PMs at night does the trick.

We survived our camping trip. Vim and I are still married and Jack is unscathed. It was all pretty fun except for the normal stress of traveing witha toddler. Jack was perfect on the plane ride out and only a bit of a pill due to tiredness on the way back. He handled the 4 hour car trip to the camp site like a dream. Lake Michigan was beautiful, the weather was perfect and Vim’s family took care of us with all camping eq, stuff for toddler, food etc. I would def. go back. Jack was the only baby and so he got lots of attention and he was happy and friendly the whole time except for one rough patch the first night in the tent when he cried for like an hour.

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But it’s getting close! It’s too hot up in the bedroom during the day to get anything done up there! I swear, that is the truth. It’s not that I am a lazy git and have lost focus that the project is not done…

The small photo is the original disaster area.

Next you can see I have made some small improvements. Two shoe shelves units stacked keeps my shoes all in one place. Before they were just all over the place.

I got rid of so many clothes! Many many bags have gone to Goodwill over the last couple of weeks. I’m so I’m so impressed with myself! So now the two small shelves have a box with purses in it and some pants and sweaters and some folded skirts (not sure why the skirts). Maybe I need to look at the skirts and decide if I want to keep them. I think they are there because I ran out of skirt hangers. then the top shelves have a few larger pairs of shoes, a box of hats, a box of bathing suits, some luggage and some pants tht don’t fit but BETTER FIT SOON, if you know what I mean.

the Blue chest of drawers has bras, slips, socks and hose, and tank tops and gloves. I added another rack of knobs to hang stuff on in between the drawers and shelves. Handy!

Still. the closet is more useful but still boring… hmmm.

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I keep trying to remind my brain that we are doing the best we can at the moment. That messy doesn’t matter that much. That it will get better. That I am making small progress everyday.

But it’s NOT working! I am still enraged.I feel like I can’t keep up. I can’t get rid of shit fast enough. I can’t organize the shit we do have.I’ve been fretting about this for like a year now. I started slowly doing crap reduction on the theory that once I have less crap it will be easier to get organized… This is clearly not working out for me and it’s time to change tactics.

This morning as I emptied the dishwasher I realized that the way our kitchen shelves is set is is fucking stupid and makes no sense and that it contributes to our never ending kitchen chaos. Basically, when I open the dishwasher to put the dishes away I CAN NOT reach where they go. Pretty obviously a problem, eh?

I mean, I understand the principles of organizing, at least, I think I do…

Have all the items you use most often in accessible positions that work this the flow of your daily activities. Er… okay that’s the only thing I can think of. What am I missing?

My friend G. has said she will help me reorganize, possibly this Monday. I am going to take some before pictures detailing the stupidity and then I will take after pictures showing improvements! I’m excited. And scared.

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