Talk About Moving

Whoa! Where am I???

You can find me at my new blogging home, LazyOrganizer.com/blog. I haven't finished unpacking yet (are you surprised?) but it already feels like home. If you want to bring a housewarming gift I could really use a new heavy duty blender for my green drinks. Or you could just bring your TAT link. See you there!

Sweet Dreams

We spent the day Thursday at Roy pool with my Aunt and my two little cousins that are closer to my kids' ages than mine. Since the boys were going to Scout camp the girls invited Persistence and Lovely over for a slumber party that night. It's not often that little three year old Lovely gets invited to do fun things with the "kids" as she calls them. They both had a great time and I had great dreams of what I would accomplish on Friday: reading, working, organizing, napping, you name it.

The reality with a two month old Sweetness was that I got about two solid hours to myself before the girls came home at 2:30 in the afternoon. Waaaay too early if you ask me! In fact I was 5 minutes into a nap when they walked in the door with their fists full of artwork and home made lip gloss.

The good news is that my Lovely little terror is going on a trip with her Grandma this week and will be gone for three whole days. Did you just get butterflies in your stomach? I did!!!

Now that I know the realities of my situation I can plan on getting about 9 hours of work done in that time if I'm lucky. With a little help from my Persistent babysitter and a lot of ignoring of my other three children it may be more so here's what I have planned. I'm going to paint the kitchen island that is coming up on it's one year anniversary and really deserves to get prettied up for it. And I'm going to at least get started on a blessing dress for Sweetness. (BTW Stranger, did I mention we were going to be blessing her in two weeks when my family is here?)

Wish me luck!

Lock Your Doors People

If you own a house/hotel/condo and you ever see the Gallaghers coming do not answer your door and run the other way as fast as you can. Even if they look like nice people and they are friendly and have a valid credit card. They might seem harmless but they are home wreckers.

• If you rent your condo to them...


• They will plug your (broken before they got there) toilet and flood the bathroom.


• As a bonus the condo beneath you will also receive extensive water damage that you will have to pay for.


• Then they will fix your (broken before they got there) toilet (because they kind of needed to use it) you will be upset that they didn't wait till the plumber could look at it.


• Jerks.


• Old people will run screaming from your pool because they (the kids) were rude enough to get in the water and, I don't know, swim and splash.


• The nerve.


• When you buy a brand new purple couch please do not invite them over to see it.


• Because their two year old daughter will like it so much that she will pee all over it.


• Do not ever ask them to house sit for you while they are building their house.
  


• They will (in spite of their Mother's warnings) run down the hall, out the sliding door and onto the trampoline.


• They will have lots of fun doing this until one of them decides to see how funny it will be if he closes the screen door when it's sister's turn to go.


• It's too bad she is such a fast and hard runner.


• Too bad for her and the screen door.


• They will turn on your central humidifier.


• You know those dry Utah winters?


• And yes, flood your basement.


• Maybe you should have told them your humidifier has been broken for 27 years.


• That would have been nice.


• Just to be kind they will scrub the crap out of your toilet before they leave.


• Literally.


• With your scrubber that they didn't realize looks more like a barbed wire fence than a toilet brush.


• But I'm sure you won't have trouble finding a another pink toilet exactly like it in this decade.


• Just so you know, when you get that new toilet, you might want to buy a new toilet brush as well.


• They will remove every last bit of dog hair from your carpet and take it home with them in their clothes.


• (Sorry about that.)


• But I'm sure you know where you can get more.


• Last but not least, they will "organize" everything in your home while they are there.


• If they thought you didn't need something anymore then you probably didn't.
  


• Just send them the bill for anything that's missing.


• They might have broken it and swept it under the couch cushions.


• Oh no, that was were they hid the melting cherry Popsicles.

Talk About Organizing

Welcome to Talk About Tuesday! If you are new, check out the Guidelines before posting.

I have a couple organizing projects to share today. Nothing too exciting. My pantry is always a challenge. People like to pile junk in there and I didn't keep up with it at the end of my pregnancy.

All clean!

It was hard to toss things I had once thought were valuable enough to spend money on. The first ten minutes osf sorting through clothing was like choosing which child of mine should live or die. Timothy Ferriss from the 4-Hour Workweek

I hear you! Reading The 4-Hour Workweek has inspired me to be even more ruthless when going through our things. I talked to the kids about it when we were in Sun Valley a couple weeks ago. What if we went home and got rid of everything that we couldn't take on a sailboat for a year? Doesn't that just give you chills? Imagine such a clutter-free home!

I started with the game, puzzle, toy cupboard. We just don't need all the stuff we had crammed in there. This is what it looked like before. It was organized but I wanted to get rid of at least half of it.

Much better! The kids always seemed to play with the same games over and over so why did we need it all? There are a few empty drawers now and I even had room for a couple board games that I had stashed in Victor's room. Normally I throw the boxes away and store the games in an Organizing Bag but with games like Scrabble it's easier to just keep it in the box. Especially when it's your husband's game and he would divorce you if you had your organizing way with it.

Speaking of Victor's room... This is the mess I hauled out of it a month ago. He and I finally went through it and got rid of most of it. He kept one small box of treasures and the rest we put in the garbage or the give away box. I can't tell you how wonderful it is to walk into his clean room every day! There is nothing to mess it up except clothes or books. The girls' room will be next.

Because of our lack of book shelves around here I took over the top shelf of his closet for my new Great Books collection that was previously homeless.

A note about my last post. I turned the comments off so everyone wouldn't feel like they had to comment on my pity party. Little did I know you all would email me instead! Thank you for all the kind, supporting words and offers to help! Please don't worry too much about me. I am feeling a bit depressed but it's not overwhelming so I'm handling it. Most of the time. I did get severely depressed after my second baby so I know what that can feel like. I promise I will talk to my doctor if it gets any worse.

In the mean time, let's have a great Tuesday!!!

*Important - Please link to your individual Talk About Tuesday post instead of your home page or else my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder will have to spend time fixing the links. Here is how you link to an individual post if you’ve never done it before: Right click on the date at the bottom of the post you want to link to (or the post title depending on where you blog) click “Copy Shortcut” and then paste it into Mr. Linky.

Depression

It's been coming on gradually. I've been fighting it off with exercise, organizing projects and inspiring books but today it got the better of me. I am trying to remember that these feelings won't last forever, that I don't really hate everyone I've ever met and that the world isn't such a horrible place to live.

Sweetness had a hard time settling down for her evening nap so I held her while we both cried. Then Lovely and I made chocolate chip cookies. Big ones. For some reason they didn't make everything all better.

How's that for a blogging come back?

Talk About New Ideas

Welcome to Talk About Tuesday! If you are new, check out the Guidelines before posting.

I have figured out what my Internet addiction is all about. I thought it was me being a lazy slacker but really it's all about my thirst for knowledge. I want to know everything! I have less of a desire to do everything but I do have that too. I have even less of a desire to know everyone. So that's what I've figured out. Some people are, in general, thinkers, some are doers and some are feel-ers (people persons). Did I miss anyone?



I am a thinker. Not because I'm smart. I just have a sincere desire to know everything there is to know about life, the universe and everything. The sad thing about this is I have a horrible memory so I can't remember what I read or thought about yesterday let alone last year. I may not be getting anywhere in my quest for knowledge but I'm treading water fast I tell you!

I'm not interested in trivial facts but I love new ideas. I am always thinking, "Why didn't I think of that before?" or "Why haven't I heard of that before?" Sometimes I feel like the universe is conspiring to keep things from me. There is obviously a lot of stuff out there that I need and want to know about. Why aren't people stopping me on the street, for instance, and telling me the easiest way to peel an egg? (It didn't work for me by the way.)

If I'm not reading a book, I'm on the Internet looking for new ideas. I was poking around last week and followed a link to TED. Now here's where I have to get mad at a bunch of you. Why haven't any of you told me about TED before??? It's a conspiracy I tell you! TED is everything I love about the Internet. I stayed up till 2:00 in the morning watching it and I watched more with my kids today.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

Here are some of my favorites so far:

A man brings mentors and students together in an amazingly creative way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaSF1gPBKrA

Another conspiracy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um5gMZcZWm0&feature=user

This talk has changed my life. Seriously. Getting what we want doesn't make us any happier than not getting what we want? One of the biggest problems in my life is that I try to control every little detail of it. Now that I know I know I will be happy no matter what happens I think I can finally go take a chill pill. Some things you know but you don't really know until you get slapped in the face with them. Hard.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTO_dZUvbJA


I can not rest until I have seen every single talk on TED.com. My new life's mission is to some day have an "Idea Worth Spreading".


*Important - Please link to your individual Talk About Tuesday post instead of your home page or else my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder will have to spend time fixing the links. Here is how you link to an individual post if you’ve never done it before: Right click on the date at the bottom of the post you want to link to (or the post title depending on where you blog) click “Copy Shortcut” and then paste it into Mr. Linky.

Move Along, There's Nothing To See Here

I have been dying to share this because it is so hysterical. I happened upon Mothering.com several weeks ago where some nice and some not so nice women were talking about me. I felt like such an evesdropper but it was fun. Here's a little of what they had to say about me. (You can find the entire thread here.)

I could find no post on organizing, just on her pregnancy...sorry not interested in that in the least.

True, there wasn't much organizing going on here two months ago but I think that should be allowed when you're nine months pregnant.

That is exactly what I was thinking! It really bugged me. That was a personal blog, not an organizing one.

In case anyone was wondering, this is a personal blog and I write about (almost) anything I dang well want to write about. I'm pretty sure that's still legal in this country.

I don't really get it..you should buy her bags so you can clutter your house with a bunch of hooks with bags of stuff in them?

You figured me out. This blog is all about trying to get you to buy more stuff so I can sell you my "weird" Organizing Bags to put it in. You can read more about my evil plan here, in this post, this one, and all of these. And when you're done don't forget to order more bags for all the stuff I talked you into buying.

P.S. Why did I post an unrelated picture of my baby in this post? Because I felt like it!

Education of a Wandering Family

I didn't start out liking the 4 Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss but I ended up loving it. Tim and I don't have much in common but one thing is certain. We are both independent spirits. Except that while he's traveling the world shark diving and cage fighting I'm at home washing my hair with baking soda and baking sour dough bread. So I'm getting the idea from his book that maybe I could step my dreams and aspirations up a notch. Especially for my kids' sake.

Last October I blogged about the fact that Stranger wants to move South of the border so our whole family can learn Spanish. Back then it was kind of a joke but it's not a joke anymore. We are going to do it! When? Oh in about three years. We need time to pack and to potty train Sister Sweetness and then we're off. After about a year of learning Spanish we're going to buy a sailboat and sail around the world for a year. Or maybe we'll do both at the same time. I wonder if our food storage will fit on the boat.

I've been bugging Stranger about quiting the railroad for some time now. It's a very secure job with great benefits and a crappy schedule. You'll never know how crappy until you've lived it. (On call 24/7 with 28 days off a year) But when I talk about him quitting he says, "But I get to run trains!" If you quit you get to sail a boat with your family! If he wants to run trains when we get home he could always buy a 40 mile railroad line with a spare 50 million dollars or so.

So we're going to do it. Next summer he's going to get his skippers license and all of us are going to get scuba certified. Then the next year we will spend 28 days on a sailboat for a practice run and the year after that we will be off on our great learning adventure. Stranger says we'll have an extra room on the boat for guests if you want to visit. Who wants to sign up to take care of our chickens while we're gone?

The only real question I have is this...Can we get intenet in the middle of the ocean?

When I was talking to a friend of mine about our plans she told me about a documentary she had just watched - A remarkable story of a conventional family of five living a very unconventional life afloat. They look like a bunch of lunatics to me but the ocean should be big enough for more.

Outsourcing

I've been learning about outsourcing in some of the business books I've been reading lately. Paying someone to do all the things in my business and life that I don't want to do? What's not to like about that? Now I just need to get Stranger on board.

Here's how things went down with our new snow mobile a couple months ago:

Him - "Momma, (yes, that's what he calls me) a guy at work is selling a snow mobile. Do you think we should get it?"

Me - "No. We don't need a snow mobile."

A month later Stranger notifies me that we have a "new" snow mobile outside.

Me - "I thought we decided we didn't need a snow mobile."

Him - "No, you decided we didn't need a snow mobile."

So we now have a snow mobile.

Here's how things went down with my new outsourcing project:

Me - "Daddy, (yes, that's what he makes me call him) Don't you think we should have someone come clean a couple hours a week so I have more time for other things?"

Him - "No. We don't need anyone to clean for us."

Two days later (today) I notify Stranger. "Oh by the way, someone is going to be here in 10 minutes to clean."

Him - "I thought we were going to talk about this first."

Me - "We are talking about it. In the mean time I thought we should have someone come to see how we like it."

Verdict? We (I) like it. (Imagine that.)

So we now have a cleaning lady.

Let's see ... what should I outsource next?