The Downstairs Playroom

We finally finished getting the great play room reorganization wrapped up.  I managed to weed out a few toys…not as many as I had hoped, but it’s a start and the drama and tragedy was kept to a minimum.  We now have a nice place for everyone to do their thing and as long as I stay on top of everyone, I am hoping we can keep it cleaned up and enjoyable.

We have all of the “play house” stuff along one wall with plenty of room to pull out the table and chairs to play kitchen.  It would be nice to keep it out, but this space is between the stairs and the rest of the basement, so everything gets tucked back in when we are done, so we don’t have to worry about tripping over stuff.

I found a chair and a loveseat at the thrift store, so there is a place to sit with a book and a blankie or a nice place for mommas to sit and chat now that we can actually have someone over for a playdate again without worrying about losing a child in the chaos.

And finally, the new shelves!  There is a bin for almost all of the rest of the toys, so there is a clear difference between put away and claiming to have picked up, but in fact thrown things any old place.  There are also shelves that are out of reach to some family members to make “Don’t take anything new out until you pick up the old mess” somewhat more enforceable.  The table is a good place for Lego building or art projects and there is enough floor space for trains or blocks and the like.

Although we are starting to get to the season of more outside time, it will be nice to have a welcoming space inside, especially in the cooler basement once the summer starts warming up!  Hopefully, I can remember to get some pictures of this space in action…

I am still puttering away at weeding out and organizing throughout the house, but the next big project to tackle is the downstairs bedroom.  If I can chip away at it, I am hoping to once again unearth the futon so we have a functional guest bedroom once more and get the rest of the space organized so I can have a welcoming place for crafting and creating.  The biggest obstacle is taming the clutter, so I just need to keep making progress on that…

Making changes

2011 appears to be declaring itself the year of home improvement.  With three kids, we are living in constant chaos and I feel like I go into cranky-mommy meltdown mode fairly regularly to try and restore some order.  There have been times in my life where home was basically a place to eat meals and fall asleep between hectic here-and-there-ing.  As a homeschooling mom, I am finding that we need our house to be a place that is more conducive to creating and learning and just plain old living.  I am reading Shelter for the Spirit:  How to Make you Home a Haven in a Hectic World by Victoria Moran.  This book was recommended in one of the sessions I went to at the homeschooling conference last spring and has turned out to be just the right book at the right time to make our space more livable.

Being in a rental, there are some things that just aren’t going to happen.  It makes no sense for us to invest time and money in making things more like we like them only to have nothing to show for them when we move out.  So, early last month, I went through our place, room by room to figure out what we need to live with and what changes we can make to make things work.  A few things clearly fall in the need-to-live-with category are the dishwasher and washing machine.  Each has significant personality issues and after several requests to the landlord are as fixed as they are going to get.  So if you could send a good word to the deity of your choice for them to die completely so the landlord HAS to do something, I would appreciate it.

So I have developed my big list which includes simplifying and reducing stuff where we can and getting the stuff we have better organized, as well as creating spaces for our living to happen.  There is also a whole category of things that I am doing to keep things that were a problem when we moved in from getting worse and quick and dirty cosmetic fixes I can do to make things look nicer.

So far, I have made a bit of progress in our upstairs bathroom and in the basement.  Most of the bathroom had crumbly caulk and clear evidence of mildew under the linoleum.  After fight the futility of trying to keep water inside the bathtub for too long, I finally got it fixed.  Really the lino needs to be replaced, with some work on the floorboards underneath, but I did the best I could to get everything sealed tight so we can have splashes without aggravating the problem.  We also finally replaced the light bulbs above the sink with CFLs.  The bulbs were gradually burning out and I didn’t feel the love for having two types of bulbs going on, so we waited until half of them were gone and then replaced them all.  It is now possible to see in the bathroom again.  Very exciting stuff.  Since I have my fancy pants white caulk, I will probably go in and recaulk the sink just so it looks better at some point, too.

The basement has also been getting my attention.  We spent the better part of a weekend planning out shelves.  We currently have a mish-mash of shelves and storage containers and have accumulated just too many toys.  So the first job was upgrading storage.  Since we don’t expect to be in this place forever, we decided that it made more sense to go with something modular that can be taken apart to be moved or to be repurposed.  We have some of these shelves in the garage, so we spent a weekend planning out how many and what size of shelves we wanted and had our pantry shelves put up a couple of days later.  Now I have a good place for canning supplies and equipment, as well as a place to keep the full jars.

We also mapped out shelves for the play area, but the end pieces had to be special ordered, so we didn’t get them until just last weekend.  I have been working on them since.  Putting the parts together is easy.  The shelves themselves, however are a bit fiddly.  The narrower shelves above only needed a chunk about 1” x 1/8” taken off the sides at both the front and back edge.  After having done the ones in the garage, I have gotten pretty good at whacking out what I need to with the Dremel.  And the pantry shelves have only two shelves with a grand total of eight corners, so it went pretty quickly.  However, the shelves for the toy area are taking longer.  For the wider shelves, the premade shelves we are using are a bit too wide, so in addition to the four corners, I also have to take 15/16” of the long edge.  I wish I lived closer to family members who have a table saw or a radial arm saw, but I have gotten pretty handy with my Skil saw, so I am working away.  The other part that is taking much longer is that there are seven shelves, so that means sawing off seven edges and shaping twenty-eight freakin’ corners.  I finished four of the shelves today.  The bad news, however, is the reward for finishing the other three is that the next job is going through all the toys and getting rid of everything that is broken and winnowing down things that don’t get played with.  It is very likely to be not pretty as neither Bug nor Bean parts easily with belonging.

I am once again hoping to get back into the habit of blogging, but I’ve made that promise before, so don’t hold your breath!

Finally finding a kitchen system

Making grocery lists and planning meals have long been a bane of my existence.  I have A LOT of trouble finding the mojo to sit down and plan a week’s worth of meals, especially doing so the evening before I might actually have a chance to get to the grocery store during a part of the day when the kids aren’t completely tired and acting that way.  For a couple of years now I have been compiling a binder of recipes we use and like so I can flip through it for ideas rather than dragging out a bunch of cookbooks.  Also having my own copies makes it easier to make out a grocery list as some cookbooks have some of ingredients tucked into the instructions, which I never discover until I am standing in the kitchen, knee-deep in prep.  I have a standard format for my binder, so I can find ingredients or prep time in the same place for every recipe.  More recently, I have been experimenting with ways of listing out meals so I can remember what I have ingredients for.  I rarely plan out which meal for which day, but I may make a note that a particularly quick meal would be good for say, Wednesday, when we have park day in the later afternoon and I don’t have a lot of time to get supper together.  I also like to have notes to myself with reminders of things that need to be defrosted (e.g., big ol’ pork roast) or that need some attention first thing in the morning (e.g. crockpot).

While this system has been better than panicking nightly when it is time to start supper there were still a couple of big obstacles.  First, I was having trouble making the list of of odds and ends that come up during the week mesh with the list I sit down and prepare before doing groceries.  Second, I wasn’t very consistent with checking the meal plan list to actually notice the reminders for night before or early that morning jobs.  Nothing like discovering that the only meal that you have ingredients for is a crock pot meal and it is just an hour until dinner.  Third, I rarely get everything we need in one place.  Now that we are in summer, I get my pastured meat and eggs from a nearby farm, my veggies from our CSA on Thursday, other veggies from the local Farmers’ Market on Friday, milk from the mystical milk fairy on Thursday.  Occasionally, I need to run up to the Fitchburg Farmers’ Market if I need pastured lamb.  Several time throughout the summer, we go berrying (strawberries in June, blueberries in July, raspberries in August or early September) or pick up canning quantities from either the CSA market or the local Farmers’ Market.  So…complications combined with the attention span of a fruit fly…not pretty!

There have been two recent additions to my method of madness that seem to fill in the missing pieces.  First, a homeschooling mama at park day said something about using dry erase markers directly on the refrigerator.  Genius.  My dinky dry-erase board wasn’t doing the job, but a big space…

I can list out what is in the crisper drawers from the CSA so I don’t have to go digging.  Upcoming meals are easy to see.  I can make lists of other kitchen business.  The notes in red were items stuck in the upstairs freezer without labels when I finished a roll of masking tape and discovered that we didn’t have anymore (Ms. Bean, the artiste, goes through a LOT of tape these days).  Once I got the tape, I got the jars labeled and in the deep freeze.  I have made notes with cookbook pages for recipes.  Plenty of room for everything I need to remember and easy to wipe off when I don’t need it anymore.

The second element is ZipList in conjunction with my iPod touch.  Since I can no longer live without my iPod, it is always close at hand, so I can add a couple of items to my list as I am standing in front of the fridge.  I can add other things when they occur to me.  Plus, ZipList has all sorts of neat tricks.  List items can be assigned to stores (Co-op vs. Pick-n-Save) and aisle order can be set up for each store so the list appears in the order you go through the store.  There are a few minor kinks that I am sorting out and or getting used to…for example, the last time I added ‘hot dog buns’ to the list, the default aisle was pet supplies.  I am also still working on getting the aisles in order for the stores I use.  Plus getting used to how it works and where things are.  But, I think it will be a workable system in the long run.

Women's Work

So, of what is women's work comprised? Well for one thing: making things with power tools. This is the fourth shelf of this size I've put together. It's made of three 1"x6"x4' aspen boards. One goes under the Skil Saw to become the two vertical boards and they are dowel joined using a doweling thing-a-ma-bob (Hey, I got the carpenter talk down pat for when things go wrong, I don't have to mess with the other vocabulary). All in all, pretty slick!

Here is one of the previous shelves in service:

And the big kahuna shelf:

This bad boy started out as five 3/4"x12"x6' edge-glued pine boards. It still needs some kind of back for cross-bracing. The little ones are pretty stable as is, but this one is taller and heavier and tends to prefer parallelogram to rectangle. With a load of books, things could get ugly pretty quickly.

The new shelves are a result of a desperate attempt to get organized. It's going slow, but yesterday, I unpacked 1.5 boxes of kids books that have been in one box or another since 1987 and a half a box of books that have been packed since we left Iowa City in 2005. At this rate, I should be in great shape right about 2025 or so.

Spring Cleaning

Whoa! How did it get so dusty and cobwebby around here? I hope the chirping crickets have kept you company while I was away.

Of course, away is figurative. We have been here doing much of the same-old same-old. I figured I had finally better pop in and get back in the blogging groove (well, if not in, at least near...will being on the same landmass be close enough? same planet?). At least we are finally getting someplace close to being adjusted to daylight savings time. Clearly a flexible, roll-with-the-punches kind of crowd. Anyhoo. What have we been doing?

Knitting, of course. Lots o' stuff happening, but not a lot to show for it. The only finished objects that I haven't blogged about is a wonky little hat for the Beeb (in Peace Fleece that coordinates with his blue longies and mitts) and the February dishcloth from the Sow's Ear Dish-Cloth-Along. Then I missed March's due to a crabby mood and an illuminated engine light on the van (which has since been fixed). The close, but no cigar pile is immense right now. The third market bag is very close...just a couple more rows and then working the handles in and doing the top edge. The first Raspberry Charade sock is getting close...about 10 gram of yarn left on the leg and cuff. Bug's and Bean's hats are also almost done. Bean's is technically done, but they eyes keep falling off and Bug only has the tail, fins, and eyes left.

Spinning. I have finally been spinning again, semi-regularly. Perhaps quasi-regularly would be more accurate. Last August was my last "Spin my Spindle" check in, so I'll update since then.

Spin My Spindle
	September 2008		February 2009
Activity:	Spinning	Plying	Spinning
Fiber:	Targhee	Targhee	Targhee
Spindle:	Schacht 3"	Ashford	Schacht 3"
Amount:	9 grams	25 grams	5 grams

That is actually more spinning than it looks like. I have been spinning the Targhee quite fine and the singles are about 9 yards (27 feet) per gram. So I'm lucky if I can get through a gram or two at a time. Plus, having put it down for a while, I just don't think to pick it up sometimes.

Planting and thinking about planting. Our Fast Plants are going great guns...going to seed already! The gory details are here. The kids and I have been reading about plants and pollination and all that a lot a bedtime. We are also working on planning a small garden in our yard. We're going to grow some beets for pickling, carrots, radishes, onions, and maybe garlic for cooking and eating and freezing, herbs, and lots of tomatoes. We are also planning to put a couple of pumpkin vines in the landscaping rock beside the house so they can spread without taking over the whole garden and lawn! We are also deciding what to do for a CSA this year too. We did JenEhr last summer and loved it, but are thinking about trying something a little bit closer to us. With the kids, I really like the idea of driving to a farm to pick up rather than to someone's garage and I know there are some closer to Stoughton. However, the drive to JenEhr was just stunning, so I wouldn't be completely opposed to sticking with them. The local CSA open house is next weekend, so hopefully we will be deciding soon.

Organizing. Still chipping away at the chaos that has accumulated with three move and three small ones over four years. I have finally made headway with my recipes. I had started a three-ring binder to organize recipes I had typed up, but fell sadly behind and had to dig through folders and files and other piles of crap to find recipes I was looking for. I finally tamed the piles, printed out things that I had on my computer but not in my binder and have started formatting and printing other things that I want in my binder (goes pretty quick with recipes copied from the internet and a scanner with OCR!). I just do a couple at a time out of that folder and eventually will be caught up. I am also planning on sorting the other piles of recipes by type in an expanding folder, so I have a place to go looking when I need inspiration.

We found out that we have guests coming in early May, so there is some additional inspiration to get my studio/the guestroom organized. We also need to get loft beds built for the bigger two so we can move the old futon down to the guest room, so there is an actual place for them to sleep!

Missing out. A certain knitting celebrity was in town for the Madison Knitters' Guild annual knit-in. I did the responsible thing and stuck to the budget rather than dropping everything and signing up. I'm clearly an idiot. Rumor has it that it was even cooler than I imagined. Damn you, recession and fiscal responsibility...

Cuz we all know the best way to get malingering projects off the WIP list...

is to work on completely unrelated items, right???



Okay, it isn't quite as impressive as it looks. I started this sweater for Bean in 2005 and made a matching green one for Bug. I finished Bug's sweater, but not easily. I had to reknit both sleeves as they were VERY short and finishing has never been my favorite activity, so by the time I finished the green sweater, I was so sick of the project that I couldn't face the pieces of this one. Eventually, the pieces wound up stuffed in with about twelve mile of leftover heather green and dusty rose wool-ease and I ran across them not long ago while organizing my stash, taking pictures of yarn, and updating my Ravelry stash. Coincidentally, Beeb is almost big enough to fit the sweater pieces, so, in my deep commitment to trying to get WIPs finished up, I found something totally different to work on. I got a FO...it just didn't help the WIP list!

Specifications
Yarn: Lion Brand Wool-Ease
Needles: Denise Interchangeables and some random straights for ribbing
Pattern: Bo from Rowan Babies by Kim Hargreaves
Verdict: Glad it's done, even if it is long after it was supposed to be. The color? Beeb is secure enough in his masculinity to consider himself suave and handsome in dusty rose.



And one more pic for the winning smile:



The sweater was well timed, as poor little Beeb has a snuffy nose and is trying to break through two new teeth at the same time. There is a general clinginess going on, and I suspect that a cozy sweater feels kind of good.

And, in my continuing commitment to clearing out some of the current WIPs, I have been cranking out finger puppets. If you are in Ravelry, you can have a sneak peek on my projects page...otherwise, I'll be posting about them before long.

I have angered the Kitchen Gods

Okay, silly me, I thought I could try and get organized and make getting dinner ready less traumatic. I sat down Saturday morning and made a list of meals including both entree and sides, with a separate column for what needed to be done ahead of time (e.g., defrost meat night before). From this I made my grocery list and the kids and I went and got groceries. Saturday night supper went without a snag and I made the mistake of feeling proud of my industriousness. Well...they do say "Pride goeth before the fall"

Sunday: Chili and corn bread. Right there on my list: "put beans to soak night before." Found that one Sunday morning, so I ended up doing a quick soak instead, no harm, no foul. Fine, put chili together and the first instruction is to brown hamburger with green pepper, onion, jalapenos and garlic. The hamburger is just about brown and I think to myself, "Hmm, I wonder why those jalapenos and garlic are sitting on the counter." I had put the first three ingredients in and totally spaced the last two off. Fine, better late than never. I continue on with the chili and get far enough along to start the corn muffins. Dump the mix in a bowl, look at the instructions, swear creatively when I discover I have no eggs. Put mix in a sealed bowl with the instructions and put the darn stuff back on the pantry shelf. Forget the stupid muffins.

Monday: Chicken and Rice. I assemble the ingredients and start combining. I discovered that I had gotten Split Pea soup instead of Cream of Mushroom. How the heck does that happen? I had the right thing on the list. I have made chicken and rice many times, so I knew what I needed even without the list. I had absolutely no intention of getting anything resembling Split Pea soup. Yet after standing in the grocery aisle, searching for cream of mushroom, putting it in my cart, checking out, taking groceries home, and putting them away, here was a can of Split Pea. I even tore the pantry apart thinking maybe one of the kids liberated a can of Split Pea and the mushroom was just hiding behind. No way! Fine, I just made the dang chicken and rice using what I had. Tasted kind of weird and looked funny with peas and carrots in the rice, but...

All-in-all, no complete disasters, just the Kitchen Gods mocking me for thinking I could possibly get organized.