Seen any blue-tailed skinks this summer?

Well, it's the second day after finishing work for the summer and I finally made it outside for some hugely needed yard work. The last few days of the school year were filled with, "We're going to do XYZ better next year," and my wild PT friend, Katrien, and I wrote notes to ourselves about how we plan to manage the enormous amount of computer-based "paperwork" next school year.

Although I love using a paper calendar to jot down the to-dos for each day and refer to my one-page-per-day calendar all day long, I realized this year that I need to start up next fall using MS Outlook again, and also to use it for special notes I might refer to during the year. The search features in the Outlook calendar make finding key words a breeze and this helps so much when you're trying to recall when you spoke to a parent or dropped off a piece of equipment that no one can find when the hot days of June roll around.

A couple of years ago, when I was still working as a Realtor, I found this book at Goodwill and it was a real eye opener: Take Back Your Life--Using Microsoft Outlook to Get Organized and Stay Organized by Sally McGhee. It's business focused but has applications for anyone who needs to better plan their work. It's also a training manual of sorts for folks who haven't been exposed to managing by objectives. Now, you may find it a little overwhelming so take a chapter at a time and avoid skipping around--organizational nuts like me love this stuff.

Whew, enough of this indoor stuff--back to the garden. For years it has bothered me that the run-off water from my air conditioning unit dripped uselessly on the ground, far away from my thirsty plants. Today I set out an unused birdbath under the little spout that drips the water, creating a little critter oasis. To keep the mosquitoes from setting up an aquatic nursery the pan is angled so excess water will spill over the side. The rock border will keep the pan from shifting around and also provide a cool hiding spot for the frogs and skinks.

Keep your eyes open for the shimmering of blue-tail skinks; they're my favorite.

Pass it on

Here's a photo of a pretty hyacinth I saw outside a rest stop in Indiana yesterday, on my way back home from Chicago visiting my mom.  It looks like curled paper on a gift.

My mom, age 94, has done a great job shredding old papers and de-cluttering over the past couple of years.  I would love for her to now give away the mementoes she intends to later pass along to friends and family, so she can see their happy reactions when they receive the gifts.  However, she wants them to be special gifts after she is no longer with us.  That's the way she wants to do it.

How do you want to share your special things?  Give them away now or hold onto them until you're gone?  I say, do it now.

It may not make sense to everyone, but to me it's like remembering what any pleasure feels like, when you don't directly experience it anymore.  Now that I don't eat lots of sweets my mom will sometimes seem hurt when I don't eat her delicious date nut cake or a store-bought cookie she especially likes.  After being pressed to eat it, I'll sometimes tell her the truth--I remember how wonderful her pecan tassies taste at Christmas-time, but I don't care for any right now.  Give me a couple of seconds and my mouth will relive every molecule of the cookie, or the homemade cake, and I can enjoy the memory.  I don't need to have it in my hand, or my mouth, to savor it.

Can we give up a framed picture that a friend always admires, or a decorative tea set given to us by a departed relative so many years ago?  I don't mean to give everything up and have a bare home, but how about a few things?  It will make our homes open up and we'll feel freer.  When we remember where we bought it or who gave it to us we'll always have that memory; and now someone else will enjoy it as well.

Enough sermonizing--I'll leave you with an interesting article about de-cluttering services I saw on the Internet today:
http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/109285/how-a-pro-helps-tackle-clutter

The Pile By My Chair

Many of us have a tall stack of papers and magazines sitting next to our favorite chair, or on the floor next to our side of the bed.  There was some reason we kept each of those things, but the pile is so overwhelming we fear to even try tackling it.
If you have 10 minutes take no more than 2 inches off the very top of the stack and move it to a clear surface in another room.  Using a kitchen timer will help you stay on task, as well.  Caution:  If you stay in the room with the rest of the stack and work on it where it is, it will be harder to de-clutter it because it wants to stay in the room with its friends.  By taking it to another location, and only taking 1 or 2 inches of it, you will be much more likely to review the entire portion and trash, recycle or act on what you're handling right then. 
If the kitchen timer goes off and you have 5 or 10 additional minutes, set the timer and work until it rings.  Even if you're super energized and on a roll, stop earlier than you think you should and tidy up the surface you've been working on.   If you haven't finished going through the 1-2" of papers, put the leftovers back on the original stack.  We don't want to start baby stacks of "good intentions" all over the house or office.
I bet you will uncover unread magazines as you dig down in the stack.  Save the ones from the last 3-6 months and recycle/donate the rest.  Don't let your feelings nag you into keeping older ones--you're on a mission toward freedom from too much stuff.  If you can stand it, give them all away or recycle them.  Relax, you'll receive more in the mail real soon.  The more you give away, the more freedom you will feel when you walk about your house.  I take my old magazines to work and put them in the lunchroom.
We all need a mental "oasis" area in our homes.  Your reading chair or bedroom can be that place.  Gather together the last month's worth of unread magazines, wrap them up in a leftover ribbon and give yourself a present to take to your oasis area.  By tying them with a pretty ribbon you'll know that you made a clear decision to keep and enjoy them; also, they won't get mixed up with other papers.  As you read each one, pass it along to someone else the very next day.

Reclaiming the Kitchen Table

Leslie K. and I worked with a friend this afternoon to de-clutter her kitchen table and find a method for whittling down and saving preschool art.  With two guys under age five there is a lot of preschool art coming home every week.  What to save???

As an experienced Creative Memories consultant Leslie suggested:

• Save the best stuff--what pulls at your heart when you try to toss it?
• Give priority to what the kids actually made on their own--the fingerpainted duck beats out an Easter egg decorated with store-bought stickers.
• If it's 3-D it's going to be hard to keep over the years.  Take a photo and toss the real thing.
• Forget trying to save anything decorated with marshmallows, Fruit Loops or macaroni.
• Write your child's name, the teacher's name, the "school" and the approximate date on the back of each item you keep.
• Go ahead and keep something you're unsure of, but review your stash in a year and whittle it down again.

On Friday I had told Fiona that we were going to be helping a friend sort through preschool art.  Fiona described how she had attended a workshop at the JCC and learned how to make an inexpensive portfolio from two pieces of large poster board. This worked great today, we just taped the pieces together at the bottom and it was ready to use.  The poster board portfolio should hold several months of saved art work.  Cost?  $1.04 plus tax at Wal-Mart.  We used colorful folders for 8.5 x 11" papers, one for each guy, and stuck them in the portfolio.

Stay tuned for how we made the refrigerator shine again.

We found the table!  Note the hanging art that now decorates the kitchen table area.  Each guy gets one picture to display for a limited engagement!

East meets West

My friend, Amy, and I had so much fun de-cluttering and organizing her pantry shelves.  See the "before" photo of the whole pantry, then look at the close-up of her canned goods shelf after she streamlined and organized the contents.  Notice that the Asian foods are separate from her other foods, to make finding them easier.  I admit, I could pick up the can of tuna much easier than the one of eel--Eek!!!  I'm such a wimp!

We used about 2 hours to tidy up 3 shelves, but we also took some breaks to talk about kids and life during the process.  My favorite part of the morning?  Amy fixed dumplings with vegetables and spicy dipping sauces for our lunch--Yum!

Doesn't her son look adorable as he drags the out-of-date canned goods to the back door?  Kids love to help.

Spring in Virginia

Pretty soon the roads around Richmond will look just like this--ain't it gorgeous! I started spring cleaning a little early--my friend, Amy, and I worked on her pantry for a couple of hours this morning and she's a natural space organizer. She was able to make decisions about what to keep, share and toss within seconds and the time flew by. Even her little two-year-old son helped take out the trash--keep tuned for a cute photo of him hard at work.

Remember, make labels for your piles of items to Keep, Share and Toss. If you have some items you just can't decide about right then and there, make another pile for things to decide about later--your ????? pile.

Success Stories for 6-27

Enjoy these two messages from group members. Look for the riddle in the first message and enjoy the before/after photos from Fiona's post. Karen

I am having so much fun cleaning up! I tell you everyone should have to downsize , clean up a place to sell it and clear out their house every few years. Even though I wasn't home most of last week yesterday I cleaned out a kitchen drawer that was totally stuffed with a little of everything under the sun. I can't tell you how many pens there were, pencils that never get used, rubber bands, used twistees....you get the picture. And, true confessions, I even bought some organizing containers on Friday but they didn't fit and I didn't let that stop me. After throwing a lot of it away, I was determined that I could find containers in my house to put the items in and in a surprisingly little amount of searching I did. Now it has a container for pens; one for scotch tape, masking tape and correction tape; one for my egg timer, note paper, small calculator and a couple misc. items; and one for chip clips and clothes pins. The open space has scissors and in the back behind the containers are marking pens that I hardly ever need.

Then I cleared out something that had 949 items in it but it made no visible difference after I cleared it out. This is kind of like a riddle, huh? Can you guess what it was?? ...................... My email in-box. I am sooo bad about letting that accumulate. I have decided to get it down under 50 and not let it get over that.

Well, my last entry was quite awhile ago when I cleared off the "big" stuff on my desk. Only trouble was I never got around to clearing the accumulating "little" stuff. A quick analysis of "how did it get this way" yielded an easy answer--When anyone in the house "tidies up" it goes on my desk. The mail that was on the kitchen table. The invitation that needs an RSVP. The dry cleaner receipt for picking up the comforter. You get the picture.

To add to this difficulty, we are considering re-vamping our home office into a children's room. Additionally, we have a small home in general, so there are many things that simply don't have "homes". This will be quite a big task. I needed reinforcements. A friend came over to provide "an intervention". She spent 3 hours with me and if you would have asked me if we would have gotten the amount of work done in that time period, I would have said there was no way. In fact, we did so much work, it would have taken me days to do it. Probably more considering I didn't do it by myself.

Like Karen said, it is difficult to make some decisions. For example, my bridal bouquet, which I love, has not aged well. I followed all of the directions my florist told me to, and it just didn't work. It was falling apart and started to mold! Instead of looking at the bouquet and reminiscing, I would look at it and think, "what did I do wrong?" having been so disappointed. Having my friend, Pat here, helped me to decide, it REALLY was not looking well. I have many treasured photos of me holding that bouquet, and those photos elicit a much more positive (and healthy) response! This started me thinking about other things that I was holding on to that didn't have mold that was visible, but that it was almost a symbolic mold. Something that didn't truly represent what it did some time ago. I threw the bouquet away and I have had no regrets, and I am not sure I would have been able to do that without my friend spurring me on!

I think the small bites philosophy is good and works in most cases. I needed a bigger push though to jump start the process. If you feel like you might need some help from a friend, here are some things to consider:

Establish clear goals up front discuss any philosophy differences. For example, do you want to work horizontally or vertically? Do you want to start with an area that is out of sight or within sight? Active listening is important. My friend started out by listening. I went through the whole house, explaining where I felt I needed more space and she simply listened. No suggestions - those would come later. Confidentiality. Especially in a home office, you are bound to come across things that are, well, considered personal. Neither of us would have been comfortable purging my tax file together! So things that were either too personal or too time consuming were set aside as a homework activity for me to accomplish later.
My friend went through things in the office that could be easily sorted and didn't require much decision making. Paperclips went with paper clips, post-its with notepads, etc. When she came across things that she felt might be potential tossables, she would ask me about them. For instance, the dried-out rubber bands I hadn't used in so long. This also enabled me to do my own separate sorting while she was doing this, so we got twice as much done. Karen asked me what was the most helpful way that my friend helped me. After considering this for a moment, it was just the fact that she was there. It made the time go quicker and she is a master of the raised eyebrow method! For instance, since I work in the schools, I end up receiving a lot of freebie tote bags. She pulled out 9 bags from the closet --all empty and taking up lots of space in a pile in the closet. She said, "Wow, these are a lot of bags!" I said, "Well, I don't think I could get rid of ALL of them." and she said, "No, you might not want to get rid of ALL of them." And then we got started. First we started with discarding the ones without zippers. Then closer inspection revealed that a few of the bags were not "pocket worthy". We got rid of ALL the freebie bags and only kept 2 bags which were high quality totes. These went inside one another and took up much less space.

The most important consideration--document short term and long term goals while your friend is still there to support you! I still have lots more work to do, but I have a clear action plan, which makes me feel like I can actually take action!

Happy Decluttering! Fiona