Meal Plan Monday

OOooooh, Meal Plan Monday. That has a ring to it doesn’t it? I use to be very good about meal planning, then I got pretty sketchy, then I was just garbage at it and meal planning meant keeping frozen burritos in the freezer and having a binder with every take out and delivery place within a 20 mile radius. Then I forbid those options but still wasn’t great at meal planning so then sometimes we just didn’t eat. Yes, seriously.

So here’s me returning to meal planning with renewed dedication.  I’m hoping to use the potential public shaming of blogging if I don’t follow through  mixed with foodie lust inspired by excellent and motivating pictures that go with online recipes and returning to some well loved cookbooks (once I find them) to bring me back to the land of those who meal plan. If I don’t meal plan things go to hell in a handbasket very quickly.  I’ll make an elaborate meal but only once every 48 hours.  We start scavenging in the pantry like wild animals and subsisting on hand fulls of nuts and dried fruit. “Healthy!” people usually say in response to hearing that… But after a few weeks of your only sustenance being eaten out of the palm of your hand like a rabid squirrel and never sharing an actual meal let alone cooking one together it gets pretty feral here.

Rough meal plan for the week-

Monday- Pizza
Tuesday- Quiche
Wednesday- Curry
Thursday- Meat Loaf
Friday- Tuna Casserole
Saturday-  ? It’s on the list on the kitchen counter, I’ll fix this later
Sunday- It’s the day of rest and my family will food me obscene and wonderful amounts of ham.

Because I’m trying to have us eat more than one meal a day I decided I was going to be totally awesome and lay out some breakfast options. If you were to join us for breakfast… Well, that would be pretty uncomfortable for everyone because I would probably be eating it while  I soak in the bath tub and read. I’m really not a morning person. Not at all. But hopefully having an option of donuts, bagels with cream cheese and smoked salmon, or honey greek yogurt with berries will make mornings a little bit brighter around here. Buying yogurt in little cups is so handy dandy and I love it. It’s also so much more expensive and I like to add fresh fruit, or at least whole frozen berries. I’m not a fan of the sort of berry sugared jam that passes for fruit yogurt usually. This means I was incredibly proactive awesome and mixed up some yogurt & berry cups after we got back from grocery shopping. If I was a really awesome sauce blogger I’d have exquisite photos of yogurt and berries carefully layered in either antique glass cups or painfully smart and modern smart little dishes. Instead I used our handy smart spin containers. It’s not pretty but it works great. I actually aspire to something more appealing looking but, yeah, later. Right now I’m impressed that I have –3- breakfast options, even if one of them is generic boxes of cheap and delightfully tasty donuts. Really, Really not a morning person.  I use to feel bad about this and the one really great thing about being told that my doctor thinks I have rheumatoid arthritis is that I now have a medically legit reason for looking like I crawled out of a trash can in the morning and feeling like Oscar The Grouch. SCORE.

The Office Of Doom

It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that just straightening up and tidying up isn’t enough in our household. Even decluttering wildly doesn’t really fix it. Things need to be arranged to work well for us. The office did not work well for us and we started piling up crap we use, then using it as a room to shove things and and and. Yeah, it was a fugly mess.

We ended up removing almost everything from it, rearranging furniture so that it worked better for us and provided more/better storage and it’s still fugly but no longer near the same mess level. I’d wanted to finish everything that was left over this week to make it functional. That didn’t happen, big surprise there eh? The most frustrating part is seeing the todo list not dwindle and still having flotsam and jetsam about the room. Oh yeah, and that it’s totally ugly.

Will be seeing how much I can finish up in there today inbetween work and getting weekly housecleaning done so that the weekend can be devoted to dealing with the livingroom. and pizza. making and eating a lot of pizza. and Finally watching Alice In Wonderland. Finally. Maybe even in our actual livingroom. Maybe.

A Room A Week

I’ve finishing up making the dining room side of the front room usable. I end up wanting to do things like paint the interior of the front door rather than do necessary things to make the room functional though. It’s a constant battle between those types of impulses and sometimes I stop dead and get nothing done. That applies to other areas of my life but it’s very in your face visible when it comes to an entire room.

Because of our hobbies, the menagerie and everything that makes us special and unique snowflakes our “making the dining room functional” list involves things like-
*Drain, move, redirect cords and reset timer for South American Biotope Aquarium
*Find or buy bolts so we’ll actually have a table again
*clean rodent terrariums and restack them in new location & reset timers

Given my freakish love for beverages even when I don’t feel like eating we also have a small retail rack that now displays (most) of our beverages so that they’re handy and mancreature doesn’t forget that they exist entirely. Out of sight out of mind takes on a new depth of meaning with him. So, tonight I can’t sleep and finishing up putting junk away or tossing stuff from the dining room. The whole reassemble different table didn’t happen during the week.

The room for this weekend will be the office. It will be another battle to try and just get it to functional and not to get bogged down with deciding to choose tomorrow to file all of our paperwork. That really does need to happen but the room needs to be navigable. Yeah, being able to walk through the room without sidestepping and leaping has a higher priority over filing stacks of paper.

This will be a huge relief once done though since this is the room we work in daily, or avoid working in because it’s so unpleasant. I know it will improve the quality of our work and make everything work related much less stressful.

We Ended Up Having To Sign A Lease Here

Not happy about it but it’s the reality. We’ll be here for awhile longer. There was no way we could do first+last+damage deposit to move and so here we are for awhile longer. What makes it worse is how emotionally UNinvested in this place I have become. It shows. Deeply, widely, messily, and ugly.

I can’t handle living like that(this) (uhg) any longer, especially living here, working here, hermitting here. Far, far too crazy for me to exist in 24/7 and it makes everything harder. Let me repeat. It. Makes. Everything. Harder. Getting work done? Harder. Cooking? Harder. Even watching a movie? Yeah, that’s harder too in clutter and chaos. and Folks, our clutter and chaos is EXTREME. It’s something I have dealt with all my life and always will continue to need to deal with but I had been hoping for a blank slate ( with more space which is not an unrealistic desire between our menagerie, hobbies, and working from home)

For now though all that living which we home bound trolls seem to do entirely within the walls of our home (that might need some shaking up too) needs to fit in our current place that is around 900 sqft speaking generously afaik. I’ve been told that it’s more, but then I was also told that that was including nonlivable space like the balcony. I’m going to just stick with 900 sqft from now on since I’ve been told that it was less than, and told that it was more than but never has anyone said that it was actually 900 sqft so it seems like a greater number to pick.

So, since I know everyone, between all 5 and 250, a day according to the numbers, people totally want to hear about how I turn this place that use to be a major train wreck and is now only a car wreck, though a sort of traffic stopping, free way pile up place into a habitable home.. Well, Hello Bloggy World. I read great blogs about gorgeous homes that are inhabitated by creative, and organized people. That’s not what the next few weeks (months, years) will be about. It will be about major, and in some cases Hoarders proportion digging out and figuring out how to live like grown ups while running our own business and taking care of ourselves instead of subsisting, and barely at that.

Yeah, I was depressed beyond words and expression when I had to face the reality that we would be stuck here. But we are, and that’s that. I can’t face waking up for days on end being depressed and frustrated with what a craphole we’ve made of the place that I didn’t want to be stuck in though. It’s going to be hard to face that we need to make the place simply habitable and aren’t going for lovely at all atm. But again, that’s that and I need to pull on my grown up pants.

For anyone worrying about safety after reading the above, no the place isn’t a health hazard. Amazingly enough I don’t like dirtiness at all and can’t deal with it. For anyone thinking I’m making much of a minor situation.. I’m not. Think of words and phrases like “Hoardtacular” “Holy Crap Pile, Batman!!!” and that about covers it. In the mean time I have been dealing with several health issues and life issues, and obviously finances was one of them so… I’m sorry to people I haven’t followed through on things for.. xoxo

Greenery

So, right now I feel like my life is mostly crap and stress. I can and do stop to appreciate things like this though-

When ManCreature was at the store and saw this in the produce department and thought I might like it so he brought it home for me. I did in fact like it very much and some of it ended up on our dinner that night and some more is ending up on our dinner tonight. It’s Upland Cress and it’s a bit peppery and a lot delicious. Tonight it’s going on chicken breast sandwich dealios with a rasberry chipotle sauce with some red onions. We will hopefully eat well and not mind our geriatric folk heart burn afterwards.

Next to the cress on the kitchen garden shelf I also have this growing-

I try to keep different greens growing in rotation for the cats. I attribute people/plants/felines living in relative harmony to the fact that they usually have access to their own greens that they can nom on to their heart’s content.

I’m a fairly big believer in not just saying no but giving an alternative at the same time. It seems to work out pretty well whenever I employ it. Why don’t I do this with myself nearly as often? who knows. Off to finish dinner now. Also trying to figure out how to take better food photos. as well as better photos of everything. I’m out of practice, apathetic, and unsure with digital. G’luck to me.

Under Construction

I decided to actively start blogging as a New Year’s Goal. I posted about New Year’s goals around the same time. I have kept up with some, some have been abandoned, some have felt unachievable with how life is right now.

The blog though. It actually turned into three, yes three. People questioned my sanity keeping up with that. It turns out the problem wasn’t writing posts or taking photos. It comes back to some of my other New Year’s Goals, and things I needed to deal with.

I have problems with chronic disorganization. I found out awhile ago now that I have some problms associated with nonverbal learning disorder. That was actually a great thing because it meant I wasn’t as stupid as I’d thought I was for a very long time. It just meas my brain goes about things a bit differently. And a few years ago I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis. This isn’t the place I like to kvetch about those things I don’t want them dominating everything.

That’s something I had to really learn, not just mouth the proper emotinally healthy things but to start to really learn and apply..I have some problms going on and I can’t ignore them, that’s a disasterous way for me to deal with them. I also don’t want to let it dominate my life.

There’s a line to walk between acknowledging things and letting them control your life. That’s part of what this year has been about for me.. I ignored underlying health problems for years and became a very cranky person and did some actual damage to my body. I also became a person living in chronic pain who was mostly denying it and totally not addressing it and over time I became a very peevish and unpleasant person.

While I’m still a cynical grump I’m thankful that it is possible to learn to become a different person in many ways. And I’m appreciative to the people who have continued to love me while it took me some time to figure some things out and to learn to deal with problems that aren’t going to magically go away and some bad behavior habits that actually can.

All this, this kind of rambling, isn’t what I wanted this blog to be about. The best way I could figure out to deal with some of the less than stellar parts of my life was by picking better alternatives, learning new ways of dealing with things, setting better goals … This blog was intended to be a place, and for awhile was a good idea, for talking about goals, following through on them, and sharing them with other people. It got neglected as I started to fail at following through on things or simply couldn’t for reasons out of my control.

A good/bad thing happened. ManCreature and I started a business. That part is great. We have started doing internet design and development. That part is great. I wasn’t happy with my own blog though. The design was bad to say the least, the organization could have een a great walk through for all the What Not To Dos that I try to help people avoid. In my displeasure with all of that I hucked aside the blog and the parts of it that were great for me too.

Right now I actively don’t want people visiting it because it’s such a mess. I let what I do for work kind of muck up what I do for personal time. It’s hard to separate the two and at the best they can support each other and enhance each other. There really was no good reason for letting the two sides brig each other down that much.

That’s another area of my life that this year is about. Learning how to cope with being one half of a company.

I know that stuffing things down and not dealing with them is terribly detrimental. Letting everything run amuck and make a mess of every area of your life and having no balance is almost worst, as far as I’m concerned. As well as being unbalanced it’s also not functional. A dearly loved friend refers to what he does as compartmentalising. He also manages to be pretty amazingly balanced and to deal with ALL areas of his life and when things get out of control he addresses it. Basically I think he’s a titan. I also know I’m blessed to have him in my life.

So this is the sort of maudlin post about nothing in particular except that my life can be a mess and I’m working on making .. if not less of a mess because I’m going to guess my life’s always going to have plenty of those.. Then at least a more pleasant, happier, more beautiful mess.

On that note, A Beautiful Mess by Jason Mraz at Nobel Peace Prize Concert ’08

It’s kind of sloppy highschool but with more wit and insight. Being a teenager who has failed to grow up in many ways I have to admire people who do it but do it well.
had to go check and and yes, there’s also a pretty neat blog called A Beautiful Mess.

And a little more Jason Mraz. I have to love Lucky, but especially with Lisa Hannigan. Sorry Colbie …

Any time I get frustrated with ManCreature I can always go for a walk and listen to this song. It’s hard to stay upset when you know you’re in love with your best friend and gong home to them…It puts frustrations into perspective.

This year is about getting better perspective. 😉 and this blog might be heavy with posts like this for awhile but they should let up after a bit.

Hullooo Moss Factory

I neglect this poor little blog dreadfully and keep intending to return to it and post something, anything. Then I realised today that I really did have something I needed to post.

I get a strange amount of consistent traffic for wabi kusa, kokedama, and string gardens.

For anyone interested in sweet, adorable ways of bringing plants into your daily life and home please check out

It’s run by a delightful woman named Carol so if you ended up here looking for info on interesting plant ides please head over to her site.

Cheers, plant people.

Testing Live Writer

Wondering how this will work out for me.

Spring Cleaning The Bedroom

This is a pic of the bedroom after Spring Cleaning-

I made the bedding myself, I was pleased having a Springy Flowery set. I post that first though so the first thing people see isn’t the before because-

That’s what had happened to the bedroom by the time I was done with the bathroom and the closet. Is Chloe trying to jump into the garbage can or the slightly open can of paint there? BTW, There’s a great story about that slightly open can of paint.

There was a great deal of cleaning out of dust bunnies, cleaning out the Ferret Land under the bed, but that’s more for Menagerie Meanderings, oiling of the wood furniture we’ve built…

The night stands we’d finally finished, those got oiled, cleaned out underneath, and rejoiced that the ornamental plums are blossoming.

Maintaining furniture we’ve built seems to take a bit. I try not to take that as a reflection on our poor building skills and only as an indication that they are finely tuned pieces of furniture that require seasonal maintenance-

That guy needs the bolts that hold each shelf in place tightened every so often. Also dusted off the shelves and took about a dozen books ultimately to Half Price Books

Loving my jar of pretty tealights-

Hamsterariums moved out of the bedroom and faux fur covered down pillows as cat beds moved in-

There was some more wall washing, decobwebbing, cleaned candleholders, cleaned out our linens. In the name of decluttering and simplifying I cut our bedding down to two sets.I found myself very unhappy with this which has led to thrifting more bedding, or making more like in the first pic. I’m simply not content with only limited choices. There’s something very happy for me in being able to switch it out every week. Though for months and months at a time all I want is a pile of deep, white, soft fluff to sink into. The underbed drawers are all sorted out now though and even labeled. ❤ my labeler!

And there was some deep cleaning, decluttering, and organizing of all the ferrets stuff as well as sewing them some extra cage liners. Our bedroom is crazy crowded, and it's even nuttier now that we've moved in a cat tree we made. I just don't know what we can get rid of though. I am really at a loss as to how to get to a simpler home with fewer things. Everything seems so essential. We also really do seem to use everything in there regularly. This seems to be as good as it gets for us.

Almost forgot this littlepicture, these are most of my succulents that survived the winter cold and chill. They got a little bit of Spring Cleaning love too-

I don't know which I like most about spring.. The lengthening days or the flowers-

Spring Cleaning The Closet

So, I know I want to move and the Spring Cleaning is sort of insane because of that.. I’m not sure if we’ll be able to move when our lease is up because we’ll need first, last, & damage deposit and I just don’t know if we’ll have it that soon. If we can move then it’ll be for the better to have things sorted out and easier to move.
The wall washing & baseboard painting is just all me. There’s no accounting for that.

I started by excavating back here-

Yeah, that area that looks like the end of the closet, there’s actually another 3′ of closet space back there nearly inaccessible if you keep anything else in the area of closet in front of it. I understand the need to make use of all available space but this is one frustrating nook. So, time to start pulling things out to try and remember what’s actually back there-

Stuff dragged out. What was back there are our dress and work clothes, those I can actually reach while standing on my stepstool. There was also our luggage, the extra toiletries, many, many cat & ferret toys, and off season shoes and some off season clothing that got swapped out. We probably don’t need snow suits for spring in Western Washinton.
I also bravely tried on all of my dresses and everything else back there and it was a miracle, everything pretty much fit, I love how forgiving dresses can be.

While I was dismantling everything I also started going through my jewelry that looked like this-

I was about like a 7 year old playin dress up and mancreature came in to find me wearing a jumpsuit and about half of my bracelets. Luckily he has no memory and doesn’t notice much so other than me documenting it here, for the world, that moment is gone for ever from history.

I got the bracelets sorted out by type and more organized so they are accessible

Then I started working on the necklaces, there had been an entire wooden box with more tangled piles. Some went away forever, a few went to my jewelry making boxes to have some repairs made, and this was the result for the necklace cabinet-

I can see them and they are mostly sorted by type now, silver chains, silver chains with pendants, silver chains with stone pendants, stone and gem and bead necklaces.. blahblah. Now I can find things though.

I went through my clothes and as usual found very little I was willing to get rid of, the daily photo thing does better at that than just looking at clothes that seem decent and ok in their clean and tidy little piles or on hangers. For now though this is my black hole density closet land-

With the curtains safely closed-

So, if we are blessed enough, and work hard enough and well enough to be able to move the closet is fairly easy to empty and pack up, which is something else Spring Cleaning is showing me. a few wardrobe boxes for everything on hangers, a few cardboard boxes i can separate layers in with paper and things should be easy enough to pack and unpack…

I also got to spackle a hole (a few holes) I accidentally put in while trying to put that shelf up underneath my jewelry cabinets. The walls got washed, winter woolies got washed since they won’t be worn much more this year, spring stuff got aired out, and toiletries got rotated into the bathroom to replace anything we were missing. I like to stock up and have backups. This didn’t go so well with mancreature who just saw me buying extras and started tossing things in the shopping cart to ‘stock up’ too. at one point we had 8, not a typo 8, bottles each of Aveeno Calming AND Hydrating shower gel. and the ones in the shower. We do NOT have that kind of space for stocking up regardless of how good the sale is. Not when he started doing it for every product he thought he might need at some point in the next year, and bought a 3 year supply of each.

Looking at the pics I wish I had painted the inside of the bracelet cabinet to match the necklace one, oops. And life would probably be better off if I gave up on more of my heels since my feet are so pathetic now. Maybe later when I am more stoic.

Closet was finished though, and I moved onto the bedroom that had been reduced to carnage while cleaning out the closet.

I think I can safely promise for once though that I won’t be painting any walls as part of Spring Cleaning, other than builder white, and that will be a first.