Clearing Out The Dross

It's been a weekend of cleaning and clearing at our house.

We're having the carpets shampooed downstairs this morning.  Which meant that all weekend long as well as this morning, I've been running around and straightening and clearing off flat surfaces and anything near the floor to facilitate a thorough shampooing.

The good news is that our downstairs looks wonderful at the moment.  So being thoroughly pooped is worth it, I'd say.

My goal?  Once the carpet is cleaned and dry, we sift through the remaining dross sprinkled here and there upstairs and down and do a wholesale purge of things we neither need nor use.

Know Not If It's Dark Outside Or Light

Woke up this morning to a steady, soft rain falling from a gray sky. It is the sort of day that only makes the robins on the lawn happy, while the rest of us try to come up with ways to stay indoors.

My perennials, though, are drinking it in, reaching up toward the heavens with their thirsty roots stretching out below.  If you listen closely, you can almost hear the sound of their "ahhhhhhh" as the liquid life seeps inward and up.

Meanwhile, Roxie, our westie, is laying with her belly toward the heater vent, disgusted by the wetness on her paws and refusing to look at me after her forced trip to the yard this morning.   I am momentarily persona non grata in pooch world.  (Until it is time for lunch, anyway, at which point I'll become the single most exciting person in the history of time.)

The house sits still and silent this morning.  Everyone has gone off into the world and left me sitting here alone with my coffee.

I love Monday mornings for just that reason.  They are an island of silence in an otherwise chaotic, noisy world.

This morning, I can hear the robins calling to one another outside my windows.  And the little song sparrow calling everyone to the morning's feast now that the bird feeder has, mercifully, gotten filled this weekend.  He's perched on the side of the feeder, trilling his little heart out this morning, just on the other side of the glass from me as I sit here typing.

Part of me wants to sit right here for the rest of the day, soaking in the life outside my windows.

Just Another Weekend

I don't know why it is that our weekends seems to disappear insanely fast, but they do.  It is as though time speeds up on the weekends, and whizzes by us as quickly as possible to get everyone back to work and school.

It is tough to savor the relaxation when there is just so much to get done.

And harder still when the window of time in which to accomplish the weekend "to do" list appears to be shrinking exponentially.

I've decided that better time management is my friend.  The trick is to figure out exactly what that means and make it work to my advantage.

Anyone have suggestions for ways to manage day to day tasks with more efficiency?  Or establish routines that help in that tremendously?

Finding Balance, Out of Africa Style

For me, one of the marks of a good film or a wonderful book is how much I want to spend time in or around its characters, how I want to somehow crawl out of my own world and into theirs each time I watch the film or pick up the book.

In terms of movies, for me that most often happens in period pieces where things are not overly romanticized, but where the visual tone is one of comfort and slightly declining splendor -- where the polished world begins to show a wee bit of tarnish, so to speak.

This was an unexpected find for me -- some deleted scenes from Out of Africa.  There is a second cache of deleted scenes available here as well.  Watching them this morning, I am in heaven, because these are scenes I never knew were available anywhere.

Out of Africa is as close to perfect as a film can be for me.  Yet I now have this irrational need to see an uncut version with the deleted scenes added so that I can see them directly in context within the whole of the film.  The acting, the cinematography, the sets...it is seamless and a perfect antidote to having a sick, wee girlie at home at the moment.

There are days when you need a little dreamy otherworldly atmosphere to pull you out of your own doldrums, right?  Out of Africa does that for me.  The music, especially when coupled with the gorgeous wide-shot scenery in the opening scenes of the movie, are worth watching over and over again for that alone.

Squeaky Clean: Tackling The Clutter Within

Last weekend, we had some new furniture delivered.  We have been sleeping on the same mattress for fifteen years, and the sagging sides and mountain in the middle that it had become meant that our old mattress had passed the point that a new foam topper could reasonably fix.

When we started looking around the house, what we realized was that it had been a long, long time since we'd gotten anything new.  And that the condition of some of our old furniture meant that it was well past time for something more functional and workable in both our living room and bedroom.

The fact that we found a local store that was doing a five year same as cash and no penalty for early payment deal made it all the more workable for us.  And so?  We spent the weekend moving old things out and new things in and getting them (mostly) arranged.

If I ever decide that I'm re-doing two rooms at the same time again?  Please feel free to ship me off to crazy town, because I am utterly, painfully exhausted.

But getting new living room and bedroom furniture along with the new mattress?  That meant that we had to empty our old furniture and shuffle a dresser into our spare room and find a new home for several other pieces of furniture that were still serviceable but no longer worked with our new things.

What I've learned over the last couple of weeks of frantic cleaning and shuffling?  We have way, way, way too much crap.  

Making Our Home Our Castle

One of our goals this year is to get a better handle on our family budget.  As we hurtle toward retirement, being able to live comfortably when we are spending well below our income is a big goal.

Both of us have seen far too many people need to keep working well past when they would rather have retired because their expenses were too great to be able to stop and enjoy their lives.  We've also seen far too many people retire, and then have to find some other part-time employment or something else to cover rising medical or other expenses that weren't planned for earlier.

We're very blessed in that we have the means to live well, because we have both worked very hard to get us to this point and continue to do so.

But that doesn't mean we ought to just take it for granted that will always be the case, or that we shouldn't be more thoughtful about how we use our resources.  Using them more wisely is always a good goal. 

One way to enjoy what we already have more while spending less is to get our home where we want it to be -- comfortable, cozy, inviting, less cluttered -- so that spending time at home is preferable to going out, spending more money and buying crap you don't need.

I've been looking around our house lately with that sort of eye toward what is working for us and what is not.

For 2012? Choose More Joy

This year?  The New Year's resolutions have a different feel.

Gone are the days of nitpicky, little derogatory "what's wrong with me, let's make a list" kinds of resolutions.  Ticking off a list of what I don't like about myself or my house or whatever else has not produced the desired results, even after years of self-diagnosis and attempts to beat myself into resolution submission.

No more.

Usher out the old, enter the new.

This coming year, I choose more joy.  I vow to make better choices for myself and my family, one choice at a time.

When I come to a fork in the road, I'll try to choose the best one I can based on the facts I have.  And if it doesn't work out?  No self flogging, I'll just make a course correction toward a better direction and keep on going forward.

In 2012, when I have an opportunity for a good belly laugh, some hugs or play time with our 8 year old, some hand holding or a dance with my hubby?

I'm there.  With gusto.

Cleaning House

I am so stealing this fabulous idea from Sarah at Memories on Clover Lane:

Here's how I spring clean:
I take a notebook.
I make a heading for each room. Even closets.
I imagine that I'm a potential buyer of this house. You know...PRETEND!...and see the room through someone else's eyes.
I stand in each room and look around and see all the imperfections.
Then I write down what needs to be done if I were to put it up for sale. Every single thing.

Now this is a great idea for starting to refresh my house before the start of the new year.  Additionally, it would be a great way to work systematically through things without forgetting something in any one room. 

I love this.  A lot.

The fact that it appeals to my detail-oriented, list-making self is only part of its appeal. Imagine how much more you could refresh and fix up if you only saw it from a completely different perspective.