Loose Ends and Unfinished Business

Sometimes there is just no way to get off the roller coaster of life. There are no eject or pause buttons available to us. And when that happens, what happens to the projects that get started or suddenly arise out of necessity? They become loose ends and unfinished business.

So in case you wonder what keeps me up at night worrying, here's my current list...

I need to order fall and winter garden seeds; research food stuffs I can grow through the winter.

Want to incorporate working my way through my 15-minutes-a-day plan to purge and clean every drawer and shelf in the house; so desperately needed but just can't seem to surface to the top of the priority list.

Deep clean the barn and pitch old and broken items; yes, the girls could do this, but it just might not be as thorough as is needed.

Pick date for a garage sale. We're finally getting to the point we can sell off anything that relates anyone younger than eight.

Consolidate and purge my goat resource notebook; the loose and duplicate papers are driving me mad.

Sort through three years of digital photos and create hard copy photo albums with them through Shutterfly; perish the thought, but if they were lost due to an inability to restore them from backups, it would be a true disaster. This should get some priority I guess.

Along the same line, organize the keepsake and memorabilia and unfinished baby books of our four children. This was supposed to be done for my oldest once she turned eighteen. Now she's twenty.

Finish homeschool school planning for our eight-year-old and thirteen-year-old; this really needs to get wrapped up!

Make notes about this summer's garden so that I don't duplicate the same mistakes year after year.

Work outside including substantial weeding and mulching, researching how to prune our fruit trees, how to boost the performance of our blueberry bushes, how to improve our pastures, and in general just time to get things done.

My mother needs new flooring in her house; since my dad passed away several years ago, those type projects have fallen with our family to help orchestrate and supervise. As she would like the job done before fall starts, it is looming overhead as well.

I could list improving or monetizing my blogs...to validate the time I do spend online.

Create an on-the-fly menu plan and grocery list so that on panic weeks, I can just grab the list and send it with DH and or one of the older kids to save my sanity.

Get to some of the kid-friendly projects we collected supplies for in early spring just for the reason of doing them during 'down time' in the summer; the concept of 'down time' just makes me laugh right about now.

Our sixteen-year-old son will be needing college-level recruiting cover letters and resumes along with videos to promote his passion...football...this coming fall. Need to educate myself on how to promote athletic prospects I guess.

Of mounting importance would be helping our eight-year-old figure out what she would like to take to our county fair for 4H Clover Buds so that we can get them tagged and ready to exhibit; fair is only a few weeks away, so this is going to become VERY important REAL soon.

We have two horses; I grew up obsessed with horses; do I ride these said horses? So obviously that is another to-do item that is important to me...to take advantage of what we have now...you never know when life circumstances change and an opportunity of a lifetime might be lost forever.

Now if I sat here much longer while listening to two of my daughters help record a scripture song CD for our church, I'm sure I could add to this list. But by now I've probably lost your interest, and you might be wondering, "Lady, get your act together!" So I will leave this topic...get back to the business of life...and continue to chip away at this list albeit slower than I would prefer.

Wordless Wednesday - Summer Pool Fun

This post is linked up at Wordless Wednesday at Five Minutes for Mom.



Summer Pool Fun, July 2010

Household Organization Notebook

To be honest, I really didn't know what to call the notebook I have been keeping household information in until I started looking around to see how others have organized their household information. A Swagbucks search of "household organization notebook" came back with enough information that I decided that that title should work just fine.

A household organization notebook should be just that...a notebook that helps keep your household organized.  And I know we all could use help with that. Ideally it would have all the important information that you might need in an emergency or just refer to make daily life simpler, all located in one place. It makes it easy to pick it up and go if you need to leave the house with it quickly. I usually go through it every summer once I hopefully have a little more time and update the information.

My notebook is pretty simple: three-ring binder with page dividers labeled with a Dymo labeler. A few plastic pocket folder and sheet protectors add a little more functionality to some sections, but it's just pretty basic and gets the job done. Currently I use these sections:

Household Maintenance - My running list of where in the house I have deep cleaned and purged; a back-up copy of my Remember the Milk regular chore lists for household cleaning; information relating to cleaning zones.

Animals - Because we are responsible for so many animals, this section also has my hard-copy of the appropriate Remember the Milk (RTM) tasks for our animals; list of horse vaccines and worming schedule; puppy health information.

Garden - This is a pretty broad category but includes the pool maintenance check sheet; hard-copy RTM for watering schedules and timing for various garden-related tasks.

Books - My list of magazines to reserve the library is stored here; a listing of magazine subscriptions and their actual expirations dates (so I don't renew them as early as the publishers would like).

Health - The children's immunization cards; list per family member of dates of various medical procedures and appointments, as I can never remember how long ago someone went in for a strep throat check, physical, you name it; address list of physician/dentist/orthodontist and insurance policy names and contact information. I had a gift list stuck in here, perhaps to keep wandering eyes from seeing it, but I think it deserves its own section now.

Notes - This would be a better home for that gift list; an excellent article on prayer; verses and quotes I want to remember; and most importantly to me, a single sheet with very large type, "Excellence is achievable; perfection is God's business".

Addresses - Pretty self explanatory but a copy of our emergency contact information that is posted in the kitchen cabinet by the phone; a second copy of my Yahoo contact list (my current location of my address list).

Beaver Lake Stables - I no longer have enough activity over there to maintain its own notebook, but I do keep my receipts and statements for the work I do as well as the boarder and trainer contact information.

School - With one child in public high school, there needs to be a place to keep school progress reports, accounting receipts, and school phone numbers. This is where they go. There is also a list to record outside activities for future reference (volunteer work, awards, athletic camps, etc.); school calendar; class schedule.

Mom - No, not a section for me, but for my mother's affairs that I assist her with. There's always a need to refer back to my notes for some transaction that took place or person she contacted and cannot find the paperwork herself.

Your notebook would most likely have completely different sections although some are pretty basic to most situations. I found some other excellent notebook ideas at Blissfully Domestic, Tipnut (which has some cool printable sheets), and Flylady. Along with your own inspiration and creativity, you can pull together a notebook that meets your household's needs and frees up a little more space in your already crowded cranium. Knowing where to go for specific information is definitely worth an hour or two now to get yourself organized.

Have fun, pull together a notebook, and let me know how it went.

Iron Chef Kitchen and a Full Pantry

I suppose there is a chance that you have never heard of the Iron Chef food contest on Food Network. If so the short explanation of this program is the specialty ingredient that is revealed at the beginning of each contest to three chefs who then have to create several courses using this item and a fully stocked pantry.  They come up with some pretty stunning pieces I tell you.  And to be sure, many of them I would never touch, much less my family.  So what's the parallel here?

Our kitchen doesn't usually feature a stunning surprise ingredient too regularly, but it usually does offer up extras of several ingredients or containers of leftovers that don't seem to appeal to anyone the second time around. So my own personal Iron Chef dilemma is to simply turn those items into our next meal or face the fact that they need to go to the chickens before they spoil.  I do keep a pretty well-stocked pantry which might rival those of the TV studios. It's just one of my priorities to be sure I have on hand what I might possibly need just so I can run my own personal Iron Chef dinner any night of the week.

So here's an example of how it went this evening:

There were bowls full of spring greens from the garden needing to be used up...romaine, kale, radicchio, mache, endive, spinach. Good healthy stuff. So a main course salad was where I was headed. I mixed up some of my Honey Mustard Vinaigrette, grabbed some frozen chicken breasts out of the freezer (a branch of my well-stocked pantry) and threw them on the Foreman grill, still frozen, with a little seasoning salt.  There were snap peas from the garden and a red onion as well. In they went.  Main course was finished after the chicken slightly cooled and was sliced to top the salad.



I had some smokey paprika goat cheese that I had made, but then of course needed something to go with it. So using my recipe for Parmesan Flaxseed Crackers, I popped them into the oven...once again thanks to my pantry and my lovely Parmesan producing goats.  Since we were fresh out of croutons, the crackers would also double as 'crunch' in the salad for those who just had to have a crouton substitute. As far as goat cheese goes, some of the plain chevre would have been pretty good in the salad too, but that would have been too exotic for probably everyone.



The mystery ingredient of the week would have to be strawberries from our patch.  I had just finished reading Blue Jeans and Cotton Tees's recipe for Strawberry Pie, so I put that together as well with only a few modifications based on what I had on hand.



Another dinner down the hatch thanks to inspiration from the Iron Chef and my pantry. But in reality the majority of a lot of our work in the kitchen is probably Iron Chef based. What was on sale this week at the grocery store? What do we have too much of that we'd like to use up? What produce is overly abundant thanks to our gardens? It's a tough job sometimes, creating something from the situation we're currently handed versus what we otherwise might plan out in advance. But that's the beauty of a culinary challenge...keeps us on our toes, keeps a little extra change in the pocketbook, and keeps the dining interesting. Bon appetit!

Wordless Wednesday - Strawberries

This post is linked up at Wordless Wednesday at Five Minutes for Mom.

Rainier Strawberries from our Garden, June 2010