CAR STUFF - MY RECIPE CHAOS TAKES A TURN

While on my way to clearing up my cookbooks and recipe collection....and I was making fine progress - thank you very much...  I got a phone call and one of my kiddies decided it would be an adventure to crash our car into a telephone post.   Now please understand that I am completely grateful to God that she is fine, that her friends are fine.  In a weird way I am grateful that she crashed the new car rather than the older, smaller and with not so many safety features car.  

We bought the new car in red since we had a new driver and wanted her to be seen and safe.  We ensured it had extra reinforcements down the sides in-case of a side impact, it had front and side airbags - we bought it specifically as a "just in case" car.   Well, "just in case" happened and while it was upsetting for me as a Mum to know "my baby" had been in a crash, she had left home armed with her insurance papers, her license, ownership and her auto club card.  She had all the tools at hand to help her deal with the crash which - was out of province and 3 hours away from me at the time.

The other great thing was, when she got home, she had written down all the information from the police and insurance -  so follow up was easy.

We pulled the insurance file, which thankfully was in order and got that set up - we did need to find the original purchase agreement for the car since it is a total write off and while my heart stopped for a moment thinking that I did not know where it was...when I opened the Mazda file, there it was...phew! 

All the small organizational steps that I have taken to keep paperwork in order, all the small checks and balances when my daughter was leaving for her trip, made a bad and stressful situation much easier for all of us.  

Check your insurance files and make sure they are in order.   Do you have home, auto and life insurance?  Are your files labelled and papers in the correct folders?    In a crisis, your brain will be sluggish, check these things now - the calm before the storm is when your emergency planning should occur.   Take time this week to ensure your papers are in order and that your wallet contains everything you would need to provide to the police or a paramedic in case of an accident.   Even if you think your insurance files are in order - check them again.   This should not take you more than 15 minutes.  

If you need to get insurance - make that all today!

Need some personalized organizing assistance?   Subscribe today to our Moment-By-Moment Organizing Program and you will receive the help you  need!

RECIPE RIOTS

Are you like me? Do you have recipe books that were your Mother’s, wedding gifts, one’s you have purchased because they were pretty, an ongoing subscription to Everyday Food? Are they rioting and rebelling to find space in your home, do they lob tomatoes at you in an expression of displeasure at their appalling treatment? Well, mine sure are, they are on the desk, in the book basket, spilling off the shelf in the kitchen and generally ready to rumble!  Take cover books, I am about to fight back!

Here are my goals for the recipe mayhem over the next 30 days.

1) DO NOT renew my Everyday Food subscription! While I love the recipes, I simply have no space to keep receiving and storing them. I can find every recipe I could want for free on the internet. Why do I continue to waste money and space in my home receiving recipes in a magazine, or buying books – did you know the library loans cookbooks for free? I have been foolish - wasting time and resources and I am vowing here and now to change this cookbook obsession.

2) GO through all my Mother’s recipes, scan and print any that I want to keep for the girls (some are in her handwriting and for sentimental reasons; I am opting to scan those rather than type them out.)

3) GET an early start on Christmas by making each of my daughter’s a recipe book with all their favourite foods. This goes back to losing my Mum early in life and not knowing how to cook all the family favourites. I want to bless my daughter’s with the ability to make their favourite childhood meals for their families one day. At 18, 15 and 13, I know they will appreciate the gift and they can add new recipes to their books when we find new meal we enjoy.

4) COPY all my favourite recipes, toss any recipe books that are covered in goo, ripped and just plain gross, into the recycle bin.

5) DO NOT keep any books that I have not used in the past year – gulp, this will be hard because I truly love looking at recipe books but again, I can find any recipe I could possible want on the internet....these really can go...(I have The Little Engine That Could chuggin in my head right now "I know I can, I know I can"  *huh*, weird.)

6) EDIT my cookbook collection! . I am committing right here, right now, to not keep any books that do not fit on the shelf. In the kitchen I have 2 small shelves that hold the girls lunch bags for school and my cookbooks That is all the space I have in the house, so if it does not fit, it does not belong in the house.

Thirty days may seem like an awfully long time for such a task but I am tying in recipe books for the girls at the same time. Hopefully I will get it done much more quickly but my goal is 30 days!

Today’s goal: I am going to begin with the “icky books” and pull the recipes I want to keep and toss the remainder of each book – okay, I am going to deal with the recipe riot taking place in my kitchen NOW!

WEDDING ALBUM FINALLY COMPLETE!

Late last evening, I put the finishing touches on my wedding album. Twenty eight years later, I can finally stroke this task off my list.

I did have an album that I bought about 10 years ago, I did have a couple of pages pre-scrapped (4 to be precise) which I completed at a scrapbooking class several years ago, I did have some pre-made matting that I bought from a gal off ebay several years ago - these things made the task go quicker than it could have.

What I found shocking was that in this one album I used over 1500 adhesive square to stick the papers and the photos into the album - that was approx at twenty dollar expense. After my first 1,000 squares, I went to Wal-Mart and bought the least expensive acid-free adhesive I could find, which at least made me feel a little better.

I threw away a lot of photos, blurring, unnecessary (how many photos of bridesmaids and groomsmen in a row do you need?). I found it hard to throw some away because my Dad has passed away and some were blurry pics of him...but, what do these photos benefit the next generation if they are not quality photos.

Our albums are to tell a story about an event or a moment in time, the event should be clear and concise. Scrapbooks are expensive, adhesive is expensive - the key to a good album is editing. Make each photo count and make each photo represent an important part of the moment. Aunt Joan with a mouth full of food will not thank you for including her picture unless there is a terrific story about why that mouth full of food was so important. Your dear friend Joe will not thank you for scrapping a photo of him with his head in the toilet at a frat party when he is 45 and a CEO. We remember these moments, we remember these events, albums are created to share the moments with others so be conscious of this when creating albums and respectful of family members and friends who may have moments they would rather not share with the world or future generations!

Total time after the initial sort was approx. 10 hours - done is small chunks over a couple of days, cost for album, papers and adhesive, approx $100.00 but the only thing I paid to complete this was $20.00 for the adhesive, everything else was already in the house.
So the oldest job is off my list now and I can tell you there is a huge sense of relief just getting it done. My wedding photos will not be a burden to my children, they now have then in a book and they can decide to keep it or toss it when I am gone.  They do not have to sort through boxes and bins to decided what to do with them - that makes my heart sing!

That leads me into my next photo task....back on August 16th when I did the big sort of photos - one of the groups I compliled was a big bag of photos and crafts. So begins the next photo journey, ...scrapping all my daycare kiddies and their lovely gifts of artwork. After almost 25 years of daycare, I have a lot of goodies - the key will be editing, cropping out parts of photos that are unimportant and focusing on getting it done rather than walking down memory lane with each item and photo.   At least with this task, I do already have an album started that I use as a portfolio when interviewing potential clients.  This should merely be a matter of adding more pages and just getting it done.   Today is Wednesday and I have given myself until Sunday to complete.  

UPDATE...Friday August 27, task complete!   Whoo Hoo.   I was also able to finish my youngest school photos and get them into an album for her.  The book was started and many of the pages just needed to be stuck into an album but it is done - I also left blank pages in the back of the album to cover the grades she has yet to complete.    She now has a book with all her class photos in order of year plus any ribbons or certifiates she was awarded are in the book with the correct school year.   I am so happy to see these tasks completed and it is amazing to see the piles disappearing! 

BACK TO THE PHOTOS

So... days have passed and still the quest to get my photos organized continues. I have been married for 28 years – 28 years and still have wedding photos that have never been put into an album. What is with that? This is one of my most important life events and I have not devoted the time to celebrate it, or showed the moment enough respect to get an album together in 28 years!!! Weird. This next week is wedding album week. I will post before and afters when I am finished.

AND THEN THERE WERE PHOTOGRAPHS!

My goal for the rest of the month is to do something about the boxes upon boxes of photographs that are in the house. I have my parents photos, none of which are labelled or in albums, I have some of my grandparent’s photographs and boxes of my childhood pictures and those of my children and husband.


Most of my personal photos were in those old albums with the sticky glue in them but I removed them all a few years ago because I had read in several places that they were murder on photographs and were not acid free. They apparently speed up the breakdown of the photographs! So, out they came and with the best of intentions I was going to “scrapbook” them all into lovely albums that would be the showcase of ultimate creativity. *Alas*, years later, they are still in boxes.

So, I swallowed my need to be creative and have everything perfect and Saturday I bought three acid free albums with the plastic pockets to just slide the pictures into. It was a tough thing for me to admit that I had resorted to pocket albums. I wanted the photos to be in albums of beauty! Coming to the conclusions that any album was better than a box was a "light bulb moment" and so the process began. Between the three albums I will be able to store 1500 snapshot sized photos. I am sure this will not be enough but it is a start and I began to tackle this situation yesterday.

Sunday afternoon was a miserable day here. It was pouring rain and thundering – dark and damp so it seemed like a good time to grab a box of photos and get started. I used my bed as a sorting table for two reasons: It was quiet and clean, and the main reason was I would have to finish or at least clean up after myself to get some sleep that night. I sorted photos into groups...old house life, this house life, at the cottage with friends, vacations, photos focusing on just one of my children, my parents etc... As I went through each photo, I tried to not stop and reminisce, I just sorted. Once they were in piles I took the three albums and began to slip them in. This is also when I did a little tossing and likely should have done more. As I woman whose parents were gone early in life, and one who has had to pack up the home of a very clutter loving step-mother once she passed away, I do tend to look at things differently than I did before. I look at the things in my home and wonder how they will impact by children when I am gone. Will they be a burden to them or a blessing? Boxes of photos will be a burden! Albums full of random photos will be a burden not a blessing!

Really how many photos do we need of our child opening Christmas gifts on the same Christmas? If it shows a favourite gift, a particularly special moment – great - but really one Christmas need only be one or two pages in an album. Does your Christmas tree look the same each year? Do you really need a photo of it each year? How many photos of turkey dinner do we need? How many photos of that pretty sunset on your vacation do you need? Pick the prettiest shot and toss the rest! These are all individual decisions but photo albums cost a lot of money and the photos we choose to put in them requires an investment in time, dollars and storage space. Is each photo equal to the time, dollar investment and worthy of the space we will need to dedicate to storing it?

Some things to consider when sorting photos:

• If the photos are blurry, why keep them – toss!

• Duplicates – toss!

• Worst picture of you or your dear ones – toss!

• If they are not something you want your grand-kids to see – toss!

• When you are dead and gone, are the photos you kept the ones you really want to pass down to the next generation? Will they be interested? If not....toss!

• If you really cannot see your loved ones well – toss!

• No idea who is in the photos – toss.

I also went through all my parents’ old negatives and tossed them. It was hard to do, it was not easy, there was huge guilt associated with tossing their memories but there was also deep relief to finally have that box of clutter dealt with. They were a burden in my life. My Mum died almost 30 years ago and it has taken me that amount of time to come to terms with the fact that the world will not end if I throw her negatives away and if I were to die tomorrow, my poor kids would have the same burden .


In the box I found some old photos from the WW2 so I set those aside to mail to the War Museum. They are not family, they are not anyone I know, so perhaps the museum would find them of interest and if not, the museum will toss them. The photos are going into an envelope and into the mail today otherwise, they will sit for months and my best intentions will be gone.

So my Sunday photo sort ended with one box, approx. the size of a Banker’s Box being sorted, purged, tossed and filed into albums. The total time devoted to this project was about three hours with 10 minutes breaks for coffee and visits with my kiddies every 20 minutes or so.

If I can do it, you can too!

Note:   If you are planning to remove your old photos from these types of albums, try slipping dental floss between your photo and the book to gently release the picture from the glue. Most came out quite easily but there were a few that really required some gentle surgery.

_________________________________

Update 2013 - If you are looking for a Professional Photo Organizer - Adventures In Organizing is now assisting their clients with the specialized service.   We will sort, scan, save and upload your photos so your families memories will be preserved for future generations.   We can even assist in transferring your images into photo books.   Visit our website today and click the Book Appointment Button for personalized custom service.   We can even assist our virtual and cyber clients with this important service.

IN THE BEGINNING - THERE WAS CHAOS

Cleaning the house was never something that I was concerned with. Clutter was everywhere, clothes were everywhere, and dishes were always piled high in the sink and on the counter. I hated cleaning, I loathed cleaning and for my overly distracted mind, keeping focus on the task at hand has always been difficult.


Washing the dishes would lead to emptying and re-organizing the dish cupboard, laundry would lead to ripping apart the linen closet, and making the bed – well that often led to moving all the furniture around in the bedroom.

When my husband and I were first married, we lived in an apartment on the 12th floor of a rather nice building. The bonus of being on the 12th floor was that if someone “popped in to visit”, we had the time from when they buzzed to be let in, until they rode the elevator to the door, to clean up.   This involved a mad dash to shove the dirty dishes into the oven (it was my method of choice to clean up). The clothes piles were tossed into the bedroom with the perpetually unmade bed and the door firmly closed.  The junk lying around was tossed into a garbage bag to be dumped back out once they left. It is very embarrassing and yet funny at the same time to think back on it now.  We must have looked something like they Keystone cops gone wild!

My husband and I both lost our parents fairly early in life, our grandparents are are also gone.  This has resulted in a whole mountain of stuff.  Not only do we have “our stuff”, we have “their stuff” too!  Stuff is the root of most chaos and clutter in the home and ours had an abundance!

 I do not live a quiet relaxing life, my life is chaotic! I am a mom to three amazing teenage daughters. Each daughter has their own unique personality and ways of contribution to the chaos. On top of being a Mom to three girls, I am a wife of 28 years, and a home daycare provider for almost 25 years.    My first daycare babies are in the process of graduating from University now. There has always been a lot of action on the home front. 

My life is spent running my daycare, shopping, mowing lawns, making many trips to the hospital, mowing the lawn, paying bills, organizing the girls and their activities, volunteering, going to church, and finding time to be supportive to my girlfriends and make time for them in my week. I live a life just like most others in the western world. Chaotic and pulled in a thousand directions!

Finally, now in my late 40’s I think I have finally developed a process to keep me organized and to keep my house "company ready" at all times.  My dear husband has cancer so in the back of my mind, I keep the house at not just "company ready" but "sell ready" as well.    This was not an easy transition, it did not happen overnight in some kind of epiphany; it happened one pile of clutter at a time, one drawer at a time, one room at a time.

My point here is, that if I can get my act together, you can too; one step at a time, one pile at a time, one drawer at a time.   Time is your friend, not your enemy and you can overcome the chaos.