Average Jane

Average Jane vs. the Wrapping Paper

Yesterday I decided it was time to tackle the mountain of shipping boxes and bags in my dressing room and get all the holiday gifts ready for distribution.

Over the years, I've reached the point where I have TWO plastic caddies for gift wrapping supplies: one for rolls of paper and the other for gift bags, tags, etc. But this degree of organization means that I can safely store everything for years and years and years, which brings me to the point of this story.

At some juncture in my life - and I'm thinking it has to have been a good 15+ years ago at this point - I purchased several really, really ridiculously long rolls of Christmas wrapping paper. One was green with penguins, another features a green, blue and magenta ornament design, and a third has an off-white background with holiday greenery. My niece and nephew (ages 20 and 15) have seen this paper under the tree throughout their entire lives. 

This is not good quality paper. It's thin, tears easily, and sort of wads into place rather than folding neatly. But the lack of quality has been amply outweighed by the copious quantity. It's been my go-to for large boxes for more than a decade. Within the last couple of years, I finally used up the green penguin paper, but the other two are still going strong...and I hate them.

Yes, I have purchased other wrapping paper and gift bags since I got the rolls of paper in question, but that just means they last longer. And even when I make a concerted effort to use those rolls as much as possible, there's just so much paper on them.

There was a time when I took great pride in wrapping gifts beautifully. As a college student, I worked at Sears and enjoyed wrapping gifts with the heavy paper, double-sided tape and beautiful bows they had. This cheap, shitty paper ruins all that. Only with the squarest of boxes can I get a halfway good result, mostly from distracting the eye with a nice bow.

But I'm thrifty and persistent, so I will use up those rolls of paper. Brace yourselves, family. Here it is again.

Average Jane's Home Organizing Project

If you're following the saga of my self-assigned year of organizing, I can report that it is going exceedingly well. I'm trying not to over-report about it here, but there are some developments over the past couple of weeks that are changing some of my mindsets in ways I hadn't anticipated initially.

Deliberate Donations

I knew that this project would involve throwing away, giving away and donating a lot of items from my house, but the purge volume is turning out to be much higher than I thought it would be. At first, I was just taking everything with residual value and dumping it at the thrift store, but when I got to my linen closet, I started thinking about better ways to get the items directly to people who can use them most.

We have a charity in town called Sleepyhead Beds that focuses on providing beds and bedding to families and children. Once I pulled everything out of my linen closet and drawers, I remembered that I also had significant amounts of bedding stuffed into big plastic tubs in my basement. I'd already bagged everything up willy-nilly, but I realized it made more sense for me to unpack the bags, match up the pillow cases with the sheets, and re-bag the items that Sleepyhead Beds will take. I'll have my husband drop it all off during their business hours some weekday soon.

I also ran across some towels I no longer use, so those will go to a nearby animal shelter, along with all of the cardboard trays that my brand of cat litter comes in. I have been letting them pile up in the basement out of sheer laziness, but it's a simple thing to remove the plastic to recycle along with my plastic grocery sacks and stack the cardboard trays for donation.

Permanent Upgrades

Cleaning out the cupboard where I store my baking pans opened my eyes to the potential for getting rid of a large number of low quality cookie sheets and baking pans. I'm replacing them with two high-quality half-sheet pans that will probably serve me well indefinitely. One of my old cookie sheets is so warped that I once used it to bake a butter-heavy type of cookie, only to have the entire panful slide to one side and form a giant cookie Pangaea. 

I don't think that will be happening again.

Making Life Easier

This whole project is ultimately serving to cut down on the nagging pull in the back of my mind of work I know needs to be done. A welcome side-effect is that every completed project makes some aspect of my home life more convenient. Call it feng shui or just good organization, but the upshot is that when I need to find something in one of the places I've already worked on, it's exactly where it should be.

And One New Rule

I'd already decided that if I did an assignment early, I could just skip that week when I got to it. Well, this was the week when I had to decide what to do if I didn't complete my weekly project. Between a lack of motivation on Saturday and a lot of other things to do on Sunday, it was clear that my task for this weekend wasn't going to get done. So I made a new rule that in these instances, I would swap the missed work project on the spreadsheet with the first one that had been completed early. That way, I get to move on to whatever was next and get to the skipped project later on.

Why not just do it next week? I could have gone that route, but I suspected that my failure to complete an assignment might attach some psychological baggage. Moving it down the list to a logical but relatively random date helps ensure that I'll approach it with a fresher outlook. Plus, it maintains the spirit of my earlier rule by still giving me a week off - just not the week I originally would have gotten.

Average Jane's "Lazy" Day

Rolling into the three-day weekend, I decided there was no real reason for me to leave the house yesterday. In fact, I spent the entire day in my pajamas and robe.

To the casual observer, it might have appeared that I spent the day sitting my favorite chair in the living room, goofing around on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. That almost feels true to me, but a quick inventory reveals that I also:

• Baked a batch of chocolate chip cookies.
• Wrote a blog post to share my sister's bean dip recipe.
• Washed pots and pans and cleaned the kitchen.
• Ran the dishwasher twice.
• Cleaned the kitchen sink.
• Did 7 loads of laundry, including a rare white load with bleach.
• Cleaned out my main food storage cupboard.
• Got on a roll and also cleaned out some lower cupboards that have been an annoying mess for a while.
• Cleaned out a drawer above those cupboards.
• Decided to swap the contents of two upper cupboards, so I cleaned them out as well.
• Took a LOT of trash out.
• Made a batch of popcorn and spiked some Orange Vanilla Coke with Jack Daniels to enjoy while watching the season premiere of The Magicians.
• Put away all the laundry I'd done.
• Filled a big cardboard box and a trash bag with items to take to a swap with friends next week.

How does all that fit in with my year-long organizing plan? Well, three of the "extra" items I did yesterday were on the list for later in the year, so that gives me three free weekends to do other things. One of the drawers wasn't on the list, but it was definitely overdue to be cleaned out.

Today I have plans with various friends for most of the day, starting with brunch this morning. In between, I'll be making the bean dip mentioned in the previous post so my husband can enjoy it while he watches the Chiefs game.

That leaves Monday for the errands I put off yesterday. I like how this weekend is shaping up.

Average Jane Makes Progress

In my last post, I laid out my plan to start tidying one part of my house every week. This is Week 3 (because I started the last week of December) and so far it's going swimmingly. 

I was looking forward to this week because the project was to clean out the closet in my bedroom that I use as overflow storage for my kitchen. It holds cleaning supplies, serving ware, small appliances, kitchen tools, special occasion cookware, baking pans, and some odds and ends like canning jars, spray paint and a furniture dolly. 

Here's what it looked like to start with:

I mean, it's not HORRIBLE, but it's definitely jumbled and disorganized. 

I took everything out and either laid it on my bed, put it on a card table I brought in for the occasion, or set it on the floor outside the closet. I had an empty box ready for useful things that I'll take to a swap with my friends. The next one is coming up in about 10 days and anything that doesn't get claimed will get donated.

I started another box of items to donate to Habitat ReStore - mainly cleaning products that are full or nearly full. I had a lot of carpet cleaners, for example, despite the fact that my home has almost no carpeting.

A few things needed to be thrown away, including the two cartons of oat milk you see on the bottom, left-hand shelf that expired two years ago. I got out a trash bag for those.

Finally, I discovered a very full box of dead compact fluorescent bulbs that I will take to Lowe's for disposal.

The end result:

Voila! Much tidier. I even left room for some storage containers that are currently in use.

I think I'm going to get some baskets to attach to the inside of the right-hand door that I can use for some of the things that are still kind of hanging out in there without a defined spot. That would be good for stuff like the ShopVac attachments you see on the floor to the right and the pile of cleaning rags that are stacked on top of other cleaning supplies on the shelf. 

Even without the baskets, it's still in a much better place and it will definitely be easier to find things and put them back after I use them.

One of the best things about this whole project is that most of the tasks are relatively quick and easy. Even today's project took less than 90 minutes.

Now that I have it out of the way, it's time for me to make some pizza dough and bake cookies. 

Hope you also had a productive weekend. And if it wasn't productive, I hope it was relaxing and fun!

Average Jane Makes A Plan

It's a little early for new year's resolutions, but I got an idea earlier this week and decided to run with it.

I was thinking about all of the things around the house that need to be done but get skipped over because procrastination is a way of life. Some are large and some are small, but there are a LOT of them in my house (and probably in yours as well).

So how do you ensure that you'll get to them? My mind went straight to spreadsheet.

What if I made a list of every area of the house that needed tidying, put them on a spreadsheet and associated each one with a weekend next year? Breaking the work down into bite-sized chunks with two days every week set aside to get them done seemed more than reasonable, especially for smaller jobs.

I opened Excel and pasted in the dates for every Saturday in 2020, marking off the weekends when I would be out of town or busy with a holiday. Then I started thinking of every drawer, cupboard, cabinet, closet and shelving unit in the house that needed to be reorganized. I put in a column for the room the problem area was in, another for the specific location that needed to be addressed (e.g. "upper drawer to the left of the sink"), and a notes column for more complicated projects.

As I began adding projects, I developed some rules. One was that if I got something done early, I could either take off the weekend I had assigned to that task or use it to do something else early. As I was making the list, I kept thinking, "I should do this or that sooner!" Which sounds great, but without the list and the assigned date for accountability, history tells me I wouldn't get to those things ever.

There's a pretty wide spectrum of difficulty and effort associated with the 47 weeks of projects I eventually listed. They range from cleaning out a single drawer to renting a roll-off container and cleaning out the garage. There are only 3-4 large projects on the list that will probably take an entire day or weekend. I tried to limit the scope of the assignment to tidying, rearranging and cleaning, but in one instance there will be a little light reconstruction under one sink.

Only one thing made it on the list twice and that's organizing the closet in my bedroom, which is arranged as an overflow pantry. It gets out of control pretty quickly, so I thought I should tackle it once in the spring and once in the late fall.

Now that I have the list set, I'm considering adding another section for additional projects outside of the original scope. For example, I have a couple of rooms I'd like to re-paint this year and I need to cut down some trees in my yard. Some general to-dos like taking the mower in for maintenance would be good to add as well.

To kick the whole thing off, I gave myself two relatively small assignments this coming weekend. One involves cleaning out and throwing away an old side table so I can be ready to rearrange my bedroom furniture when the headboard I got for Christmas arrives next week. 

I'm pretty pumped up about this whole idea. Next on the agenda is to print out the spreadsheet and hang it someplace where I'll see it every day. Heck, maybe I'll even get gold stars to mark the completed items.

Have you ever tried something like this? Leave a comment and let me know!

Photo by Jessica Fiess-Hill, cropped, used under CC by 2.o

Average Jane Goes to Bed Early

I'm not a man and I'm still working on the "wealthy" part, but I think Ben Franklin was onto something with his recommendation to turn in early.

Let's start with the admission that I'm a morning person. That's not a choice, it's just how I'm hardwired. 

As it turns out, Dottie is a morning dog. Depending on the season, our first trip outside every day is around 3:30 or 4:30 a.m. We both go back to bed for a while after that, but if I want to get a lot of sleep, I need a good head start the night before.

Around the time I stopped performing with my last band, it occurred to me that there was nothing stopping me from going to bed whenever I wanted. Tired at 8:30? It's bedtime! Feeling sleepy at 9:00? Time to put the dog in her crate and settle in for the night.

It's. Been. Wonderful.

I need a lot of sleep to function properly and going to bed well before 10:00 p.m. pretty much guarantees that I will get it. Now that I'm achieving eight or more hours of sleep per night almost every night, I feel better physically and mentally. I don't find myself canceling plans as much. I get more done every day. I think I'm even getting by on less caffeine.

I know that early bedtimes aren't for everyone, but they certainly work for me. The next time you're feeling overwhelmed, exhausted and fried, give it a try. 

 

Average Jane Remains on Daylight Saving Time

Time changes always wreck me. I'll think I'm fine the first day, but then it takes me a good couple of weeks to get used to the switch.

Because I now have a dog with strong feelings about schedules, I've decided that I refuse to acknowledge the switch from Daylight Saving to Standard time this year. Instead, I'm just going to move all my activities up an hour.

It actually works out very well because almost everyone I work with is on Eastern time. If I go to work at 7:30 a.m. instead of 8:30 a.m., my whole team gets in around the same time I do and works until about the time I'm getting too tired to think straight. From a convenience standpoint, it just makes sense.

I'm very much a morning person, so I wake up around 5:30 a.m. anyway. Now that I'm no longer in a band, I don't have to worry about many activities interfering with my preferred 9:30 p.m. bedtime. (Okay, sometimes it's 9:00 p.m.)

I might be a little tired in the mornings, but that's what coffee is for.

Photo credit: Stuart Rankin, CC BY-NC 2.0

Average Jane Goes to the Zoo

I got a chance to take advantage of the warmest day of the weekend (low 60s Fahrenheit) and spend the day at the Kansas City Zoo with my nephew and some friends. It was "pumpkin smash" weekend where they give the animals pumpkins to eat/play with and it's become somewhat of a social tradition for us.

The meerkats have always been my favorites because they actually love to eat the pumpkins, but they are off exhibit right now. So, we didn't actually see a lot of pumpkin interaction except among the orangutans and the baboons. But we did get to witness a baboon commotion that the African wild dogs thought was fascinating.

Some construction at the elephant exhibit meant that we did less walking than usual because trams are currently mandatory for getting back and forth to see the African animals. Still, I walked well over four miles and I was TIRED by the end. I keep threatening to start going to the gym and it really does need to happen.

And now you've seen all the photos I took today. I was trying not to take the same ones I take every year and I ended up being more restrained than I meant to be. 

It was a very busy weekend, but I enjoyed myself. Now I need to catch up on actual work so I can go to bed when my body clock disagrees with the time change.

Average Jane Finds Her Blog's Purpose Again

Way back in 2004, I started this blog in part to serve as a writing warmup every day before I went to work and wrote all day for clients. Today, I'm once again writing for a living and sometimes I find it challenging to turn on the word tap to the proper volume.

Last week I traveled out of town to the office where most of my team members work. As we developed our editorial calendar for 2019, I could see that I'd be writing and publishing two blog posts every week – AND THAT FELT LIKE A LOT. Then I remembered that I used to blog here every single weekday, and I was kind of mad at myself for letting that slide.

This feels like the perfect time to reinvigorate the blog for several reasons. There's no question that other social platforms have taken the place of my blog writing over the past decade. We've all known that those platforms are not ideal for content producers, but as they have become more toxic in their own ways, it feels refreshing to go back to a place where I can produce and store content that I own.

Even my husband mentioned the other day that it was sad to see my blog decline because it used to be a convenient place to find out when we got various pets and track other milestones. 

Nothing's going to change about this blog and its content except the frequency. I'm going to start by going back and filling in some of the aforementioned milestones from the past year or so, just so I'll have a place to find them easily going forward. I hope there are a few diehard readers still around, but if not I'll do this for myself.

It feels good to be back.

Average Jane Works from Home

Today, Dr. Jones and the other cats helped me work all day. I had a doctor's appointment in the morning and when I got to my office, there were no parking spaces in any of the lots. I decided that the universe wanted me to spend the day writing from my living room chair. 

It was quiet and I got a lot of stuff done, despite the fact that the cats took turns being on my lap at all times.

How do you feel about working remotely when you could be working in an office?