Quick, quick, zoom!

Just a quickie post to let everyone know that things here are just fine. Crazy busy as usual, but just fine.

Newsy items to share. Um, we're down to four cats. A friend of Bill's has a farm and needed cats, so Cooper, Echo, and three of the kittens have a new home with lots of barns and sheds and plenty of critters to hunt. We decided to keep one of the kittens (as yet unnamed) so we still have her plus Puufy, Abbie and Peanut.

I've been making a point to sew weekly at a friend's quilt shop and it's working out very well. My stress level has dropped immeasurably.

I'm writing steadily on SPORE and a proposal's been sent out to the world. It's a different kind of book, but I think it's really fun!

We're all looking forward to Dark Knight Rises and Brave.

Honestly, that's about it around here. Mostly it's just more of the same, just kinda crazy busy. :)

If anyone has blog post topic ideas, please let me know. I'm mostly coming up blank here.

Have a great week!  {{huggs}}

Everything is Clutterin'

Like a lot of people, I have a tendency to accumulate clutter. For me, the main culprit is paper.

I print out recipes, writing tips, cute sayings, quilt patterns, all kinds of things. I save magazines, newspaper articles and birthday cards. I'm a sucker for office supplies, catalogs, and freebie calendars. In short, papers pile up. Since the papers are piling up, I don't get other things put properly away either. Before I know it, there's a paper and clutter explosion.

Frankly, I'm sick of it.

Cables and office supplies and books and papers, oh my!

We switched the office and living room a couple of weeks ago. I loved having both rooms empty of almost everything but furniture. No extra stuff, no clutter. But to do that, we had to move the extras to the kitchen table, my sewing room, and other places. Since then, the crap has begun creeping back, mostly because we occasionally need to use the kitchen table, etc. Right this moment,  I literally have a long pile of miscellaneous useful-but-rarely-used stuff sitting on the floor behind me with no better place to put it. None. Why? Because its almost entirely clutter.

I'm tired of stepping over it every time I go to my desk. I'm tired of the dog knocking it all over the otherwise clean room whenever he comes running past to see what eeeevil dog is peeing in his front yard.

I have too much paper clutter. I have too many quilting magazines and patterns. I have too many kitchen do-dads, too much fabric, and I'm one more kitten away from officially being a crazy cat lady.

It ends today.

I have some big totes and a deep vat of determination to put my 'rarely used but don't want to part with it' stuff in the totes, all separated and categorized by function. Writing-related books and articles. Fabric. Quilting patterns and such. Kitchen crap. All of my big clutter-monsters. They're going in totes and going in the basement. If I need something out of one of the totes - like my notes and articles on The Hero's Journey, for example - I can go down there, pull out the folder, and get what I need. If I don't need it, it'll stay in the tote. Next year, if it's still in the tote, it's outta here. No exceptions.

If I don't use it on a regular (at least weekly) basis, it's going in a !(@*$^ tote, dammit.

An incredible lightness of leftovers

I have this weird thing about frugality. I don't like to waste anything. I don't waste one thread of fabric I don't have to (it's one reason my quilts are all so scrappy). I don't waste money. And I don't waste food.

Nothing aggravates me more than finding something rotting in the fridge that I could have, should have, used up before it went bad. I can't say I've never thrown anything away - I do, on occasion, have to toss a slimy half-tomato or gushy hunk of cucumber - but I make a point to repurpose extra bits of food as much as possible, and make sure leftovers get eaten.

Today's breakfast was leftover fried rice that I'd cooked Tuesday from leftover chicken, leftover miscellaneous veggies, half an onion I needed to use up, some celery that was starting to edge toward limpness, and the last little smidge of soy sauce in the bottle. Other than the brown rice and a handful of frozen veggies to round it out, the whole batch was repurposing leftovers. And it's yummy, and cheap and, since it's homemade, reasonably healthy.

Last night I made burritos from Monday's leftover taco meat, some tortillas and a jar of salsa. I'll probably have some of them for lunch.

Remaking leftovers is awesome. And nothing goes to waste.