Friday, February 15, 2013

SNOW DAY weekend! (bonus post because I forgot about it until now)

Last weekend started with a snow day! This is tremendous on a couple of levels. First of all, I love snow. LOVE IT. This happens in my head every single time it snows:

And then, when I calm down, this happens:

I was made to live in Michigan, you guys. The other reason this is tremendous is that sometimes when the University where I work closes, our Dean keeps the library open so that international students and students who live on campus have a place to go. But Friday he decided not to do that. So that means: double snow day!!!!

So what's a girl to do? Hmmm... stay in her jammies, drink a bunch of coffee, knit just about everything she can, take a nap with some cats, and read some blogs.

Here are some snow day highlights from my snowday and the weekend:

I started the day with whole wheat pancakes. I ate so many of them I almost made myself sick.


Then, because it was a beautiful day outside, I had eaten way too much, and I had a sugar/coffee high going, I went outside and shoveled in this outfit

 
for an hour and a half until my driveway looked like this


Later that day, my cousin and I drove up to Frankfort for the weekend. The only picture I took the entire time I was up there was this one


It was a beautiful winter wonderland! When I came back home, I saw my super pregnant sister who's ready to have her baby just about anytime and who looks like she's just pretending to be pregnant.

 
 And then hung out with Harper.


That was last weekend. Who even knows what this weekend will bring!
 












Pinterest Wednesday (a little late, shh!)

Hello everyone! Today's Friday edition of Pinterest Wednesday is brought to you by my very messy back room:

This is the "craft" room. It's been various levels of untidy during the entire time I've lived in my house. I decided to make it my first priority in my decluttering project because it's the only room in the house that is completely unusable and I find it horrifying. It's not always quite as bad as in the picture above, but it's never been great. This used to be my ex-boyfriend's office when we lived together and when he moved out at first I thought it would be GREAT to turn it into MY office and craft room! Hooray for healing! Instead, I would get tired even looking at it and go take a nap on the couch or knit something. Emotions, man. They'll getcha. But now I'm further away from the breakup and ready to dive in to some decluttering! I split this unholy mess into categories: paperwork, craft supplies, stuff under the table, stuff on the table, the bookshelves, and the closet. And since I have so many days on my 100 days to declutter list open, I can take just about as much time as I need to with each category.

I have some meetings coming up for which I will need certain papers, so I decided to jump right in with the paperwork. I put a bunch of it in a bag and brought it out in the living room to spread out. When I got back from grabbing my phone so I could take pictures, I found Harper inspecting the bag. "Oh, that's so cute," I thought and snapped this picture.

Little did I know she was going to try to help me with the recycling:

 

And with the papers I wanted to keep:


Other than my adorable (and annoying) cat, there isn't too much excitement in sorting papers. I sorted them into keep, recycle, and shred piles. It's still a work in progress but it will be a good feeling when I can all of this organized. Step one toward decluttering is a go!

Thursday, February 7, 2013

Happy Vindication Thursday!

Happy Thursday to all! Today's Thursday is brought to you by vindication

I have many, many irrational fears. So many, in fact, that "irrational fears" was already a label on this blog. I try not to let these fears overtake me or rule my life, but they are there. One such fear is my fear of whales. I'm pretty terrified of the ocean in general: it's big, dark, scary, full of weirdo creatures, is where sharks live, not to mention the high drowning risk. I'm in awe of it, I love looking at pictures of deep sea creatures and thinking about this whole other planet, in a way, that exists on our planet. But still: scary.

Here's the thing with whales: they are beautiful, majestic creatures and I would love to go whale watching someday. But I'm always afraid that they'll just come along and with their MASSIVE size, sort of nudge the boat and then you'll be in the ocean with all the weird creatures, sharks, and drowning. When I tell my friends about this fear, oh how they laugh. "Why aren't you afraid of sharks instead of whales?" The two fears are not mutually exclusive, guys. But anyway, in the video above you'll see that while no one fell into the ocean, a humpback whale definitely NUDGED a small boat on the ocean while surfacing.

So there! Vindication!

This weekend, I'll be going up north for a birthday, knitting a lot, and reading. What are your plans? What are your irrational fears? Did you just add whales to the list?

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

The beginning of Pinterest Wednesdays

Hello and welcome to Pinterest Wednesdays!

As part of my goal to blog more, I have given myself three recurring blogs to write each week. On Wednesdays, the idea is Pinterest Wednesday. This also incorporates my goal of trying something I've pinned on Pinterest each week. Hopefully, the knowledge that I have to write a blog about it will inspire me to plan on trying a pin (might be a recipe, might be a craft, might be a product, an exercise who even knows? SUSPENSE.) and hopefully actually trying a pin each week will give me an easy blog to write leading to more regular blog writing. Killing two birds with one stone is the only way I kill birds! (Metaphorically is also the only way I kill birds).

So to kick things off, I looked at my Pins I've Tried Board. But I didn't feel inspired to write about any of those things. Some of them, I'd already written about and the rest just weren't doing it for me. So I picked a new pin:

I will be honest, I largely picked it because the mug looked beautiful. And it was such a peaceful scene that it made me think: Heck yes I want to improve my life in 60 small ways over the next 100 days. 

Then I read what the 60 small ways were. Hmmm....not so small as such. At least, not all of them. Some of them I think are great and doable. Some of them I think are great, just not for me. And some of them I just don't want to do. That's what great about writing your own blog and doing your own things: you can do and not do pretty much whatever you want.

Now let's get started: it looks like you're supposed to do all of these things all at once, which I find overwhelming and silly, so I'm going to start one at a time.

Number one small way to improve your life: Create a 100 days to declutter calendar- make a list of 100 things to declutter and do one each day. I typed up my list quickly, mentally moving around my house in a circle. It was actually kind of hard to think of 100 things, so I tried to break bigger things into smaller parts. Even so "Basement" is 30 of the things (mostly because my basement is big, totally cluttered, stinky, and scary, so I'm only going to be able to be down there for maybe 15 minutes at a time) and I left 63-100 blank. As I start this project, I might need to break some of my list items into smaller chunks, or I might think of other things to do. I'll be sharing them here on Pinterest Wednesdays as I go.

What pins are you doing? Are they going well or not so good? Do you have 100 things you could think of to declutter?