Friday, June 20, 2008

Dustbunnies and Socks

So far I’m doing alright with the Flylady system. I’ve shined my sink two nights in a row, and two nights in a row H has put a dirty bowl into it within minutes of my shining it. It’s okay, though. It’s a new system and I try not to sigh or comment maliciously.

Yesterday I took a few minutes to dust the dustbunnies off the ceiling fan. Formerly this fan would run 24-7, but I’ve been turning it off when we leave the house lately to save on energy. Meaning when we walk into the house we see this bunny-encrusted ceiling fan just sitting there taunting us. So I dusted it. I realize now that the bunnies were a crucial part of the balancing mechanism for the fan, because now it’s making little ‘tick-tick-tick’ noises every couple of minutes.

Next week my focus will be on laying out my clothes the night before. We do this with E, as she has a hanger with compartments and we fill it up with a weeks worth of clothes at a time. This helps her get up and dressed a lot faster without worrying about whether she has clean socks. This week I’ve had to worry about socks, and more importantly pants for work, and it has not helped us get out of the house quickly in the mornings.

I’m feeling a little more centered about the process of getting my act together, as I’m realizing it is a process and will not happen overnight, or even in a week. As long as I’m making progress I think I’ll be okay.

Financially we are still right on the edge and still waiting for our stimulus check, but it comes when it comes.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Beginning Again


austin1
Originally uploaded by torres21
Lately, I’ve fallen off the financial planning wagon as several things have clumped up to make things rather tight for us as well as very busy and I’ve fallen off the blogging wagon as well. For some reason, I feel as if I shouldn’t blog if I’m not doing well in my financial goals. But if this is truly going to be a record of my progress, in this and any other goals I’m trying to accomplish, I need to record the good and the bad. So I’m calling a mulligan and starting over.

I did a bad thing. I had planned to use our stimulus check to pay some credit cards off and buy some camping equipment we needed for a trip we were planning. Originally we thought the check would be direct deposited, but that didn’t happen. So we were looking at the payment schedule and figured the check would be here mid June, so we used our regular paycheck to pay for the camping equipment and trip and figured the check would be here by the time our trip was over and we needed to pay our regular bills. But somehow we managed to read the schedule wrong. So our 2nd check for the month covered the bills for the 1st half of the month, and the 2nd half bills will be covered by the check when it gets here.

Moral: Never count your chickens before they hatch.

Meanwhile, I will be starting a new job in 2 weeks. This won’t make much difference in our financial picture, but the commute will be a bit shorter and I will hopefully be less stressed. The new job situation looks to have a much saner boss and work schedule.

And I’ve decided that I need to make some major organizational changes in our household… in that we need a little. So I’m looking into flylady.net. I’ve been on Flylady’s program before, but more in the ‘I read the emails and don’t really follow the advice’ kind of way. This time I’m going to read the emails and follow along as best I can. I’ll try to keep an update here on my progress in that department.

Also, I’m going to try to follow along with the Going Green group that ’Burban Mom is starting up.

So a lot of changes here at Trifling Occasions. Let’s hope I can keep up.