Oh well.

The Joyful Housewife is about my journey not theirs – and my personal struggle is with clutter, disorganization, and procrastination – especially when it comes to cleaning.

Following are my cleaning and clutter- busting goals for the next month (Febuary)  These are easy things I can start doing regularly that will make me feel better. They are also things that I’ve long had huge aversions to doing.

Blech

1. Wipe my kitchen counters every night. 
I can’t explain why, but I hate wiping counters. When I mention this to people they say things like,

• “I love wiping my kitchen counter!”
• “I ALWAYS have to wipe my counters. I’m like obsessive about it.”
• “It gets so gross if you don’t wipe it.”

Well they’ve already discovered what I’m learning. You really feel better when it’s done – and it’s not that bad to do it. The mental benefit definitely outweighs the physical cost – if only it weren’t so hard to remember that.

2. Clear off and wipe down dining table every night. It really improves my morning when I walk into the room and the table is all cleaned off and wiped down. I think we let things pile up on the table because we don’t have storage space, or know where to put things.

3. Wipe bathroom counters weekly. It is so much easier do to when it hasn’t gotten overly dusty

4. Empty bathroom garbage cans every couple of days. It just looks gross when the wastebasket is full – and then I stress-out when I want to invite someone over or someone stops by.

5. Abide by the “one-minute rule”* to avoid procrastination. I stumbled upon this idea at Gretchen Rubin’s website about her best-selling book The Happiness Project. She explains it in a few different posts and videos. Basically, if it will take less than a minute, like rinsing a dish, putting it in the dishwasher, filing a piece of paper, etc, then just do it right now. A lot of little things can really add up if you don’t just do them immediately, before they can even have an effect on your psyche.

How does this schedule sound to all you naturally clean people. Does it sound about right?

It has been so cool to use organic local fruit from nearby orchards for this process, and to change the fruits with the seasons.

The process is quite simple. Just stuff a bunch of fruit into a jar and cover it with vodka (lately we’ve been using Tito’s Handmade Vodka for the value, but we first made it with Prairie Organic Vodka, after out Minnesota relatives visited, and that honestly tasted smoother) then agitate it twice a day for two weeks. To agitate, you turn the bottles upside down and then upright ten times. Then strain it through a cheesecloth and funnel it back into a bottle.

I know that pineapple infused vodka has been popular lately. Let me know if anyone tries any other off-the-wall flavors – like peppers or cucumbers!

I’ve had some big falls off of the bicycle of life.

When I was suffering from chronic depression in college, I accumulated seven Fs on my transcript because I wasn’t able to handle the necessary hoop jumping to get certain classes dropped – which I should never have been signed up for in the first place. *Sigh*

You would think seven Fs would kill your college career for good, and yet, even when my appeal was denied to get some of them retroactively removed, I was still able to get my master’s degree in Linguistics, a very difficult field.

How did I do it?

(1) Ignore the naysayers, real and imaginary

I didn’t allow my negative self-talk, or anyone else, to deter me from my goal to enter the field of Linguistics and to finish with my Master’s degree. When I had to face the head of the Linguistics department with my seven Fs, I held my head high and said, “I am aware this looks bad, but I know I can do this.” After his initial skepticism (boy did he hit me with some heavy condescension!), it was he who invited me to apply for the Master’s program two years later.

(2) Get Over It: Don’t Dwell In, or On, the Fall

I know there are many people who would have given up for good upon failing out of college – as I essentially did (I was required to take a year off before I was permitted to try again). It is for that reason that I trot out this story over and over again. I did not dwell in the story of my failure, deciding to be a college dropout for the rest of my life. Nor do I dwell on that story of failure, by using it as a “poor me” story. Instead my story of failure has become a story of success.

(3) Just Do It, AKA, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway

Get back on the bike. When my academic probation was over, I held my transcript in my hand and met with the head of the Linguistics department. That took tenacity. Guts!

In the end, really, you have nothing to lose.

Currently I’ve fallen off the blogging bicycle.

Somehow I’ve let the weeks slip by and have not posted in two months! It never used to matter so much when I let time pass without posting, but now this blogging thing is more than a purging of thoughts to me – I care about what I’m doing in this space – and I don’t want to lose all my readers by being perceived as an unreliable poster.

How do I solve this according to the above strategy?

(1) Ignore the naysayers, real and imaginary

For me, aside from my fears that my readers all hate me now, is my extreme writer’s block stemming from, “What exactly do I write to fill in the blanks of several weeks gone by?” Seriously, where do I start? So much has happened in the past two months! Sebastian has begun eating solid foods, has eight teeth, enjoys swimming (being held and swirled around in deep water), and is crawling!

(2) Get Over It: Don’t Dwell In, or On, the Fall

I messed up.

Why didn’t I just post the following?

:: Summer Break ::

“Dear readers, I’ll be taking a summer break. I will resume with weekly Keep or Purge posts sometime in September.

Enjoy your summer!”

I refuse to identify myself as a failed blogger. I have blogging goals that I have not yet reached and I’ll never get there if I keep replaying that negative self talk over and over and over. Yes, I’m upset with myself for not at least foreseeing that I would need to take a summer break and alerting my readers to that fact. But what’s done is done.

(3) Just Do It, AKA, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway

And here I am! I’ve done it. I was terrified to post again, but now I have! I’m back on that horse, or bicycle.

Or whatever.

I love this mug!

Below is a fun picture mug that my sister sent me after she had her first child – the niece that made me an aunt! And it’s been sitting at the back of my cupboard for a couple of years now because I broke it. Snapped of the handle and put a huge crack down the side.

My oldest niece.

I’ve already pointed out my propensity to break dishes before. I don’t discriminate. I break wedding china, wine glasses, and sentimental mugs. This is not the only sentimental mug I’ve broken either. I also broke a couple of the ones that I took from my godfather’s farm after he died.

Hey you...Hands off my Aunt Jessie's Mug!

But what do you do with a broken mug you can’t bear to throw away? This was one-of-a-kind mug. There is no other like it. Every time I drank coffee out of it while studying in college and graduate school, hundreds of miles from my family, I felt closer to them. Then one day I smashed that connection.

I suppose this should be a reminder to pick up the phone or write a letter, huh?

Anyway, I don’t think I want to set it on my desk and put pens in it, or to try to grow a plant in it, so is there really anything else to do with it besides put it back up in the back of my cupboard?

You don’t want me to *gasp* throw it away, do you?!!!

What would you do with it?

Please vote and leave your comments below.

Check out last week’s Keep or Purge :: Purple Gift Bag and Tissue Paper

Quinoa with black beans, sesame oil, soy sauce, raw carrots, and raw snap peas.

I’ve been taking baby steps toward keeping healthful, whole foods, and tons of veggies prepped and ready to eat.

My current goal has been to keep a batch of cooked beans, and a batch of cooked whole grain, such as quinoa, in the fridge at all times. We cooked these black beans with a bay leaf and salt and they taste pretty good on their own.

My husband has been eating the quinoa and beans for breakfast with a little bit of sesame oil and soy sauce. We originally got the idea to eat savory whole grains, instead of oatmeal  for breakfast, from Mark Bittman. Wheat Berries are delicious prepared this way. We also try to keep some sliced green onion in a bag in the the fridge so that he can sprinkle them on top. (FYI – he ate breakfast at the hospital today, eggs, potatoes, with green chile and fresh fruit, and he texted me at 11:00 saying he was WAY more hungry than usual. So skip the potatoes and eat whole grains instead!)

I had been eating the black beans and quinoa for lunch and having cut up veggies on the side, when I had the idea to put the raw veggies in the quiona.

The result?

A perfect 2 minute meal!

This has been my lunch for the past two days:

3/4 C. Quinoa

2/3 C. Black beans (made from dry beans cooked with bay leaf)

2 tsp. Sesame oil

Splash of Soy sauce

1 Raw carrot, diced

6 or 7 Raw snap peas, sliced

This is the perfect 2-minute-meal and a healthy alternative to fried rice! It really did taste like fried rice, and the black beans were a surprisingly fine substitute for the scrambled egg that it usually contains. We cooked a large batch of both beans and quinoa at the beginning of the week and I am able to microwave a portion while chopping carrot and 6 or 7 snap peas (and in the future I’ll do this ahead of time too), WHILE holding Sebastian on one hip.

If you’re like my sister and you don’t use the microwave, it will still take very little time to heat them up on the stove.

What’s the big deal, you ask? Well, try as I might, I continue to hate cooking and it is a constant effort for me to be motivated to do it. And I couldn’t believe how quick, easy, and delicious this was!

Also, my husband and I are trying to lose weight. I joined Weight Watchers a few weeks ago and he has been trying to eat foods with a low Glycemic Index. This is an excellent meals for both weight loss strategies.

(For those interested in Weight Watchers Points Plus, 1.5 cups of fried rice is 15 PP while this is about 9-10 PP for almost 2 cups of food!)

This meal is a win, win, win, all around!