Sunday 7 & Resolutions

Last year, I printed a big retrospective on What I Accomplished In A Year. This year, you can use the "resolutions" tag if you care. Me, I'm... enduring.

Having four days off - truly off, no proposal work or any other take-home stuff - is amazingly helpful. Yesterday I did grocery shopping and wrapped presents (the gang here has the present exchange early January instead of at/before Christmas). Since I'd done all my present shopping in Italy, that made things easy. No furoshiki this year, but I have plenty of wrapping paper, and most of the things were small anyway, as they'd been schlepped in the Barbie Memorial horror for a week.

I also started the house deep cleaning, and that progresses into "scrub day" today - I'm going to declutter and seriously wash down my bedroom, the downstairs bathroom, and the kitchen. The hope is to get all the big sweaty stuff out of the way today so that I can relax for the next couple of days balling yarn, knitting, updating Team TARDIS and putting it on Teaspoon, and spamming my resume across the various local sites.

There is a Sunday 7 (I think I'm going to keep up that weekly posting, although I am no longer going to promise to have specifically seven things.) I'm freecycling a set of earrings, the VHS versions of some Christmas movies, some china bowls with lids (they turned out not to be watertight, and thus not good for bento), a watch that was a giveaway from some store, and a couple of those recipe holders where you slide in index cards. (While I have the subscription to Fine Cooking, I want to use a binder, so I can rip articles right out, punch, and bind them.)

This week, M & I will be reducing the cardboard rubble to just a couple of boxes. (We save boxes, mostly Amazon ones, all year long so they're there for mailing and boxing presents. Everything is sent, so all the remainder boxes get recycled.)

I've canceled the newspaper subscription as of the first. It's one less piece of clutter, and anything I miss I can probably find online. Besides, considering the number of promotions they're running at any one time, I can probably restart it much cheaper if I want.

I've also canceled getting up early to walk and shower before work. The endorphins of exercise were not compensating for the resultant lack of sleep. So I have to figure out where to fit that back into the day, but the morning yoga/evening strength exercises remain.

Oh, and thanks to M, I've accomplished the ultimate declutter. My library was originally a dining room, with a chandelier at face-level smack in the middle of it. Until now, I'd had a very cluttered table under it. She figured out how to loop up the chandelier so that it's secure but overhead, and we cleared off the table to put the tree on it. When the tree comes down, the table goes in the basement... and the room that had been so cluttered for two years that there were only pathways through it will have *nothing* in it except the bookshelves and their contents and one basket of stuff to go on eBay. Huzzah!

Oh, and one last random comment. Turkey curry with the Christmas leftovers? Fab idea!

One more last random comment: considering how stressful things have been, I wonder if I can work a "weekly pamper" into my schedule somehow to help destress. Something inexpensive (or better yet free) but that is just for me. An hour set aside for a bubble bath, or a trip to The Book Thing or some such other treat. Trying to find 52 things of that ilk will be something soothing to plot about.

STUFF I DID
RtE Book Reviews published:
- Lye in Wait
- The Bloody Tower
- A Tisket, A Tasket, A Fancy Stolen Casket
Wrote
- The Amazing Team TARDIS
Knitalong status: 18 out of 55 blocks done
Homekeeping:
- Completed Sunday 7*

*Technically, I still have parts of the basement to clear and there will continue to be things that I can get rid of every week. But I have done such massive purging of the areas that are commonly used that I think it is time to turn my attention towards renovating and reorganizing them, rather then dealing with every last corner of the basement.


( Stuff I gotta do )

( Stuff I'm Thinking About Doing )

The 5 Best Ideas of 2007

This morning I posted my resolutions for next year; this post is for summarizing the things that were THE most useful lifestyle changes of 2007, in the hopes that they may help/inspire someone else.

1) - The Sunday Seven/Seven Items Project. By breaking up the frighteningly massive job of decluttering into something manageable, I've been able to clear out something like 1/5 of my unwanted possessions. (Which reminds me - there's going to be a couple of things up for LJ swap soon.)

2) - The morning yoga/evening strength training. (Routines here) What has made them so sustainable, I think, is that neither routine takes a long time or requires anything special, and they're both built into regular parts of the day. The strength training hasn't shown a lot of effects yet, but it has only been started relatively recently. The yoga has definitely paid off in balance and flexibility.

3) - Bentos. Yes, it's a bit of a toy, but it has also put a major focus on my making my own lunches rather than buying them (significant money savings) and pay attention to nutrition (in the effort to have the traditional 5 colors per box.) Although I have a lot of boxes at this point and my favorites have been constantly shifting, the ones that I turn to the most often right now are the Tiger Lunch Jar and Aladdin Lunch and Go Salad Set. The Tiger with its leakproof 1-cup container is good for soup-based lunches, with a muffin in the small container and fruit and a sweet in the large one. The Aladdin salad container is superior to their lunch box because it has a half-cup leakproof container. The Aladdin is too large to fill to the brim in proper bento style - it would be far too much food - but the larger shape beats the traditional tiny bento boxes because you can put oddly-shaped things inside, such as chips. And you don't have to cut sandwiches into odd strips to fit them. Also, I like to fill my bentos several days in advance sometimes, and the traditional boxes allow things to go stale after about two days; the Aladdin doesn't. It is also leakproof, so you can put jucier things inside than the traditional bentos.

Also, the Aladdin and a Stonyfield yougurt drink container (they're washable and reusable) both just fit into my insulated lunch tote. And neither one spills if carried on edge.

4) - Moleskine Weekly Planner Notebook (second on the right as you scroll down). I had a palm pilot, but I got so comfortable with this specific planner that the batteries on my palm pilot died from neglect. I'm a compulsive listmaker, but the problem with most paper diaries is that I end up copying list items from one day to the next if they don't get accomplished. So with these, I put daily stuff in the daily page, but make my lists on the lined page. (I've penciled a line down the center, like a steno notebook, to double the listmaking space.)

5) - LJ. No, seriously. Knowing that I am going to post my status has kept me honest and focused. homekeeping has had some amazing ideas for organizing the house and keeping it organized. And I have high hopes for 52_indulgences for helping to come up with inexpensive ways of pampering and destressing.