Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Making my house fair: Day Two

I don't want to say this day wasn't a success just because I didn't exactly accomplish my goals. I admit that I walked up to my desk a few times today and had absolutely no idea how to begin. It is still a wreck and I thought about taking a before picture but our camera is dead, which fact became yet another reason to avoid clearing my desk. But, really, I know what I need to do. Everything needs to be swept into my my "inbox." I've done it before with the thought to blog about my amazing organizational system. That's why I have a picture of it. But that blog post never appeared because I still haven't gotten to the bottom of that basket filling event and my organizational system is looking less amazing as a result. The method involves taking items one at a time from the basket and acting on it decisively. Trouble is, most of the things in that basket have no place or their place is within easy reach of a certain one-year old so they all end up back on my desk anyway. I'll keep at it tomorrow.

My day, however, was not a failure. I did clean out the kitchen freezer to great effect. My bulk soup project is going to have to wait until we eat some of the stuff currently taking up room in our freezers. I did create a lot more room in this smaller freezer but what our freezer has in size it makes up for in poor design. The newly-created elbow room for my ice cream is only serving to keep the items from falling out every time I open the door.

I also did a lot of work on Christmas presents. For a variety of reasons I wanted to go all-homemade this year. The obvious way for me to accomplish that is by giving food since I'm not really crafty. I settled, finally, on "gourmet" spice rub blends since my co-op has a great deal on bulk spices. I'm giving everyone a half cup or so of four different rubs for a total cost of about 3.50 per recipient--before packaging. Which leads me to a question for my faithful, creative readers. How to package these? I want the packaging to be reasonably airtight and label-able. I don't mind giving reusable containers and making that sort of part of the gift and I'm thinking of these jars. (Which, incidentally, I'm buying for my own spices the minute we have a place to nicely store such things). How would you label these? Any better ideas for packaging?

Not a bad day considering we had a breakfast guest, we were out for the morning through lunch and Margaret clung to me desperately all afternoon before taking an hour to fall asleep this evening. And neither kid napped.

So, tomorrow:

The desk. Really.
The top of "the dresser" in our living room. We don't know what to call this piece of furniture but it's top surface is the perfect dumping height.

2 comments:

Dave said...

Do you guys have a filing cabinet? If not, it might be worth finding a used one and putting it to work. I just bought a little cabinet in Vermont. It's an "antique", used, cute and cheap. All good adjectives. My plan is to use it to store papers and such. I am going to get some stand up paper/magazine holders for it. We are trying to slowly replace our office stuff (instead of getting a bed...someday...) because it is a little cramped for my work. So we are going very used and "antique" because of all the adjectives I listed above. So, this is my plan for that little cabinet, but we will see.

I love the jars and might steal the idea.

Hélène said...

When my mother used to give away homemade jams all she would do was cut a circle of material (usually a Christmas type calico) big enough so that it would drape down about an inch all around the jar. She would use scalloped scissors so that the edge would look cute. Then she would tie a ribbon around the material at the base of the lid. On the ribbon she would attach a homemade gift label before tying it in a bow.