Paper Clutter

Today is Saturday.  I'm sitting in the living room, cleaning out some paper clutter that has been weighing on me since... Oh, I don't know, I've had paper clutter weighing on me since I encountered adulthood.

This seems like a good moment to give a shout out to my friends from college.  In the early 1990's, not everyone had a computer to themselves, and I was one of the fortunate few who did.  It was an enormous "portable" computer with a six-inch green-and-black screen and two floppy disk drives (the luxury!) and it weighed about as much as an overpacked suitcase.  I had my own printer too, an utterly aggravating dot matrix that invariably failed to function on the date that any paper was due.  If I had a paper to turn in I always turned up about halfway through the class. (Probably I should have started my three page papers more than thirty minutes before they were due; putting words on a page has never been a problem for me).

Anyway, I was generous with my electronic access -- my friends could use my computer whenever they needed, and in thanks they tidied my dorm room up for me.  Thanks, Alene, Heather, Tiara, and anyone else unlucky enough to need me!  You guys rocked!!

As a resident advisor I had piles and piles and piles of paper coming through my inbox every day. I was expected to hang it on the floor bulletin boards.  Sometimes I did, usually I missed the dates.  I had no system for managing it and nobody ever suggested the idea of a routine to me.  I just made random choices moment to moment, based on what I "felt like" and what was most urgent at the time.  When I graduated from college most of the paper problem evaporated, but now that I have three kids in school it has returned with a vengeance (home ownership has an impact as well, though I haven't not been one long enough to see the improvement).

I'm a grown up and it's summer vacation.  I can take the time to create a process that will keep me from having to bring in help in dealing with all this paper.  I'd like to also model a rather better strategy for dealing with my paper for my kids, as well, so they find themselves less overwhelmed as they grow into their own paper problems.

So today I am clearing the decks.  I've got a stack of recipes that have been collecting wine spots on my counters and a stack of magazines to cull.  I found one this morning from 2002 -- YIKES. I'm pleased to see how much useful information I'm encountering, though, so I'll share a few strategies I'm working on to deal with all this crap these responsibilities.

1.  File folders.  Bonehead!  Yes, it has taken me nine years to figure out that I need file folders.  I'm sorry, but I'm a slow learner.  No, actually I'm not a slow learner; I've just been slow to appreciate that what I'm doing is important enough to merit file folders. In my former life as a CPA/corporate tax preparer, file folders, red and blue pencils, and my computer were the primary tools of my trade.  Somehow, when I stopped working in that profession, I devalued myself.  Only people with "real careers" need file folders, right? The rest of us are just indulging in org porn.  WRONG! I need file folders! I need to know where I've kept all the home maintenance receipts and the kids' school papers, the directories for church and school, the medical stuff... I need a lot of file folders. And it only took me ten years to value home management as a valid activity worth investing a few supplies... that I already have around the house. Aries is certainly a bone-headed sign...

2.  Binders.  My mother-in-law started me with my first binder when my husband and I were engaged.  She gave me a gigantic three-inch binder filled with magazine tear sheets in sheet protectors. It was all home decorating information: pictures of beautiful rooms filled all three inches (do you know how many pictures that was???)  That binder was a godsend when we bought our fixer-upper, when I was expecting babies and creating nurseries for them, and especially when we remodeled.  I added more binders over the years: a gardening binder, one for the holidays, and a recipe binder.  When my husband was doing more DIY projects I created one for him as well, though at the moment all but the decorating and recipe binders are currently disbanded.  I'm going to create two new ones that reflect my current interests and abilities -- no point in fantasizing about elaborate garden and holiday projects I can't indulge: articles about writing, and fashion inspirations.

3.  Evernote. The binder system works beautifully for image-heavy content; it's like the pre-Pinterest Pinterest, but not so great for more detailed information.  (reasons I'm not using Pinterest anymore here)  Sheet protectors prevent organizing tabs from being visible and I generally want a whole menu, rather than a single recipe, when I am coming up with meals.  I'm trying to be sort of low-carb and would love ideas for breakfasts that start me off successfully.  My kids love traditional breakfasts any time of day and I want to know how to make treats that are more nutritious for them. I have family recipes I don't want to lose track of, but that I also don't want to make more than once a year. My usual method for getting recipes is to pull them off internet searches, especially epicurious.com, and then I have a stack of cooking-stained scrap papers with ingredient proportions, no instructions; fifty-fifty if they have a recipe name attached to them.  The longer they hang around the more successful I consider them, but either way I have to read the ingredient proportions to know what it is.  I've been using Evernote for my novel planning, but it took my husband pointing out its usefulness for recipe organization.  Using this system will make it easier for me to prepare weekly menus and shopping lists, as well.

4.  Bins.  Every organizing article and book I've ever read (no small number) asks: What the hell do I do with all the kid output? In my attic I have a 30-gallon tote full of all the stuff my mom saved from my childhood. I know what's in it because it was my childhood, but otherwise it is of almost no interest to me. My husband has a 3.0 cubic foot moving box from his childhood. I might have looked in it when we were newly married, but I couldn't tell you today what is in it. We don't care a whole lot about that stuff, but we also recognize that when our children are older they might find it interesting. So I have designated a 17-gallon bin for each of my children to last the entire time they are under my roof.

When we moved to California from Virginia I learned that the further I get from the time the artwork was created, the easier it is to discard it. When I had been away from the children for a little over a week to empty the house and see to the boxing up and shipping, I couldn't bear to toss all their little drawings and projects.  A year after the move-in, I could not understand why I had trucked all that stuff three thousand miles. (Sure am glad I didn't pay to ship it!) I kept one piece. But with the bins, I have a place to store the stuff till I have enough perspective to choose my favorites, to see how they develop so I can choose the piece that is most representative of what kind of people they were, and to have new darlings that I need to make room for.

*   *   *

I've been silent for a week or more, as I struggle to put together a post that I should probably have done first.  I want to come up with a definition for simple living, a question that was posed by a friend on Facebook a couple of weeks ago. It has been harder than I thought (and not helped by losing half an entry from some kind of Blogger glitch), so I'm asking for some help.  What is Simple Living to you? What are you looking for when you read these posts?  What changes are you looking to make in your own lifestyle?

And in the meantime: Don't be afraid to invest in your own needs.  Take your role as Home CEO seriously enough to have a planned home for the documents that are generated in this not-simple world we are navigating and make your life a little simpler. Recognize when things that used to work don't, and be willing to adjust.  And most importantly, think about what works for you, your personality, your household, and your activities.

And if you're blogging, please be sure to use pictures and text that you have permission to use. Simple generally precludes being involved in a legal action.

Pictures

After hearing several stories of bloggers being sued for use of photographs found on the internet, I've decided to take down the ones that put me at risk.  I will leave the posts up without pictures until I can re-illustrate them, so please be patient with me as I trawl through this process.

For one post with a lot of information about fair use, etc., that can lead to other sites with similar information, follow this link and read the comments as well, which include input from photographers.

I guess I'll also be learning photography, so please bear with me as I work my way through this learning curve!

Domestic Bliss -- A To Do List

On a day when the children are very tired and not fighting too much, finish a book you've been plowing through for three weeks.

Add one handsome husband and 1-2 glasses of very good red wine.  Kisses helpful, but optional.

Quietly and peacefully make your favorite simple dinner. Linger. Especially if the children are being quiet.  (Suspiciously quiet is OK if you've had enough wine.)

Call the children to the table. Refill your glass. Put only their favorite vegetables on the table.

Turn on the Glen Hansard channel on Pandora.  Ask everyone about their day.  Sit back and enjoy your meal.

Then put the children to bed.

My Fifteen Minutes

This is my house.  Tidy.  The dining room & kitchen; I'm standing in the living room. 

This is my house.  Tidy.  The dining room and living room; I'm standing in the kitchen.

This is my fifteen minutes of glory.  I'm enjoying it.

(When Charlotte heard the title of my post, she snickered and said "Five minutes is more like it." But then we sent her to bed.)

Right-Sized?

I have been living in 1470 square feet with three children for four months now.  For the most part it's going well.  But I'm not sure this is how I want to live for the rest of their childhood.  Or, frankly, even much beyond the end of our current lease.

I don't want much.  I want maybe a foot more space in each room.  I'd like some delineation between the dining area and the living area.  I'd like a little more space for the children to play -- especially now that my six year old has become totally obsessed with Beyblades and had to be restrained from shouting "One... Two... Three... Let 'er RIP!!!" at six in the morning, and the sound of battle tops hitting the wood floors at seven on a Saturday morning is hard to sleep over.

I would love to have a kitchen where I can open the refrigerator and the dishwasher at the same time.  With enough counter space that the kids and I could stretch a really good cooking project, or playdough, or art, or... well, just about anything.  But I would like to have enough room for more than a single person in the kitchen.  It doesn't have to be huge, just roomy enough for us to spend time together.

I'd like to have a separate office from my husband's.  The mostly-empty bookshelves behind his desk cramp the room up and make me a little crazy, as I'm sure my piles make him.  I've tried, but I've never in my life managed to live without them. I know he'd love for me to figure that out. Or we could just work apart.

I'd like to be able to host book club at my house without waking up the children with our wine-fueled conversational catharses.

So much for the minimalist dream.

I'm sure some of my squeezed feeling is left over from the quiet I was able to experience escaping to a quiet couch in the upstairs of the house my entire family shared in Hilton Head, or the peace of hanging out in the screen porch at my in-laws' house.  And that summer vacation can make even the most harmonious families a little short with each other. But I would really love 300 more square feet and a garage.

Is that so bad?

I'm feeling a little torn. Proponents of responsible, sustainable living advocate for smaller houses and we're reminded by authors of money-management articles like this October, 2011 article from U.S. News & World Report that big houses are expensive in more than just the mortgage payment.  "Do you really want to live in a home that's 2,500 square feet or larger?"

Yes. Yes, I do.

But, chides the article,

If you take a quick look back, you'll see that historically, smaller homes have been the norm for most of us. In 1950, the average home size was 983 square feet. In 2004, at the height of the building boom, the average home size was 2,340 square feet. That's an enormous difference just over the span of a few decades.

I'm going to take slight issue with this.

First off, if people actually liked living in tiny houses, the houses wouldn't have grown. But they have, and not only the new houses; the 1939 house we bought in Falls Church, Virginia had an addition tacked on to the side that the previous owner had added in the 1960's. That addition consisted of a master bedroom & bathroom, a large family room, and a screen porch.  The kitchen had been remodeled in such a way that the refrigerator was moved into a walk-in pantry just outside the kitchen; it was arranged this way so they didn't have to change the basic footprint of the kitchen when enlarging the counter space and adding a dishwasher. The basement, which isn't included in square footage but which is a major bonus to living space, had been subdivided to provide an "illegal" bedroom for one of the couples' two daughters.  When we stripped the wallpaper from the original upstairs secondary bedroom, we noticed a head-shaped dent in the plaster wall and joked that the daughter must have been exiled to the basement after a massive adolescent fight between the two girls.

When we remodeled the house in 2004, the previous owner stopped by with his daughter and asked if he could see what we'd done.  I was a little nervous about this; we'd stripped the house, for the most part, back to the foundations, and built off the original footprint, out the back, and up, to double the size of the house as it had previously stood in all its dated, slanting horror.  (I guess I'm showing that my interest in minimalist living is pretty recent).  This was partly necessary, because the fabric-coated wiring and DIY addition weren't aging well, and it was partly... well, because we could, and we wanted to.

But as Joe, by then in his 80's, and his daughter, who was probably in her early 50's, walked through the house, all he kept saying was, "Yes, this is what I had in mind.  Yes, that's what I was going for.  Oh, I see you put the kitchen on the screen porch; that's exactly what I was going to do."

The daughter asked to see the basement, and when we got to that tiny illegal bedroom, she sighed and said "I really loved that room."

"Really?" I asked, speechless.

"Oh, yes," she answered. She was glass-eyed remembering the past. "I was so happy to get some space away from my family."

Joe bought that house in 1962.  He wasn't appalled and looking back at the glory days of a happier, simpler time.  He wanted what we had managed to build. And we were able to build as we did because of the floor plan he put together during the time that big living was supposedly anathema. I'll tell you something else: Joe didn't build the house bigger to hold more stuff. The closets were never the best part of that house. In fact, the coat closet next to the 1939 front door couldn't even handle regular hangers, because it was too shallow for the door to close if I put a coat on a hanger (it did have a hanger bar, which I never understood). When Joe tacked the addition on to the side of the house, he built a new front door as well (right next to the original front door, which we always thought was hilarious). But he didn't add a coat closet. His family didn't care about stuff.  They just wanted space to stretch their legs a bit. That's true for all the other many, many World War II era houses that were built in the DC metro area that have little box additions tacked on to the side or back (trust me, that means most of them).

And then "average size" is a meaningless statistic.  What does it include? My first studio apartment in Atlanta? The 18,000 square foot, eight bedroom mansion for sale in San Francisco (and all the other estates like it) right now?  Let's be specific, people! Tell me how houses have changed for a specific kind of household in a specific part of the country -- and tell me how those people are living now, too. There might be good reasons for living smaller, but "because that's how they lived before" is not one of them, especially when that assertion is poorly supported.

I realize that I'm writing contrary to "Simply Richer Living." I'm sorry. I'm trying to process what is beginning to feel like mutually exclusive states of being: The desire to simplify my life and the desire to live more easily and fully. I want my little guy to wake up early in the morning and practice his passion.  I also want to be able to sleep till my appointed wake-up time (and for my four-year-old to do so as well).  I like being close to my kids wherever we are in the house, and I also want to be able to get a little quiet for some part of every day so that I actually want to talk to them. I want to be able to entertain my friends at home, not at a restaurant.

These desires are new in a historical sense. An interesting paper, "Housing: Then, Now, and Future" by Moya K. Mason points out that:

The novelty of our age is that how we use the space in our homes is continually evolving. And, as we transform these spaces, they transform us. These transformations are the result of demographic, economic, lifestyle, environmental, and technological changes and pressures. Home offices and media rooms are new spaces, while old spaces like living rooms are now being used as computer rooms. Video entertainment, games, computers, and the Internet serve to isolate, and also demand more personal space, separating us from the people we live with.

Bill Bryson's At Home makes a similar case with much more entertaining language, for anyone who is interested in the history of our home space. But essentially: Living rooms are computer rooms now, because we use computers heavily in most of daily life, and because we entertain more casually, with friends welcome in our "family" rooms and our kitchens. Home offices are the result of a greater diversity in the work force, including women who work from home, and a greater complexity in home management needs.  The new configuration of our homes serves both to isolate us, but also to make more of our relationships less formal, more genuine.


Certainly isolation is a danger of a larger home space, and for sure that's not what I want. But my family and I don't live the kind of life people lived in 1940 or earlier; we live now. Part of living now is that people actually live quite a lot in their homes.  Kitchens were smaller because frozen dinners were supposed to do away with the need to cook every night, and a more elaborate food network meant that you didn't need to have the skill or space to preserve at home. Our reliance on the car and the decay of community means kids have to live at home instead of out prowling the territory that could be covered on a bicycle (without a helmet). What I want is to figure out how to create a lifestyle that is consistent with my values of creating intimacy with the people I care about while still having the space to recharge and be the sort of person with whom they want to be intimate. I don't want to be obnoxious about the fact that I can have these things. I just want a little leg room.

OK, it doesn't have to be 2500 square feet. Am I asking for too much? In a world where way too many people live in poverty and the earth is going to hell speedy-quick, then definitely yes. In the world I live in... I don't know what is right. What are my obligations to the world, and to what extent am I entitled to live, well, selfishly? I don't know. I hope I figure it out some day.

In the meantime, a basement would ease things here significantly.

Omphaloskepsis: July 17

Reader, I have brought in additional assistance.  I bought a FitBit, and I signed up for a StickK contract.

I said before you can't lose weight just by deciding to; you have to take action. I needed a little bit more information about exactly how small decisions were impacting me.  I had a FitBit before and found it really helpful; unfortunately, the day after I started wearing it again I lost it while out on date with my husband.

That wasn't intentional.  Really.

I upgraded to the FitBit Ultra this time around and I'm really pleased that I did.  A few years ago when I decided I needed to lose weight I put together a huge complicated spreadsheet that kept track of calories in, calories out (determined by the FitBit), daily weight and weekly additional measurements, including body fat and waist, hip, and thigh measurements.  I was successful, but there was still a certain amount of guesswork involved in how I timed my meals, and the system itself required a TON of record keeping.  It probably eventually failed when we went on a trip.

The FitBit comes with a cool website that keeps track of all that information for me, with very pretty and informative graphics, and it updates every fifteen minutes. Or sooner, if I really need it to. Likey.

Before you think I'm advocating this for anybody, I'll just say -- I personally require a lot of information to satisfy the control-freak elements of my personality. I personally find this level of information helpful for understanding that yes, that little bit of chocolate really will make a difference to my success for the day.  Even if I'd like to say that it won't.

The StickK contract holds me accountable to the tune of $10 per week if I don't lose a pound on any given week.  I still haven't figured out how to circumvent that snacking habit, and I found that my desire to work through it was fading a little bit, though my impatience with myself wasn't so much.  So for $10 per week, if I don't succeed in losing a pound that week, I'll keep figuring out why I absolutely can't spend an afternoon not snacking.

This afternoon I tried to take a few minutes of quiet for myself and was interrupted every forty-three seconds by Duncan insisted that I absolutely had to see the contortions he had made to the Wii characters he was playing with.  After ten minutes of bouncing up and down I finally snapped and said that I could not get through the afternoon without fifteen minutes of NOT LOOKING AT THE DAMN WII.  (OK, I restrained myself and didn't say damn, but I thought it.  Hard.)

I think that part of my problem is that because I feel like Jeff is at work all day long, that I also ought to be "at work" with the kids all day long, and the idea of spending a bit of time in the afternoons recharging before crazy hour begins feels forbidden. Meals are permitted -- he gets lunch breaks.  Ergo, if I'm eating it's OK. With my newfound $10/week motivation I'm going to see if just saying "this is my quiet time," even if I only say it to myself, makes it easier for me to relax without consuming anything.

Hopefully this works.

In the meantime:  Yay me!! I lost ONE POUND!

Where Do You Get Fashion Advice?

My favorite fashion magazines are InStyle, People StyleWatch, and Lucky magazine.  And I can't say I like them very much.  They tend to feature girls almost half my age wearing four-inch heels and mini skirts, with fur vests or dresses that cost $1,200.  But they are useful for seeing what shapes and color schemes are trending, so I still pick them up occasionally.

I'm actually a "charter subscriber" to Lucky, because I subscribed in the first couple of months that magazine was published, and haven't let my subscription lapse in twelve years. (Yikes! I just looked that up. Time to cancel.) Back when the magazine first came out, it featured a couple of very trendy, creative looks, then recreated each one with items found in a wide range of sources and price points.  Everything from Old Navy and Target to high-end labels were represented in these looks. It was the democratic nature of the magazine that billed itself as "The magazine about shopping" (as opposed to "the magazine about clothes, or advertising, or whatever Vogue is supposed to be about") that appealed to me and kept me renewing my subscription for so long.

Fast forward twelve years and here I am, a twenty-two year old girl in a forty year old woman's minivan lifestyle; Lucky has aged a lot worse, from creating looks that anyone can adapt for themselves to showcasing $1,500 black slacks and four-inch-long miniskirts from Forever 21.  These are not styles a forty-year-old mom of three can wear to the playground.

I have yet to find a magazine that offers style advice -- and only style advice -- for a woman with an active, not athletic, lifestyle.  I don't want a magazine like Cookie (now defunct), which claimed to be for hip moms (I'm not sure how hip I am, but I'm willing to try... sort of) and interspersed celebrity parenting advice with Ralph Lauren tie-and-jacket ensembles for toddlers and pencil skirts, rather than minis, for the moms. Uh, no.

I may drive a minivan, but believe it or not, I am actually interested in looking stylish in my own right.  My kids are cute, but I'm not throwing in the towel on myself.  When I set out to learn about new trends  I don't want to accidentally run into an article that reminds me that the kids are watching too much TV, that the white bread I put in their lunchboxes is some day going to kill them, and that I didn't put on their sunscreen... again.  No, I want to see if bootcut jeans are back, find out what the season's color palette is, and figure out how to repurpose the stuff in my closet so that it looks all brand new.

Since I have yet to find a magazine that will give me that information without also including a recipe for chicken broccoli casserole, I've had to branch out a bit. There are a few great fashion resources on the internet that I've found useful.

jseverydayfashion.com

J's Everyday Fashion updates daily and is budget-aware.  J is on Facebook as well as at her own site, and is generous with answering questions on her FB Wall. She encourages followers to post pictures of their own outfits on her Facebook page and offers suggestions for how to accessorize for specific situations.  She has a web-show in which she gives fashion advice for real women, J's Everyday Fashion (3 episodes recorded as of this date); her advice isn't just buy this or that, but here's how to remix your wardrobe to stretch it in ways you hadn't thought of before.  Episode 2 and Episode 3 (yet to be aired) feature... wait for it... moms who want to look great even when their kids are around.

The one thing I don't totally love about J's Everyday Fashion is that since she is a very trim size 4, what looks good on her (skinny pants and short shorts) aren't necessarily going to be great for me, and to a certain extent I have trouble compensating for that.  But I love the way she puts colors together and her suggestions for how to duplicate or adapt looks found in catalogs and magazines. I appreciate that she periodically takes time out to share how she creates a shopping list for clothing and how she makes decisions about how she manages her clothing budget -- $100-$200 per month (J is newly single and child-free).

fashionatforty.blogspot.com

Fashion At Forty is a cool fashion blog maintained by a real woman with actual curves.  Niki seems very sweet.  Her outfits are sometimes a little trendy for my taste (I really don't like the high-low trend), but that's occasional; she tends towards preppy, for the most part. She's also pretty up front about her own reservations about what works and what doesn't. Her blog is about how she makes her fashion fit her life, and so her choices are budget conscious; unlike J, in addition to lots of retail options she shops at consignment shops, eBay, and Etsy to find higher-end and custom pieces without spending too much money.  Niki is a working wife with no children, but her outfits are wearable even for those of us who stay home, and she is on-trend with color combinations and accessorizing. Like J, she's very responsive to questions and comments.  She also has a blogroll (J doesn't) that includes more fashion resources. I have to admit I've only skimmed a few of them because I haven't found them to be as comprehensive as Fashion at Forty, and I really like Niki's tone.

I have to also credit Niki with a book recommendation.  Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion will be my next book review, and most likely will change the way I approach my wardrobe as well.  But that's a different post.




My other favorite sources for fashion inspiration are Pinterest and Polyvore. I follow several fashion-heavy pinners on Pinterest.  I found Outfit 31 through her blog, which she doesn't appear to be updating anymore.  She still pins outfits, though, and her outfits are totally playground ready.  Note that though a lot of her repinned outfits include high heel pumps, there's no reason they have to be duplicated with the pumps, a cute wedge or loafer would do just as well for the vast majority of the outfits shown.  I also use the search function on Pinterest to figure out what to do with what's already in my own closet -- for example, I searched on "gray blazer" to get some ideas on how to mix up the underworn gray blazer in my closet and found images that dress it down in ways I might not have thought up when just staring glass-eyed in my closet.

I'd like to mention that my husband's cousin had the brilliant idea of organizing her fashion pinboards by color (using, very cleverly, lines from songs for board titles) and I sure wish I had thought to do that before I accumulated 250 pins to the "My Style" board... live and learn.

Polyvore is a little bit more labor intensive than flipping through a fashion magazine, but just as informative and a lot more adaptable. It's basically a Facebook for fashion with a Q&A section for people with fashion dilemmas.  I find it difficult to use for my own purposes, but most of the best images on Pinterest come from there, so if you've got the inclination to work through it (and please, share with me if you do), then it is a great shopping resource. One of the blogs I have listed in my blogroll, Outfits by Stacy Gustin, I found on Polyvore. The images are attractive, but she's light on text, and since I'm a text kind of girl I'm going to find it a little less compelling than chattier bloggers. Stacy Gustin is a mom of three, however, and the outfits generally seem wearable, so it's worth checking out.

If you Google "mom fashion blog" a decent list of blogs will pop up and you can peruse those at your leisure.  I've checked out a few and ruled them out for my own use, primarily because of the cost of the items pictured, or because the moms are so posh that I rarely find their articles useful. Also, I'm happy with my current resources. There is only so much time available for hanging out online clicking through outfits. But fashion is personal. Maybe you've got a runway ready figure, or a job where heels are daily requirements, or a way better night life than I have. Go crazy! Share what you find! And most of all, have fun dressing yourself, not just your kids, because, let's face it... they got their good looks from you.