Organization & Home Keeping

May 26, 2016

Family Meeting #3

Monday marked Family Meeting #3.

This one was a little different as we had a family photo shoot right in the middle of prime family meeting time. We tried so hard to protect this, but the photo shoot had to be moved because of weather and the weather made us do it. Argh.

So photo taking was our activity.

We also 1) paid allowances, 2) went over the summer goal chart, 3) had cookies, 4) played Machi Koro

All in all, a good meeting. Next go-around I want to implement gold stars and I want to come up with a rotating system for picking the fun activity (from a list) and the treat (same).

May 20, 2016August 29, 2016

Family Meeting

A few weeks ago, I told Matt that I wanted to start having regular family meetings. I said I wanted to have an agenda and a family credo and snacks. This is exactly the variety of corny/cheesy stuff that Matt instinctively rolls his eyes at and internally GROANS. We’ve both been through way too many corporate team-building sessions with mission statements to be wary of this sort of thing and I get it. But to his credit, he heard me out.

I made the following argument: The kids are getting older. School, activities, friends, devices, etc. are encroaching more on our nuclear family and while that’s not wholly bad, it’s important that we are deliberate about protecting family time. We need to also be deliberate about communicating what values, activities, lessons, etc. are important to us and teaching the kids a few things. To his credit, he saw what a fabulously great idea it was and got on board. 😉

Continue reading “Family Meeting”

May 18, 2016May 17, 2016

A Weekend in the Shop

This guy had a birthday last week.

It was a pretty fun affair if fairly low key. He got new sheets and a new backpacking chair (which hasn’t actually arrived yet) and he got to hang out with these weirdos and drink homemade lemon cream soda (delish).

But my other gift to him was taking a whole Friday off to hang together. And it was pretty awesome.

See we needed a new patio table. We had one from our old house, but it was just a little too wide to really fit our somewhat narrow porch. And as “luck” would have it, a crazy windstorm picked up the tiles that made the top of the old one and smashed them into the railings and floors, breaking all but 2 of them. So while the table frame was fine, it needed a new top and we were ready to say bubye to that table.

I designed this new one sometime last summer before the other one was destroyed. It’s almost 12′ long and as we plan to have 4 benches (2 per side) and 2 chairs on each end, we can comfortably seat 14 people. Not too shabby.

Matt and one of his friends have been working in his wood shop by night, toiling on our new patio set and on our friend’s new coffee table. We had friends coming over that evening and had created an artificial deadline of having the table done when they arrived, even though the forecast said it was supposed to be cold.

But artificial deadlines are great and we got down to business making the table. The guys already had the frame built, so we just had to add the top. It seems easy, but it was quite a bit of work, let me tell you.

I got a real appreciation for the work Matt puts in in his wood shop, that’s for sure. Each board has to be properly dimensionalized (made perfectly square and into the correct thickness) which is quite a lot of work, running it multiple times through two different machines since each pass can only take off a fraction of an inch at a time.

Then you have to cut it to size (on one of 2 or 3 different saws) and attach. The attaching part on this is actually “simple” compared with his normal work. He regularly uses complex joinery (not screws) to attach pieces. This one has carefully hidden screws instead since it’s less “fine” woodwork.

Finally, you must finish – that’s at least 3 rounds of sanding (everywhere!) and then using some variety of finishing solution on it – stain, sealer, oil, etc. then sanding again, staining again and sanding again. You can do this a couple more coats if you want to depending on the finish. This is the part I regularly help with, so I’m very versed in it.

We didn’t get past the first three rounds of sanding (still not done) but it was fine to eat off!

You might notice the middle looks kind of strange – that’s a trough that runs up the center. You can put ice in it for drinks (like so), or add river rocks and sterno cans (like so) for table top s’mores. Also, if we end up hating the idea, we can pretty easily run narrow boards down the center and just finish it off.

Anyhow, that was day 1. I fully expected to be done, but inclement weather caused our friends to cancel the hike we had planned and so we decided to get going on 1 of the 4 benches.

So we did. More dimensionalizing, cutting to size.

And then gluing! It seems so strange that something that we sit on (several of us, actually) could be held together with glue, but that’s the deal. I suppose there’s also some dowels and strategic structure choices, but mostly, it’s glue. Crazy.

But it turned out great! Check it out!
This guy actually required even more sanding than normal because we were sanding several disparate pieces of wood to perfectly flat and it’s not much difference (less than 1/32 in most cases), but it’s a lot of sanding.

Love how it looks though!

And here’s the other little thing I worked on … a little sign for Matt’s shop. My woodgeek. 😀

January 11, 2016

2015 in Review

2015 was in many ways an excellent year for me and mine. The second full year following Mom’s death had it’s own pitfalls and moments of sorrow, but it went on and was definitely more happy than sad.

Family

We soaked up lots of family time, skiing, hiking, camping, backpacking, cooking, walking, reading, playing and just hanging together. It’s odd – I thought things might get quieter as the kids got older – I think because I thought they’d take less of my time to manage, and they do! – but we do so much more together.

Tabby is turning into a young lady right before our very eyes. She’s worked hard at school and at home and generally has a great attitude and work ethic. She reads like it’s breathing and impresses me constantly with her artistic abilities and insights. She got her ears pierced over Christmas break after working hard for this all semester, and it makes her look even more grown up. She’s enjoying learning piano and getting pretty good and has fun with karate and swimming.

Benji is still our darling little guy. I’m so glad he’s not too big or cool to give me lots of hugs and kisses and snuggles. School can be a struggle for him with all the requirements to sit down and concentrate, but he does well academically and we’re grateful for that. At home he’s a huge ball of energy. He spends his freetime building either with legos or in Minecraft. We’ve also gotten him interested in running on the treadmill and we’re hoping to help him beat some winter blahs that way (fully supervised of course). He’s a force to be reckoned with on the slopes and so so much fun. He also had a major puncture this year, but it was of the unscheduled variety – he had his finger slammed and badly injured in a door at school and a few hours at the emergency room later and minus a fingernail, he is much improved.

Matt and I are doing our usual balancing act, making sure everyone’s fed, bills are paid and the house doesn’t look like too much of a disaster zone. We bought a second treadmill on a crazy sale in early December so we can workout together in the evenings … important because we’re training for another half marathon in April! We sneak away just the two of us whenever we can manage it – date nights when dad takes the kids or sometimes a day off when the kids are at school and occasionally, we hire a sitter to watch the kids so we can go for a run or a bike ride. It’s a nice little luxury.

Work

Matt took on a new and extended role about halfway through 2015 and it’s making him happy and keeping him busy! He goes to the office about once a week and traveling more (none of us loves this, but it’s good for him and his career).

Work has been going great for me as well. I work long hours sometimes, but usually it’s very manageable. We’ve picked up a ton of work this year and really gotten our “hit rates” up – that’s marketing speak for how often we win work. Some of it is the improving economy, I’m sure, but I fancy that some of it has to do with some cool new things we’ve been doing. Cheeeeeers!

Travel

It was a fun travel year. The coolest trip we took, was probably the surprise trip we took in May! It deserves its own post (which it never got), but I won (!!) a trip to San Francisco to go to MakerFaire! So Matt and I took off while my dad watched the kids and we flew to CA and did it up right! It was a blast!

We also had a few ski trips throughout the winter and filled up the summer with camping trips and our first ever family backpacking trip.

Our longest trip was from Denver to Nashville, with some stops along the way. We pulled the pop-up to Missouri and dropped it off at my mom’s cousin’s house. Then we went onto Nashville, spent a few days there, including a great trip to Mammoth Cave in KY, and then picked it up, took it to family reunion and came home. Exhausting, but wonderful!

We finished off the year with an amazing trip to Big Sky, Montana over Christmas to ski!

Home Improvement

We did lots of little projects around the house throughout the year. We organized our laundry room and some kitchen drawers. We did a bunch of yard work. We planted a garden.

But probably the biggest project of the year finished up right before Christmas when Matt installed our new barn door!!! He and a family friend worked for HOURS on it and it turned out so amazing. And trust me, it’s even better in person.

There are probably another load of things I could and maybe should talk about, but those are some of the highlights. It was a good year.

February 10, 2015

Money Matters

When we were driving to AZ over Thanksgiving, we listened to a lot (LOT) of Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman – that is a LONG DRIVE – among other podcasts. We are truly pretty good with money and for the most part always have been, thanks largely in part to my fiscally conservative upbringing and personal OCDish tendencies. We use credit cards only for convenience and points and we pay them off every month. We save for rainy days, college and retirement FIRST, before we even think about luxuries. We budget and save for big purchases. We know what kind of life insurance to buy and have good estate planning in place.

But we were far from perfect and we are certainly not doing as well as we could be. We could have been putting more money into paying off our mortgage early, or more into retirement and college savings. We should have been working harder to stick to our monthly budget (noun – a document with fictitious allotments for our monthly income that we never ever actually hit). To be perfectly honest, we just weren’t really paying a lot of attention to what we spent and we made dumb excuses about spending it.

So for the past two months, we’ve been really buckling down on hitting our budget numbers. It’s been a good exercise for me to do this weekly (usually on Sunday) instead of whenever the heck I get around to it (i.e. once a month or so) and instead of me doing most of this in a bubble, I’ve been involving Matt more. We’ve been a lot more careful with how often we eat out and how much we allow ourselves to spend when we do so. Fortunately, splitting a meal behooves our waistlines as much as it behooves our bottom line, a win-win.

Cooking at home is a big part of that too. Of course we’ve been pretty good for years about cooking at home most weeknights, but things get a little dicey when we’re out and about so much during the week with kid activities or on the weekends when we’re again out and about. And it all went absolutely to heck when we were commuting back to our own suburb from the rental house.

So we’ve redoubled our efforts. All this has really meant is bit more discipline- more planning ahead to make sure we have leftovers and options for breakfast and lunch and quick dinners for crazy nights – and reminding ourselves that there’s good food at home to eat for (usually) a fraction of the cost and that it’s OK to be hungry for the 20-30 minutes it takes us to get home from lessons. It’s also cut down at least some on our food waste.

It hasn’t always been 100% smooth sailing of course, but we’ve been pretty good about defaulting to things we have on hand like sandwiches and quesadillas and not using it as an excuse to order up pizza.

Thanks to these, and other “sacrifices” we had money leftover in December (probably a first) and even more in January. It is good to see these fairly small changes having an effect on our bank account. It’s one of the areas we feel like we were forced to give up some control when the kids were small just to keep our heads above water. And now they’re older, more self-sufficient and we’re getting them back. I’m a fan.

January 18, 2015

Home Things

We’ve been on quite a roll with getting some little projects around the house done. It’s a nice side effect of the aforementioned actually BEING at home more often. I love seeing the results of these little projects.

The first photo is the fruits of these labors … the kids putting together a storage cart from IKEA. The idea is to store their school/homework supplies in it and then they can wheel it out into the living space when Matt is busy on conference calls, etc. We have yet to stock it, but that is the IDEA.

Another project we tackled was turning this unholy mess on top of the washer/dryer into something you might want to actually use.

Like so. That’s a $16 piece of melamine mounted on 4 brackets from IKEA. It’s not gorgeous or anything, but it really does the trick. We actually have a second shelf waiting in the laundry room for later when we have brackets to mount it. We somehow thought we bought enough for 2 shelves, but that wasn’t the case. At some point in time, I’d like to add a spot for line dry/flat dry items, but for now our beds and closets work just fine.

Moving right along. In the playroom we installed these shelves specifically to hold Ben’s Lego collection. These are at great peril when we have small-fry company so this system keeps them out of small hands until we can grant permission.

We also decided to doll up the spot in the office above the big work desk with shelves (months ago) and now a triptych of magnetic boards. These will hold kid artwork and papers, particularly of the “here’s the instructions and password to log onto this textbook’s site” variety.

Lastly – and this is probably the project I’m most proud of – we reorganized some of our kitchen drawers. I don’t think this looks awful, but the functionality was TERRIBLE. That tray thing is about to fall apart and it raised everything up just enough that it continuously caught when we shut/opened the drawer.

For about $30 we bought supplies from Home Depot, 4’x2″x1/4″ craft board that we cut to size and some loc-tite adhesive that we put everything together with. They’re not attached but just slip into the drawer so we can easily remove them if we want to. And they look AWESOME.

It is amazing too how much better things fit in the drawers. Without the bottoms and extra sides to hold them together, we can get 24 sets of flatware in this drawer that only used to hold about 16. We wanted to do a couple more drawers, but ran out of materials. Maybe next weekend.

February 10, 2014February 10, 2014

The Weakend

It was a kind of disappointing weekend. We put our house on the market on Friday and while most of our friends had had at least two full-price offers by now, we haven’t even had two showings. No idea what’s up – weather? price? market slow??? We’re going nuts over here with frustration. I know it’s early, but it’s really disappointing.

We worked around the rental house, getting it ready to go and ran off to go skiing on Saturday. That was a bit of a disaster. Long drive up, kids were in foul moods by the time we got there and because of that and the semi-nasty weather, we only got one run in. I took the kids back to our hotel room to play on their ipads until dinner. They went to the kids’ club with our friends’ kids and we all went to dinner with my dad. We cut our evening short since everyone was tired.

Sunday we got up bright and early and got the heck out of dodge. I think I have a bit of a reputation for being a Nazi when it comes to getting back to Denver on Sunday and I don’t really care because where the drive took us about 2 hours, it took our friends who left at 11 about 4.5 hours and our friends who left around noon over 6 hours. Our drive was also a lot less … err.. exciting than theirs.

So the weekend was in some ways kind of a bust, but we did start to get more settled into our little Golden house. We bought (on Fri) and built (on Sun) two shelves from Ikea to house pantry goods – this is the single biggest problem with the house – there is no storage available for things like linens or dry goods. That went a long way to getting some boxes cleared out of the kitchen. We actually had dinner there last night!

Tonight we’re heading to dinner with friends after kiddo pickup and then we’ll be back at the rental house, writing more valentines and putting up some other stuff – a key rack/organizer I bought, our TV and reassembling our treadmill. Slowly but surely.

January 31, 2014

Moving Got Me Down

I know I know, two weeks have gone by without me posting, after I just.resolved.to.post.more! But seriously?

This is what it’s like around my house:

And this … And this …

And this!

By the way, the purple wall that Matt and I both adore is getting painted over today. I’m not looking forward to it. Boooooo.

But the house is pretty much not ours anymore. It has very little in the way of our STUFF in it. Almost everything is off the walls, out of the cabinets and closets, and in storage or at our short-term home. It has had all the personality SUCKED out of it.

So we are making the big push this weekend to be living in our short-term home. Though it is small, it has some advantages – like proximity to some of our best friends and being within walking distance to a charming little town – and I’m actually really looking forward to a scaled down life, at least for a while.

So that’s what I’ve been up to – burning the candle at both ends, just making things happen. Work all day, pack all night. But it’s almost done. I’m like 95% sure of it.

January 13, 2014January 13, 2014

Looking at 2014

2013 got derailed in a couple of ways, namely my new and markedly more intense job and Mom’s death. Between these two things, I’m impressed to have just survived the year, yet, when I look back on my 2013 resolutions, I didn’t do so badly. When adjusted for the handicaps of 2013, I will consider it a win.

So what does 2014 have in store for me? Good things, I hope.

Family

I recently read The Five Love Languages of Children and took some time to chat with the kids about how/when they feel best loved by us. Quality time was the clear marker. They love reading, cooking and crafting together and going on outings and trips. With that and other things in mind:

make a concerted effort to do things with the kids – big and small
continue the tradition of Sunday night dinners with my dad, sister and grandma
get back in the habit of taking photos, even if it’s just with our phones
have date nights at least monthly with Matt
continue to encourage personal responsibility through chores and schoolwork

Personal

Since Mom passed away, I’ve put on about 5 lbs that add to some other slippage that had already occurred. Beyond losing a few pounds and getting my running back on track, I’d like to finish another triathlon. There’s a few other small areas I’d like to work on too:

the health and fitness stuff
finish another triathlon
run my 1/2 marathon in April in 2:15 or less
keep reading great books, 52 for the year
buy myself a few new clothes now and again – and not just workout clothes as I’d prefer
blog at least twice a week, including some of our family’s favorite new recipes

At Work

plan my week before it starts
finish the dang website before the end of January
meet my direct mail and press release goals

At Home

continue our excellent track record of at-home cooking for dinner
fill the freezer with extras so we don’t eat out for lunch (on weekends) as much
complete our move and organize the new house

April 19, 2013April 18, 2013

Friday Favorites 4/19/13

What a Friday! I’ve got a company-wide staff breakfast, a jobsite visit, a few other meetings, two overnight guests arriving around 5 and our Nashville family arriving around 6. So we better get down to it with another edition of my Friday Favorites.

Favorite Craftiness: I very much like the look of this Perpetual Chalkboard Calendar. Except mine would have to be dry erase … maybe fronted with plexi glass?

Favorite Daydream: I wish I’d known about this gorgeous Japanese Garden in Portland when I was there a couple of years ago. Of course I had no car and it rained the whole time I was there, so …

Favorite Sweet Thang: I’m pretty sure this Caramel Popcorn is a horribly-carborific bad idea, but I want to try to make it anyhow!!

Favorite Wise Words: Dr. Suess was a smart man. I like his take on Nonsense.

Favorite Breakfast Noms: I think this Blueberry Cream Cheese French Toast will be a huge hit with the family.

Favorite Workout: Run, Burpee, Run … am I sick to think this looks like fun? I think I’ll try it tonight!

Favorite Funny: this amuses me far more than it should

Favorite Purchase: I finally broke down and bought a griddle. I hate to add things to the kitchen, but it is awesome cooking pancakes on these and you can fit soooo many!!

Favorite App: So if you’re a Google Reader afficianado, you know it is dunzo here pretty soon. I’ve tried out a few options and Feedly is my favorite. It’s got great apps for ALL platforms and a pretty good extension for the browsers. It imports seamlessly from Google as well and switch-over is (supposedly) seamless when Google turns off the lights.

Favorite Savory Delight: Another recipe from Iowa Girl(originator of the Friday Faves concept, I might add) I cannot wait to try: Smothered Sweet Potato Fries!!

Hope you all have a looovely weekend!