October « 2009 « Well-Ordered Chaos

Hallowe’en Hiatus

Hallowe’en is a busy time for me. In addition to dressing up and handing out treats, observe the old Celtic festival of Samhain from which so many of our Hallowe’en traditions derive. Samhain (prnounced SAH-when) is part harvest festival, part new year’s festival, and part ancestor remembrance. The holiday has a lot [...]

Organizing an Entryway, Step 2: The Pre-Sort

This is the second post in my Organizing an Entryway series. I’m breaking it down into steps that are as small as possible to prevent ADD overwhelm.

The second step in my organizing process is a quick pre-sort. This is a quick way to get rid of two categories of stuff: things that don’t belong [...]

Organizing My Entryway, Part 1: Taking Stock of the Situation

I stared work on my entryway today. I’ll be posting a series of entries on how I’m going about it, step by step, so you can see how a Real Live Person with ADD starts and finishes an organizing project.

I basically use Julie Morgenstern’s five-step SPACE system (“SPACE” stands for Sort, Purge, Assign a home, [...]

Want to organize your junk drawer? For starters, don’t call it a junk drawer!

Earlier today I came across a blog post by a CPO (that’s “certified professional organizer” about your junk drawer. You know, the one that has all those packets of ketchup in it? And those containers of pepper flakes that come with pizza? And your spare buttons, and some batteries, and that piece of paper with [...]

That was NOT decaf

I went to Peet’s Coffee before my art class tonight and ordered a small soy-milk decaf dark chocolate mocha. Yes, OK, I’m one of THOSE people. It was evening, I have trouble digesting milk, and if I had my way the chocolate wouldn’t have had sugar in it at all. So sue me.

Anyway, [...]

Housekeeping hacks: rodent management

When I found out that there were rats in my roof, I went through a moment of shame. I’m used to thinking of myself as a terrible housekeeper, a total slob, so I automatically felt that the rodents were somehow my fault. Even though I’ve been pretty organized for a couple of years now, [...]

Friday’s Worthy Distraction

It’s Friday, Chaos Demons, and you’ve earned a break. Go ahead and distract yourself. Let yourself get lost on the internet. Nobody’s getting anything done today anyway. If you’re too impatient to read a few paragraphs before you get to the distraction, scroll on down.

I’m a huge Jane Austen fan, for all the usual reasons. [...]

I can USUALLY find my keys…

My cat decided to keep me awake all night last night. I’m a light sleeper, which means she knows she can stomp on me, meow in my ear, lick my eyelids, and touch her cold wet nose to my face, and I will wake up and pay attention to her (even if it’s just to [...]

ADD-friendly gardening tips

Or, Why I $%#@ing HATE Palm Trees

Today I realized that palm-trees are not ADD-friendly.

I came to this realization in a round about way because of the mice. As I mentioned last week, my house has been invaded by rodents. The good news is that they’re not roof rats like I thought; they’re house mice, [...]

ADD moment in the rain

If you’ve been reading the news crawl on CNN or Google or pretty much anywhere, you might know that a coastal rainstorm is hitting CA pretty hard right now. We don’t get that much rain here. In fact, for much of the year we can count on absolutely dry weather, which can be nice if [...]

Well-Ordered Chaos

Now where did I put that post…