I have, for the last three days so far, been working on getting my house organized in a major project I call my 12 Days of Productivity. The results have been phenomenal, and each day I am more excited to start (and finish! imagine that!) the next part of my plan; I can truly visualize my house looking the way I want it to look, even behind the cabinet and closet doors. Yesterday’s assignment was to clean out the double cabinet over my kitchen desk. This is where I keep about half of my cookbooks, the phone book, my address book, notecards and stationery, and all kinds of other miscellaneous…
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The Finals Countdown
The older boy is smack dab in the middle of finals, and preparing to come home for winter break at the end of the week. He has had a particularly heavy class load in his first semester; none of the class subjects would have been overly difficult for him individually, but these classes grouped together provided a tremendous amount of weekly hours full of papers and projects to complete. It all exploded yesterday, apparently. He turned in his final art project–an assignment of epic proportions which had him apparently feeling very hostile about the color yellow, as he indicated in a Facebook status–on Monday, and was busily working on the…
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12 Days of Productivity
I’ve been belly-aching–mostly to myself–about how unorganized our house has become over the past couple of years. A few years ago, I went through everything–EVERYTHING–and cleaned up, cleaned out, and generally streamlined wherever I could. I haven’t taken the time to do that since then, and I have slowly felt myself smothering under our clutter. It was for this reason that I decided to seize the opportunity I got this year, with an early occurrence of Hanukkah and now a couple of weeks during which, publicly, everything is quieter because most people are rushing around worrying about Christmas. I am starting my own home project, the 12 Days of Productivity.…
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HomeGoods Should Be Called HomeGreats. That’s All.
I don’t shop much, outside of purchasing food for the family because, well, ya gotta eat. The idea of going to the mall and browsing around like I did when I was a teenager and in my early twenties is something that really never sounds fun to me anymore, and I think twice (or three times) about most things that I buy when I do have to make a trip to any non-food store. My husband (who doesn’t pay much attention to price tags unless we’re shopping for something large like appliances or automobiles) gets extremely frustrated with my frugality, though I choose to look at it as being “financially…
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Phil Keoghan Would Totally Dig Us.
“The Amazing Race” is one of my favorite shows. My entire family loves to stop everything on Sunday evenings to watch. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the show, it’s a reality game show in which teams race around the world, completing tasks along the way, in hopes that they’ll be the first team to the finish line. On most legs of the race, the last team to arrive at the finish line (where host Phil Keoghan waits for them) gets eliminated. On the very last leg, the first team to arrive at the finish wins a million dollars. Two years ago, we even had a theme dinner…
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D-I-S-R-E-S-P-E-C-T
I was chatting with Kate the other day, when she told me of a recent frustration of hers. She is the director of a program that trains a certain genre of professionals (which I won’t give away here for several reasons) who are highly degreed. As she was teaching one of the classes, she had to reprimand some of the class participants–again, degreed professionals–for texting and checking Facebook during class. The “professionals” she reprimanded were highly agitated, saying that they could do what they wanted to do. Is this what it’s come to, people? I understand the temptation of today’s technology; in fact, I will be writing about that topic…
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Flowers, Cookies, Candy, Popcorn, Wine…Sounds Like The Perfect Afternoon To Me!
I don’t entertain much. Wait, let me clarify that. I like to think I am quite entertaining, but what I mean is, I don’t host dinner parties and such. Mainly it’s because of our family’s schedule: we’re just so dang busy all the time. When we do have friends over on those rare occasions, I try to do little things to make it memorable, like plan the food around a certain theme, make special music playlists, and other such things. New ideas are always good, though, and last week I got some great ones when I attended a lovely holiday event hosted by the 1800FLOWERS family of companies: 1800FLOWERS1800BASKETSCheryl’sThe Popcorn…
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You’re All Winners, But In This Case, Six of You Are Winning-er Than The Rest
©2010 Suburban Scrawl
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The Gift Of Self
We broke Hanukkah tradition this year, since the older boy is away at college. Normally the boys open one gift each night (give or take) during the holiday. This year, the younger boy opened a gift each night, all alone, for the first couple of nights until his brother came home for the weekend. Saturday night we had our Hanukkah extravaganza (latkes, blintzes, kugel, oh my!), and the boys opened all of their gifts together. The older boy had a special gift for his brother, something I didn’t ever expect. When he told me about it earlier in the day Saturday, the whole thing had an egotistical slant to it,…
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Another Hanukkah Tradition Lives On…
My dog is not stupid. In fact, the way her brain works, I wouldn’t be surprised if she has a whole other life that I don’t know about: maybe a doggie husband, a couple of puppies? I got an unexpected reminder of how smart she really is today, when she carried on her sixth annual Hanukkah tradition of locating the gelt* (chocolate coins**) I had hidden (from her), and eating them, but not before she took off the wrappers. (Do you know how difficult it is for a human to take those wrappers off sometimes???) Here’s the deal. I had the gelt in a Target bag (YES! Target sells gelt…