Home January’s Challenge: BE TIDY
Daughter-number-2 will be arriving for tea tonight, and will be staying for the week with 5 year-old Ben and 5 month-old Erin Rose. She is a tidyness and cleanliness whiz, well trained by her older sister (not me!). Hence, my Tidiness Challenge will be well looked after this coming week. I will ask my daughter to help me purge the linen - I have spare sheets, quilts and blankets taking up space that could be otherwise well used.
I wondered why I was having so much trouble with being organised and staying tidy, and realised that while I have things stored in containers, the containers are too hard to get to or they are too full, or they are not attractive containers - and so it is not a pleasure to go into a cupboard or drawer and find what I want. And also it is not a pleasure to return things to their alloted space, if indeed they fit! So I think my untidyness is partly because I have not purged enough. I have wasted huge amounts of time lately looking for things, many of them everyday items often used. They were somewhere, but I did not know where! Are my cupboards still too full? Haven't I decided yet where exactly I will keep my glasses and mobile phone when not being used? Are some of the storage spaces inconveniently situated and hard to get at. Am I being lazy in not cleaning up as I go along? Am I trying to do too many things at once, even though I think I am energised by having multiple things to keep me from being bored? I need to think about what is working and what is not working and why. Maybe I have too many places where I am placing things like my mobile phone, the home phone, my camera, my glasses! And so the list goes on. Daughter-number-2 just might help me assess and attack, if we are not too busy playing babies or going to the beach.
I wondered why I was having so much trouble with being organised and staying tidy, and realised that while I have things stored in containers, the containers are too hard to get to or they are too full, or they are not attractive containers - and so it is not a pleasure to go into a cupboard or drawer and find what I want. And also it is not a pleasure to return things to their alloted space, if indeed they fit! So I think my untidyness is partly because I have not purged enough. I have wasted huge amounts of time lately looking for things, many of them everyday items often used. They were somewhere, but I did not know where! Are my cupboards still too full? Haven't I decided yet where exactly I will keep my glasses and mobile phone when not being used? Are some of the storage spaces inconveniently situated and hard to get at. Am I being lazy in not cleaning up as I go along? Am I trying to do too many things at once, even though I think I am energised by having multiple things to keep me from being bored? I need to think about what is working and what is not working and why. Maybe I have too many places where I am placing things like my mobile phone, the home phone, my camera, my glasses! And so the list goes on. Daughter-number-2 just might help me assess and attack, if we are not too busy playing babies or going to the beach.
Garden One day a month
Apart from hand-watering with the hose, when I might also pull a few weeds, amazingly I only seem to "work" in the garden about one day a month. Because I am not really gardening regularly, I should consider looking into moon planting, as I believe that farmers-of-old had an understanding of the moon's affinity with the earth and its plants. My first job today before I headed into the garden after an early breakfast was to organise myself, collecting everything that I thought I would need so that I did not have to take off my dirty gardening boots to re-enter the house. Strangely, it is long way down to my feet these days!
I was very pleased with my organisation effort, for in my collection of things I might need were: the home phone (in case someone rang, as I did not want to re-enter the house); my camera; a clean pair of gardening gloves; and a glass of water. The camera and phone were even put in a lovely basket so that I would know exactly where they were when not being used. It is very embarasing to go searching for such items somewhere in the garden - especially the expensive camera - not remembering where you last left it!
I was not long before I realised I could not enter the locked garage door from the outside to get the long-handled cutters to cut up some palm fronds for the compost bin, so off came the boots, and into the house I went to unlock the garage door from inside. Boots on again!
Then I saw this lovely elusive butterfly which I had spied yesterday, so I chased it around the garden for a long while until at last it settled for me to photograph it - except that my camera notified me that the memory card was not in it - so it was boots off and on again!
By this time, the butterfly had well and truly gone, so instead, I photographed one of the many very small sunflowers in the garden. They were supposed to be Sunfola - a variety good for cooking oil, giving one beautiful yellow flower on a tall stem. The multiple small but beautiful flowers on a tall stem did not seem to me to be Sunfola, so I will notify the seed provider. I expect they will post me a free packet of the real Sunfola!Because I had not yet tidied up that messy half-hidden corner of pots, I spent an hour sorting and cleaning pots. By this time, I was ready for a cup of tea - that delicious herb-mix tea that I buy in Brisbane, so delicious that I even eat the tea leaves, savoring the mellow flavours of licorice, lemon grass, ginger, dandelion etc. So, it was boots off again and then a quiet sit down, which got me musing as to how much I appreciate so many of the little items I often use. The Chinese teapot from my neighbour Yvonne who spied it at a garage sale; the silver teaspoon from my sister Sandy's holiday - she always thinks of family when she goes on a holiday; the shiny blue Chinese placemats from my lovely Daughter-number-2. It is a very good feeling to be surrounded by the pleasures of home and by happy thoughts of others.
After my cup of tea on our sheltered back patio with my boots off, I was returning the dishes to the kitchen (being tidy!). As I was about to enter the house, I spied a long stick insect laying stretched out, dying by the back door. So I gave it a nice clean sock so that it would know it was appreciated and so that it felt comforted. Stick insects are a garden pest like the grasshoppers, so I could make some pawpaw or chilli spray if they really become a nuisance, but I think there are enough comfrey, amaranth and sweet potato leaves for me, hubby and our family as well as the grasshoppers, stick insects and their families.
from Robyn
Robin in a flowering gum
Painted by Brenda, Robyn’s mum
