Boy, its been a long morning and early afternoon. We are getting much more brutal on what we are willing to trash at this point. I really had no idea we had so much stuff in boxes that absolutely has no reason to exist in our house. Old statements from beyond seven years ago, old check carbons, newspapers, magazines that will never be read again.

If it isn't Discover, Fine Gardening, Fine Cooking or Writer's Digest, it is out the door. I am even thinking about ditching the gardening one. And I ought to just write down or type up the recipes from the cooking one and ditch those, too. Except they also have cooking technique information that is quite useful so maybe not.

I don't think I ever really realized just how big the closets are in this house. They are enormous. And rapidly being depleted. I am running across doubles and triples of things that were bought because the first one got misplaced. That is the ultimate in wasteful spending. I cringe at it now. Before it was just a fact of life.

The thing that keeps going through my head is that in a year when we have built the new cedar shed and bring all the stuff back from storage that we have been putting in there now, will we go through this again? I mean the whole why did we save this, why didn't we get rid of this thing last time. I hope not. But maybe we will. Maybe it takes time of being away from you stuff to just realize how worthless it is and how you don't need it for anything. Something to think on.

I'm hiding out from DH at the moment, so yet another entry from me today. I think this makes four. Anywho, we've gotten through a lot of junk, totally cleaned out the closet in DH's "room" which is more of a catch all place for his junk. It's technically the spare room/library, but it is not really used for that.

Found a bunch of old magazines and papers that could be recycled and a bunch of papers that need to go through the shredder first. They are old work related papers from DH's job, so I don't have to do it for a change, yay! I also found the Tightwad Gazette II, which has been missing since we moved here almost 9 years ago. Would not have thought I would find it in that closet.

I am really exhausted. I hope I can get him to call it a night. I just want to go to bed and sleep until noon tomorrow. Cause I just have to start all over again tomorrow, so no point getting up early. I do not know how you can fit so much stuff into one 1800 square foot house. I really want to get the carpets washed tomorrow but I'm not sure it is going to happen.

The only nice thing I have to say right now is that the house is starting to feel much more spacious as we weed junk out. How did we ever spend so much money on stuff we don't use and certainly don't need? I almost shudder when I think about it. No, I do shudder when I think about it. I am glad that lifestyle is so far behind us now. And neither of us want to ever go back to it.

I wish the first 11 days of my blog hadn't gone missing for the last several months. I think they are well and truly lost. I don't think I can make a bigger pest of myself about it, I've inquired three or four times, but nothing has ever come of it. So I must consider them gone, absorbed into the void of cyberspace as if they were an email sent from Yahoo.

This is kind of a bummer for me, as April 9th is coming tomorrow and I had wanted to go back to my first entry and see how far I'd come in the past year. Disappointing, but I'll get over it, I know.

I think I finally have my blog colors the way I want them. I had to play around for about an hour until I settled on what I like. Well, what I really liked was a combination of really bright blues and really bright pinky purple, but put them together and they were really quite garish, so no. I toned it down a good bit and I think its a nice combination now and shouldn't make anyone want to put their eyes out on seeing it. I mean, anymore than one normally does on reading my entries.

What I am really doing here is procrastinating and taking a bit of a break from the house. But it keeps calling me, literally as the buzzer on the dryer has gone off three times now. So back to it, I suppose.

We have spent the weekend (yet again) organizing in the house. I cannot believe how much we have hauled out of here. I've filled 2.5 large kitchen garbage bags full of boy's clothes from size 2T to size 4/5 and am offering that up on freecycle. I've filled another same size bag with my daughter's outgrown clothes (sent one off with grandpa last week) for her older, shorter cousin, and managed to fill half another one with little girl toddler clothes. My daughter is 10.5, I thought the girly toddler clothes were long since gone.

I've also got several fancy recital costumes from her dance days and 5 or 6 really pretty leotards in the age 3 to 7 sizes, that I think I will put up on e-bay. I will probably wait until August when people are gearing up for dance classes that start in the fall.

We filled the recycle bin with newspaper and could probably do it again. Usually we burn newspaper, but I've rolled as many paper logs as will fit in the firewood box and folded as many sheets into kindling as will fit in the kindling box.

We've gone through all the old magazines, too. I've filled two crates with old magazines. Out went Reader's Digests, Woman's Day, Family Circle, any gardening magazine that wasn't Fine Gardening, and a lot of the cooking magazines. I kept Fine Cooking and tore out recipes from the other mags that I will input into my cooking database.

I'm still wading through laundry, but instead of it being up to my knees its down at a much more manageable ankle depth. I'm only half kidding. But I am folding and putting away, or hanging up, or putting into give away bags, stuff as each load comes out of the dryer.

Dishes are one load from being caught up. My daughter, who isn't supposed to eat in her room, had at least a load's worth of dishes under her bed. Fortunately it was nothing that was growing any strange creatures in them. Mostly glasses and bowls.

I still have a pile of documents to shred that will probably fill a paper grocery bag if I pack it tight. We also filled a paper grocery bag of regular paper for recycle, mostly envelopes of the stuff we have to shred still.

I never realized how much junk there is in this house. It doesn't look like its as bad as I've described, but a lot of stuff was shoved in closets. We've done spring cleaning before, but never this deeply or thoroughly. The house is still a bit chaotic but that improves with each box we move to storage.

I need to put up a set of Encyclopedias on freecycle, too. My sister managed to bamboozle my husband into taking her old set when they moved. I had already told her twice that we didn't want them, but J being who she is, can be quite determined to get her way. She didn't want to move them or pay for them to be in her storage space. DH brought them home not knowing I had told her no twice. Since we already had two sets of encyclopedias, he shouldn't have even thought we needed any.

Admittedly one set is used to hold up a shelf in T's room and only one set is available to look stuff up in, unless someone wants to balance the shelf while something gets looked up, but its not like that is hard. Anyway, the third set has been sitting around taking up valuable book shelf space, so out it is going to go.

It still seems like there is a world of stuff to do in this house, but I am seeing improvement now instead of total chaos. You know how it always seems you have to make a bigger mess than you started with to clean? Well, we seem to be past that stage now.

All right, I guess that is enough work avoidance. The laundry is calling my name, and then the shredder.

I certainly gave our new dryer a run for its money today. I think I did six loads but it might have been seven. I even got everything folded up or put away, or had the kids put away their stuff. Rose's room is now clean and its going to stay that way.

I hope my power bill doesn't take a ginormous leap this month. At least the dryer is more energy efficient than the last one.

Dinner tonight was from the freezer/pantry. I am gradually getting my stockpile whittled down. A lot of the frozen stuff is at that 3 month stage where it won't be very appealing in a few more days. So two very thick chuck steaks that I cooked like roasts in the oven, some pan-fried potatoes sprinkled with herbs, salt and pepper, that had probably seen better days but weren't squidgy yet, some frozen broccoli with paprika/mustard cheese sauce and some bananas that needed to be eaten today or made into banana bread tomorrow. But everything tasted fab. You would not know it was clean out the freezer/pantry day.

I am getting better and better at managing my food usage for my family. I hope to get down to less than 10% of wasted food. I'd say I'm running about 20% right now.

Today was one of those days where you have a million things to accomplish and are lucky if you even accomplish one. I guess I count myself fortunate that I actually accomplished three things. Even if one of those things was simply emptying the dishwasher. Hey, it was on the list.

We also mostly finished up in Rose's room and took a bunch more stuff to storage as FIL was kind enough to bring his truck out and run DH in with the load. I've been buried in laundry from Rose's room. I don't even know what was dirty and what was clean and never put away. But she knows if I find one thing on the floor its confiscated. She has a her own laundry hamper and a closet she can easily hang things up in, plus a dresser with easy slide drawers. NO excuses whatsoever. If its on the floor it is gone!

I think its going to take me a couple of days to get caught up on laundry, sort out what is too small and needs to be handed down to her older cousin, who she is a head taller than, and what needs to be put away properly. Sigh. I swear I had just done this six months ago and it was nowhere near as bad. How one kid could be so messy is beyond me. I did take away her guitar for a month because I found it out of its case and on the floor.

I don't get where the messy gene is coming from. Even Tobias keeps his room neat most of the time and he's only seven. I think she has a packrat tendancy, maybe got that from MIL and FIL. I dunno.

Aside from that I did manage to get 2 book pages written today and will work on it some more tonight and 3 the day before. I also read book 2 of the Withern Rise trilogy, "Small Eternities" by Michael Lawrence and started the 3rd one, "The Underwood See." I liked the first book and so far the third book more than the second, the second was more of a bridge piece. Necessary, but the less exciting part of the story. Very interested to see how it will turn out.

Didn't really do anything in the financial arena other than balance the checkbook and it actually balanced, always a good. Okay, I guess I did get more than three things accomplished today. But the list still doesn't seem any shorter.

Spent some time online going over stuff with my friend I will be meeting in California at month's end. We are plotting our vacation to waste the least amount of time possible.

I guess that's about it, then.

Big, fat fluffy flakes. We woke up to it, waited for the school bus in it this morning, waited for the school bus in it this afternoon, and finally saw the back of it at about 6:00, when the sun came out and everything melted.

We've gotten snow on the first day of spring before, but this is the first time in my life I can remember having snow in April.

We spent the day cleaning out Rose's room. DH and I worked in there for at last six hours. It's still not done. It's such a disaster. Rose has the name destructo girl for a reason. Mostly I just close her door and ignore her room but I was just so sick of it.

That girl is going to keep it neat this time or I'm going to take away all of her stuff. She can have five toys and one week's worth of clothes and some books and anything else she has to earn back.

I'm sorry if I came across as snarky this morning, just not my favorite holiday and I went back and read the previous entry. I don't want to spoil anyone else's fun, just not my thing. Anywho...

We've been cleaning and organizing for most of the day. Yesterday when we picked up storage containers we also bought 2 CD's that I had planned for, the one from Chris Daughtry and the one from Kathrine McPhee.

I was very pleased with both of them. There's a song on hers about shoes that my daughter just loves and the beats on her album are just so contagious. Perfect cleaning music. I think Daughtry is more car driving music.

All in all, not bad for two singers who didn't win first place on that reality show last year. And I've listened to the winner's album and its nowhere near as good as what he did on the show or what these other two have done.

We have got so much sorted and sifted, but how come the house always looks like a hurricane hit it while you are cleaning and after you have taken umpteen loads of junk out of the house? Well, I suppose I can just be grateful that it only looks like it was hit by one and not ever actually hit by one. From reading Jan's blog I know that the reality of that silly phrase is so much worse.

I do think actual progress appears to have been made though this time. Always a good.

We're loading up the car for a trip to storage today. Most of the stuff we will be taking in this trip is stuff that has been stored in my closet pretty much since we moved in. It will be nice to have the space in there for other things. I've got 4 cubicles that can go there and organize stuff that is just floating around, mostly. Like my yarns and other knitting supplies, sewing basket, photo albums and cooking and garden magazines I don't want to recycle.

After that we are swinging by FIL's house and picking up his truck and we will load that up as much as we can and take it in.

We ended up with a 10X15 foot storage unit, that is also 15 feet high. We ended up with the bigger one because we wanted to be able to go through stuff there, instead of here at home. When we go through stuff at home it just seems to make the house a huge mess. Obviously I will be weeding out paper junk beforehand, but we will be putting the table up in there as a work surface so that we can figure out what we will keep and what we will try to sell on e-bay, and what might work for garage sales.

We also decided to move the majority of our bookcases and books in there. We should be able to fill the entire back wall with that. We will leave a space along the front of the bookcases and the other storage containers, and then leave a path down the middle of the unit so we can walk back and retrieve any book we might need later on, which is another reason for the larger unit.

It has been so long since I've had an organized house. The kitchen is about the only thing that stays organized and that's because it has a gazillion cupboards.

So how does this relate to finances? Well, when stuff is misplaced and I can't find it, I'll often go and buy a new widget. If I was organized I'd be able to find my existing widget. This happens far too often and I am tired of wasting money on widgets.

We've rented for six months. This summer we are hoping to build a new storage shed in our yard and then we won't need to rent one after that. But I think in the meanwhile it is worth the money for us to get the junk and excess stuff out of here. Not to mention it will make me a lot happier and not so overwhelmed with the whole "Where do I start?" in the house.

I missed a couple of days of blogging but I have a good excuse, honest! In the past 3 days I have driven my husband to the airport, had my son turn seven and celebrate at two sets of grandparents' houses, took cupcakes to school, and a family only (the four of us) birthday dinner out at Billy McHale's restaurant.

I don't have any idea if Billy's is a chain or not. I know of two in Washington state. It is a wonderfully charming place. Full of old things, old signs, weird things, very retro. Like on one wall it has a sign for Glass Bottom Boat rides, an antique telephone, a two-handled lumberjack saw, and gas pump from the 1940's, an advertisement for canned meat, 10 cents a can, old neon gas station signs (of the eat here and get gas variety). It's just very unique and has a certain ambiance you can't get anywhere else. It sounds like it could be tacky, but its not.

Our table had a red light over it (there's a different colored bulb at each table, five or six different colors). But the piece de resistance is an elevated train that you can have Happy Birthday or Anniversary written on cardboard along with the person's name(s) and attatched to the flatbed cars and then it runs around the restaurant. Tobias was in heaven! He's beyond train happy. Plus he got a free dessert and the staff sang to him.

And if that wasn't enough to keep me busy, I went on a writing jag. I wrote 72 pages in three nights. I had insomnia on one of them and I got in that mode where the story starts writing itself. A lot of it, most of it actually is for the second book, not the first one, but I've got a lot of stuff thought out now and can go back to the first one. I am very happy with myself right now.

DH and I also went and tried out laptops. Well, I tried them out and he watched me. I typed on every single one they had on display at Best Buy. It was weird how different keyboards can feel when you are typing 70 words per minute. I settled on the one I liked the best, which turned out to be a $649 Toshiba, not top of the line, but Toshiba's a work horse. And the keyboard felt right to me. So I wrote down all the information and I'm going to save my plasma money for a new laptop when I get back from vacation.

The Toshiba laptop I have now is still functional but it is old. Its a Tecra 8000. It is very heavy, and I got it off e-bay for $150, but then had to spend another $150 because it didn't have a legitimate copy of Windows on it. It had been part of a network, so network software had been used. Not something that was revealed by the seller. But anyway, I've had it almost a year and its okay, but I don't like the size of the keys, they are a little small for my fingers, so cause some stumbling around. I also don't like the placement of the shift key next to the delete key, cause guess which one I hit too often?

I really like the layout of the other keyboard, the keys are a bit bigger and there is no awkwardness at all. DH is all for it. And he'll take over the one I'm using now, because his is really old, running Windows 95. Mine is Windows XP but only cause we upgraded it when we bought the legitimate software. So it isn't as ancient, but...the battery holds no charge and you can't get replacement ones and I would take my computer everywhere to write if I had a functional battery.

Half a dozen places around here offer free wireless access, and we're in the boonies.

Anywho, we made a decision about renting a storage facility for at least six months. We have way too much stuff in the house to ever get it organized so we are going to rent a 10X10 unit and use it to sort in and store until we know what we are getting rid of and what we are keeping. I am so sick of an overstuffed house, I want it to be clean and organized, which is hard when you are tripping over toys all the time. Left over from the affluenza days.

My niece gave me some clothes for Rose to try. She has to upgrade now that she is a teacher so a lot of stuff gets handed down. Rose is allergic to wool and in this bag were 3 wool sweaters that are part cashmere or part angora, one is Gap and the other two are Ralph Lauren. She said she didn't care what I did with them if they didn't fit Rose, so I am going to put them on e-bay. They are lighterweight sweaters, more spring sweaters than a winter ones and are in very good condition. There are also some pants that are cut too low for Rose and some jeans that I may put on e-bay as well.

I think that about covers what I have been doing. Oh, and in my spare(?) time, I am reading Command Decision by Elizabeth Moon (latest in Vatta's War series, excellent military sci-fi) and watching season 5 of 24.

DH and I did some more organizing in the kitchen today. Mostly it was just moving things around to more convenient locations. This is the first real overhaul that we've done in there since moving in here in 1998. I'm happier with where stuff is now, though we are not done. We spent several hours on it, though.

I did do a little writing, wrote three more pages so I am up to 42 so far this year. That averages out to a page a day for 2007.

We didn't spend any money today and aside from a few PTR's, I didn't do anything to make money, either.

I have been really sick of the fact that all of my casserole dishes, glass baking pans, glass bowls, divided plates with lids, bamboo steamer, and microwave safe dishes barely fit into the cupboard that I have designated for them and quite often will jump off the shelf if you open the door too fast.

And I've been grumping about all the canned goods that are on the floor level shelves that I have to get down on my hands and knees to see what I have in there.

And I've been irritated that all of the juice is way up high on the top shelves. Well, I decided to finally do something about it.

I put the canned goods in the cupboard where the dishes used to be, put baking items where the juice used to be, put the dishes where the baking items were, and moved the juice to the floor level shelves, where the kids can get them out easily. I don't know why I didn't do this before.

Now I can easily see how much and what I have to work with and it is right at mid-level, so no reaching and no hunkering down. I may make some more adjustments, but at least now I know I won't be running out of tuna, salmon, green beans, corn, or tomato sauce anytime soon. And I can easily see what I am low on.

No more buying stuff that I think we are out of and not buying stuff that I think we have too much of and being wrong. That should save some on the grocery bill and make this week's menu planning a breeze. Which I oughta do tonight, but probably won't do until morning.

Sorry that last post today probably came across as very negative, and I've managed to shake off that negative vibe and just try to realize that you can only help those who want to be helped, not those who say they want it but don't, and next time I'll just walk away from it.

On to happier news. Yay, for us! DH and I finally finished the laundry room today. It has been bugging me for so long so I am very happy to be done with it. It is so nice to be able to get from the kitchen to the laundry room instead of having to go through my bedroom and then through the master bath to get there.

It's going to be so much easier to keep on top of the laundry now and to hang clothes on the drying racks as they come out of the washing machine.

The kitchen floor and laundry room floor got mopped today, too. It is nice to have a clean house again.

No more fruit flies! We managed to kill the buggers off without using bug bombs. It took a week, but with fly strips, scrubbing down the kitchen, putting all food in sealed containers or Ziploc baggies, and DH vacuuming up stray ones, our kitchen is now fruit fly free. Try saying that 5 times fast.

We decided not to chance anything tonight by cooking in the kitchen so we grabbed fast food. Not healthy either physically or financially, but that's the choice we made. We just did fast food drive thru after going to the chiropractor and making our milk run to town, then back to the school just in time for Rose's basketball practice.

I made bread last night in the bread machine and I shouldn't have to make any now until Sunday. Tomorrow we shall cook again. It's spaghetti and meatballs night, with salad and fruit (either apples, blueberries, cherries or pineapple as that is what we have on hand). I need to make up a new week's worth of menues as I misplaced the other ones I'd done. Oh, to be organized.

We did do some cleaning in the laundry room, the bit that still hadn't been done yet. There's a little bit left but its almost done, will probably be done before we go to bed tonight. Which will be really nice. Hopefully tomorrow we can work on taking down the Christmas tree or at least getting the ornaments and lights off. I want it done before DH leaves for Alaska on Sunday. I want my living room back before he goes and the tree itself is to heavy for me to haul out to the shed for storage (its fake).

One of these days I will be organized! And I believe that slightly more than I believe my neighbor will ever pay me back the $11.55 he owes me. Anyone have a bridge for sale?

The evening saw a lot accomplished. We found the floor in Tobias' room and unburied the dresser and put all his clothes away in it. That helped a lot. So now he has a perfect dresser and a perfect desk with his computer on it, which was perfect to begin with. One thing he does keep neat is his computer area. Just like his sister. These are old computers by the way, leftovers. They don't have much on them besides Word and Works and games.

I swear I did not buy 75% of the junk in his room. Grandparents. Enough said.

Dinner was an old stand-by: Tex-Mex Chicken and Rice. And I cheated, too as I had leftover chicken and leftover rice. So I just warmed up the chicken and rice, dumped in two jars of salsa, stirred it, reheated it and stirred it again. Presto, chango, dinner. Cheap, fast, easy.

DH and I are going to try to finish T's room tomorrow while he is at school. Who knows how succesful we'll be? At least his closet was still completely clean and organized from the last time I did it. Of course, that was because he couldn't get into it because of all the stuff in front of the door, but I'll take what I can get.

Cause if they do, I want to put them to work. Gotta earn their living just like the rest of us.

I've put out 3 apple cider vinegar traps and there are a couple caught in them. DH got impatient with the traps and he decided he was going to suck them up the vacuum hose. And as long as he moved slowly, it worked. Apparently fruit flies are stupid. And they do vacuum.

T's room is going to take more time than I thought. Probably won't be able to do much tomorrow as I have a dentist appointment smack dab in the middle of my child free hours at 11:30. Well, there is always Tuesday.

And then there is my daughter's room. What ever time it takes to do T's I will probably have to triple for Rose. For someone who spends almost no time at home or in her room when she is home, how did she become such a mess maker? I have a song I sing to her to the tune of the song Matchmaker from Fiddler on the Roof:

Mess Maker, Mess Maker
Make me a mess
Fill up the corners
And give me some stress
Cover the floor
Until there's no more
Mess maker
Make me a mess!

I don't get it. Her bed is always neatly made and her desk and computer are in perfect order. But there is nowhere else in the entire room except a little area that is a path to her bed from the door that is free of childhood debris.

Serious purging time. I just hope I can get it all done this week. DH is helping. DH is doing more than helping. He's doing more than I am. He also cleaned out, well half of, the laundry room and took the old freezer out onto the back porch. That opens up so much space in the laundry room. I can now set up the drying racks there and have room for the hampers, too! Love that. Anyway, there is room for the repairman to get to the dryer if and when I decide on fixing it.

Today was a no spend day, hooray. Didn't go anywhere, didn't shell out one cent. DH found a nickle last night that I forgot to mention. It went into the change jar.

I added $7 in ones to my coin jar today. We have enough organic milk to get through until payday, DH comes home Wednesday and he can just go without until Friday. We have apple juice so he will deal. I also found two quarters and three pennies while I was cleaning.

Yes, I know I said I was going to be Mrs. Lazy Pants today since all of my closets are organized, but I decided I was tired of only being able to enter the kitchen from one direction. Our kitchen is laid out where it has an entry to the laundry room and entry to the living room and an entry to the playroom/exercise room.

The hall leading off the kitchen to the laundry room is filled with "stuff" either kitchen or laundry related and needs to be organized. I can't get through that way to the laundry room at all. I have to go through my room, through the masterbath and out to the laundry room that way. Which isn't that big a deal but has to be dealt with before we get the dryer fixed.

Usually we can only get into the kitchen from the living room because there is so much "stuff" in the doorway to the exercise/playroom. You can get into it from the living room so its just a major pain to always have to go around.

Most of the stuff was recycling stuff. A lot of cardboard boxes that needed to be broken down, cans and plastic bottles that needed to be taken outside and put in the appropriate bins. Pop bottles that needed to have the labels removed. Now we haven't bought pop since Labor Day, so this should tell you how long they've been sitting there. A bunch of plastic grocery sacks that needed to be shoved in one bag and put under the sink for use as garbage can liners.

Well, I finally tackled all that. It took me 2 hours, but everything is outside and in its appropriate bin, ready to go out Monday night for Tuesday morning pick-up. And I can walk through my kitchen in two directions and it makes me very happy.

Entry 4.

I think I have been spending way too much time on the blogs and boards today. I did get some stuff accomplished in the laundry room today but it didn't get finished. I don't think it really even got halfway done.

I keep thinking I've shaken off this cold, I start to feel better and then the next day or two, bleah. I started coughing about 4 hours ago and its definitely in the bronchials now. Tobias is still not better either. He is almost never sick and this has just dragged on and on with him. He spent most of the day just laying on the couch watching his sister play video games, which is very unlike him. And his cheeks are bright red and he is running a fever again.

I did manage to get a load of dishes done, and do three loads of laundry. Two loads of towels are on the drying racks and one load of clothes is hanging (on hangers) from the shower rod to dry. I took 6 surveys, or tried to, only qualified for 2 of them, and did some PTR's. But mostly I just got lazy and didn't do much of anything that I had planned. Didn't even start the turkey stock going like I planned, so hopefully tomorrow I will get to that.

At least there was no temptation to go out and spend money. Even if we didn't feel yucky, it is pouring rain again. We may have flooding again soon. I am just so grateful the flood plain is 3 miles away from where I live. Not that I'd have bought property by a river in the first place.

I successfully completed my closet the other night, it took until 1 a.m. but I did it. Just for the record I ended up with 2 paper grocery bags full of shredded paper, one milk crate full of other recylable paper such as magazines, envelopes, junk mail, etc. I had seven plastic grocery bags full of garbage (nothing gross, just a lot of plastic, packaging, those blow up plastic pouches they use for shipping. 3 empty Pepsi cans (not me, must have been DH), several water bottles, and a box full of cardboard. Oh, there are a couple of boxes DH needs to go through, but I'm not worried about those. It looks neat and tidy, so I'm happy. Plus I have a side of the bed to walk on again, the overflow was pretty bad.

Today the task will be to get the laundry room in order. It is not as bad as my closet was and is a bigger space. I need to make it accessible through the kitchen and not just through the master bathroom. I want to get the repairman out to look at the dryer but I don't want him traipsing through my bedroom and bathroom to get there. Mostly it is unsorted dirty clothes that need to go into hampers, childrens' toys that need to migrate back to the other end of the house, and a lot of cardboard that needs to be broken down for recycling.

It will be a no-spend day. We aren't going anywhere. I made really delicious cheeseburgers for lunch today. My trick is to add an ounce of plain tomato sauce to a pound of hamburger. Makes the burgers stay moist and yummy. Can't add more than that or the burgers will lose cohesion and you won't be able to flip them without them falling apart. Had them on 100% whole wheat buns (delicious)with slices of Tillamook cheddar cheese instead of the old Kraft singles. So good and completely natural.

I'm going to make turkey stock today. I have a bunch of neck bones, so I will throw those in my stock pot with water, onion, carrots, celery, parsley and salt and let it boil away today. Tomorrow I will make turkey noodle soup with whole wheat spaghetti noodles. Looking forward to that.

3rd Entry for today.

While I was cleaning my closet I found a check that has been missing since February. It is a refund check from the orthodontist for $55.60 and it was nowhere near the portion of my bedroom that I thought I'd lost it in, either!

I thought it had fallen between the baseboard of the bed and the mattress/boxsprings and rather insistently continued to search in that area because that was where I remember it last being. I found it in a laundry basket in the closet that DH had shoved a bunch of stuff in one night so we could change the sheets on the bed, since I'd had everything spread out on it. Back in February. I told you the closet needed going through!

The check doesn't say anything about being void if not cashed in a certain amount of time so I will try to deposit it into savings tomorrow. I am so happy to have found this, it has been an irritant for 8 months.

The closet is only half done. It is taking longer than I expected but the good news is that there is a lot I can get rid of either by giving it away or recycling. Also have found 3 grocery bags of garbage so far. I don't know why I had so much plastic packaging in the closet when it should have been thrown away when whatever it contained was unpackaged. I don't remember putting it in the closet so it must have been DH and one of his bad habits, instead of one of mine.

2nd Entry for today.

I'm just taking a break from the closet to read some blogs. Is it possible it looks worse than when I started? LOL It will be nice when it is done, just sometimes it seems like you need to make a bigger mess than you start with to end up organized, doesn't it?

I think I have too many clothes. I really need to develop some system of paring down what I have. I think I only really wear a dozen tops and five pants, and in the summer 8 tops and five shorts. But I've probably got triple what I need and I know some of it is either too big or too small or out of date. Fortunately, none of it is what was I thinking? I am happy with my taste in clothes. I have noticed that I have at least six sweaters that I don't wear anymore, too, so I should probably root them out.

I should probably go take some time to eat, too. I just really want to get done today!

3rd Entry for today.

No, these are not my deepest, darkest secrets, I'm just planning my day tomorrow. I am going to tackle, oh, horror or horrors, my bedroom closet. It has grown to quite fearful proportions and is threatening to take over that entire side of the room. So I am going to take everything out of it tomorrow, except the clothes that are hanging up and put it all in the living room and then tackle one box at a time. My goal is to get through the whole thing.

I've got bags of outgrown children's clothes that need to be sorted and readied for freecycle, old maternity clothes (youngest will be seven come March) yarn, craft supplies, pillow stuffing, batting, and several miscellaneous boxes of stuff. Papers that need to be shredded, magazines that need to be recycled, papers that need to be filed, newspapers that need to go in the box by the fireplace, wrapping paper, ribbons, bows, gift bags, and junk. I swear, it is all breeding. I hope I can get it sorted, trashed, organized, recycled, given away or whatever all in one day. It sure would be nice.

What has this to do with finances? Well, getting the old statements and bills filed or shredded will help in organizing the finances. And spending the day at home cleaning means I won't be out spending money. Other than that, not much. LOL