Starting a new month in your journal

Which is also your notebook and sketchbook. Because reasons.

 I feel like a new month is a chance to start over, and to try new things. It's definitely a chance to add in new pages, to replace the ones you've been using all the previous month with clean, open, fresh ones. Here's some of what I'm doing right now.

Because my journal is the same book as my notebook, my dream journal, my day-to-day list-book and scratchpad, and everything else, I set up a month like so:

• A new calendar for the month. Lately, I've been using the one sent by StarGardener in her Right Brain Planner subscription, and it's great. I'll use this one for scheduling, notes, what I did and what I should do, whatever. 
• I usually also have a second (and sometimes a third) dedicated calendar to record weather, moods, how I feel, etc. I usually use the freebies from LiveCraftEat for that, since they're cute, clean, have a lot of space, and I was using them before I discovered the #RBP.
• I also tend to put a little smudge of any nail polish I use on the day it's used, or the day it's bought.

• This month I'm trying something new: Across from my calendar, I've added in a sheet of things I want to track this month, with a square to fill in for each day--practical things like when I babysit, when I get orders in my shop, when I exercise, and more aspirational things like meditation, reviews, stuff like that. It's also got lines for mood, body, whether I keep to my diet, household chores I tend to forget, stuff like that.
• Then there'll be a page for me to track my monthly spending, because I've gotten bad about that again.
• A page for the first week's schedule and to-do list.
• A page for ongoing monthly notes, things I need to remember during the month, and future dates. Usually also whatever from last month still needs doing, sometimes on its own to-do list, and sometimes just in a general way, mixed in with other pages.
• Then it goes back to being a journal.

I'll mark the pages I need to remember to go back to with little post-it tabs, and I'm playing with the idea of color-coding the edges of pages so I can more easily find things--but that'll probably be more like something I do when I'm closing the book, as part of the indexing process.

Throughout the month, I have my RightBrainPlanner pages:

And I usually have a page a week or a month where I just stick down things I find--lately, it's been things like leaves from the playground, colored bits of paper off the ground, samples of new art supplies / nail polish / whatever, pretty packaging off things I buy, just stuff like that.

Sometimes I put a list of journal questions to answer during the month, a list of goals for the month, a list of items that need buying, a rough financial plan; it all depends on what's going on and how I feel about it, but these are usually all clustered together, set up when I start a new month.

I also like to Take A Moment--I'll think about, and sometimes write about, what happened during the last month, what I learned from it, and what I can do in the month ahead. This is especially useful when the month I just finished was hard or hectic, and it gives a feeling that I've wrapped it up, that I can move forward without dragging all that behind me.

Do you do anything special when you prep for a new month? How do you track the passage of time, either in your notebook, your journal, or your planner?

I made butter!

Because I can! I was thinking that stick-butter is not as fresh as it could be, and also not as pure as it could be and also expensive. But cream was on sale, shaking the bejeezus out of it is goo exercise for my flabby arms, and the bonus is that I get butter!

One quart of heavy whipping cream got me about 3/4 lb of butter and maybe 15oz of buttermilk for Fourth of July Biscuits!

Here's the How! I forgot to take pictures of the early stages, and then when I tried, it's really hard for a crappy phone cam to get clear pictures of uniformly white milk, but here's what you do:

• Gather your supplies:
• A jar to shake the cream in -- I used one of the tall ones olives come in
• A jar to pour off the buttermilk into -- as you can see, I used a spaghetti sauce jar
• make sure these don't have lingering smells if you're reusing old jars; butter soaks up smells like woah
• A bowl to put the butter in
• A spoon to mash the rest of the buttermilk out when you're done
• Pour maybe half a jar, or a little less, of cream and make sure the lid is really, really tight.
• Shake it.
• A lot.
• Like, really a lot.

It'll go through stages that are all usable:

1. Cream
2. Thickened and expanded cream that's good for, say, berries and cream, or as another layer of texture in a strawberry shortcake, like a custard sauce without the egg or the cooking
3. Whipped cream
4. After the whipped cream gets really whipped, it'll stop moving all together. This is clotted cream, perfect for scones, and a delicious flavor halfway between stiff whipped cream and butter. And it's the sign that the butter is almost there, so that's when you shake it WAY HARD. Like, the way you shake a brand new glass ketchup bottle to make the ketchup move, that hard slam down. Make sure the lid is still really tight or you'll make a HUGE mess.
5. Then, all at once, it'll just sort of thunk in the jar, and the whipped cream will break and the butter will suddenly be butter. Shake it a few more times to glob all the butter together, and then pour off the buttermilk and pile up the blobs of brand new butter into the bowl!

Look how pretty it is!

This much took me I think five repetitions--apparently a full quart is a lot more than I was expecting, but it gave me so much butter. Each time around took somewhere between ten and twenty minutes to get from cream to butter-blob, the time getting longer as my arms got tired, but it was never really undoable--even if you only shake it a little, it'll eventually become butter; it just takes longer. So just keep shaking!

You can eat it as soon as it's all done, if you're going to eat it that day. Last time I made butter, years and years ago, I made way less and we ate it straight from that stage on bread that was out of the cooker at about the same moment the butter was done, and it was glorious, but it didn't need to last so I didn't worry about this next step.

If you're going to keep it, though, you'll need to rinse the rest of the buttermilk out of it so that it won't spoil the butter. Did you know you can literally just wash butter? Well, you can!

Use your spoon (stick it in the fridge while you shake so it won't melt things) to mash the butter all together into a ball. Sort of knead it like dough. Some of the remaining buttermilk will squish out like that. Then, like above, fill the bowl with clean, cool water, knead it some more, and pour off the water. Do this maybe three more times, until it's just water and butter-oil coming off, until the water is pretty clear. Keep mashing it along the sides of the bowl, and don't, like, whip it--the goal is to get moisture OUT of the fat!

And be careful pouring the water off--as the moisture comes out, the butter will start floating! I almost lost all my hard work down the sink!

You can leave the butter "sweet", or you can salt it. I like salty butter. I also happened to have pink Hawaiian salt, so this picture actually showed up! You can use whatever salt you have, somewhere between a half tsp and a tsp, until it tastes as salty as you'd like. When you knead this through, you might get more drainage; just pour it off.

You can just leave it in the bowl if you like, but I had these cute bento-box deals that I've lost the lids to, and they were just exactly the right size, so I lined one with plastic, spooned in and squished the air out, and then folded the plastic up!

Tada! Perfect to set up in the fridge!

Except for this bit that I totally had to eat. This is a premade tortilla because I ate all the ones I made myself, and it still tasted AMAZING. I'm making more tortillas tomorrow, and I can't wait to see how amazing it tastes on them, hot off the griddle and toasty!

Some notes!

• Butter doesn't really need to be refrigerated, and actually tastes better at room temp, but it will only last a few days before it goes rancid. Keep out only what you'll use. You can freeze the rest, it shouldn't damage it at all, but wrap it up really well because it WILL take on freezer-smells.
• You can mix any herb or spice into the butter before you fridge or freeze it.
• You can also preserve butter by either canning it, or turning it into ghee. 
• My hands are super-soft now from handling the butterfat. Also, my shirt is milky from that time I opened the jar and it splattered.

Have you made butter before? Would you? I think I'm going to add this to my list of old things to do--the exercise alone makes it worth it, I think!

Official #DIY4Lyfe to-DIY list (mine, anyway)

Lately, I've become sort of...Well, I was going to say obsessed, but that implies bad things, and I don't think it's that deep yet. More like fascinated. Lately, I've become fascinated with things I could be making myself. I made the tortillas yesterday because, yeah, I could totally make those instead of buying them. And then I spent a big part of the rest of the day looking up other stuff I could make myself. So here's what I've got on my list, to be done...whenever I get to it.

Food:

• yogurt
• kefir / water kefir
• pickles
• GF bread (because I really like making bread and now I can't because I can't eat it and that'd be cruel!)
• mustard
• also all sorts of other condiments--ketchup, mayo, BBQ, etc
• jam, which I haven't made in ages
• fermented stuff--kimchi and / or kraut, cheese, maybe fruit wines or vinegars, classic gingerbeer
• butter! and clotted cream, because that's halfway

Non-food:

• New gypsy skirts
• vintage-style dresses
• All The Art
• some sort of nail polish display
• jewelry

What's on your list of Stuff To Make?

Good ideas for a better world - This Indoor Garden Is Ideal For Urbanites: No Soil, No Water, No Fuss | Food Republic

This Indoor Garden Is Ideal For Urbanites: No Soil, No Water, No Fuss | Food Republic:



This is so cool.

'via Blog this'

Good ideas for a better world - An Artist Reimagines How We Store Our Food | Food Republic

An Artist Reimagines How We Store Our Food | Food Republic:



I would totally line a whole wall of the kitchen with these things.

'via Blog this'

I made my own tortillas!

Yay! More crappy pictures taken with my crappy old standby phone or the crappy camera in my ancient iPod!*

Since I went GF, I've basically replaced almost all the bread in my diet with corn tortillas. I eat almost any *-salad--tuna salad, chicken salad, egg salad--as a taco, basically, and anything I don't put over rice winds up in a tortilla. Recent examples: steak-sandwich tortilla rollups, sweet-chili tuna and veggie "tacos", peanutbutter and / or nutella roll-ups. Basically, anything that would go on bread is now on tortillas. 

This means that I go through packs of them pretty quickly. Which means I don't spend any more money on them then I really have to. Which means most of the ones I get are passable, bought because they cost less and give more more, but not great. And once in a while, they're downright gross.

And then my friend Sy posted some pics on her Instagram of making her own tortillas and I was like "I can totally do that, I bet, and for cheaper than buying those plastic-tasting things!". Because #DIY4Lyfe.

Did you know that the hispanic food section of our Target here is a joke? Because I was surprised. I found the masa harina** at Food Lion, which has an impressive ethnic food isle.

Here's the recipe, exactly the same everywhere I looked:

1c masa harina

3/4 - 1c hot water

pinch - 1tps salt

And here's what I did, which I forgot to take pictures of the early steps of:

• Plunk the masa and the salt in a bowl. I used yellow corn masa, as you can clearly see, and pink himalayan salt, because I picked some up at the flea market and it tastes SO MUCH BETTER than table salt. I figured since it's the only seasoning, I'd use the good stuff. 
• Point of order: I actually forgot the salt until after I'd added the water, so I threw it in then, and it didn't seem to matter to the finished product.
• Add the water. I mixed in the 3/4c first and stirred it all up, and then dribbled in the rest around the edges so make sure it was moist all over.
• Cover it and let it sit for 30-60 mins. I made it about 45, and it was fine. 
• Ball it up. It's supposed to have about the texture of play-doh, according to more than one site, so I had to add a little more water again; our house runs dry because mom needs low humidity for her lungs. Your mileage may vary.
• Squish and re-ball it some to be sure everything is evenly mixed and there's not air pockets or anything.
• Patty-up the ball, divide it in 8, ball up the wedges. There's a pic for this one!

• Flatten the balls. I did it this way: I cut the edges on a ziplock bag so that I had a sort of open-able thing, made the ball sort of into a patty and put it inside the plastic, closed the plastic over it, then mushed it with a plate, and evened it out with my hands. I'm going to get myself a tortilla-press to make this step MUCH EASIER, because it was the fussiest part of the whole thing.
• While you're flattening the first one, heat a dry pan. Make sure it's way hot before you put the first tortilla in; my first one stuck real bad because it wasn't hot enough yet. Even stuck, though, it peeled up when it came to temp, and it tasted great--it was just ugly.
• Cook like this:

• Flip it when it starts getting that distinctive spotty look that means it's a tortilla for realsies. It takes a few minutes per side, so you have time to mash the next ball into a tortilla in the meantime.
• Continue until you have all eight!

• Mine came out perfect on one side and less perfect on the other, and crispy-ish when they came off, but softer later.
• I immediately made a quesadilla because I was starved, but I ate them with chicken salad for dinner later, and they were just as delicious. 

These guys are a little time-consuming, but most of that is waiting for it to hydrate while it's covered. And even a little unevenly pressed and a little burned, they have much more corn flavor than storebought, a much nicer texture, and come with the satisfaction of making things with your own hands. Plus, the bag of masa costs only a little over the cost I was spending for a pack of premade tortillas, and I can make lots of tortillas out of it without having to buy more for a while!

They don't have preservatives, though. This makes 8, and I ate 8 in a day, but I don't think they'd last more than maybe another day or two before they started getting too dry or maybe moldy***, so this is a small-batch sort of recipe, not a bulk. I don't know if they freeze or anything; I didn't have leftovers to worry about it!

Variations:

• I think I'll try white corn ones later, and if I can ever get my hands on blue corn masa, maybe I'll splurge and try those, too.
• I'm going to see what makes masa different from regular cornmeal, and see if I can make it on my own from the corn itself; I saw someone on Diners Drive-ins and Dives make their own, but missed the part where they said what makes it special, so I've got to research.
• Also, that'll require a source of dry corn and my own grinder, neither of which I have, but it's the next level of tortilla-escalation.
• Arepas, made of yet another variation of corn, are the next project!

Do you make tortillas? How do you like it?

Notes:

*Hopefully this will be fixed in about a month and a half when the upgrade comes due and I can get a phone that isn't already broken.

**And the masarepa for arepas later on!

What project are you working on?

I feel like I always need a project to work on, even if that project is only myself. This week, despite being sick with whatever horrible virus my dad brought home and full of body aches* because of it, despite babysitting strange hours because The Sister and the Brother In Law** have new schedules in a new place and at a new, futher-away house, despite my own lack of inertia in any real direction, here's what I'm trying to work on:

• I'm getting into the swing of major edits on BEACON. It's something like magic when you can feel the story coalescing and taking on an actual shape--there's a glide to it, an easy flow, even if the work is hard--and since I'm writing tons of new stuff***, the work itself is definitely hard.
• I'm filing for economic forbearance on my school loans before they get stupid and start damaging my life. How I feel about my school loans is a post for another day.
• I need to make an art. I also need to scan and post the last one I did, that I never got around to finalizing in that way because of all the crazy that started last week. I need to find my way back to that sweet spot that I'd just started getting near before things went wonky again.
• I'm slowly getting my bedroom back into order so that I can start rearranging it. Somewhere along the way****. I sort of just put stuff wherever, and didn't have a plan for how I wanted it to be; now it's full of stuff in weird places and it's supposed to serve as Bedroom, Office and Workroom, but has none of those parts organized.
• And I'm resting. My body, because I'm sick, and my mind because there's too much stress all over my life, and if people won't stop generating it, I'm going to have to stop soaking it up. So it's back to meditation, when I can, and back to writing, and back to yoga, all those things that help me deal with stress.

What project(s) are you building on?

NOTES:

*I heard once that viruses make your body ache because they literally destroy your cells--like, they're inside your cells, hijacking your DNA into producing more of them instead of more of you, and then when your cell is full of new viruses that you created for them, the cells just burst. I don't know if this is true, but I think about it every time I get a cold and start aching, and it makes me feel all crowded, like a train station too full of tourists.

**Why doesn't English have single words for extended relationships? Sister. Brother. Mother. Father. And then we get all into Brother-In-Law or Sister's-Husband, and it's too much to type and too much to say. H says Chinese has individual words for every relation, words that don't repeat usage, and I like that. Maybe I'll find words in other languages and start using them until they catch on.

***Because the old stuff was literally just a disarticulated skeleton.

****Like, right when I got this room.

Summer Solstice

This picture is a truth and a lie. It's what the sky actually looks like right when I started this post, and it's also doctored up with three filters in Pixlr so that it looks more magical and dreamy. I wish I could add filters to my eyes so that things could be this pretty all the time*.

I love my Quarters and Cross-Quarters--they feel like road-maps for how a year goes, and what I should be focusing on to live in harmony with nature as it goes--but I almost forgot about the Summer Solstice this year. And I haven't actually celebrated any of the Days in years, especially not since I moved back home and I'm sort of in this limbo where I try not to draw attention to the "weird" things I generally feel like doing instead of the more "normal" things I was raised with. I don't want to have those discussions again, and I don't have the space here, with four other people in the house, to just take a half hour to light a candle without interruptions.

I miss my Circle on these Days. And the freedom of a life that we'd built for ourselves and ran on the motto "Whatever, I do what I want".

Also, I know this day mostly as "Midsummer", and there's that weirdness brought on by the official calendar saying that it's now just the beginning of summer. My personal calendar, the one I hold inside my head, says May, June and July are summer, and it's weird when the seasons and the general culture don't agree, but it's also the way that makes most sense to me. It certainly felt like summer this May, with the temperatures suddenly going way up and all.

I can tell it's summer because...

• The last two days have been full of heavy clouds and thunder
• Every biting insect in the world is out to get me
• I can feel the Wanderlust itching in my bones really badly
• The sun is so bright it comes in even though my window is not on the dawn-side of the house
• The tomatoes I planted are fruiting and blooming their hearts out
• The pool across the way is packed with kids making too much noise in that crazy way that kids have
• Walking outside is like walking in a pizza oven
• All I want to eat are smoothies and popsicles**
• I want to clear out everything in my house and replace it with gauzy curtains and blanket forts and mellow sunny-sky colors***

How do you know it's summer? How do you live in the summertime?

NOTES:

*As soon as we can have in-built cameras and heads-up-displays in our eyes, I hope someone invents filter apps we can apply.

**In fact, I'm going to try to get my hands on a set of freezer-pop-makers so I can freeze all my juice, fruit, yogurt, smoothies, tea and whatever else into popsicles.

***And I would totally do it if I had the ability to hit a button and put everything into inventory like I can do in video games.

Things I love - Hark! A Vagrant: — Examples of work and flawless colors from Tadahiro...

Hark! A Vagrant: — Examples of work and flawless colors from Tadahiro...:



I'm pretty sure I want to live in this picture.

'via Blog this'

Currently...

• Wanting to write and finding myself reading instead
• Sort of obsessed with making my life better than it is
• Loving the thunder outside, and the sound of rain on the window--feeling like a cat in a thunderstorm doesn't mean I don't actually love thunderstorms
• Sad a lot, but not debilitatingly so
• Frustrated
• Getting back on the GF and Yoga and self-care wagon
• Learning to be gentle and loving with myself
• Seeking out good examples
• Being more creative
• Seriously considering a cuppa, even though it's way late--the battle between my no-caffeine-after-dinner rule and my I-was-raised-in-the-UK mentality
• Wishing Doctor Who was back on because damn, I really just want some new episodes
• Also wishing Sleepy Hollow was back for much the same reason
• Feeling blog-talkative and not really life-talkative
• Thinking about sleeping on a different surface tonight, just cuz

How did I not know about Googlism?

Googleisms about me...

• Sorry, Google doesn't know sami holloway

Um. Let's try that again.

• samantha holloway is unfit for anything but writing expansive fantasy and the occasional science fiction story
• samantha holloway is an investigator in the trust & safety team 
• samantha holloway is a freelance writer and editor
• samantha holloway is a co
• samantha holloway is a freelance writer and editor
• samantha holloway is
• samantha holloway is an independent scholar
• samantha holloway is a writer

Mostly accurate! Let's try...

• Sorry, Google doesn't know pirategirljack

Well damn. I obviously need to grow my audience or something.

All change happens at once and I feel like Ninja during a thunderstorm

In case, through some weird fluke of how our lives line up you don't know, this is Ninja. Also called Binka. She is the cutest, sweetest, bestest Binka baby ever to bink or be a baby.

But she doesn't like thunderstorms.

She walks around starting at sounds I can't hear and meowing her face off for hours before a storm, and then cries through all the thunder, or hides way far in the closet for the whole day.

That's how I feel right now.

I spent all of Monday this week and a large chunk of Tuesday watching the kids in an empty apartment because they were too young to help move, and the space they'd take up in the car was needed for the stuff being moved. At first, it was okay. It was sort of an adventure. But the satellite-TV guy couldn't get a line of sight so there was no cable, and then the kids got bored, and they don't know the rules AND have bad habits that they need to break for the new house, so I spent a lot of time explaining that these are new walls and new carpets and they needed to not be jerks to them. And then a lot of time yelling at them because I'd already explained it a million times. And then a lot of time yelling at them because they couldn't seem to keep the back door closed, and A1 immediately broke the screen off its runners, and there wasn't any furniture and my back and whole left leg were killing me even before I had to spend eighteen hours sitting on the floor or standing.

• I learned I'm no better at other people's moves than I am at my own*.
• I learned that pain and sleeplessness makes me really impatient.
• I learned that there's only so many times I can explain to a three year old that he's not being abandoned or held captive, but that this is his new home.
• I learned (again) that when I have kids, I'd probably do best to keep it to one or two, because even two is exhausting, and three is insanity.

And the very same day that I was going through this, my brother and my mom were driving all day to pick up my niece and her cat, who are now living with us. This is the first time she's lived with her dad since she was a toddler, and only the third or fourth time that I've even seen her. 

Ninja isn't handling having a new, unknown, much younger and more energetic cat in the house very well. She hid for almost two days in mom's closet because Annabelle (the new kitty) stole her usual spot in my closet. She's only just now starting to come out, and that's mostly just to sleep on mom's bed and cry whenever she sees people, and then to creep out once in a while in the most heartbreaking way. It's like she's the one who only just got here, and it's almost exactly how I feel.

Like I want to hide.

Like I don't want to talk to people.

Like I have over-extended my brain and my coping skills and just sort of want to sleep for a week.

I'm sure we'll both be fine in a while. We've gone through the same thing (or very similar things) before, and we're fine. But the more change happens that isn't my change and isn't my choice, the more I want to climb into the closet with Ninja and just stay there.

Too bad that doesn't help anything.

I know I have to get my schedule back on track and fall back on my own personal rituals that make it feel normal...I just haven't yet. It takes a few days of wallowing before I can get back on that horse, and get my feet onto a new Makeshift Surface.**

NOTES:
*At least the kind I'm relegated to now, since we're no longer privileged to super-efficient military movers who do all the packing AND the shifting AND the unpacking in the new place. And haven't been since I was 11, but that's still the way I feel like moves should be--I always want to move, and never want to do it myself.
**See what I did there?

Things I love - Rich Woman Abandons Apartment In 1942. Look At What They Found Inside... - The Meta Picture

Rich Woman Abandons Apartment In 1942. Look At What They Found Inside... - The Meta Picture: "
"

Click through to see more!

'via Blog this'

Merengues! Pavlovas!

If you follow me on Instagram (@pirategirljack), you've seen that today I made meringues!

A few days ago, I made a key lime pie for my dad for Fathers Day, and that recipe calls for four egg yolks, so I had these four whites laying around. I hate egg white omelettes or quiche, and we didn't have a lot of staples around--plus I really need to stop falling off the GF wagon because it's upsetting my everything. I wanted chocolate, but we were out, and we didn't have any nuts to make amaretti or macarons, so made straight up meringues!

 It was so easy!

They weren't perfect, but they tasted great and are ready for perfecting and trying new flavors!

 Here's what I did:

• Preheat the oven at 275' 
• Warm up the egg whites to room temp; if you're starting at whole eggs, separate them and let them warm up. Takes four. 
• Whisk it with a pinch of sea salt; if you're doing it by hand, whisk forever; I used the electric mixer and a whisk attachment and whisked it until it was soft peaks, I guess--firm enough that it held up the first of the sugar when I sprinkled it on top. 
• Add one cup of sugar a few spoons at a time, whisking until it's dissolved and it's the consistency almost of marshmallow fluff. Even with the electric mixer, it took a while, but it was so smooth and white and shiny when it was ready!
• The recipes I consulted (this is a combo of about five of them) said to use parchment paper, but we were out of that, too, so I did it on a well-seasoned cookie sheet just the way it was, and the bottoms stuck. One recipe said to spray it with baking spray, but several of the others said that moisture and oil are the enemy of meringues, so I didn't risk it*. Next time? Planning ahead and making sure we have parchment.
• Scoop by somewhere between a heavy teaspoon and a heavy tablespoon; these were made with a big tablespoon, and got bigger; I think I'll go smaller next time, but if I do, I'll have to remember to cook less.
• Bake it for somewhere between half an hour and an hour and a half--depending on whether you want soft, chewy middles (I did) or crunchy-dry all the way through, and how hot your oven runs. Ours runs way hot; otherwise, to get it soft-centered, I'd probably go about 40 minutes, and 60 for crunchy.
• Let them cool on the sheet, then carefully remove them with a sort of twist-and-lift motion. Like I said, the bottoms stuck, but the tops were nice eggshell-thin crunchies, and they came up pretty easily. They also collapsed pretty easily if I wasn't careful.

I ate two of them just the way they were, standing in the middle of the kitchen while my niece looked at me like I was bonkers (she thought they were weird; I disagree). Then, I didn't realize my mom had planned strawberries and whipped cream** for dessert, so I had that with a third meringue on top and made the delicious and beautiful pavlova you see above!

I'm so making these again. Next time I make a custard-based pie, I'm making these a day or two later. From the recipes I looked at, here's some basic variations:

• 3-5 tablespoons of cocoa powder mixed into the sugar before it's added to the eggs = chocolate meringues; I've eaten chocolate-walnut ones, so I guess you'd mix it all the way up, and then super-carefully fold in the chopped nuts.
• Switch the white sugar for an equal amount of brown sugar (this sounds amazing)
• After the whipping is done, drop a few blobs of jam on top and then swirl through it as you scoop it onto the pan to cook = fruity-meringues.
• Add a weensy bit of mint extract and teenie chocolate chips or shavings = mint-chip.
• Add the zest of any citrus, but not the juice (the moisture will mess it up) = citrus.
• I bet they'd be amazing with a little (like, 1/4 tsp or less) rosewater or orange-blossom water or elderflower extract. Probably, really, with any extract, but I feel like flowers would be super-decadent. Or with some lavender or violets folded in...

How do you do your meringues?

NOTES:

*Also? I don't like baking spray. It always smells funny, and I'm not super happy about whatever else is in there other than oil.

**Actually Cool Whip, because that's what mom prefers, but I think it'd be fantastic with a good thick real whip, or probably even with a coconut whip.

Three world meme thing

So this is that thing that's everywhere, where the first three words you see are supposed to describe you, and it seems The Bloggess and me are both contrary. I picked:

• Sqhonsjpro
• Mnchrdk
• Fulnsqasq

NOTE:

If you're making me pick real words, I saw Pure, Cool and Intelligent.

On divination, meditation, and setting up your own spirituality

(isn't this this most ridiculous picture ever? i sort of love it.)

A few years ago, I made a set of oracle cards that I still use when I need guidance--but I think that all that guidance comes from my own subconscious. I made the cards vague on purpose; each one only has one word, and no pictures*, and the meaning is not written or defined anywhere. I did it that way so that I can always interpret it the way I need to, in combination with the other cards in a draw, to get the meaning that my subconscious is trying to get across to me that day.

I think this is how all oracles work. It's basically nonsense and randomness, but it's nonsense and randomness you use for yourself to make meaning and glean self-determined guidance. 

I think the only guidance that matters, even the guidance from other people, is the kind you filter through your own needs and wants and knowledge and higher / deeper knowledge. It's all what you already know but haven't faced yet.

I've always loved the concept of oracles, but I never really fit with any of the pre-made ones. I have a tarot set that I bought because it's pretty and never use. I made a rune set in highschool and keep it because it means something...I just don't ever know what. I'm fascinated by people who can throw sticks or shells or pig knuckles or stones and know what they're telling them. So I made one that works for me.

What works for you?

I meditate sometimes because I need the calm. I'm not trying to reach Nirvana, and I'm sure that I'm not the sort to reach it even if I was, but there is clinical and proven evidence that meditation works to realign the body and mind, to smooth over anxiety caused by too much not-calming-down, to solve problems you keep getting bothered by, and just to lower blood pressure, stay present, be happy. All of these things work. For me, anyway.

I usually sit for five or ten minutes with a timer running so I don't have to try to be conscious of time**, and just...be. I breathe deeply, I look at what my brain projects against my eyelids, I listen for advise and ideas and new ways to look at whatever is going on, and I practice not obsessing. It's something I really need to practice a lot, but obsessing over not obsessing is sort of defeating the purpose, so I try to bring my calm back out of the meditation space and into my day. 

Some days I just do it to get my back and neck to stop tightening up. Sometimes I listen to music. Sometimes I silence everything. Sometimes I sit outside somewhere nice. Sometimes I pretend to be sleeping and curl up with the cat. Cat purrs are very meditative, and Ninja loves any time when I'm still and warm and she can sit on me.

Most times, I have at least one thing to write down in my journal when I come back, and I write it down and keep it. Sometimes it's an image I can use in art or writing later, or a new idea for some project, or an answer to a question. Sometimes it's nonsense from my subconscious that I need to think about and meditate further on so that I can get the meaning out of it.

How do you create calm and maintain balance?

I'm not religious. I'm not anti-religious, either, because it's obviously working for some people, but I'm not one of them and I'm sort of skittish about religiousness being pointed in my direction. The way I see it, a religion should be discovered on your own through direct intentional searching, not through someone walking up to you and pushing it into your face. 

I haven't needed to look for religion, but I do consider myself spiritual, and I have constructed a list of things I aim for, values I try to support, physical things I try to do--like using cards to get to my deeper self, and meditating to keep my brain clean, and, when I was younger, running wild around bonfires under the full moon***. I've found nuggets of wisdom from all sorts of sources**** and pasted them together into an idea of how I want to be, spiritually, and that's what I aim for. 

I don't think I need any sort of external organization. I know what I believe. I've thought long and hard and tried on lots of different hats to get here. I don't need someone else interpreting the universe for me. I don't need external validation of my beliefs--in fact, I think the specifics should always be kept inside, in your own secret places, unless you're specifically opening up to someone lovingly and spiritually and honestly, like a lover, a best friend, a mentor, a Circle-sister. If everyone kept their beliefs to themselves instead of splattering them all over the world and making them into laws and proclamations they impose on everyone, think how much freer we'd all be!

So how did you find your beliefs? How do you live them and express them each day? How often do you weigh them in the face of new information and adjust them to new realities?

How much nicer would the world be if we all found our own spiritualities at our own pace, and built them to address our won needs, and left everyone else alone?

NOTES:

*I was going to add pictures and never got around to it.

**I have a really weak sense of time, and trying to figure out what ten minutes feels like when I'm intentionally turning inward is like trying to figure out what time means in a dream. 

***I love running wild under a full moon, and I'd still do it every month if my girls lived nearby. It's not as fun alone, and it's unfeasible right now because I don't have a yard and there's nowhere to light a bonfire.

****Spiritual leaders, lifestyle design folk, scientists, philosophers, actors and writers I like and feel drawn to, quotes from books and movies and TV--anything that speaks to me in the most crunchy-granola-hippie sort of way.

Confessions of a fuzzy girl

Hair is kind of a complicated subject, you guys.

Look, I didn't inherit the Hispanic skin from my Cuban grandmother, but I did inherit Hispanic follicles*. My dad's a fuzzy dude. My brother's a fuzzy dude. That seems to be okay with everyone. My sister and I are fuzzy, too, and that's suddenly not okay?

I want to be one of those women who don't care, and most days I get about half way there. I subscribe to the Dollar Shave Club and get my constantly-new awesome razors monthly, which is a godsend when you're poor and each leg basically takes the edge off a blade. But here's the thing: I only shave when it bothers me.

Examples:

• I shave in the summer when I'm going to be swimming or wearing lighter, looser clothes, because I don't like feeling like there's sea-weed attached to my legs, or like every bug in the world is crawling on me when the wind blows. I only shave in the winter when my leg hair gets to long that it pokes through my tights, or when I'm feeling fat--taking off that fuzzy outline does make a leg look thinner.
• I shave my eyebrows so that I have an actual arch and not just a flat line, but I rarely shave my armpits--the skin there is sensitive, and have you really thought about the weird angles you have to get into to get all the hair out of there? Unnecessary effort I could be spending on art or writing or babysitting.
• I remove other body hair above the waist  because it itches or makes makeup application difficult, but I couldn't care less about my arms, and below the waist is meant to be fuzzy if you're past the age of, like, nine.
• And I rarely ever cut my hair. If we've met, you know that it averages about waist length** and that I'm a fan of really messy buns and fancy braids, both of which would be impossible if I cut my hair shorter. Also? I live short hair for about one day, maybe two, and then the first time I wash it, every single time, I hate it--too much upkeep to keep it short, too much trouble getting it to look like anything but a rat's nest, way way WAY too much trouble getting it to grow back out again.

Other days, when I'm fragile and stressed and otherwise not right, I feel like I'm too hairy and too fat and too short and too pale and too much of everything I'm not supposed to be.

But who decides what is supposed to be?

I have never had a guy tell me that he won't sleep with me because I'm too hairy. On the other hand, I've also never tried to sleep with a guy who looks like he'd care***, so there's that.

And I have also never had a moment since I hit puberty where I didn't notice that everyone everywhere is getting more hairless--girls, yes, you hear about that all the time, but also men. There's a commercial for NoNo for Men, where these dudes with over-plucked eyebrows and orange tans are NoNo-ing the hair right off their arms, and I'm just like O_o??? If you're not a husky living in South Florida, why do you need to shave off all your hair? If you absolutely must clean up your lines, why do you have to get rid of all of it? Then you're whole life is about being exposed in places that are meant to be protected, and constantly dealing with itchy regrowth and the potential for ingrown hairs.

I keep waiting for hair to come back in fashion, so I don't have to spend ages shaving before I spend two hours getting ready if I want to look mainstream, and it hasn't happened yet.

I keep waiting for people to stop caring about other people's hair, and it hasn't happened yet.

I keep waiting for media to stop making all the grossest people in the world the hairy ones, and all the beautiful people the ones so sleek they may as well be made out of glass, and it hasn't happened yet.

I keep hoping if I have kids of my own, their dad will have a low amount of body hair naturally so they have a chance of being naturally less fuzzy so they don't have to go through all the trouble--or deal with the fallout of making the decision not to care about it all that much like I did. Because there is fallout. My fourteen year old niece was messing with me the other day because my legs were fuzzy--when I wear long skirts almost every day of the year and I'm currently both single and not required to follow any sort of formal dress code day-to-day. 

She's fourteen. As far as I know, she's never even kissed a boy yet, and she's convinced her own legs are ugly and that I'm weird because I don't care to spend the time to remove hair that isn't bothering me. I didn't even start shaving at all until I was fourteen, and she's been shaving for two years. She's not even done forming yet, and she's worried she isn't whatever it is enough.

I guess it's a feminism issue. I don't think of it that way, exactly. I think of it as a personal issue--personally, I have better things to spend my time on, and because of that, I'll shave once a month or less. Personally, I think people should be allowed to be whatever they are, to look however they look, without being told, constantly and from all sides, that they aren't right. Personally, I think that people have no business telling anyone else how they should look or what they should do with their own bodies.

So I'll just be over here, being a fuzzy girl and working through the pile of BS I'm no longer reacting to and now starting to slough off about the fact that my hair follicles happen to work in volume. And I'm going to do my best to get the same across to my niece, and my nephews, and any other kids I come in contact with or produce on my own.

If we all stopped worrying about body hair, what could we accomplish?

NOTES:

*And a deep and abiding love of guava, a similar love of mango and avocados, and an obsession with garlic in all my food.

**Currently, long enough that it sometimes gets stuck in the waist of my skirts when I get dressed. Soon I'll be able to sit on it accidentally!
***Basically, if a guy looks like he cares about how he looks more than he cares about anything else, it's sort of a turn off; how could he care about me if it's all shaving and primping and gel and tanning? Ew.

Ten reasons why summer ISN'T my favorite season, and five reasons why I love it anyway

1. I don't handle heat very well - I got heat-exaustion once when I was 16, and sun-poisoning when I was 14, and ever since then it's been a battle between fear of being that sick again and avoiding being that sick again. I like a brisk snow day so much more. I'm not built for heat, with my pasty skin and predominantly Irish and Welsh heritage. I did NOT inherit a love of heat or a constitution to handle it from my Cuban grandmother.
2. Mosquitoes - I'm apparently super-tasty to them, and no matter how much garlic I eat or bug spray I use or citronella I burn, the biters still get me. All of the biters, if we get down to it--mosquitoes, fleas, ants, anything that likes to chomp a person.
3. Sunburn - The afore-mentioned pasty skin. I freckle, but I don't tan, which means I burn SO EASILY IT'S SCARY. Like, I have a thing on my phone that warns me when the sun index goes over 8 because I know if it does, I burn in about five minutes and I need to find shade. I also have a family history of skin cancer and I hate the feel of sunscreen on my everything, so basically staying out of the sun is the best bet.
4. All my show are off the air - I'm sure I've mentioned before that I watch A Lot Of TV, and that I Don't Do Well With Cliffhangers. It means that the summer basically lacks the schedule of shows I watch, so I gradually stop knowing what day of the week it is, AND I spend whole weeks and months worrying about what will happen to characters I like. It's silly, but it's A Thing, and it's not something I like.
5. Bright sunlight gives me headaches and eye-wrinkles - I'm really blind. Like, without my glasses, I can see somewhere between four and six inches before it's all just colored blobs and no sense of distance or depth. This means I can't wear sunglasses unless they're prescription, which I can almost never afford, AND which are usually really poor examples of shading. Non-prescription glasses can go way dark and make it a feasible thing for super-bright southern days, but you add some actual lensing to the glass and all of a sudden it has to be just barely brown? Lame. If I have to choose seeing things and squinting or not squinting and being blind anyway, I usually choose squinting...which gives me headaches all summer long.
6. Humidity - Bad for my skin, my hair, my lungs, my patience...basically just bad.
7. Tourists - There's a difference between 'people who travel somewhere new' and 'tourists', and it has to do with obnoxiousness levels. I try to be the first, and all the people who drive poorly, tip poorly, talk too loud, don't allow for things like this is not your home, and so on, are the second.
8. Extra work hours - Only a narrow range of humans get summers off, and I've never been in that range since I started working. I've also never been in that range of people who work because it's their life; my life is what I'm working to support, and I never thought work should take up a bigger portion of my waking hours than life. Previously, I worked in retail and food service, and that is entirely dependent on people coming in, so hours doubled or tripled over summer months. Now, I'm a babysitter, and when the kids are out of school, the work doubles or triples in the same amount of hours. I love those kids, but man, they're a handful.
9. Everyone talking about how much they love it - It's fine if you love summer--most people do, it seems--but by about now each year, mid-June or so, I've seen so many articles and spots on TV and segments on talk show and bits on the news all about how wonderful summer is if you have skin that tans, that I just get sick of it. It's like it's accepted that when it's summer you talk about how wonderful summer is, and you aren't allowed to mention how awful extreme heat can be.
10. I look really awful in hats and shorts - I can pull off a flapper cloche, but that's not a summer hat. I also prefer to wear my hair in high messy buns, which get in the way of all but the worst visor-caps. And my legs are too jiggly and round for shorts unless I don't mind them creeping up on me, which I do.

But...

1. Fresh corn - Lord and Lady, I love a fresh corn cob. I wait all spring for them to come in at the start of summer. Fresh all sorts of things, actually--strawberries, watermelon, peaches and nectarines and cherries, avocados and mangoes that don't cost $4 each...
2. The beach - How terrible is it that I hate extreme and prolonged exposure to sunlight, but I love the beach? I love it so much that I'll willingly go outside in a swimsuit, wearing SPF5000, and sit under that glowing day-ball for hours just to splash in the water and pick up shells.
3. The garden - This is the best time of year for the garden. The time when the most stuff is leafing, flowering, AND fruiting, and you can start eating the stuff you've put in a whole spring's worth of work for! It's also a time when it's pretty easy, because rain and sunlight and the plants themselves are doing most of the work.
4. Travel-time - Summer is when holiday packages are cheapest, and when most people seem to catch up to my standard level of let's go somewhere. It's also when the weather is most amenable to travel, and when (because of the extra work) money seems to be easiest, so it's the time to Go Places.
5. More time to read - The flip side of the lack of shows I watch is that there are whole evening hours that don't have claims on them, and I always get so many more books read over the summer than during the seasons.

What are your favorite and least-favorite things about Summer?

#IMadeAThing

I think birthdays are a good time to take stock with less pressure than New Years, and a lot more personal meaning. This year, I set a few goals, and the first one I've gotten to is IMadeAThing.

I've been feeling for a while like I need to have some creative expression that doesn't depend exclusively on words, but for whatever reason, I never just say down and did it.

Then I read Messy Canvas, the ebook from Mandy Steward and her blog of the same name, and just a little permission to not be perfect from someone I've never even met was enough to get me moving. I have all sorts of art supplies laying around, just sort of random bits of them.

So I'm starting with what I have: #1 was done with the three colors of paint I have and some glitter; #2 with some really old oil pastel nubs I've had since that art class I took in college.

And let me tell you: it's great. I was so happy after number one that I literally threw my hands up in the air and smiled every time I looked at it for days.

And here's the best part, for me: I'm going to post them on Society6 for people to buy! I don't know how to make links on mobile (this is being written on my phone while I babysit), but search for CashewCreations and and you should find the first one!

Do you make art? How, and with what supplies? Link to pics!

Five things that need to stop happening before I go all Hulk on the world, and some things we can do about them

It seems like the current culture's jackassery is all out in the open right now--like, it got warm and everyone's worst opinions and behavior all oozed out from underground, meaner and stupider than ever. I don't like to focus on the negative things going on, and I surely don't like devoting even a small sliver of my own space to them, but this week has been wearing on my calm every time I look online (where I do most of my work, you know), and I feel like not saying something is allowing it.

So these are things that I think need to be wiped from the face of the earth:

1. Justin Bieber saying stupid shit* - And worse, it getting more and more racist and all those people who hang out with him who are being directly insulted not saying anything or doing anything to stop him, that I've seen, or that the media has picked up on. 
1. WHAT WE CAN DO: Stop allowing him to be a jackass because he's famous. Keep calling him out. Maybe a few of the people directly affected could publicly call him out, or the media could find and focus on the fact that they already have, and spread that around with the same ubiquity as the reports of his delinquency. Send him to school to get some perspective and education in his head.
2. People not taking hurricanes seriously because they're sometimes named after girls - I mean, really? You change the name from Sue to Stu and all of a sudden you need to leave town more and batten down the hatches better? It's the same storm, assholes.
1. WHAT WE CAN DO: I'm tempted to say, "name hurricanes androgynous names / after non-gender things", but that's not really addressing the problem, which is a basic discounting of anything that even sounds like a woman**. So, maybe, again, call them out is the best answer. Make it such a public scandal that it has to be dealt with. 
3. Men's Rights - Because it's not like men have free reign of the whole world or anything. The whole argument feeds itself and starts sounding scary--women don't like me, so that must mean women are bitches; women are bitches, so that must mean they're oppressing me; women are oppressing me, so I hate them; gee, I wonder why women don't like me? Any idea that separates one group of people from another as a whole and blames them for all your troubles is a bad idea. Read some history. Ever heard of segregation? Colonialism? Nazis? Mass murderers with "reasons"?
1. WHAT WE CAN DO: Don't excuse people for going off the deep end and doing crazy shit like shooting people. Don't let emotionally stunted assholes have the time of day to complain themselves into a righteous frenzy, even if it doesn't get that far. Don't allow the sort of arguments that divide. Raise your sons to understand that women do not belong to them, and a girl turning them down doesn't mean they're being targeted by some vast conspiracy. Raise them to know how to handle emotional issues without snapping and blaming everyone and being total asshats. Encourage maturity and emotional literacy in everyone.
4. Government hating women - All day every day in more and more ways, what? 
1. WHAT WE CAN DO: Stop allowing it. Stop voting for it. Read the fine print and refuse to allow the ones that mess up access to healthcare, rights, education, equal pay, whatever. Write letters. Challenge the young politicians and make their ideas on these topics public before they get entrenched. Spread truth whenever there's a new wave of propaganda making it sound like this is all cool when it's not.
5. Using the "not all ___ are like that!" argument - because it's not a good argument. It's a stall-tactic. Instead of admitting that there ARE a sizable / vocal / violent / alarming / dangerous / ignorant / whatever portion of whatever group you're talking about who cause a lot of trouble for whatever other group you're talking about, you're putting yourself in the center of the argument and then universalizing your own point of view. You're denying that these problematic people matter in a way opposite to how they think they matter, and you're denying that the problems caused by them matter. It's poor rhetoric, it's illogical, and it's really just proving that you're incapable of looking at things from any other point of view outside your own.
1. WHAT WE CAN DO: Learn to argue better. Get your facts straight. Learn to think of something other than yourself. Learn to understand that other people's experience is valid. Toughen up, emotionally, so you can weather the storm of people in your general class, race, gender, occupation, nationality, etc being called out, and if you really aren't like that, learn to stop your peers who are from making the mess to begin with. Value something outside yourself.

I'm sure this will cause trouble. I'm basically expecting terrible comments. But I'm not going to get into arguments there's no way to win; I have made my point, and I just needed to say my piece because the world is being really discouraging right now and I'm not going to just sit here and take it anymore. This is me calling it out. 

Now I'm getting back to trying to make my life better and to improve the world for everyone. I'm done with this negativity.

NOTES:
*These are totally biased google searches, for the most part, to make my point without having to link directly to sites that I personally have a problem with, therefore denying those sites hits and traffic from myself and my site. Click if you want; I'm not giving them the time of day anymore.
**Maybe that's a huge part of why climate change keeps getting ignored--outside of all the money tied up in causing it, it's all about Mother Nature, and if people (especially those in charge) are being subliminally sexist, that explains a lot.

Why we need to change "you can't do that" to "you can do this"

Here's something I know about people:

A few will be the sort that can handle deprivation in the face of abundance, but most won't, and some will outright resist it.

That's why severe diets don't work permanently, why people eat more than they need even when they know that they've had enough, why most people always seem to want bigger houses, more room, longer vacations, bigger cars.

It starts down at the bottom, like where I am right now:

If I just had one more room in this apartment...

And continues through to enormous McMansions with rooms you forget you have and have to invent purposes for.

But here's the thing: it's not just our own choices and our own lives that are like this. It's the whole culture. That's why it's so hard for green industries to catch on, and for governing systems to get straightened out--no one wants to hear "you've got to stop" and "you need to give up" and "you can't have that anymore." And the more entrenched you are in how things are, the more money you're making off the broken systems, the more you'll resist the change.

Fact.

But resistance doesn't stop change, it just gives it something to push against. And change can be managed by making it less of an us-against-them, less of a "I'm taking that away from you", and more of a better exchange, a "here's something so much better."

More facts I know about people:

• Technology has taken off because there's always something better on the horizon
• Better, as an idea, is always changing
• Ads define a lot of public opinion on whether things are working or not

So...

Let's take control of our own zeitgeist. Let's define a radical Better that actually is better--greener, more sustainable, more fair.

Further, let's focus the better-making on the other side of the argument from where it's been-- if people want to take long hot showers, let's invest in all the researchers inventing low-energy water heaters and household water recycling and low-flow showerheads that have decent water pressure, especially the ones that are creating super-affordable products with their research. 

If people refuse to give up their hot cars, make the sustainable ones so well designed, so good looking, so affordable, and so mileage-efficient that they just out-compete the gas-guzzlers. Let's create an industry for self-driving cars and cars that burn your household waste without emissions, and cars that run on water or air or grass clippings or sunlight, or power that comes from the roads they run on.

If people want their meat, let's make it so that free-range, natural-raised, and organic are tastier and more affordable than battery farms and feed lots. Let's invent lab-grown meats that taste better than anything that was alive and killed, and that happen in ways that look cool so that they'll be in-demand. Let's pour opinion and funds and pressure-for-change into making alternative meats--fish, frogs, whatever--so delicious and so popular and so cheap and easy that they become the bulk of our meat-intake. Let's invent food replicators. Hell, let's replace meat all together with something else that doesn't kill anything to make it.

 We get to decide what we'll put up with. And if the majority of people won't put up with scarcity, deprivation and denial, instead of fighting against that, let's use it to boost the Better, to get everyone eating healthier, driving healthier, thinking better, living better, throwing the weight of public opinion into directions that improve the day-to-day reality not just of the rich who can afford it, but of everyone.

Let's not just take away the bad things. Let's replace them with things we haven't even thought of yet that are so much better that we can't imagine how we ever lived without them. I mean, how did we do anything without the internet, computers and cell-phones? Let's do that with whatever replaces junky things now-- how did we ever think 20 mi a gallon was decent, how did we ever think that force-feeding animals was the most efficient way to get meat, how did we ever live like that...

Lessons I'm struggling to learn

The universe laughs at the really important plans, but to survive rough times we have to make and use plans anyway.

It's hard to think about things outside the boundaries of the current crisis, but outside it is where the most creative solutions are.

Change is the only thing we can bank on--and banking is much better than fighting.

Life is a moving target.

There is always a way to take ownership, or control, or meaning from every situation. I'm done with being a passenger, a victim, or a blind reactionist.

I need to find ways to remember this. We all do.

What lessons are you learning?

I've never been an organized person outside of work

When I'm at work, I'm super-organized. And actually, I like organizing wherever I am. I like the feeling that everything has a place that I can put it in and where it lives.

But here's the thing: I severely dislike the upkeep, and so in my personal life, all my stuff tends toward entropy. Having a cat (ie: an agent of entropy) doesn't really help the fact that I tend to just stack stuff up within arm's reach of wherever I am--the side of the couch where I usually sit, my desk, the bed*.

Job stuff requires neatness and organization, and I love a clean workspace. But I haven't had a job outside the home in almost four years, and I don't have a dedicated workspace at home, so things get...blurry. The dividing line between life and work, business and pleasure, all of it sort of grades into each other. Most of the time that's great. I'm making what little living I have doing things I like to do***, but sometimes I just look at this nest of things I've built and it about drives me crazy.

It's a constant struggle for me. The battle between the fact that I need to see everything I'm working with to remember that it's there, and the fact that if you can see everything, it's probably not put away in any sense of the word.

So here's what I'm doing:

I'm going to make work stations. I'm going to find cheap tables that I can work on, and I'm going to carve out a space just for writing, independent of the computer, where I can lay out pages and notes and whatever else. I'm going to carve out a space for crafting on another table, and keep all the crafting stuff--yarn and paint and piles of papercraft stuff--in a clear drawer thing under it, so it's there and I can see it, but it's where it needs to be. If I can fit a third table in this tiny room, I'm going to set up my sewing machine, because I've been itching to get back to my quilt that I've been working on for literally a decade.

I'm going to chuck everything I know--or have been told--about organization, and I'm going to come up with my own system that balances the need to be able to grab what I need without searching for it, the need for space to work on, and the need to not be a total mess all the time.

And then I'm going to share what I learn about the whole process.

I've already got a pretty good system for day-to-day scheduling--between my journal being full of to-do lists, the schedule page I make up each Sunday or Monday for the week, and the calendar pages where I track my monthly writing goals, what I did each day, and how I felt, it's a pretty smooth system, as long as I remember to stick to it and look at it. Now it's time to figure out a way to keep the rest of my life in line.

How do you keep organized?




NOTES:
*Or whatever I'm currently using as a bed. Right now, the room I'm in doesn't have space for a bed, so I sleep on the couch like a transient house-guest in my own place.**
**I actually like sleeping on things that are not beds, and I love having more than one surface I can sleep on in a house...but I do miss a real bed, so I'm working on that problem.
***Making nail polish and selling it to lovely girls and the occasional boy all over the world! Writing stories! Blogging! Watching those monster-babies! Crafting!