For starters I didn't take photos of everything I have completed so you will have to take my word on all that I completed. You trust me, right? Okay, good. Secondly, I have had a bit of a hiccup in completing my daily list and there is one word for that: Larry. Mid-June brought news that he received a new job here in Boise and for the following three weeks our lives were in kind of a happy-giddy whirlwind, ending this morning when he began his new job. But, for an entire week this past week he was back home (and underfoot, but in a loving, good way, of course) and therefore our entire schedule was thrown off and set loose.
Nevertheless, I did manage to get a handful of stuff done.
1. More weeding. I go out there probably every week with my spray and a bucket and pull some and spray some. I like to keep on top of those pesky weeds and it makes me happy to see a weed free yard.
2. File loose recipes. Holy hell, I had a lot sitting around waiting to be put back into my 3-ring binders (I hate filing more than anything). I sorted them and put them back where they belong. I have a few stragglers, but for the most part, I finished.
3. Organize game cabinet. We went from two huge built-in cabinets in our family room filled with a mess of games and other play things down to one cabinet neatly organized.
The cabinets in the family room and the "before" shot.
4. Sweep and mop. This goes along with the weeding...I sweep and mop regularly so I can almost always put this baby on my list!
5. Menu plan for the month. I figured out our menu for the month of July.
6. Clean/tidy pantry and make note of what needs to be used up. Luckily, the way I shop and prepare/plan menus and meals means I don't have a lot of food, if any, that falls to the back of the pantry forgotten and alone. I try to not overbuy just to fill my pantry unnecessarily (also a way to keep that food bill low). But, I did tidy and straighten (and clean the cocoa powder that Josh left behind on the shelves).
7. Go through cookbook binders and purge the recipes I'm no longer interested in. This went well with filing the loose recipes. It turns out that there were MANY that I was no longer interested in so this was an easy project to work on.
8. Relabel cookbooks with new tape. Instead of buying new tape for my label maker I decided to use a glue stick and re-stick the labels. So far, so good.
This is how it looked "before". With them glued on, all the labels look nice and neat!
9. Pick flowers for house. I picked a beautiful bouquet of roses from the garden.
10. Work on gardening notebook and keep updated. This was one of those projects that would normally sit and sit and sit and the season would be over and I would be bummed out that I never did it. So, I sat down one quiet morning and began gluing images and seed information into a cute book my friend Darcie made for me...drawing sketches of my vegetable garden and tracking what and where everything is planted, what died and what has been replanted for a second harvest, and what was newly planted to replace what didn't make it. I made notes on small things I am learning, like the whole onion thing and tidbits I gleaned from the folks at local nursery's. I even began planning for a fall/winter garden, on paper. I went through my garden book and made quick notes on helpful tips and hints about growing the vegetables I have growing in my garden.
11. Put together a gardening 3-ring notebook. I love this! I gathered all my garden tips (on freezing, drying herbs, gathering seeds, creating compost, handling weeds, etc.) and all the recipes containing the vegetables I am growing and used tabs to separate them all. For instance, if I have a ton of zucchini (already do) I can quickly go to the "Zucchini" tab and see a bunch of unique recipes using zucchini. Ditto for tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, greens, herbs, onions, beans, peppers, and so on. I also made a tab for fruit, even though I'm not growing any, because I usually will end up at some point with an overabundance of summertime fruit.
12. Go through large cabinet in island of laundry room. This was done by default, but done nonetheless. We were actually looking for our GPS so Larry could take the kids geocaching so we removed everything from this cabinet and I put only the items I wanted in that cabinet back and took everything else out. It isn't perfect yet but at least it is neat and not a thrown-up looking mess.
13. Clean garage. I didn't "technically" cross this off my list because all we did was straighten it up before Larry rolled into town, therefore the drawers and cabinets on his workbench are still a bloody mess. However, we swept, tidied, and bagged up donations.
