suziebeezieland

better living in 5 minutes a day #15:purge some board games

Yesterday I was thinking, board games take up a lot of space, which is dumb if any of them are games nobody plays. 

So set your timer for five minutes (or just wing it) and fill up a bag with games that your kids have outgrown, or that nobody plays anymore, or never played to begin with.  Throw it in the back of your car and take it to Goodwill or The Salvation Army or similar next time you're close to one.  These games will make somebody else happy. 

Unless they're missing important pieces, which will make nobody happy.  Throw the unplayable games away.  I guess you super creative gals could make cute art or something with leftover game thingies.  Like maybe a keychain made out of that Monopoly little iron.  I have always loved that little iron. Also, the dog. (Hey, speaking of Monopoly, did you know you can print Monopoly money yourself?  I guess you go to Monopoly jail if you get caught Monopoly counterfeiting.)

Now take a second and make sure the rest of your games are accessible so that if people want to play them, they don't cause an avalanche trying to get to.  My experience here in our house is that the games that are hard to get to don't get played, even if they're fun.

claire made my lunch today :)

better living in 5 minutes a day #14:clean under the kitchen sink

I don't know about you, but the area under the kitchen sink in our house is never going to be pretty. I think if you have a new kitchen, it could be, but ours isn't. My goal in spending time organizing it is to keep it from being gross and nonfunctional.

Here's the "before" picture.  Every time I have to get something from down there, I feel frustrated.

Here are my suggestions for spending five minutes making it better.

1. Put a towel on the floor and sit on it. (This is just a comfort thing. Ha.)

2. Take everything out from under the sink.  Working quickly, sort everything into three sections on your kitchen floor:

• stuff you use regularly
• stuff you never use and can throw or give away (I had several containers of cleaning products I'd bought just because they were on sale, but never once used in a year!), and
• stuff you use regularly, but not in the kitchen, and which should be elsewhere

Throw or give away the throw/give away stuff. :) When you're all done with this project, put the elsewhere stuff elsewhere.

3. Wipe out the bottom of the cabinet if you need to, and line it with something wipeable or washable.  I used a bit of leftover oilcloth. In the past, I've used shelf liner or garbage bags.

4.  Put everything back.  Don't fill up the whole space if you don't need to. It's okay to have empty space in your house. You'll probably fill it up, anyway, next time you go to Costco and buy a six-pack of wipes or something.

Here's the "after" pic:

This did actually take me seven minutes. :) But close enough.

(If you missed numbers 1 through 13 in this series, they can be found by clicking on the "organization" category in the sidebar at right.) 

when we landed in nebraska, i confirmed what i suspected . . .

Okay, I promise this is not going to become a YouTube blog, but today when I showed my sister the wedding clip from the post below, she, in turn, showed me this one. And I have to show you in case any of you haven't heard or seen it yet because, oh my goodness, I love this. ♥ (The whole story behind the song is here.)

wedding dance

My friend Kathy had linked to this on her Facebook page, and I just have to share it because it made me so happy. :)

fairy cakes & a new tablecloth

My friend Becky made fairy cakes for book club last night.  They were delicious.  There are only two left.  Perhaps the fairies snuck some for breakfast. Yes, that must be what happened. ;)

We discussed Jane Eyre last night. I have decided it is definitely my favorite novel. (I've bumped Pride and Prejudice into second place.)  The first time I read Jane Eyre, I was ten.  I stayed up all night with a flashlight under the covers, enthralled.  I don't think I've ever found a heroine to top her. She's it.

I also seem to be over my Twilight obsession. I mean, of course I'll keep reading them over and over and getting excited about the movies, and buying all the movies on Blu-Ray, and watching them repeatedly, but I'm also very excited to read other things right now. (Edward Cullen, please meet Edward Rochester, who is one of the original Byronic heroes.  If not for him, I strongly suspect you would not exist.) I've noticed there is a very nice camaraderie amongst women who have really gotten into the Twilight books. We cluck and say nice commiserating words to women who are just discovering them and going through that first week of no sleep, as if we'd all had some kind of weird disease together.  You'll survive, and be stronger for it. Don't worry.

I've actually read many enjoyable novels this year, and will discuss them in a later post.  In other news, I found a tablecloth I like at Crate and Barrel last week. This is exciting to me because I rarely find tablecloths I like, and now I can have one liked tablecloth in the kitchen and one liked tablecloth in the dining room.  (I still have to hang that mirror up, in case you're wondering why it's just leaning against the wall like that. That mirror was my Mother's Day present. It's like the one in the living room over the sofa. I'm trying to make it seem like there are windows and a source of light and air in the claustrophic and dark dining room.)

St. John Rivers would not approve of my frivolous delight in these household items, but that's too bad, because I don't marry him.

tea party

Last Friday afternoon, Claire's best friend and her best friend's mama treated us to a lovely afternoon at the Tea Rose Garden in Pasadena. 

For the grownup tea, the other mama and I each chose the "Tea Rose Afternoon Tea."  You choose a tea from their tea menu (I chose English Breakfast) and a scone (I chose lemon blueberry) and three tea sandwiches (we shared: cranberry chicken, chicken almond, cucumber mint, turkey and basil, goat cheese and sun-dried tomato, and egg salad with watercress) from the food menu.  They also bring fresh fruit, little tea cakes, and a spring petal salad. It was delicious!

The children's tea included similar treats, and a choice of pb&j or raspberry cream cheese sandwiches. For the kids, they fill the individual teapots with tea, fruit punch, or pink lemonade. Clarie and her friend both chose pb&j and fruit punch. :)

toofy

Claire lost her first top tooth last Friday. I can remember exactly how it feels to have that tooth missing. Can you?

sunflowers

I've told you before that I'm easily impressed, so I'm posting a photo of this summer's sunflowers, even though they're pretty much just like last summer's sunflowers. And the summer before that one, too.

But I'm telling you, these guys always just blow me away. You throw some seeds into this little strip of nothing dirt next to the fence, you water them, and a few months later you end up with SUNFLOWERS that are so tall, they're taller than you are. It's a miracle.

the turquoise thing

My sweet sister found this little enamel turquoise dipper thingy at an estate sale, and gave it to me because she thought it would look cute in my kitchen.

We don't know what it is. Do you? I call it "the turquoise thingy." I love it. ♥ I'm pretending that someone like Juliette Binoche used it to dip chocolate out of a big pot in her chocolate shop in the French countryside somewhere.  She poured the liquid chocolate onto a big marble slab and made it into candy which she gave to Johnny Depp when he came in playing his gypsy guitar.

naptime

embarrassed admission

I'm strangely tempted by these wigs. Aren't they cute? (I won't really buy one, because I bet they are one million degrees hot to wear, and if I wore one, somebody on rollerskates would zoom by and grab it off my head or I'd walk under a low tree branch and it would fly off or something, but I'm just saying, I'm tempted.)  My own hair never looks cute like these. 

I might be a bit wigged out (ha ha) about wearing human hair, though. I mean, I know I wear human hair now, but it's my own. The fancy human hair European ones are really expensive. There is one called Reality, which is ironic.

All the names of these wigs crack me up. I think "Beguile" would look okay on me, although I'd probably feel self-conscious and wonder what my facial expression was supposed to be, to match that wig. 

I also think it would be fun to buy "Hot Sauce," just so you could say to all your girlfriends, "Hey, how do you like my 'Hot Sauce' wig?" 

That "Embrace" one is pretty cute, too, but boy, I bet you have to make sure the person you are embracing knows that you're wearing a wig, because that could be one big ol' surprise there for somebody at some point in the embracing. ("Whoops, my wig just fell right off the back of the sofa.")

Also, look at Raquel Welch. That's airbrushing or PhotoShop something-something, right? Because she's 69 years old.

dear suziebeezieland twihards, please advise

{image from vanity fair}

1. I've read Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn each through once. Then I read Twilight again. And now I'm reading New Moon again.

2. I've read the Midnight Sun partial draft online at Stephenie Meyer's website.  I've bookmarked her website, and note that I know how to spell "Stephenie" with the unusual middle "e".

3. I watched the movie Twilight three times when I had it from Netflix, and then I had to return it, so I went and bought it on BluRay and have watched it twice since then (once with the commentary turned on).

4. I say "RPatz" and "KStew" and "Robsten", and I know who they are, and I keep track of them daily online. 

5. I've watched the trailer for New Moon.

6. I've watched the spoof of the New Moon trailer with guinea pigs, which made my coffee come out my nose.

7. I downloaded the Twilight soundtrack from iTunes, and listen to it every day when I'm in the kitchen working.  "Supermassive Black Hole" is very good for dishwashing.

So. What do I do now?

It's a really long time until November 20th.  Aren't there some action figures I can buy or something?

ps Does anybody want to go on a little road trip to Forks and LaPush with me?

my old dollhouse

The last time my folks came out to visit, they brought my old dollhouse with them. I was so excited to see it again! 

It's a bit the worse for wear and thirytsomething years in a garage, but Claire and I are fixing it up.  First, we had to scrape off all the Snoopy and Josie and the Pussycat stickers I'd slapped on it when I was six or seven. "See, this is why you can't just go putting stickers on things willy-nilly," I grumbled to Claire. "Because years and years later, your old self will be mad at your young self."

We are painting the outside Behr's Pale Stem, which is the green color of Claire's bedroom walls. The inside walls will be Behr's Lucent Sky, which is the blue color of the stripes on the top of Claire's bedroom walls. The floors will be bright white. I think we'll staple oilcloth on the roof, which is an idea I got from Jenny B's adorable dollhouse over at Allsorts.  But we might shingle it. I have to talk to our Susanna first, who as you may remember has done some pretty amazing dollhouses herself here and here and here. 

Anyway, stay tuned! :)

eggs, feverfew, & a candle