I’m starting a five lesson series on Daniel tomorrow. Five lessons isn’t enough, but it’s a start. In all my teaching, I’ve only taught one lesson from Daniel before. Daniel is an important OT book. And Daniel is an unusual prophet. He and his three buddies were just children when they started.
🙂 22 years ago I finally gave birth to a daughter.
🙂 I’ve had a lovely visit with her and seen a lot of one of my brothers. (The other, as usual, is traveling. Today he’s in China)
🙂 My husband has been in Kansas City with the high school mission trip. Headed home today, he called last night SO excited about the glorious way God has been at work and how he bounded with the 11 kids.
🙂 He’s felt God leading him out of 3/4 Sunday School specifically to reach this graduating class –aiming at discipline the guys.
🙂 It’s neat to see how God is putting a desire for His word and worldview into the hearts of these kids. Very exciting!
🙂 Almost done.
🙂 Visiting the final research book today at my old stomping grounds: the UCLA research library.
😦 I can’t believe I haven’t been inside that library in 37 years? Where has the time gone? 😦
🙂 A couple of days ago my husband drove our daughter to work and did the grocery shopping on the way home. When I unpacked the groceries, a small carton of Haagen-Dazs peanut butter chocolate was in there. I’d never bought it by the carton, but my husband remembered me saying that is the flavor I get when I go to Haagen-Dazs (which I haven’t done in 15 or 20 years, since I just haven’t lived near one recently).
🙂 Birds have been very cooperative with my photography this week. And we’ve had a lot of juveniles coming by. Right now the downy woodpecker is drinking from the hummingbird feeder. I had read that they do that, but hadn’t seen it till this morning.
I’m identifying a few of my wildflower photos at a time, but this is a pretty big task. I’m debating whether to add photos I’ve taken in other states. . . . It seems inevitable I’ll make some mistakes of identification, and many flowers have multiple “common names,” so I’m choosing one or two when they have more than one. (Like the lovely “firewheel” is also called “Indian blanket” or a couple of other things.)
🙂 I finished a really pesky project.
😦 This has been the slowest start to summer in my twelve summers of freelance work.
🙂 Daughter joined us and then spent the night. She’s now on her way to spend a week of her holidays at an NCEM Bible camp working.
🙂 Friend will be mentoring our daughter this coming year as they live in the same city. She has such a heart for young women.
😦 Corn was knocked over by the wind this week. We’ll see if it recovers or if we’ll have to stake it up
😦 Peas are ready to be picked – garden to muddy to get into
🙂 Most things on the Jeep are fixable by husband
😦 Lots of work on the Jeep to be done in the next week or so
😦 Dad has a cold coming on – they were supposed to travel to visit us on Monday/Tuesday. Now they aren’t sure if they should or not. His colds really tire him out and he develops bad coughs with them. He is almost 82.
😦 Work situation –
🙂 Possibility of a new job, closer to home, and in a ministry
🙂 😦 Going back to school shopping with BG. We have to go early because we have to find pants that fit. Hard to believe she is going to be a Junior. Where did the years go?
😦 Just about tearing my hair out over the level of disorganization in our house. I got a good start on decluttering several weeks ago, but ran out of steam. There are a few rooms that look pretty good, but the rest are nowhere near that. There is too much stuff, and I don’t know where to go with it all as I try to sort it. What I should do is throw, throw, throw; instead, I analyze, analyze, analyze. Analyzing doesn’t get rid of the mess. 😦 I am so inept.
Ha, here’s a rave to follow up my rant: I just found a free Kindle book at Amazon, entitled Diary of a Messy Mom: 7 Days to Change My Messy Ways. A reader review said, “a cute and clever take on the perspective of a messy person determined to get organized, not a type A person dictating how to clean your closets or cabinets, lol.”
🙂 First crop of peas has been picked. Raspberries too. This is the first time in many, many years, that I’ve pick raspberries and the first time they were MY raspberries.
🙂 It was nice to pick the peas while husband was in the garden propping of the corn. I wasn’t nearly so worried about a bear walking out of the bush behind me.
Yum, home-picked raspberries. My grandparents next door had raspberry bushes (and a strawberry patch, too), so our family got our pick of lots of tasty berries for many years as my siblings and I grew up.
6 Arrows, that’s me too. Before I married, I threw away and gave away a lot. But I’m a packrat and I moved into a smallish house that was already “full.” I’m “most of the way there” in fitting everything somewhere, but to the point where any additional progress seems impossible. Periodically I will do more and then just work not to go “backward” from there. But I’d love to have it really finished.
6 Arrows. I can save you time and effort in reading any books to get organized. Get three larger boxes. Label them Give Away, Put Away, and Throw Away. Set a timer for 15 minutes at a time and start sorting. “Give Away goes in the trunk of your car for your next trip to town to get to charity or put out by the curb if you live in a neighborhood. Put Away gets put away at the end of the 15 minutes. I will leave it to your imagination as to what to do with Throw Away.
Our house isn’t all that big, either, not for a family of our size, anyway. I can’t remember its square-footage, but I think something in the ballpark of 1300 sq. ft. We bought this house 25 years ago, before we had children, and it seemed quite roomy then. Not so much now. Of course, not having to move often doesn’t help motivate a person to keep the load light. My husband and I both have packrat tendencies, too, and since we didn’t see this as a starter home, but one we could conceivably live in indefinitely, we didn’t try to minimize how much we were accumulating, as we maybe would have if the chance of moving again seemed pretty likely.
Adding six children into the mix had a little bit of impact, too. 😉
It took 25 years for your house to get in the shape it is in. I won’t get fixed in a day.
I have used Flylady for years. I would suggest you go there. You don’t have to sign us for the daily emails but you can follow her system.
I don’t know, Kim. Flylady almost makes me break out in hives. 😉 I can’t put a finger on why, but when I tried doing some of what she recommended (this was years ago), it just didn’t work. It was overwhelming, for some reason, even though I’m pretty sure I tried slowly easing into it. The times I’ve revisited her site, thinking maybe things would click this time, because of being at a different life stage or whatever, it still didn’t.
I’m slowly reading a book called One Bite at a Time, and that has helped a little. It has 52 projects, and I set out to do one per week, to cover them in a year. Some of the projects are one-time deals, and others are ongoing, more habit-training, maintenance-minded things.
Even though it seems like a slow pace to take a year to work through the book, I think I may need to slow down some, and concentrate on making a habit of the projects I’ve already “done” that are ongoing. One week isn’t really long enough to make a habit out of something, and at this point in the year, a little more than halfway through, it feels like there’s still a lot to do on past projects AND the upcoming ones.
Anyway, I’m still trying to figure out the best way to keep from being overwhelmed, and I appreciate your offering suggestions.
Although I am familiar with her, I don’t follow Flylady. But my own system is sort of similar. I do things in “bite sized” periods of time.
An example: If I decide I should clean the whole kitchen, but don’t have a lot of energy, I’m likely to do a quick job & get the main stuff done well. But if I decide that I will clean this portion of this counter right now, I will do a really thorough job on that one section. Then, a while later, I’ll move on to the next section. The former way, the toaster (or other countertop appliance) gets brushed off, the latter way, the toaster gets a thorough cleaning. Works great for me.
Some weeks I concentrate on merely cleaning & tidying, other weeks I do a “good enough” job on cleaning, but concentrate more on other kinds of projects, the things that don’t need doing every week,
The beginning of verse 10 in Zechariah 4 (NKJV) says, “For who has despised the day of small things?”
Other versions say “small beginnings”.
I’ve heard this used in sermons about not being discouraged by the small steps one is taking. Of course, that is in reference to growing in God, but I think it can have application to other things we do as Christians.
Keep taking those small steps & you will get somewhere. 🙂
Kare, a buck could eat my peas anytime, if I had any. And my husband (who hates peas) says a big hearty amen. But I happily let a mockingbird get the rest of our wild black raspberries, even though they were quite tasty, because it seems worth it to me to let the animals I like get it. (Although I admit we are taking our bird feeders down every evening now, since a coon started getting into them, though I personally love coons. We don’t want to encourage them to come quite that close on a regular basis! My husband had to kill one this winter that wouldn’t take “no” for an answer during the daytime. It was young and, in this really bad winter, probably pretty hungry.)
I said I “like” coons, not that I want to see them on my doorstep. I concur that we need to avoid feeding them and drawing them in. If nothing else, we don’t want to attract anything that might pick a fight with Misten. But in a perfect world, I would be feeding them readily, because I do think they are beautiful and smart, and I’d happily spend time watching them <in the wild.
My peas are very delicious as I pick them when they are very tiny – my stepmom laughed at me for their size, but I won’t eat them when they’re all fat and mushy. 🙂
Wandering Views 
🙂
I’m starting a five lesson series on Daniel tomorrow. Five lessons isn’t enough, but it’s a start. In all my teaching, I’ve only taught one lesson from Daniel before. Daniel is an important OT book. And Daniel is an unusual prophet. He and his three buddies were just children when they started.
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I start typing with a sunflower. When I finish, the sunflower has turned into a deer.
😆
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Neither rant nor rave, but I’m still, after all these years, amazed at how much time Elvera and her sister can spend on the phone together.
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The deer ate the sunflower 😯
Elvera and her sister are perfecting the art, Chas. 😉
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I have no rants nor raves. I slept well last night and late this morning. The sun is shining. I am drinking coffee…it seems enough for now.
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🙂 22 years ago I finally gave birth to a daughter.
🙂 I’ve had a lovely visit with her and seen a lot of one of my brothers. (The other, as usual, is traveling. Today he’s in China)
🙂 My husband has been in Kansas City with the high school mission trip. Headed home today, he called last night SO excited about the glorious way God has been at work and how he bounded with the 11 kids.
🙂 He’s felt God leading him out of 3/4 Sunday School specifically to reach this graduating class –aiming at discipline the guys.
🙂 It’s neat to see how God is putting a desire for His word and worldview into the hearts of these kids. Very exciting!
🙂 Almost done.
🙂 Visiting the final research book today at my old stomping grounds: the UCLA research library.
😦 I can’t believe I haven’t been inside that library in 37 years? Where has the time gone? 😦
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Happy Birthday to your daughter, Michelle! And your husband bounded with the 11 kids? That’s one energetic bunch. 😛
Good to hear about God’s work in the hearts of the kids. A real blessing.
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🙂 A couple of days ago my husband drove our daughter to work and did the grocery shopping on the way home. When I unpacked the groceries, a small carton of Haagen-Dazs peanut butter chocolate was in there. I’d never bought it by the carton, but my husband remembered me saying that is the flavor I get when I go to Haagen-Dazs (which I haven’t done in 15 or 20 years, since I just haven’t lived near one recently).
🙂 Birds have been very cooperative with my photography this week. And we’ve had a lot of juveniles coming by. Right now the downy woodpecker is drinking from the hummingbird feeder. I had read that they do that, but hadn’t seen it till this morning.
🙂 I finished a really pesky project.
😦 This has been the slowest start to summer in my twelve summers of freelance work.
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Still no honey bees, but I have several, what we call, bumble bees among my beans. I try not to disturb them.
🙂
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🙂 Lunch with ‘old’ friends yesterday
🙂 Daughter joined us and then spent the night. She’s now on her way to spend a week of her holidays at an NCEM Bible camp working.
🙂 Friend will be mentoring our daughter this coming year as they live in the same city. She has such a heart for young women.
😦 Corn was knocked over by the wind this week. We’ll see if it recovers or if we’ll have to stake it up
😦 Peas are ready to be picked – garden to muddy to get into
🙂 Most things on the Jeep are fixable by husband
😦 Lots of work on the Jeep to be done in the next week or so
😦 Dad has a cold coming on – they were supposed to travel to visit us on Monday/Tuesday. Now they aren’t sure if they should or not. His colds really tire him out and he develops bad coughs with them. He is almost 82.
😦 Work situation –
🙂 Possibility of a new job, closer to home, and in a ministry
LikeLike
🙂 😦 Going back to school shopping with BG. We have to go early because we have to find pants that fit. Hard to believe she is going to be a Junior. Where did the years go?
LikeLike
😦 Just about tearing my hair out over the level of disorganization in our house. I got a good start on decluttering several weeks ago, but ran out of steam. There are a few rooms that look pretty good, but the rest are nowhere near that. There is too much stuff, and I don’t know where to go with it all as I try to sort it. What I should do is throw, throw, throw; instead, I analyze, analyze, analyze. Analyzing doesn’t get rid of the mess. 😦 I am so inept.
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Ha, here’s a rave to follow up my rant: I just found a free Kindle book at Amazon, entitled Diary of a Messy Mom: 7 Days to Change My Messy Ways. A reader review said, “a cute and clever take on the perspective of a messy person determined to get organized, not a type A person dictating how to clean your closets or cabinets, lol.”
There might be hope for me yet. 🙂
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We told the kids if they ran the garage sale they could have the money . . .
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🙂 First crop of peas has been picked. Raspberries too. This is the first time in many, many years, that I’ve pick raspberries and the first time they were MY raspberries.
🙂 It was nice to pick the peas while husband was in the garden propping of the corn. I wasn’t nearly so worried about a bear walking out of the bush behind me.
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Yum, home-picked raspberries. My grandparents next door had raspberry bushes (and a strawberry patch, too), so our family got our pick of lots of tasty berries for many years as my siblings and I grew up.
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6 Arrows, that’s me too. Before I married, I threw away and gave away a lot. But I’m a packrat and I moved into a smallish house that was already “full.” I’m “most of the way there” in fitting everything somewhere, but to the point where any additional progress seems impossible. Periodically I will do more and then just work not to go “backward” from there. But I’d love to have it really finished.
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6 Arrows. I can save you time and effort in reading any books to get organized. Get three larger boxes. Label them Give Away, Put Away, and Throw Away. Set a timer for 15 minutes at a time and start sorting. “Give Away goes in the trunk of your car for your next trip to town to get to charity or put out by the curb if you live in a neighborhood. Put Away gets put away at the end of the 15 minutes. I will leave it to your imagination as to what to do with Throw Away.
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Our house isn’t all that big, either, not for a family of our size, anyway. I can’t remember its square-footage, but I think something in the ballpark of 1300 sq. ft. We bought this house 25 years ago, before we had children, and it seemed quite roomy then. Not so much now. Of course, not having to move often doesn’t help motivate a person to keep the load light. My husband and I both have packrat tendencies, too, and since we didn’t see this as a starter home, but one we could conceivably live in indefinitely, we didn’t try to minimize how much we were accumulating, as we maybe would have if the chance of moving again seemed pretty likely.
Adding six children into the mix had a little bit of impact, too. 😉
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That comment above was in response to Cheryl. And now I see Kim has snuck in with wise, practical advice. 😉 Fifteen minutes I can do. Yes! Yes!
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It took 25 years for your house to get in the shape it is in. I won’t get fixed in a day.
I have used Flylady for years. I would suggest you go there. You don’t have to sign us for the daily emails but you can follow her system.
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I unearthed a 2012 magazine titled “Get Organized!” this past week — as I was clearing out a stuffed magazine rack. 🙄
I tossed the rest (all vintage 2012), but I did keep that one.
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I don’t know, Kim. Flylady almost makes me break out in hives. 😉 I can’t put a finger on why, but when I tried doing some of what she recommended (this was years ago), it just didn’t work. It was overwhelming, for some reason, even though I’m pretty sure I tried slowly easing into it. The times I’ve revisited her site, thinking maybe things would click this time, because of being at a different life stage or whatever, it still didn’t.
I’m slowly reading a book called One Bite at a Time, and that has helped a little. It has 52 projects, and I set out to do one per week, to cover them in a year. Some of the projects are one-time deals, and others are ongoing, more habit-training, maintenance-minded things.
Even though it seems like a slow pace to take a year to work through the book, I think I may need to slow down some, and concentrate on making a habit of the projects I’ve already “done” that are ongoing. One week isn’t really long enough to make a habit out of something, and at this point in the year, a little more than halfway through, it feels like there’s still a lot to do on past projects AND the upcoming ones.
Anyway, I’m still trying to figure out the best way to keep from being overwhelmed, and I appreciate your offering suggestions.
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Pass that magazine along to me when you’re done, Donna. 😉
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Although I am familiar with her, I don’t follow Flylady. But my own system is sort of similar. I do things in “bite sized” periods of time.
An example: If I decide I should clean the whole kitchen, but don’t have a lot of energy, I’m likely to do a quick job & get the main stuff done well. But if I decide that I will clean this portion of this counter right now, I will do a really thorough job on that one section. Then, a while later, I’ll move on to the next section. The former way, the toaster (or other countertop appliance) gets brushed off, the latter way, the toaster gets a thorough cleaning. Works great for me.
Some weeks I concentrate on merely cleaning & tidying, other weeks I do a “good enough” job on cleaning, but concentrate more on other kinds of projects, the things that don’t need doing every week,
LikeLike
The beginning of verse 10 in Zechariah 4 (NKJV) says, “For who has despised the day of small things?”
Other versions say “small beginnings”.
I’ve heard this used in sermons about not being discouraged by the small steps one is taking. Of course, that is in reference to growing in God, but I think it can have application to other things we do as Christians.
Keep taking those small steps & you will get somewhere. 🙂
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Yeah, I do the bite-size cleaning a lot of times, too. But after getting to a certain point of “success,” I often put it aside again for a while.
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6 arrows — will do. If I can find it.
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😀
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Thank you, ladies.
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🙂 Nice big buck at the garden with very velvety antlers
😦 He was eating my peas
🙂 I chased him away and then let the dog out – he’s long gone now
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😦 Couldn’t get a picture of the deer as husband took our camera to work, sigh…
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Kare, a buck could eat my peas anytime, if I had any. And my husband (who hates peas) says a big hearty amen. But I happily let a mockingbird get the rest of our wild black raspberries, even though they were quite tasty, because it seems worth it to me to let the animals I like get it. (Although I admit we are taking our bird feeders down every evening now, since a coon started getting into them, though I personally love coons. We don’t want to encourage them to come quite that close on a regular basis! My husband had to kill one this winter that wouldn’t take “no” for an answer during the daytime. It was young and, in this really bad winter, probably pretty hungry.)
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You don’t want coons hanging around Cheryl. They are mean and may carry rabies.
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I know, Chas. (See how important commas can be?)
I said I “like” coons, not that I want to see them on my doorstep. I concur that we need to avoid feeding them and drawing them in. If nothing else, we don’t want to attract anything that might pick a fight with Misten. But in a perfect world, I would be feeding them readily, because I do think they are beautiful and smart, and I’d happily spend time watching them <in the wild.
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Hey! I know Chas, too! 🙂
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My peas are very delicious as I pick them when they are very tiny – my stepmom laughed at me for their size, but I won’t eat them when they’re all fat and mushy. 🙂
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🙂 Finally have proof that the second cat, Knuki, is still alive and living in the shop
😦 We had to set up a trail cam on their food to get that proof 🙂
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