Simplify your Life

I have been trying to declutter my house, desk, files, scrapbooking things, schedule, etc. This is an ongoing battle! Today I signed up for Flylady.net again because it works for me to refocus and try to motivate myself to spend a few minutes every day concentrating on one messy closet or drawer or room. Trying to develop habits to continue this is frustrating!

One of the articles I read referred to this Zen Habits blog, and I want to spend some time reading through the articles linked on it. I just wanted to post it here for others to read as well. I hope to pick up some new tips!

Tribute to our Heros

I just watched a touching video and wanted to share it here. The music with it is very touching also.

Menus 4 Moms

 

I have struggled for years with planning a menu and cooking. I was a little better at it when I was a stay at home mom, but since I work now, I’m just terrible about it! My teen boys are also a bit TOO picky, so that doesn’t help my cooking plans either.

Several months ago (maybe a year?), I found a neat website, Menus 4 Moms, that has a free weekly menu, shopping list and recipes!

You can sign up to get this weekly email and it gives you everything you need to make meals for your family! Even though I’ve had this great resource, I have not been good about using it, and now I’m going to get busy and try it!

They also have a great area on freezer meals with lots of great articles and book resources, so that you can make several items when you have time and freeze them for nights when you are short on time. This is another plan I’ve been wanting to do for YEARS! It doesn’t even have to be overly complicated or time consuming like Once a Month Cooking, just triple the recipe you are making anyway. Eat one that night and freeze the other two for later dates. If you did this for 10 days, you would have 20 more meals in the freezer – that is a month’s worth! If you do this regularly, you can have a variety of foods in the freezer so you aren’t just eating the same 10 things on a rotating basis.

One thing I have used over the years is to get hamburger in big packages (5 or 10 pounds) and brown it all at once, let it cool slightly and put about 2 cups of browned meat into ziplock bags, flatten them and zip shut, mark with the date and freeze. This saves a huge amount of time and mess later! I can take a package of frozen meat and thaw it in the microwave for about 2 minutes and it is ready to add to spaghetti or casseroles.

Foods

A few years ago I heard a speaker who made cooking easier. She had several mixes made up and then recipes that used those mixes to prepare different foods, which helps save time preparing meals. I found a website that has several of these mixes on it, plus other great tips! It is called budget101.com found here.

Also last week I went to a Tastefully Simple party and had the beer bread again, which is SO yummy and I ordered some. Tonight I was surfing the web about something else and came across a post that someone made their own for a fraction of the cost and it tastes just like the TS beer bread! I did a google search came up with several recipes online for this, all very similar, but the one that seemed to have the most comments that it tastes very similar to TS’s is found at AllRecipes.com at this link. I can’t wait to try it, especially with all the different variations like cheesy, garlic, dill, onion, Italian seasoning, and even sweeter versions such as brown sugar & cinnamon, applesauce or 1 tsp. of vanilla & 1 tsp. of ground allspice!

It’s getting to be fall when we have more soups or get togethers with appetizers, and this bread is so yummy with dips!

Digital Photo program

I would like to give a big applause for the free Google Picasa2 program.  I have been using this for over a year now and it is really easy to download pictures from my digital camera SD card (I have a card reader slot on my PC).  I can then very easily share select pictures by email or upload them to a web album (on Google, also free).  The web albums can be kept private or made public.  If you keep them private, you can still share the link with those you want to and they do not need a password to view your pictures.  If they want to order prints from your pictures, they can do so right from your album!Once you share the album link, your friends or family can view individual pictures or view them in a slideshow. Too see a good example of how it works, here is a link to one of my albums, which I have already talking about on my blog (Unmounted Stamps).

I name my folders by the event or date.  I also recently discovered that not only can I keep my pictures in the folders as I downloaded them originally but I can ALSO copy certain pictures and put them into their own album!  I did an album of all the pictures of our dog and kept the originals with the other events and dates when they were taken.

Another plus of this program is that you can make a Gift CD or burn a CD of your pictures to make a backup.   Other advantages are being able to crop, remove red eye, change the picture to several different colors like sepia or black & white, change lighting, etc.  I always do all my cropping and editing on the computer at home and then copy the pictures that I want onto a CD to take to the store to get prints made.  You also have the option to upload them directly from Picasa2 to a place online to have them developed, or print them yourselves with the choice of an 8×10, 2 5×7’s, down to wallets, etc.

With your photo database, you can watch a slideshow, make a collage, put captions on them, get prints made, edit and backup to a CD!  It’s a GREAT FREE program!

Everyone needs a good laugh!

My friend Vicky DeCoster is a humorous writer and author of The Wacky World of Womanhood and Husbands, Hot Flashes, and All That Hullabaloo! She likes to look at the funny side of things and when I read her short essays, I always think “wow, that’s just like me!” Maybe that’s why we’re such good friends!

Here is a link to Vicky’s website at www.wackywomanhood.com where you can read more about her and place orders for her books. She also writes a BLOG which shows her writing style.

As Vicky says, “Laughter heals the soul. Pass it on.”

Unmounting Rubber Stamps project

I searched the internet for instructions on how to take my stamps off the wood blocks and save them in a smaller area. There are instructions out there, but it can be difficult to find! You can buy sheets of unmounted stamps much cheaper than pre-mounted on wood blocks. I have collected a fair amount of stamps over the last 10 years or so and it was taking up a lot of space. Not only that, but I had to keep them in another room from my scrapbook area because I did not have room for them there. I wasn’t using them much because it was too much trouble to get them out!

Last week I started converting my stamps to unmounted ones. I thought I’d try to take them off the blocks and they came off very easily. I have a few that I bought in stores or non-Stampin Up ones that were a bit harder to get off the blocks and I may have to use the microwave for a few seconds and then get a sheet of EZMount (highly recommended). But the majority of mine came off and stuck very well to the window cling sheets I bought at a local office store (these can be used in an inkjet printer).

Here is a link to the pictures I took of the process. The instructions or descriptions are with each picture. Unmounted Stamps visual. (You can view this as a slideshow or individual pictures. You can adjust the speed of the slideshow by changing the amount of time between pictures. )

Two other ways to store unmounted stamps with cling on the back would be a 3-ring binder and cardstock in page protectors. They cling well to the page protectors. I also experimented and this worked: put packing tape on an index card and they cling to that as well. You may want to tape several cards together to make them stiffer.If you buy a sheet of unmounted stamps (a lot cheaper than premounted stamps), you will have to purchase EZMount foam/cling sheets to adhere your stamps. A great website for that is Sunday International.

I also watched a video on YouTube with instructions for using EZMount. Here is another video for storage in CD cases. Here is another picture of CD stamp storage. This website shows many different methods of storing unmounted stamps.

April is Donate Life month

I am personally blessed that my Dad received a second chance for life by receiving a heart transplant 4 1/2 years ago. I was just looking up a link to share with someone and see that April is Donate Life Awareness Month. Please go to this link and learn more about becoming an organ donor. There are so many people waiting for organs that will die without this second chance for life.

http://www.organdonor.gov/

Organizational TV shows

I have a couple of TV shows that I like to watch because they show you how to take a cluttered room and organize it, and they have good storage ideas.  One of these is “Mission Organization” on HGTV and the other is “Clean Sweep” on TLC.  I just heard about another show called “Neat” and they have a really good website with great organization tips and past season’s episodes “before” and “after” pictures.  I did a search of TV shows and it looks like it might be on TLC, but there aren’t any episodes schedule right now.

NutritionData.com

Here is another great website for looking up food nutrition information, NutritionData.com.  After you look up a food, scroll to the bottom of the screen and convert the weight to grams or ounces and easily figure out the carb factor.  There are many popular restaurant foods listed as well.

On the website, there is an option to add this to your Firefox search box.  I’ve also got CalorieKing.com on my toolbar so I can quickly enter a food to look it up.

Here again is a link to an article that explains how to use Carb Factors and a food scale.