January :: My Favorite Month

My favorite month of the year, January, is almost over.  So much has happened these past four weeks, while at the same time I feel some of that time was paused, leaving me feeling restored and rested.  Sounds like January has a little bit of a split personality, eh?  The first month of the year holds so much promise for me.  I have consciously slowed down, accomplished several home projects while working on Apartment Therapy's :: The January Cure for the third year in a row and I made an effort to get in the kitchen and cook healthier meals at home.  Yes, a good slow-down was definitely in order.

The first order of business was to carve out more time to read the printed word (not the internet).  The holidays tend to swallow me up and my brain is so full of tasks that need to be done that I can't focus on serious reading (or even reading for pleasure).  I couldn't even read a magazine during the month of December, so I'm jumping back into the habit and catching up on old newspapers, periodicals and New York Times Book Reviews.  I just finished reading my book club selection for the February meeting, A Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes.

I found a new book that I fell in love with and I must share.  It's a graphic novel that I ordered from the library for Grady, but I was drawn in by the incredible story and beautiful, colorful graphics.  It was one of those books that I had to purchase for our home library.  Now, I'm pretty selective about what books I want to own and this one makes me incredibly happy.  I even purchased two more to gift to friends.  Funny, witty, dark, some curse words & a be-heading, but in the most wonderful way.  The Encyclopedia of Early Earth by Isabel Greenberg is a gem.  You can read NPR's review of the book here.

Speaking of books, Grady is currently reading The Fault in our Stars by John Green.  Let me back up.  We rented the movie from the mobile library a few weeks ago and sat down to watch it with him last weekend.  I prefaced the movie with a little talk about how it might be a little heavy for him - you know with the terminally ill teenagers, short sex scene and a heart wrenching funeral, just to name a few.  He said he would tell me to stop the movie if it was too much for him.

Well, it was a lot for him, for us.  We sat there with tears streaming down both of our faces through much of the end of the movie.  My son nestled into the crook of my arm and quietly sobbed.  We had a good talk about life, death, friendship and horrible diseases.  This also gave us the opportunity to talk about the pettiness of gossip, what's important in life and how to find beauty in our everyday lives.

G just so happened to be collecting change this week for a school fundraiser on behalf of The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society Pennies for Patients campaign.   Timing is everything, right?

The next morning we were drawing & painting in our sketchbooks and he asked if he could look up quotes from the movie.  We continued talking about those heavy themes while creating art around some of the powerful phrases from the book/movie.  This was such a wonderful parenting moment.  Witnessing my son being vulnerable and sensitive, but also knowing he's smart enough and ready to broach conversations about big topics, like life and death.  These moments are the wonderful side-effects of being a mother and they are quite unexpected.  I never gave much thought to this phase of being a parent and it's just so, so good right now.  My fears at the beginning of the school year have subsided and I'm settling into my role as the mom of a sixth grader.

Speaking of Grady getting older, I received a letter from him last week via the Tooth Fairie.  It made my heart just about burst and then put a smile on my face for the next few hours.

So, here is my tooth.  

Sorry I don't believe in you anymore (and I mean the tooth fairy, 

not you mom), but I am a little too old.  

It just happens, right?  Well, thanks for the exciting 

ride as the tooth fairy, for me having such delight 

as a kid to find out a fairy gave 

me money and for being my loyal "Fairy Bank."  

Well, nite!

The note was unsigned, but Grady is 11-3/4 years old - it was time.  The tooth fairie jig is up and it's bittersweet, but I think I'm finally ready to put all the make-believe magic behind me, too.  He lost two teeth this week.  He's growing up so fast.

This month found me looking back on my life and pondering my crooked path to the mother I am today.  I was invited to contribute an essay to the 28 Days of Play series created by the smart and talented New York mama, Rachel Cedar.  I connected with Rachel through Instagram a year or so ago and feel absolutely honored to contribute to the conversation on how we play (or don't play) with our children in this modern day and age.  I had to dig deep and can't wait to share my essay, along with all of the other talented writers, next month.  Stay tuned!

Last year I embarked on a drawing-a-day journal project that I'm super proud of.  I didn't want to commit to a daily exercise again this year and instead have decided to use both pages of my sketchbook and stretch my exercises into several days (or weeks, if needed).  

We're training for another hike up Mt. Rainier later this year.  We will revisit the part of the mountain that we partially climbed in 2011 and you can read about that wild trip here.  Steve will be joining us this time around.

We're lucky enough to only have to drive 30 minutes and arrive at the Armstrong Redwoods in Guerneville, California.  Having lived in Sonoma County for 13 years, I can't believe I've never hiked underneath this amazing canopy of giant trees.  The hike made me feel small and grateful and restored.  I love how nature can do that to me.

As always, the children lead me and my dear friend on these hikes and we quite like watching them run, jump, laugh and have fun with each other.  They are growing up right before our eyes and these Saturday morning excursions are really special.

January is my favorite month of the year because it's allows me a stretch of days wherein I can reorganize my home and mind.  It's like a month-long reset button for my life.  I look forward to it every year and get a little melancholy as we approach the 31st day.  The upside?  February is my second favorite month.

Quote in Stephen King's Memoir of the Craft "On Writing"

Well, I started this blog post at 6 o'clock this morning and since then I've made breakfast and lunch, taken my son to school, hit three grocery stores & shopped for new pillows & curtain rods at Target.  I stopped by my work office and typed up the last remaining 1099 tax forms that need to be mailed out today and came home and unloaded all the groceries.

It's 1:27 in the afternoon and sunny outside.  I'm going to grab a book, throw on a sundress and say goodbye to this freakishly warm Friday in January out on my front deck.

And, well, I've got to make time to read, so I can make time and have the tools to keep writing, right?

Happy weekend, friends.

Apartment Therapy's January Cure 2015 :: Part One

The Ponderosa :: January 2015

Just like clockwork, I'm up in the middle of the night struggling with sleep.  Every year around this time, sleep eludes me.  My mind seems filled with ideas and running to-do lists and I wake up with the need to write or put my thoughts on paper.

Organizing my home and putting things in order at the beginning of the calendar year is a big ritual for me.  I shared a little bit about my tendencies back in 2012.  Around this time, I picked up a book called Apartment Therapy: The Eight Step Home Cure by Maxwell Ryan (the founder and creator of Apartment Therapy).  The book had these great principles for organizing small spaces and it helped me with a little spring cleaning that year.  I signed up for their daily emails about designing for small spaces and that's where I learned about their January Cure.  You can read more about it here.

I've participated for the past couple of years and you can see my posts about it here and here.

This year, I sent out a bulk email to some of my like-minded friends to see if they wanted to participate and about a dozen said yes!  Accountability really helps to motivate me and I hoped it would also motivate my friends participating in the January Cure.

My kitchen (after) + My January Cure Project List(s)

The crux of the January Cure is making your List of Projects.  I modify this a bit by only making one huge list, highlighting 3 - 5 projects for each room that I want to tackle.  This list ends up being about six pages long with the categories being Living Room, Entryway, Laundry Room, Kitchen, Bathroom, Master Bedroom & Grady's Room.  I leave Steve's office and G's art studio off the list because, hey, I'm a realist.  I also know that if I added them, it would just be too much and it would discourage me before I even start.  The January Cure team encourages  you to make another project list from this list, but I feel like that's just way too many lists!  Yes, even for a list-lover like myself, so I just put these seven pages on a clipboard, highlight the doable items that are most important to accomplish and keep it on my desk for easy reference.

Setting up an Outbox is another key component to the January Cure and mine would live in the laundry room, where I would see it when I walked by and could easily add items to be donated, moved to another part of the house and/or sit here in the outbox purgatory until I decided what I wanted to do with it.  This outbox concept is key to the success of the January Cure.  It allows you to keep your focus on the daily assignments and not get stuck in the more of the details of where to put the items deposited there.  Here's Apartment Therapy's Outbox rules:

My laundry room Outbox during week one of the January Cure

OUTBOX RULES 
1. Anything can go in the Outbox
2. The Outbox is allowed to get messy
3. Everything must stay in the Outbox for at least one week
4. After that time you have several choices
a. Take anything back out
b. Leave anything you are undecided about for one more week
c. Dispose of the rest by moving to the garbage, recycling bin, or giveaway pile 
Once you get used to separating first and disposing of later, you'll find that clearing clutter gets easier and easier. 

This is hard for me because I don't want to leave a big mess out where I can see it, but it does help break the emotional hold some items have over me.  My Outbox is growing and I finally addressed some items that I knew exactly what to do with.  The other items that are in flux are still in the Outbox.

My goal project for this year's January Cure is our bedroom.  Our bedroom is tiny and in no way feels like a "master" anything.  There isn't even room for a proper dresser.  My husband's wardrobe occupies most of the closet in our room and my clothing and shoes live in a small closet he converted for me a few years ago, just outside our bedroom door.  Living in a 1950's farmhouse has its perks, but it also has many, many challenges.  Making the most of our space in the bedroom has been a conversation topic since we purchased the house eight years ago.

Queen sized bed made of hardwood (Ash, we think) sold on Craig's List in a flash!

I quickly snapped a few photos of our 15 year old bed frame (above) and it was sold to the first person who replied, a 70 year old guy named Richard who told me he found his wife on Craig's List, too.  No joke.  Long story that I won't bore you with here, but the Craig's List karma was good for this bedroom renovation and I liked that.  Plus, the bed would only really cost us the U-haul fee.  Win-win.

Works In Progress :: New storage bed with  headboard + closet purge

We've talked about getting a platform bed from Pottery Barn for years, but I just couldn't justify the $1,900 price tag.  Searching Craig's List a few days after the new year yielded me several viable options.  I was one day too late in obtaining the very bed from Pottery Barn that we had been coveting!  And, it was only $200!  This reignited my search and the very next day I found a platform storage bed with headboard manufactured by Stanley Furniture and I quickly negotiated the deal, sweetly asked my husband if he would be the manual labor and rented a U-haul for the weekend roundtrip to Oakland to pick up the bed.  I'll share the final bedroom project photos in my final post on the January Cure later in the month.

Spice cabinet purge was long OVERDUE

While Steve was driving to-and-fro last Saturday, it gave me an entire day alone (he took G along for the ride) to deep clean my bedroom and then turn my attention to the kitchen assignment.  I was a woman on a mission and purged the pantry, vacuumed drawers, deep cleaned my refrigerator and was ruthless with purging my spice cabinet & the drawers that housed my kitchen utensils - some that we hadn't used in years.   I mean, who was I kidding?  A mellon-baller?  That thing had been collecting dust since the 1990's.  Buh-bye.

It's not all sunshine and pretty pictures at The Ponderosa (yes, we call out place The Ponderosa).  This Virgo is pretty good about the surfaces looking neat and tidy in my home, but open a drawer or closet?  Oh, hell no.  Most of the time you would find a hot mess inside these drawers and cabinets...but not this month!

The rest of the assignments have been pretty easy and I decluttered a few drawers on Thursday and marked those pesky jobs off of my pending List of Projects.  Again, any place in my home where I can hide the mess - I will.  The only bright side to this is that my home is small, less than 1,000 square feet, and when I set my mind to cleaning and decluttering it really doesn't take that long.

I've set in motion a few jobs that I needed to outsource, like calling an electrician to install wall-mounted reading lights above our bed.  We also used that U-haul rental truck to load up yard detritus, a non-working satellite dish and our old set of boxsprings and Steve transported it to the local dump.  See?  I've even got him in on the January Cure.

That's it for now.  It's almost five a.m. and I'm about to tackle the drawers that house my magazines and old newspapers.

I can't be stopped.

Happy New Year 2015 :: Shed

The new year started off kind of slow for me, which was exactly how I needed it to be.  The end of the year reflections always help me out in framing up and taking stock of where I am in my life, as well as giving me pause to think about what I'd like to accomplish when the calendar flips over into the next year.

As I shared in my last post, I usually pick a word for the year and write it down on an index card, think about what that word will mean for the coming 12 months and post it on the bulletin board just above my desk (where I will see it every day).  This year I really wanted to get rid of a few things; both figuratively and literally.  Debt, weight, health concerns, and a cumbersome investment property have weighed heavily on my mind for years and I want to lighten the burden for me and for my family.  Inherited fears about life, creative self-doubt, "things" around our home that we do not love or no longer bring joy to our lives need to be purged from my mind and my surroundings in order to bring calm into my day(s).

shed²

SHed/

verb

verb: shed; 3rd person present: sheds; past tense: shed; past participle: shed; gerund or present participle: shedding

1. (of a tree or other plant) allow (leaves or fruit) to fall to the ground.

   "both varieties shed leaves in winter"

   • (of a reptile, insect, etc.) allow (its skin or shell) to come off, to be replaced by another one that has grown underneath.

     synonyms:

     slough off, cast off, molt "the caterpillar shed its skin"

   • (of a mammal) lose (hair) as a result of molting, disease, or age.
   • take off (clothes).

     synonyms:

     take off, remove, shrug off, discard, doff, climb out of, slip out of, divest oneself of, peel off "we shed our jackets"

     antonyms:

     don

   • discard (something undesirable, superfluous, or outdated).

     "what they lacked was a willingness to shed the arrogance of the past"

     synonyms:

     lose, get rid of, discard More

     antonyms:

     put on, adopt, keep

   • have the property of preventing (something) from being absorbed.

     "this leather has a superior ability to shed water, sweat, and salt"
   • eliminate part of (an electrical power load) by disconnecting circuits.

     
     

     
     

I almost picked the phrase Shake It Off, but felt like Taylor Swift would be in my head most of the time.  No, I definitely didn't need that.  I love the synonyms for shed - slough off, case off, molt, take off, remove, shrug off, discard, doff, climb out of, slip out of, divest oneself of, and peel off.  

This year has so many opportunities for growth and change.  I want to feel lighter and less encumbered by the trappings of life and the rut of routines that no longer serve me.  I'm excited.

My father used to always say you need to walk the walk and not just talk the talk.  This phrase kept looping in my brain and the word shed seemed like the simplest way to remind me of a great many things.  Wish me luck?

We juiced four out of five days this week.  That seems reasonable and I completely utilized my CSA box from our local farm.  The kale usually languishes in my crisper drawer and I feel guilty for not wanting to eat it, but this week I juiced it instead.  Steve is usually the juice maker in our house, but he is NOT a morning person.  I found I was waiting for him to get up and make it and by then we were usually running late with getting out the door.   The juice window would close and I would just drink coffee and skip breakfast.  Well, not this week.  I boiled a half dozen eggs to keep handy in the fridge for a quick breakfast and drank the electric drink elixir without making a face.  Honest.

Ms. Paltrow's green juice is super bright and delicious (and I'm a tough critic!).  I think the lemon is the trick.  I used a Meyer lemon and nixed the mint, but only because I was too lazy to go out and pick some.  I'll add it next week.

Best Green Juice 
from Gwyneth Paltrow's book It's All Good

Serves 1
5 large leaves of kale, ribs discarded, roughly chopped
1 lemon, zest and pith removed
1 large apple, roughly chopped
A 1-inch piece of ginger
1 sprig fresh mint

Push all ingredients through juicer

Last year, one of Grady's goals for 2014 was to learn how to skateboard.  Mid-year he made it happen.  He's come a long way in six months and it both delights me and scares me (broken bones!).  I need to lighten up, encourage him and just make sure I know the fastest way to Kaiser Hospital.

This year he resolved to climb (part of) Mt. Rainier with his god sisters, again.  We did this back in 2011 and it was the most incredible experience.  He'll be four years older and absolutely capable.  We're going to do it as a family, so it's on my 2015 list, too.

Treated myself to a beautiful 'Lauren' leather double clutch by Hobo.  I had been saving my Mamalode commission checks with the thought that I should spend the money I earned for writing and illustrating on something that would remind me of how I earned it.  I'm a thrifter at heart, but buying a good, quality product that will last a long time is important to me, too.  This clutch will serve as my wallet and can easily transition into an evening bag.  I absolutely love it.

Last year I took several workshops that really helped me stay on my creative path.  Artist Lisa Congdon's basic line drawing class was by far the most influential for me.  I viewed the classes online while we were in Costa Rica by logging onto Creativebug's website.  You can take an unlimited amount of classes via their website for $9.95 a month and they offer a 14 day free trial.  

This time around, I signed up for Lisa's sketchbook explorations class.  This week we worked on watercolor backgrounds and the addition of black Micron pens.  I already use these tools in my journaling, but I was hoping to pick up some of her tricks of the trade, as well as design and composition tips.

I had the good fortune to take a workshop with Lisa in person last year at the San Francisco Makeshift Society.  Her 3+ hour talk was on professional illustration and how to get your work seen and get paid for your art.  Two months after this class, I did my first illustration work for Mamalode.com.  Coincidence?  Maybe, but I was ready to tackle my first print job due to the knowledge so generously shared by one of my favorite artists.

More workshops are on the horizon with calligraphy, hand lettering and whiskey topping the list for 2015.

As much as I've loved my subscription to the Sunday New York Times, I think I need to put my weekly love affair with the newspaper on hold.  It's felt like treading water trying to keep up with reading the paper and its magazine inserts the last six weeks or so.  I have a backlog to catch up on and I haven't made time for books.  And I love books.

We continue to visit our local library about once or twice a week and the mobile library comes to a town nearby every other week.  Since we are in a rural area, our book requests go to the top of the queue with the mobile library system in Marin County.  What that means is that when we request books, we usually get them.  In my case, I get them all at once!  This week's haul has so many goodies.  I have a lot of reading to do.

My husband witnessed two red-tailed hawks fighting over this western meadowlark just outside his office last weekend.  I've never seen this type of bird around our property, but learned from a friend, Sarah,  that the western meadowlark is Montana's state bird and has the most beautiful song.

We skipped our usual bird burial rituals and decided to leave it where the red-tailed hawks could come back and retrieve this yellow-chested beauty.  Honestly, we didn't need another bird buried on our property, especially since I was trying to shed and release things back into the universe.  This seemed like the perfect small act to burn this concept on my brain.

Walk the walk echoed in my ears.  Just walk the walk and shed my instinct to perform a funeral for this little avian creature.  The act of burying dead animals on our property was more for the sake of teaching my child about the circle of life when he was younger.  We would have sweet conversations about life and death and the importance of honoring and remembering animals and people you loved.  He's 11 now and I know he gets it.  He kind of always has and I think when I was giving him those little talks, they were helping me as much as they were helping him.  I would choose nature over nurture this time around and so the bird was placed under our oak tree, also known as the scene of the crime.

The little meadowlark ended up shedding five pretty feathers during its battle with the red-tailed hawks.  I gathered the tiny, grey striped plumage from the ground and placed them a little vase on my desk to serve as a reminder of my intention for this year.  

Shed...

Be the verb, Tammi, be the verb.