Efficient ribbon storage for as little as $10,000.00.

Remember a while back when I made fun of that gal who had a dressy pantry and a casual pantry because basically I was just jealous of her pantry?

Here's another ridiculously organized pantry from Sand & Sisal.  I will admit, it looks great but the mechanics of it are what makes me question its efficiency.  Think about it.  You get home from the grocery store and instead of just putting your groceries on the shelf, you have to open the package and dump the contents into another container.  But what if your container isn't empty yet and you can only dump half your contents, then what do you do??  That must be the reason for those baskets...so she can hide the stuff that won't fit in the bins.  Or that's where the casual pantry that no one ever sees comes in.  That's where the real food storage is happening, this one is just display.  I'll bet she has a glass door fridge too and it's always full of fresh vegetables.  I hate her. 

This pantry is nothing compared to others I've seen where it looks like they have emptied their canned goods into glass jars and recanned them because it looks better on the shelf.  Okay maybe they don't actually do that but I guess what I'm saying is that although it looks great, these kinds of pantries are high maintenance and just not practical for most of us.  And I will be switching to this method just as soon as we move to Houston.  Just to prove how bad it is.

I don't think I blogged about this ribbon storage from Delightful Order but I did talk about it on Facebook.  I don't have a whole lot of ribbon but what I do have is unruly and I've never found a storage method I'm happy with.  I love this idea of wrapping it around wooden clothespins and vowed to try it as well after we move.

During the organizing frenzy I have come across a couple of wayward spools of ribbon and decided to deal with them now instead of later.  I've found those round clothespins online for as little as $.10 each but the problem is that they're not in my hands right this minute.  What I did have in my hands right this minute was several packages of jumbo craft sticks, aka tongue depressors.  I can't remember what I originally bought them for but I'm sure it was fabulous.

I decided to try out the craft sticks for now since I have them and they're free.  I'm sure they will cause a little kink in some of the ribbon but since I seldom use it that's not a huge problem.  I did discover that this cute little storage idea is not as fabulous as it looks since I didn't consider the time and effort involved in wrapping each and every ribbon around a stick.  Yes, the result is great, but is it worth the time involved?  I dunno yet, we'll see.  I've just done the skinny ribbon so far and haven't tackled all my fibers which is a much larger issue.

In case you missed it, that was the connection between the pantry and the ribbon.  It looks great but is it worth it to repackaging something that was already packaged?  I'll have to let you know but my first impression with the ribbon is a definite maybe. 

Naturally I forgot to take a "before" picture but I did snap one of the empty ribbon spools.  That's about 30 spools of various widths but mostly 1/4".  I've had them in a box, in bags, skewered on dowels, hanging from a string, just about every way there is to store the dang stuff, I've tried it.  Some of them worked better than others but they all took up quite a bit of space.

Checkout how much space those 30 spools take up after they've been wrapped on sticks.  Big difference, huh?  Well, okay I guess it's impossible to tell in the pictures, especially since Jayson still has the good camera and I'm making do with my phone.  You'll just have to trust me on this.  That's a little bread basket they're sitting in which is not where they'll live permanently but I'll deal with that after the move.  I can grab those sticks and hold them all with my 2 hands...impossible to do with 30 spools of ribbon.  I'm sort of impressed.

So the next time you find yourself with waaayyy too much time on your hands, grab some ribbon and some popsicle sticks and go to town.  It will save you lots of space and cost you only about $10,000 for surgery caused by the repetitive motion injury it creates.  It's a trade off.

No wonder I'm insane. With sprinkles.

I started my day off stupid and finished it as a Jew.  Allow me to connect the dots between those two points.

This morning Taylor and I continued to work on our pre-move cleaning, organizing and the ceremonial tossing out of junk.  I asked her to vacuum the living room since the dog has been inside a lot lately and we needed to spread some stuff out on the floor to go through it.

While she vacuumed I took a short break and put my feet up on the couch because, really, what could I do?  It only takes one to vacuum. It wasn't long before I heard the familiar high pitched whine and clank of the vacuum cleaner sucking up something it shouldn't have.  Taylor immediately turned it off and looked at me as if she'd just been caught gettin' liquored up at the church picnic.

I told her it was probably just one of her stray bobby pins and asked her to turn it back on to see if it had worked its way through.  She turned it on and it didn't blow up but the brush thingie also wouldn't spin.  I told her to turn it back off then I gave her a lesson on how to clean the roller brush of a vacuum cleaner.

It's a gross task but I felt like it was important for her to learn since it's her mile long hair that gets wrapped around the roller.  We have a Dyson Ball and it may be true that it never loses suction, but like any vacuum it will lose roller brush action when enough hair gets tangled up in there.

I started removing some of the hair and saw that it needed a thorough cleaning so I pulled the roller out of its holder and out flopped a long flat piece of rubber.  I told Taylor that the belt was broken and needed to be replaced and that's why the roller had stopped rolling.  I am Super Woman and I know these things.

She picked up the piece of rubber then picked up her computer cord and showed me that the piece of rubber used to be attached to the cord so that when you roll it up, the rubber wraps around and holds it all in place.

Oh.  Der.  That's right.  It's a Dyson.  No belts, bags or filters to buy.  All I can say is Thank God I didn't take that strap to Best Buy and insist that it was a belt from my Dyson that needed to be replaced.  I'm certain there would have been an ugly argument because Super Woman is always right.

After cleaning the roller brush and reassembling the vacuum, Taylor turned it back on only to see that the roller wasn't turning even after she repeatedly pushed the little button that makes it turn.  The Ball has a button to push so that you can turn the roller off or on depending on whether you use it on carpets or hard floors.  I told Taylor to just leave it for now because it would obviously require some major invasive exploratory surgery but my sister had just called and she trumps the vacuum cleaner.

My sister Shamayn said something to the effect of, "Blah, blah, blah, blah, and it's official, we're Jewish".  I had heard the Jewish rumor a couple of years ago but there was no one left alive who could substantiate it so I pretty much forgot about it.  Shamayn can't forget about things like this because she has two children with serious genetic diseases and since some diseases are ethnicity-specific, she has to know stuff like this.

When Shamayn asked my mother about this a couple of years ago, Mom claimed complete ignorance about any such thing.  Yes, her great grandparents were Grandma and Grandpa Sauls which sounds sort of Jewishy but you never know.  And, being the genetic expert she is, Shamayn knows that Jewishness is passed down through the mother, not the father, so if Grandma Sauls wasn't already Jewish when she married Grandpa Sauls, it ends there.

My new look.

Now Mom has recanted her whole we're not Jewish story which is pretty much her M.O.  Shamayn said that just when we think we've gotten all of her skeletons out of the closet, a femur flies out and pokes us in the eye...which I find freaking hilarious.  But it's true because Mom lies a lot.  Not in a malicious way but in a way where she's told the same lie for so long that she sort of forgot that it wasn't true.  Now that she's getting older, I think she sometimes forgets to keep the lie going and accidentally tells the truth.  Bless her heart.

Mom said that Grandma Sauls' maiden name was Stanfield and she was Jewish by birth before she married Grandpa Sauls.  So...Grandma and Grandpa Sauls hooked up and produced my great grandmother, Mama Gee.  Her name was Mattie McGee but everyone called her Mama Gee.  When she was a child every one called her "poor little Jew girl" which apparently traumatized her into marring a Gentile.

Mama Gee's husband (Papa Gee?) died before I came along and no one ever said much about him other than he was a Sheriff's Deputy.  When my grandmother was a kid she used to ride along with him when he chased  moonshiners around Arkansas...which is fascinating although I do question his parenting skills.  If Jayson was a Sheriff's deputy I just can't imagine him saying, "Hey Taylor, I'm gonna go bust a Nazi meth lab out in the sticks, wanna ride along?"

I guess after being teased so much as a child and since she married a non-Jew, Mama Gee pretty much turned her back on Judaism so she could blend.  This would have been easy for her since she was an Ashkenazi Jew and didn't look like a text book Jew.

Okay, here's where it gets interesting.  Mama Gee and her non-Jewish moonshiner chasing husband produced my grandmother, Sita.  That's the Lebanese word for Grandmother and is a whole lot easier to pronounce than her given name: Reueleen.  Sita grew up, became an Army nurse, met the man of her dreams and married him.  That man just happened to be full blood Lebanese.

So...my Jewish grandmother married my Arab grandfather, can you imagine how thrilled their families were for them?  It was already scandalous because she outranked him in the Army so their relationship was forbidden.  They married secretly which could have ended up putting big black marks on their Army careers but fortunately she had the good sense to get knocked up which earned her an honorary discharge and, of course, no consequences for him because...well...they were in the middle of World War II.

Knowing this sure does explain a lot.  Any time Sita would want to go visit her family back in Arkansas, she went alone and rarely did they ever come see her.  They never spent a holiday together, at least in my lifetime.  From the minute they married, my grandfather's family treated Sita like their own personal white slave girl.  We always thought it was because, well, she was white.  My grandfather had 8 brothers and sisters and some of them married non-Arabs but it seemed like there was just some kind of silent understanding that Sita was to serve all of them and she did it.

So what does that mean for me?  Well, not much really but I'm sort of having fun with it.  It makes a bigger impact on my sister because of the genetic implications for her children.  Plus, she has a particularly difficult life and now that she knows she's probably Jewish she feels like she's being persecuted for a good reason now instead of just bad karma.  We're God's chosen people!  Maybe.

Shamayn has a friend who is taking a Hebrew class at a Messianic Synagogue so she's going to go over and check that out with all her newfound Jewishness.  I'm pretty sure that she is more Jewish than I am because she's more persecuted.  Shamayn said she's more Jewish because she weighs more than I do, therefore there's is more of her to be Jewish, which explains our uneven persecution.  We've both decided that because of the amount of 'persecution' she deals with on a daily basis, she is probably Jesus' favorite Jew EVER!

When Shamayn told Mom she was going to the Messianic Synagogue my mother asked her what that was.  Shamayn explained to her that Messianic Jews believe that Jesus is their savior.  Mom said she'd never heard of such a thing and was pretty sure it was a cult.

That is how I went from Stupid to Jewish in 3.5 (whoever gets that reference wins).  After I got off the phone with Shamayn I was ready to dive into the vacuum cleaner to see if I could fix whatever was wrong with it.  Taylor then informed me that it was working fine now.  When I asked her how she fixed it she said we both forgot that you can't turn on the roller when it's in the upright position.  You have to release the handle then turn on the roller.  Oh yeah.  I forgot about that and did a 180 right back to stupid.  Good thing she remembered before I had that thing so completely disassembled that it ended up in one of our growing junk piles.

So can you imagine what it's like to be me?  Don't even try.  I'm just curious as to what it looks like on a cellular level.  Are my Arabic cells constantly at war with my Jewish cells?  Are they fighting for control of my brain which both sides claim was promised to them?  Is this why I'm one olive short of a pizza?  If I stick my head in the oven to end it all can my family say it was jihad instead of suicide so they can get my insurance benefits?  These are my happy little thoughts.

On the upside, I now feel completely validated in my insanity.  I'm part Arab and part Jew covered in a crispy white Lithuanian shell.  With sprinkles.

Showin' Off My Drawers

BEFORE

AFTER

Nuff said.

What's an "empty drawer"???

I feel the need to prove that I really am doing other stuff besides making classy toilet paper tube crafts.  My quest to organize every piece of paper in the Green House is pretty much done.  Not every single piece of paper has been dealt with, but when I uncover a new piece I've already got a designated place for it to be filed and that was the main goal.  It wasn't so much about dealing with all the random paperwork we had accumulated as much as it was about having a system in place for the daily influx of new paper.

Let's take a look at my desk, which hasn't really functioned as a desk in quite some time.  It was bad.  It's a large antique pedestal desk that used to be in my Grandfather's office.  Jayson hates it because it's a beast to move and it takes up a lot of space.  I love it because it has that ginormous flat surface that I can pile stuff on.  Obviously.

I also love it because it's a beautiful piece of furniture.  All the joints are dovetailed and it has these cool wooden knobs, deep drawers and lots of character.  And when it's cleaned up it's one of the few decent pieces of furniture here at Casa de la Garage Sale.

I forgot to take a "before" picture of the drawers on the left side before I cleaned them out.  I haven't finished cleaning out all the drawers so here's a peek at the right side and the center drawer.













Kinda junky, yeah?  When I was giving them the once over, I found a circa 2003 phone book from a town I haven't lived in for 8 years.  There's also some 3-1/2" floppy disks shoved in the back of one of the drawers.  Come to think of it, there might be a computer in my garage that will take those disks.

Oh.  The garage.  *shudder*

So here's the left side of the desk all cleaned out.  The top drawer has my bill paying stuff: address labels, stamps, letter opener, stapler, envelopes, boxes of extra checks, etc.

The file drawer has my new cleaned out files in it.  I have paid bills, product warranties, misc. household files, etc.  This drawer will house stuff that I need to keep but not forever.  The forever stuff is in my Grab & Go Hurricane Box which will not live inside the desk.
The bottom drawer on the left side is a strange phenomenon that I have not seen before.  I Googled it and discovered that it is known as "an empty drawer".  I've never seen that before!  Apparently, if you have one of these rare gems you can use it at a later date for some unexpected purpose that you weren't expecting.  Or something like that.  It's still new to me and I'll have to do some more research to see how I am supposed to deal with this so called "empty drawer".






Here is the top of the desk all cleaned off.  And I didn't just move the pile to another location like I usually do, I actually put stuff back where it belonged or I got rid of it.  That pitiful little wicker organizer in the corner might have to go but for now it's doing a good job of holding all our notepads.  I have a paper fetish and it's not just confined to pretty papers.  I have lots of blank journals and note pads but I'm keeping them because I do actually use them.  I'm a list maker and even if I don't follow my lists I still feel the need to make them.

Now I feel all naked because I've shown you my drawers (heh) but I'm feeling really good about the changes happening around here!  Today's list includes the right side of the desk and then I think I'll dive into the book shelves since they're paper too.  I really love books and have a hard time getting rid of them so that project will probably be more organizing than purging.  We don't have any bookshelves for the new house so I need to get online and do something about that pretty soon.  I might just send Jayson back to IKEA for those.

The built-in bookshelves we have here also have these little covered cabinets below them where you can stash stuff then pull the door down so that no one can see.  Yeah.  I've stashed stuff alright.  I'm not sure if I have the intestinal fortitude to show you how I've mistreated those areas.  Well, a couple of them aren't so bad, they have some old CDs and VCR home videos in them.  But I'm pretty sure my dead dog is still in one of them.  I put him there because I didn't know what else to do with him and it upset me to see him like that so I just closed the door on that cabinet and left him there.  In his ziploc sammich baggie.  His cremated remains.  Bless his heart.

All work and no play...

I know I'm supposed to be knee deep in cleaning and organizing so that we can get moved out of here before our lease is up at the new house, but you know what they say:  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.  And we all know that things ended pretty badly for ol' Jack.

So, in the interest of preserving my sanity and not hacking my family to death with an axe, I took a break and made a lil Valentine bouquet.  No, it's not red or pink and it doesn't have hearts or glitter on it. That doesn't make it any less of a Valentine bouquet.  So there.

I got my inspiration for these flowers when I was taking out the bathroom trash.  I noticed that there were several empty toilet paper tubes in the trash can and I've been seeing a lot of cool potty paper tube crafts lately.  I love crafts that are recycled, upcycled or repurposed as long as they're not too cheesy.  I usually put toilet paper tubes in the same class with yogurt cup lids, pompoms and pipe cleaners.  They're great for kids crafts but I would probably never use them for anything but that.

I may be changing my mind about the toilet paper tubes.  I've seen some pretty spectacular stuff being made out of them recently.  These potty paper tube flowers are not spectacular, but they were quick and easy to make and I kinda like them.  I made them with the intention of painting them but then I decided I like the natural look so I left them.  For the centers I used little cardboard numbers and some bottle caps because they were the right size and I could find them without too much effort.

The stems are paper tubes made from magazine pages.  I chose to use those also because they were sort of lying within easy reach.  That's my design criteria.  The best material for a project is the material I can reach without having to get off the couch.  It's also nice to have an ample supply of whatever material I'm working with which is another benefit of the tubes.  Everyone in my house has some form of IBS so we always have a LOT of empty toilet paper tubes on hand. 
 
I saw some stunning coffee filter roses on a blog recently but I didn't want to take the time to paint these so I decided to leave them plain and see what happened.  I think they turned out great.  Jayson has our good camera and these bad cell phone pics don't show the detail very well but they're pretty darn realistic.  I used a dress pattern for the...uuhhh...whatchamacallits.  Calyx?  I think that's right.  And I wrapped the stems with twine just to be different.

The vase is filled with little origami stars.  It actually needs some more but if I do too many in one sitting my hands seize up.  Not because I'm old and arthritic but because I have wrist parts missing due to a surgery made necessary by a birth defect which was probably caused by generations of intermarrying on my mother's side of the family.  That's right, I will admit to a branchless family tree before I admit to arthritis.