It's me again!

It's been - ages?  A year?  More?  Less?  So - nutshell version:  May 2012, graduated teacher training.  August 2012, opened Dancing Dogs Yoga - Augusta.  Some more training happened over the fall.  Last week of February 2013, completed Level One training with Baron Baptiste - and was supposed to be in Level Two in Mexico right now, but I zinged my back and got some bed rest time.  Level Two will be in Austin, TX this coming October.  Uh - I got a new car, because Baby the Cabrio informed me he was ready to retire, and started another blog - - but am too attached to this one to let it go.  So I decided to share my varied and growing collection of life hacks here, along with ideas for staycations, personalized retreats, grilling tips, domestic horror stories, time management booyahs, and anything else that has helped me streamline how incredibly busy my life has become over the past twelve months.  Seriously, folks, my mind is as such that I need a place for my musings and another for the collection of harebrained schemes that honestly seem to make my life run more smoothly or make me so happy I squeal.  Or not.  Sometimes the not is dead-on entertaining (but we will never speak of the pizza crust that baked up three inches thick).

What's happening now is I'm in a state of shock over my house.  It needs work, it needs help, and I need help getting to work on it.  I've been through a series of starts that I let life interfere with, and during my recent down time I started researching plans and approaches that helped other people transform chaotic spaces into kickass pads.  Yesterday, I freshened up the bedroom, lit some Nag Champa, and got to work drafting a plan.  (The bedroom was step one - - I need a haven from the chaos that's about to come out of the chaos as the transformation gets underway.)

My original idea was to do what I did when I moved into this place and was struggling with organizing/cleaning/unpacking.  I went through area by area, and made a plan that consisted of one big project and two or three small ones per day.  But this time, I needed an extra kick to decide to where to start, and I don't just want a quick fix - - I want to get down to the nitty gritty and give this place some soul, so instead of unpack/arrange/have a beer it's clean and purge/repair/decorate/have a party.  That seemed a little more daunting, so much so that I couldn't decide where to begin.  How did I finally decide the starting point (other than setting up the bedroom haven)?  One very important question:

*What pisses me off the most?*

Yep.  If you're wondering where to start on a household project, ask yourself that.  It works!  What's pissing you off the most?  And it's totally not focusing on something bad, it's kicking yourself into gear to take on what needs to be taken on.  Once I wrote that part of it down and started working on it, my whole day brightened up.  Ideas started popping.  Next up:

*What do I do every day?*

For me, that meant work on the bathroom, my closet, and the kitchen next.  And finally:

*What is the BIG THING that's going to take a few days?*

Boom.  Storage room.  May the gods have mercy on my soul.

From there it was a matter of working out everything in between the every day things and the big thing.   I even set up a notebook so I can keep all of this in one place - my detailed to-do's are at the front with a tabbed-off section for shopping lists, one section is becoming an arsenal of DIY cleaning supplies and repair how-to's, and another houses the numerous brainstorms I'm known for generating - everything from how to turn bi-fold doors into a headboard to what size dome tent will fit on my deck for back yard glamping.  This isn't so much to create a reference book as it is to help me not lose things in my ever-moving shuffle of notes in my hot pink field guide (aka my Filofax).  I'm still trying to generate a name for it - - thought about Black Mamba, since it's a black spiral notebook.  But I don't like snakes.  Anyway...

Consider yourself updated!  I'm off to wrap up today's list and get more ideas into my still-nameless notebook.