I tend to view myself as a fairly lazy person.  I really, really like to sit on the couch and drink coffee and watch movies.  And the sleep, I love to sleep.  Since we have declared 2010 to be The Year of Making It Happen, I got to thinking about what I accomplished last year.  So, I started a list:

• Ran a half marathon
• Knit my first sweater 
• Started composting 
• Built a raised bed veggie garden and learned about gardening
• Planted spring and fall crops
• Got engaged
• Hosted a party for 75 of my closest friends on my birthday
• Bought a road bike and started to ride distances
• Competed in my first Duathlon and several road races (fun)
• Organized a wedding 
• Got married
• Started to tinker and come up with some of my own knitting patterns
• Had a work related article/paper published in an Australian periodical
• Worked full time +
• Travelled to (for work and play): Waterloo, Virginia, Seattle, Vancouver, Vancouver Island, Toronto (Oakville), Panama City (Florida Ironman), Denver, Amarillo, Austin

I may have just changed my opinion of myself!

This weekend, I made significant progress on my organization project.  I started by corralling up all the paper piles and boxes in the house and dividing it into pre-shacking up and post-shacking up content.  I managed to sort through all the post-shacking up papers (the majority of what was out in the open and cluttering up the house) and divided them into recycling/shredding or keep/file.

I took a large garbage bag of shredded paper to the local fundraising recycling drop off a few hours ago.  I also figured out what to file where in two small accordian filers that I bought at Office Max last spring (from their very pretty DiVoga Mod Line).  They will accomodate most of the important papers that we need to file with the exception of some monthly financial statements.  The statements come pre-punched with three-ring binder holes so I am going to file them separately in a binder.  Finally, I contacted some companies who we have done business with in the past that mail us statements and updates and asked to stop receiving these catalogs and reports.

Things left to do:

• Acquire binder, file financial statements.
• Sort through old, old papers.  These are three boxes of papers that moved over here from our respective individual homes about 18 months ago.  This does not count Patrick’s random boxes in the garage.  I have no idea what he is hiding out there.
• Recycle and shred as much of the pre-shacking up papers as possible, try to find a home for anything important in existing expanding folders with records from that era.
• Todays sorting resulted in a pile of MacLean’s and Real Simple magazines that I want to look at before recycling.  This will be my reading material for the next few weeks when the hubbie is in charge of channel surfing.

So far, I have used existing bins (from the Casual Home line at Target) and files.  I am going to look at work for an old binder which would have otherwise been thrown out.  The one thing I am contemplating buying to finish off the project is some sort of magazine rack for our family room so that our magazines don’t clutter up the coffee table.  I’m a bit stuck though - not sure where it would go in the room and some initial web-browsing didn’t yield any that I really liked.

P.S.  I have fallen back in love with my label maker.  Who knows what labels Patrick will come back to when he returns on Friday!

One of the big elements of clutter around our house is paper.  Yes, we have signed up for paperless billing and have removed our names from catalog and other junk mail lists, but we still have a lot of paper products coming into our house.  And paper is one thing that I just can’t bear to throw out - it’s just so easy to recycle! 

Since we bought our house a year and a half ago, we haven’t really been able to settle on a system which we both can live with and adhere to when it comes to mail, recycling, keeping important papers.  As a consequence, we have piles of paper stowed here and there and a constant pile of mail on our coffee table.  We lose important papers and have had a streak of being late with a couple of our bills.

Thus, the goals of this project are to:

• Move our paper intake, sorting and recycling area to a more convenient and accessible location.  Right now we don’t really have a system, so one day the mail gets put in one location and one day it goes into another.
• Re-purpose our existing mail sorting baskets to support our new process.  About 6 months ago, we bought bins from target which were “his” and “hers”.  This worked for a couple months until both our bins got full and we started to get confused about which bin was which.  Now, we will go with a “To Be Acted Upon” and a “To Be Filed System”.  This should better suit our needs and help us with some of our issues of losing important things.
• Put in place a filing system and process.  Right now we have a year and a half of back log, stashed here and there.  We will file at least monthly, if not more frequently.
• Work through and purge all the backlog.  My plan is to put it all into one place and go through it all at once.
• See if there are any more mailings that we can eliminate.  See if we can get some of our bills synched up to the start of the month and get rid of the paper bills.  Right now we use the paper bills as a reminder to pay!  If everything was lined up, we could go online once a month and deal with it.

The budget for this project is $50 or less.  We may need some filing bins, but basically we have most of the elements - we just need to reorganize and set an ongoing process so we don’t get into this mess (pardon the pun) again.

My goal is to get the majority of this done before the end of January.  Patrick will have to deal with some of the backlog and he is going away for the last week of January - so his part may bleed into February.  We are also going to the Olympics in February, so I want to be 100% complete before we leave.  Updates and photos as I work through - blogging this is mostly for my own benefit so that I actually follow through and get this done!

I’ve never been one for making New Year’s resolutions.  I have held the belief that if I want to make a change, I shouldn’t have to wait for January 1 to start the process.  While this has worked in the past, at this point in my life I feel like I have a very, very long laundry list of “Things to get done”.  I thought about it a lot this week and chatted with my friend, Shannon, about things that we would like to cross off our lists this year.

I manage a lot of projects for work and I started to ponder why I don’t apply these same concepts to the laundry list of to do’s.  And so evolved the concept of grouping my laundry list into “themes” to be managed in one to two month segments throughout 2010.  These are the rules (using the term rules loosely here):

• I will manage these work packages like I would any work project.
• They will thus have phases:  Design, Implement, Commission and Transition to Maintenance.
• I won’t restrict myself to a specific time-frame until after the design.  That way, I can take into account the amount of work and our schedule.  I anticipate that most “themes” should take 1-2 months.

At this same time that I was pondering committing myself to this,  I was eagerly anticipating Sara’s naming of 2010.  Each year, she begins the year by “naming” it.  (I can’t seem to remember what last year was.  Shame on me.)  We started discussing this today and I suggested “The Year of Getting It Done”.  Coincidentally, she was already leaning towards “The Year of Making It Happen”.  And so it has been appropriately named!

So, the first theme in My Year of Making It Happen will be Paper.

At our house, we don’t do well with our current recycling system, we need to elimate receiving paper, plus we don’t have a good system for filing and thus have a backlog of stacks of paper around.  Because of this, we lose important papers and have missed paying bills on time.  We need to come up with a plan to eliminate non-essential mail, a better recycling system, a better way to tackle important things that do come in the mail, deal with the disorganized backlog.  I will better define the problem and solution over the next week.

Like many people out there, I am hoping that writing this down and getting back on the blog wagon will help push me along.  I have definitely noticed increased rss feed coming from many blogs that I track this week!

P.S.  As I went to categorize this post, I found that I already have a “Making It Happen” tag.  Looks like I’ve tried this before - better wish me luck!

Every since I knit Saartje’s Bootees for the first time, I’ve wanted to try to make a larger version of the pattern for myself.  I finally got around to trying this last month - just in time to make them as Christmas presents!  I am posting the pattern mods here and linking it to my project on ravelry.  One day, I might write this up as a “real” pattern.

I started with the larger bootie pattern and altered it.  On attempt number one, I just scaled the pattern up (photo included in rav project).  Unfortunately, the resulting toe was far too boxy for my foot and the proportions (length:width:height) were all wrong for what I believe to be a normal, adult foot (my foot!).  Therefore, I altered the pattern as follows (by knitting the slipper over, and over, and over again):

• I reduced the toe increases so that the toe isn’t nearly as wide
• I appropriately altered the toe decreases based on the increase modifications.
• I extended the length of the foot.  The resulting slipper is longer and and less “boxy” than proportions of the original baby bootie.
• Finally, I modified the straps so that I knit a button hole directly into the ends rather than adding a button loop during finishing.  I love the button loop, but it just added to much to the finishing time and, frankly, I hate finishing.
• I knit this all in one yarn.  I’m just too lazy to switch colours!  That’s why I love variegated yarn for this pattern.

The pattern below gave me a slipper which is 8.75 inches from heel to toe when lying flat.  This stretches comfortably to fit a size 7 or 7.5 women’s foot in the yarn that I used.  It could probably go up to a size 8, but I noticed when I knit some of my prototypes too short the heel would be pulled down and start to slip off, making the slipper a little uncomfortable.

I usually wear a women’s 6.5 and have very narrow feet and I feel like the pattern below is just a little too long for me.  Of course, if knit with a different yarn, this may be just right.

I used 90% (90 of 100 g) of a skein of Katia, Peru yarn and size 9 needles.  I originally tried this with some Lion Brand Homespun, but the yarn just didn’t have enough rigidity to hold the shape of the slipper and the results didn’t fit well and were unattractive in my opinion.

In an attempt to create more affordable slippers (<$5/pair), I have also purchased some Paton's Shetland Chunky.  The Katia yarn made the slippers end up at about $11 per pair.  I'm hoping to find some washable, variegated yarn with little acrylic to use for knitting several pairs of these to use as Christmas gifts.  I think the variegated yarn just gives the baby booties a little extra cuteness...so I'm going to see if it does the same thing for the grown up version.

Gauge:  15 stitches and 16 rows (garter stitch ridges) = 4 inches in garter stitch on US 9, 5.5 mm needles.

Other Notes: Where it says “k to m”, you should knit to the marker, move the marker and then do the next stitch listed.  When I knit this pattern for the first time, I had to think about that one. Also, I’ve never seen kbf in a pattern before, but I’ve seen kfb.  In any case, I’ve actually been doing a kbf for this pattern - I’m not sure if it makes a difference or not!

This pattern is knit flat and then seamed down the back of the heel and along the middle of the sole.

Pattern

Strap #1: Turn your work normally and start to work on the first set of 16 stitches.  The other 16 stitches (for the second strap) will just hang out on the far end of your needle, harmlessly.

Strap #2:

Please leave a comment if you knit these!  I’m will knit them in a few different yarns and establish some different sizes and yarn suggestions.  Then I will publish the pattern on ravelry for free (after I ask Saartje!).  I would love to know how the pattern worked for you and what yarn/needles you used.     

Disclaimer:  I am by no means a pattern designer, and this is the first time I’ve really experimented with my knitting!  Use this pattern at your own risk!

I hereby declare the rest of September to be “fall cleaning” (part) month.  We’re making some strides on decluttering paperwork today and I’m hoping to keep the momentum.  I am going through the mailing-list removal process again.  It seems that all the people I had blocked previously, have free reign since we moved a year ago.  So, here we go again.

I also purged four inch worms off of my freshly planted broccoli and cauliflower this morning.

beach

sun

family

blue sky

salmon

cake slide 

art

toasts

rice-attack

deck

dancing

rcmp

wine hiding

kissing

happy

bliss 

I know our wedding is close because we are on the 10 day weather forecast!  In the past twelve years or so, I do not EVER remember it raining when we have been there.  So, I’m choosing NOT to believe it.

  

present

Originally uploaded by seejanebe

So far, we’ve been able to recycle or reuse almost all of the packaging from our wedding gifts. The one item that is stumping me though is this Crate & Barrel ribbon. I have admittedly already thrown some out. I subsequently felt very, very guilty.  Am I alone in feeling guilt everytime I throw an item out which seems like it will take decades to decompose out there in a landfill?

Any ideas as to what I can do with all this Crate & Barrel ribbon? If it weren’t for the store name stamped all over it, it would actually be quite lovely…

P.S. My future hubbie is a very good sport.

 

wedding shoes

Originally uploaded by seejanebe

Since my wedding dress is tea length and off white, I’ve been toying with the idea of wearing some coloured, retro-ish pumps with it. I pretty much gave up on finding matching shoes, and really, I’m not so matchy matchy.

Turns out lots of people wear coloured shoes - but mostly red or blue pumps and neither of those are really me. I was thinking orange or green would be cool, but had pretty much given up hope of finding something in those colours after browsing on zappos.com, nordie’s and dsw for the past few weeks.

Yesterday on the way home from work I decided that it was time to bite the bullet and try to get the shoe thing done. I stopped at one DSW and didn’t find much. Honestly, all of the pumps had SUPER high heels (3 inches plus) which, when your feet are only about 8 or 9 inches long, causes your footsies to be at a very steep angle! I was ready to give up hope, but decided to push on to a second location where I found these beauties.

The called to me from down the aisle, and I had to reign myself in from sprinting toward them. There were only two pairs and one was in my size! And PRADA? Are you kidding me? I’ve never owned shoes that cost as much as a laptop or camera. Their BOX is nicer than most things that I own.

They were originally on sales from $650 to $499. However, this pair was an additional 70% off. FATE. I clutched the box to my chest and roamed the store like a crazy lady. No one could have separated me from that box. The shoes feel like butter on my feet and smell like Italy.

Yay! Green shoes!