Happy Friday!  Sorry for the delay in posting today and the lack of post yesterday, I’ve been having internet trouble associated with the move, but that’s all been fixed now, so we’ll be back on track next week.

Anywho, back on track.  This week I’m putting up a song that, while it isn’t new, is so happy and so upbeat that I thought it was absolutely perfect for a warm, summery Friday: “It’s Good to Be Us” by Bucky Covington (who, by the way, reminds me of what a Confederacy General might look like if he was dropped into today’s world – weird but true).  To go with that today I put together a perfect summer dinner recipe: Beer Can Chicken, Strawberry Salad with Poppy Seed Dressing, and Corn on the Cob.  So, without any further ado, here’s the music video and the recipe.  Enjoy!

Beer Can Chicken, Strawberry Salad, and Corn on the Cob

Ingredients for Beer Can Chicken (from Food Network)

• 1 (4 pound) whole chicken
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 2 tablespoons salt (I like mine with less, but this is the actual recommended amount)
• 1 teaspoon black pepper
• 3 tablespoons of your favorite dry spice rub
• 1 can beer

Ingredients for Strawberry Salad with Poppy Seed Dressing (from Cooking Light)

• 3  tablespoons  sugar
• 3  tablespoons  light mayonnaise
• 2  tablespoons  fat-free milk
• 1  tablespoon  poppy seeds
• 1  tablespoon  white wine vinegar
• 1  (10-ounce) bag romaine lettuce
• 1  cup  sliced strawberries
• 2  tablespoons  slivered almonds, toasted

Ingredients for the rest of dinner

• Corn on the cob (1 per person)
• Dinner rolls (if desired)
• Light beer (Cooking Light recommends Sam Adams Light or Yuengling Light, I’m good with either!)

Directions

• Start grill heating.  The chicken will need to cook over medium-high indirect heat.
• Prepare chicken (remove neck and giblets, rinse, pat dry), rub chicken lightly with oil, then rub the chicken inside and out with salt, pepper, and dry rub.
• Open beer can, drink half (seriously, that’s actually an instruction!), and then put the can on a solid surface. With a chicken leg in each hand, plop the chicken onto the beer can.
• Transfer the chicken to the grill grate, balancing the chicken on its two legs and the can.  The chicken then needs to cook, with the grill cover on, for 75 minutes (until the breast temperature is 165 and the thigh is 180).
• When the chicken is twenty minutes away from being done, clean and chop up strawberries for the salad and rinse the lettuce.
• When the chicken is ten minutes away from being done, start husking the corn.
• When the chicken is five minutes away from being done, start a large pot of water boiling for the corn (give yourself more time if its going to be a larger pot).
• When the chicken is done, remove it from the grill and put it on the cutting board, but don’t cut it yet.  Give it ten minutes to rest.
• While the chicken is resting put the corn in the boiling water, return the water to a boil, and boil the corn for 5-7 minutes.  Also, mix the first five ingredients of the salad together in a small bowl.  In a salad bowl put the lettuce, strawberries, and almonds, and then add the dressing.
• Carve the chicken, get the corn out of the water, and serve up the salad (and dinner rolls if you want them), open a can of beer, and enjoy!

Have a great weekend, and check back next week!  I have a big announcement, we’ll finish up the organizing posts (once you’ve had time over the weekend to finish out your timetable and purge all your old stuff), and there’s going to be an awesome Wedding Wednesday.

See you on Monday!

Once again, there have been rumors of marriage around some of my friends, meaning that I’ve already started to get waaaaaay too excited.  Usually I can distance myself from a wedding inspiration board, but as people I know start to get engaged I start to put my own taste in.  And weddings in my style mean comfortable, traditional, a little vintage, and very family-oriented.  And party barns!  Mmmm, party barns.  I haven’t forgotten about you my friends, I’ve just been busy!

Anyway, enough talking to inanimate objects.  Time for today’s wedding board!  (by the way, how cute is that dog?!?!)

And just because I’m so excited, here’s another one:

Now that you’re on track with storing and organizing your time, the next step is to get  prepared to really start organizing your surroundings.  The first steps in this process are purging and grouping your items.  This is, honestly, the hardest part of the process.  It requires you to go through all of the areas that you hope to organize and get rid of anything that’s holding you back.  So, before you begin purging, I’d recommend these preparation steps:

1. Clean up a bit.  It’ll be easier to really look through what you have if all of your sweaters are in the closet, all of your books are at least near the shelf, and all of your dishes are in the kitchen.  Otherwise you risk having to repeat the process ad nauseum as you find more objects that should have already been organized.

via Martha Stewart (who, by the way, has an awesome "Homekeeping Handbook" that has excellent cleaning instructions for everything!)

2. Mentally prepare yourself.  Try to get yourself into a mindset where you can get rid of things.  If you start the process thinking that you’re only going to be able to get rid of 1% of your items, then you’ll end up getting nothing accomplished.  You should also prepare yourself for the fact that you won’t be able to get everything done in one day (unless you live in a very small apartment, and even then it’ll be a stretch).  Even if you could fit it in timewise, purging can be emotionally exhausting, so don’t push yourself too hard.  Just get ready to tackle one or two rooms/areas.  Set aside a couple hours per room or large area, or just one hour for smaller areas (like bookshelves or linen closets).

via Beach Float Abroad

3. Get your tools together.  You’ll need several boxes or bags (I prefer bags for clothes and soft items and boxes for heavy or unwieldy items), the exact number will be dependent on how much you have to donate, throw away, repair, or keep.

Now you’re ready to begin purging!  Purging is a fairly simple process, and you can adapt it to fit your needs.  But there’s one hard and fast rule of purging that I like to follow: don’t start a room or area if you can’t finish it before you go to sleep. Purging is NOT something you want to sleep on; it’s an instinctive, intuitive, spontaneous process, and stretching it out over more than one day will give you too much opportunity to think up excuses to keep something.  If you have to think up an excuse to keep it, get rid of it.

To start purging, get your clearly marked boxes and bags ready, and pull absolutely everything out of the area that you’re trying to clean.  If it’s a closet, make sure that closet is completely empty.  This makes sure that nothing goes back in the closet with you thinking about it first.  If you’re doing a whole room, like an attic, do it in sections.

For each item, look at it and decide whether to donate it (to a friend, to Goodwill, to a sister, to a traveling circus, to a community theater, to whomever), pitch it (or compost or recycle), repair it (only do this if either of the following is true: a – you can repair the item yourself in a reasonable amount of time, or b – the cost of the repair is less than the value of the item), or keep it (whether to be used daily or to be stored more permanently, such as in a small memory box).   Then, once you’re done purging, look at your piles.  If your keep pile seems too big, keep in mind that the purpose of this process is to get rid of the things that are holding you back, go through the keep pile again.  Repeat the process as often as you need to until the keep pile is small enough to comfortably fit in the area where it’s supposed to be.

via kinowear

Once everything has been separated, go ahead and make an immediate trip to Goodwill, the recycling center, the trash can, the shredder, or the repair shop.  Follow your instinct on purging (unless of course your instinct tells you that a teal bridesmaid dress with a giant bow will ever be worn again), and you’ll be on the right track.

Now, the hard part is to resist the urge to automatically start organizing everything.  Instead, group the keep pile into a couple large groups: (1) going into permanent storage, (2) going into seasonal storage, or (3) going into day-to-day use.  Clean up the day to day use items a bit (i.e. get candy out of coat pockets).  Then leave the piles alone until you’ve repeated this process for every area that you intend to purge and organize.  If you’re going through a large area, such as an entire house, it might be helpful to put all the permanent storage items in one room, all the seasonal storage items in another, and put the day-to-day use items in the room where they’ll be used on a daily basis.

And that’s it for today!  Check back tomorrow for advice and strategies for the next step: large scale organization!

Weekly TimetableAs we’re preparing to move, I’m noticing more and more how much we rely on proper storage.  Mostly because our storage containers are already packed and full of things, and everything else is just running around loose.  And it’s driving me crazy!  Oh well, tomorrow we get to unpack and organize things (I LOVE that part!) and then things will calm down.  A little bit.  Maybe.

Anyway, storage is a problem that most people face without knowing it.  I spent years in high school and college convinced that I lacked the ability to be clean.  What I really lacked was the ability to purge the old/bad/stained/useless/broken/etc. and so I was left with waaaaay too much stuff that just didn’t fit the space I had.  However, as that space got smaller over the years, from my beautiful childhood bedroom that was as spacious as a kid could ask for, to a college dorm, to a tiny room in an apartment, to our current apartment, I’ve learned to get rid of the items that I don’t need.  This has two benefits: (1) I use what I have more often which results in less shopping, and (2) I know what I have to store and I’m more aware of the space I have available to store it.  So, to sum up, I’ve gotten a lot better at cleaning and organizing over the last several years (which is great because I was awful at it as a child).

But today’s post is not about my ability to be clean or organized, it’s about everybody’s ability to stay clean and organized.  To live a clean and orderly life the first steps are to get rid of the things that hold you down.  These can be anything from the old socks that have no matches anymore to the tennis lessons that you hate going to but feel like you have to.  Once you’ve pared your life down to the items that are essential to your happiness, staying clean and organized gets a lot easier.  There are four different types of organization (at least to my understanding): (1) small-scale storage and organization, (2) mid-scale storage and organization, (3) large-scale storage and organization, and (4) time “storage” and organization.

via Real Simple

It’s easiest to start with the end of the list and work your way backwards when, like me, you’re trying to get your life in order.  There are two basic components to the last step, time “storage” and time organization.  Time organization is simple enough to understand, it’s how you order your time.  Time storage means setting time aside for yourself and your family, however you define that and whomever you include in that definition.

Pottery Barn's Pocketwatch Clock

Organizing your time, like organizing anything else, begins with a full understanding of how you spend your time.  For one week, copy the image below if you wish, write down how you spend your day.  You don’t have to include the start and end time, simply put the task (chores) and the time (1.5 hours).   It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it should be enough to let you know how you spent your day.

At the end of the week, see how much time spend on doing things that are neither productive nor pleasant.  Sometimes you need to bite the bullet and do something because it needs to get done, but if you’re spending 4 hours a week taking a yoga class that you absolutely hate because it’s cool to do yoga, then that’s a waste of time.  Also, you might see that you spend too little or too much time on something, and that will allow you to alter your schedule.  For example, I spend a lot of time driving, so I try to go the library on a weekly or biweekly basis and get books on CD.  This both helps me enjoy my drive more and means that I don’t have to spend some of the little time at home that I get with Marty with my nose buried in a book (I can’t give up reading, and Marty would never ask me to, but conversation is a nice change of pace).

via Country Living

After you’ve gone through your week and gotten rid of the unproductive and unpleasant time wasters, see how much new extra time you have.  And leave it alone!  By not overbooking yourself every day you’ll have more time to perform your best in all of the activities that you do have scheduled.  Plus maybe you’ll finally have time to finish that book, or, better yet, get the rest of your life in order so that you have to spend less time each week getting organized!  Tomorrow we’ll talk about large-scale storage, then mid-scale storage, and finally small-scale storage, so be sure to stop by!

One of my favorite things to do in the summer is wear white.  It’s always crisp, refreshing, and makes you feel a little lighter.  Here’s my favorite white pieces for summer, all $50 or less.  Enjoy, and try not to overheat!