Routines, Starting and Breaking

Clock found here.

You guys. I've been having SUCH a hard time getting used to my new routine. It's totally strange; my old job had completely unpredictable hours, whereas my new job is a strictly 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. affair, with the occasional work event. It also eliminated my previous 30-minute commute.

And yet. I'm having the hardest time getting a handle on meal-planning, working in time to work out, etc. Do you guys experience this? It's interesting how changing the way I spend a few hours a week has such an effect on the hours I'm not at work! 

This has led to probably more pizza nights than I care to admit. Do any of you have any tips on how you set a routine? Do you set certain days aside for certain tasks? I'll take any advice I can get! Or we can just vent about how being a grown-up is hard. That always works.

Share Your Packing Tips!

 Photo of Anita Ekberg packing to come to America, LIFE Magazine 1951

I didn't intend on making this a travel-themed week, but you guys had a couple great packing tips to share after my Hunter Boots post yesterday and now I'm wondering what other packing secrets you're harboring.

I'm the kind of person who either packs perfectly or does a nightmarish job of it, usually depending on how much time I took to do it and how much I know about the trip. My mom, for as long as I've known her, has literally made a strict wardrobe guide for each day of a trip, which is fine but doesn't leave room for changing one's mind on a whim. 

Here are the only tips I have:

• Pack a bag for laundry
• Pack an extra tote or empty duffel for souvenirs, either to carry on the plane back or just to carry your stuff back to the car easier.
• Don't stress too much about packing toiletries...you can almost always get what you need at your destination if necessary.
• Try to pack basic colors, with colorful accents. Don't pack too many items that don't match anything else. (I'm still working on learning that lesson!)
• Pack band-aids or a blister guard in your purse if you expect to do a lot of walking. I have spent SO many trips dipping in and out of Duane Reades and Rite-Aids to buy band-aids for my blisters.
• If you can, wear flats in the airport. It makes security checks SO much easier.

My friend Sarah cleverly suggested packing items inside of my wellies if I put them in my suitcase...sounds like the perfect spot for tights, socks and — on the way home — laundry bags.

Now what tips do you guys have? I'm especially interested in lessons you learned when you traveled internationally for the first time!

Senior girl leaves Monticello College, June 1946. LIFE photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt

New Uses for Common Items

Since I joined Pinterest, I'm always finding the cleverest "Real Simple"-style new uses for common items. I have yet to actually use any of these tips, but I thought I'd share some of the ones that really blew me away:

Use a hanger to store glasses/sunglasses!

Use a pull tab to hang art!

Use rain gutters as small bookshelves!

Use a tension rod to store spray bottles!

Or, use tension rods to create the perfect slots for platters, cutting boards and pans.

How about you guys? Any super clever use/reuse tricks up your sleeves?

New Use for Refrigerators

I recently went to my friend Miranda's childhood home and while giving a tour, she asked us to guess how many refrigerators her family had. I thought maybe two, one for the kitchen and one for the garage? But no...I was nowhere close.

I lost count, but I think we tallied 4 or 5. Miranda was asking a trick question, but we couldn't have known. That's because when refrigerators have stopped working over the years, her thrifty dad has turned them into basement storage.

Before you get all judgy about whether that's really aesthetically pleasing, take a look at that fridge! The man has neatly organized all the tools and maintenance equipment in the house, reusing jars as storage while he's at it. I was totally impressed.

Obviously I won't be doing anything like this anytime soon, since I don't have a fridge on the fritz, but I was blown away by her dad's ingenuity. That's kind of the opposite of newly domesticated, isn't it?

Climbing the Laundry Mountain

This is a picture of my weekend. So. Much. Laundry.

We've talked about this before, but if there is one major area in which I'm not remotely domesticated, it's laundry. I don't:

• Do it every week, even though I have a washer and dryer.
• Hang up my clean clothes.
• Put my dirty clothes in the hamper.
• Change my sheets as quickly as I should.

It's kind of a problem. I spent ALL of Sunday doing laundry and when I say all, I mean ALL. I washed everything in the house: clothes, sheets, towels, rugs, dish towels. It was kind of ridiculous. My dryer literally sighed during that last load.

So my point is, what little tricks do you guys use to keep your dirty clothes in check? Any super-secret good tips? I could use them.

Journalist Gifts

So, obviously, not all of my readers are journalists or have a journalist on their shopping list. But I strangely have a slew of journalists on my shopping list and as one, I'm always on the lookout for great journo gifts. Here are my picks:

When I was a very young child, about 6 or 7, someone bought my father a board game called "Headlines." To play the game, every person chose about five cards and tried to assemble a funny headline out of it and someone judged each round to pick the best (sorta similar to Apples to Apples). I don't know if that game exists anymore, but Man Bites Dog seems like a similar and cheaper option.

I've been a lifelong newspaper reader, but even I have days where I wrestle with the cheap paper pages and get super frustrated. A coffee shop in Staunton called Coffee On the Corner keeps these Alessi Newspaper Readers on hand and they're awesome. They retail for about $65.

My childhood home (and my adulthood home, unfortunately) was littered with old newspapers, many of which we held onto because we needed them for contests or posterity or because we're packrats. At least this $55 wire newspaper rack could help keep them straight and tidy.

And last, but not least, Save Journalist T-shirts found here.

Cord solutions from Apartment Therapy

Finally! A genius solution for getting all those computer/printer/scanner/charger cords up off the ground: rain gutters!

Unplgged featured this genius idea of mounting rain gutters and tucking all the wires inside. So simple, and cost around $30. 

More creative hanging ideas

Design Sponge featured some pictures of rooms decorated for Housingwerk's Design on a Dime event. Her entry is full of inspiration, but I fell for the idea of mounting clipboards and using them to display a series of sketches. So easy, quirky and fun. And how great do they all look lined up in rows?

In case you missed it, I also featured Apartment Therapy's skirt hanger display idea here.

One-month status report: Still Undomesticated

It has almost been a month since I moved in with Sean and a lot has changed.

I got engaged! So that's big.

I cooked three types of meat!

I unpacked most of our stuff, and organized the closets.

I got really good about washing dishes immediately.

I broke my camera. That's not a good one.

But a couple big things have not changed.



I still get too lazy to cook, but at least I'm trying to eat at home. Today I had an Italian sandwich — ham, salami, pepperoni, provolone, lettuce and balsamic vinegar. I've had pork tenderloin in the fridge, ready to go, that I've been putting off for days. I'm kind of a bum.



But more importantly, I never, ever put the laundry away. Does anyone else do this? It's a weird strain of laziness that makes no real sense, but seems to afflict many. I think part of the problem is the urgency associated with laundry; you're out of underwear, so you have to do it ASAP. You know it'll take a long time, so you pop it in and when it finishes drying, you know you have to fold it ASAP to avoid wrinkling. And by the time you've gone through this with two or more loads, you're just too worn out to go hang it all up. If I did all of that, laundry would be a full-time job! So when I ran out of hampers to stash my clean laundry in, I just laid it on top of the washer and dryer. I HAVE A PROBLEM HERE, PEOPLE! But sigh, it's just so nice outside. Too nice to hang my laundry up.

Piggy Pig Pig

I may be a novice, but I know a few things. One of the things I didn't have to be taught was to cook with kosher salt. It's coarser (which I love), perfect for pinching and it's blessed by a rabbi, which is always crucial.

I had my eye on the Nigella Lawson salt pig available at Bliss Home, but being unemployed + cheap, I didn't want to pay shipping. So I ventured out to my local Target, Bed, Bath and Beyond and World Market and came up completely empty. I couldn't find a salt pig ANYWHERE and I had two store salespeople ask me, "Salt what?" Ultimately, I bought a small glass spice jar from World Market for $2 and I imagine that will work fine for now.

Kosher salt lovers, where do you store your precious mineral?

genius!

Apartment Therapy had an awesome post today about framing odd-sized posters. Use one or two skirt hangers (probably not the cheap plastic ones from Old Navy that populate my closet) to pull the poster taut. Seriously, this is genius for me because I have SO many awkwardly sized prints and too few dollars to buy Ribba frames at IKEA.

Find the Apartment Therapy post here.