I'm FLYing!

At least I guess I am. I have routines in place, and they get done on a semi-regular basis. I'm not perfect, but in general the house goes from pretty darn clean to just somewhat messy over the week. Sometimes it gets worse than I can stand, and honestly we did about 4 hours of work this weekend to clean it up, but that involved a lot of re-arranging furniture to make the house for people-friendly.

Anyway, I think having more time helps, as does the lack of killer sinus headaches all the time. But really, you know what helped the most? Finally ditching all of my cool Web 2.0 ideas for tracking my to do list. I've tried Outlook's to do list, various calandars and to do list applications and web sites... and finally I just got a notebook and some clear folder and a dry erase marker. And you know what? It works best. It's simple and you don't have to do a lot of work if you've missed things. I always spent so much time trying to get my online to do lsits caught up with where I really was, or I'd forget to check things off, or whatever. I was so sure I'd like to have a graph to display and show myself improving, but you know what? I never had enough data or accurate data to ever do that.

But I do have a clean house and just a small notebook of tasks.

Test of the mail posting

This is only a test

Little Miss Muffet

So, here I am, minding my own business, working on tonight's dinner. I had the pan on the stove, heating some oil and getting ready to brown some meat for my famous crockpot chili. I turn around to dice some veggies, and when I turn back this pale little spider is dangling right above my pot! I turned around again to grab a cup so I could escort him outside... and suddenly hear a hissing sound.

You guessed it. And the poor spider lost a leg and started climbing up as fast as he could. I managed to rescue him at that point and take him outside. Then I scrubbed the pot in hot, hot water until my hands hurt. Ick!

But that's far preferable to the time that I made pancakes with old mix and ended up with a bowl full of pancake batter and some weevils floating on top. Ick!

Ever had anything weird wander into your cooking?

Stunned By the CA Homeschooling Decision

For those of you who haven't heard yet (or aren't obsessed with homeschooling news), on February 28th, a court made a very sweeping decision about a case involving homeschooling. The family wasn't a member of HSLDA, so pretty much no one had heard of this case until it was decided.

I wasn't concerned at first.... until I read the details of the decision, which pretty much interpreted the laws to basically make homeschooling illegal in CA.

It will be very interesting to see how this plays out. If I'm not compltely satisfied with any new decision made on this, I'm moving from this insane place, for certain.