Hey, come and join me as I play in the kitchen with my low-carb friend the artichoke. Not friends with Arti yet? You will be! Did you know that artichokes have more antioxidants than any other vegetable, are high in fiber and even are good for the liver? Some people actually use artichokes for a hangover remedy, but of course I hope you don't have to enjoy them for that reason! The ancient Greeks and Romans even considered artichokes a delicacy and an aphrodisiac. Who are we to argue with Aristotle? We'll use a few sharp tools and cut our way around the bright green leaves snipping off the pokey ends as we watch out for flying tips. This recipe is gonna be a favorite soon!

So come on into my kitchen and watch me cook them.

Wanting What Others Have Hurts You

“You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.” That quote is by Vernon Howard and he was probably never dazzled by brochures for fancy vacations or a catalogue from William Sonoma. We are continually tempted to buy what we don’t need. 

There was a recent ad on the Internet hawking the latest autumn purses (referred to as bags). It said in the email subject line: 9 Bags You Must Own This Fall. With suggestions like this, it’s no wonder we can hardly move in our closets!

Really the only thing we need to buy regularly is food and gas. Vernon would not be happy with some of my purchases. Like this crab hat my granddaughter Sophia is wearing. What was I thinking? I know, ‘I’ve gotta have it!’

Vernon’s quote resonates with SHEs (Sidetracked Home Executives) because we’ve experienced the clutter and resulting chaos that comes with not learning when enough is enough and being tempted by advertising. Yeah, we have duplicates of many items but that’s only because we lose an item and have to buy another. And yeah, we have more babies than BOs (Born Organized) because we never pay much attention to a calendar.

Easter is April 16 this year!

As we come together to celebrate the awesome miracle of Jesus's Resurrection, the sugar manufacturers have, once again, given us very colorful reminders (if we can make that mental leap) to remember what Easter is really all about. Let those brilliant Peep bunnies remind you of all the people who follow His teachings, and let that collection of multi-colored M&Ms remind you of all of your blessings. Don't EAT them, just let them remind you of how blessed you are and how grateful you are that Jesus did return in love for us all.

With that said, we really need to be careful not to buy into the sugar push in the name of this holy event. We can actually use the ubiquitous goodies to remind us that it's NOT ABOUT SUGAR. Try it the next time you're at the store. The minute your mouth starts to water because you just spied a display of Cadbury Eggs and you remember how much you love them, just swallow, pass the treats and run a quick thank you to Jesus.

I received this email and it's what inspired the subject of my blog today.

        Dear Pam,

If you're concerned about your sugar intake, this is an especially hard time for us. If we're going to stay off the sugar, we've got to just ignore those carb-loaded, chocolate-filled Easter goodies glaring at us from every woman's magazine cover and store shelf, because they'll just tempt us into buying a bunch of sugar and then we'll eat it! (If we don't buy it we can't eat it.)

With the big sugar push on, I got the idea to think up some sugar-free Easter treats and that idea turned into an Eastery way to serve real food. With a few wooden skewers and clay pots, you can get the whole family involved in making festive, affordable, Easter creations for the dinner table or for some festive hors d'oeuvres, that are so easy and fun to make.

Be sure to watch this video and let me show you what I did.

This year, Lent began on March 1 and will end on April 13. They say it’s a 40 day fasting deal, but if you count Sundays it turns out to be 46 days of giving up something that you love and are in the habit of having.

Are you, or do you know anyone who is celebrating this period of restraint? It takes self-discipline to not eat or do something you really love for ten days, let alone 46 days, and when I look back over my 73 years I’ve always admired those who observe Lent. I never have been that disciplined.

Today, March 22, 2017, we’re smack dab in the middle of Lent, and I received this poem from Judith Robinson, an amazing writer and contributor to Club Organized. When I read her poem, I cried. Okay, I didn’t sob and get snot all over the place, but sweet tears of love for women and our humanity dripped, tastefully down my cheeks. Here's her poem with her permission.

What is it really with us women and our appearance? Do we want to look younger or just not look older? When we were children we wanted to be older, that’s why we’d answer, “I’m seven and a half.” But we didn’t think about wanting to look older. I remember being carded in my twenties because I looked younger than 21, but I didn’t have a desire to be or look older, because drinking wasn’t my thing and age really didn’t concern me.

However, at about 35, I started seeing the first signs of looking older, as daring, stray, gray hairs began sprouting at my temples. I paid the kids a penny a hair to pull them. By the time I was 55 my offspring had moved on to better paying jobs and besides if they’d still been willing to work for me, I’d be 2/3s bald.

At 60, I dyed my hair for the first time in my life, but after about four years I let my real color grow out and the gray took over. I also got tired of hearing a wolf whistle, turning around and shocking the life out of some young guy who thought he was going to get the attention of a young chickie only to find an old lady glaring at him. I actually prefer being a “Q-Tip” (that's an appropriate name to describe a person with white hair) because the wolf whistles have stopped and I am officially invisible to the wolves. It’s a good thing. 

How would you like to attend a funeral for the death of your credit cards? That was my goal in 2002, when I faced $26,000 in credit card debt. I’d fallen victim to the lure of fake ownership and the do-it-now-pay-later trap! I’d been having real financial difficulty because my sister was ill and I falsely looked at my credit cards as income, hoping she’d get better and we’d be back in business! I wrote all about it in "The GOOD Book: Get Out Of Debt."

It was during that time that I got real familiar with the “voice” behind my spending behavior. If you are suffering from credit card debt, ask yourself this question: "How old have I been acting to be in the predicament I'm in? My answer to that question was nine years old!

Please Attend an Official Credit Card Funeral

I actually had a funeral for my credit cards because I mourned their death and I wanted closure. They’d become friends that payed me when I didn’t have the money to get what I wanted. Flylady attended, joined by her husband, Robert, who is a real judge and who officiated. So not only did I get the funeral, it was official! And there’s more!

My husband videotaped it! I decided at the time, I should open the funeral up to other mourners and allow them to officially bury their credit cards and the rest is not only entertaining and enlightening it’s history! Don't miss this video.

This blog is brought to you by Sidetracked Home Executives: from pigpen to paradise! It explains why a SHE is called a SHE:

When my sister and I started teaching our system for getting organized, we knew we wanted to name it something catchy. We loved the thought of calling ourselves "Home Executives." We knew we'd never be home executives like our BO (Born Organized) mom who ironed Dad's underwear, baked everything from scratch, kept her high school figure and "freshened up" fifteen minutes before our dad came home from work every night. We didn't care to be THAT organized. We just wanted to be organized enough to have clean, cozy, happy homes.

We liked the sound of SHE and since we had the HE part, all we needed was the "S." The "S" would have to be an adjective to describe the kind of HEs we were. So what kind of Home Executives were we? Scummy didn't describe us; we weren't sloppy, shifty, sneaky, skittish, sassy or stupid either. (Great names for another clan of dwarfs, but not for us.)

One day we were on our way to teach our first class and we went under a railroad bridge and I squealed, "SIDETRACKED"! My sister was driving and she almost ran off the road!

"Sidetracked, where, what?"

"Our "S" word," I beamed.

"Our "S" word?"

"Yeah, for our company name."

"Oh, that "S" word! Hmm, sidetracked, I like that.

"Yeah it's a word that implies temporary."

"And fixable," she added.

Sidetracked: normal, temporary, fixable

When you’re in a horrible mess and you feel overwhelmed with your circumstances, if you attempted to get organized from that place, you’d be like a person drowning in a lake, begging for someone to throw you a rope, or an inner tube, or a book on “How to Swim.” (If you know how to swim, then you know that this flailing, person is, at the moment, helpless and will probably drown if someone doesn’t rescue him. And you also know, since you know how to swim, that if that person would just calm down and relax into floating and treading water for a little while, he’d move into a better place not to drown.)

So how does this analogy relate to you? Do you feel you need to be rescued or do you have an intuitive notion that you can get organized with just a little nudge? Maybe you were organized once and you know how liberating it is. Maybe you had an organized mother and you remember how much fun and easy it was to live with order. Maybe you know people who are organized and you envy the ease at which they go about life, never late, always prepared, wearing matching shoes, having cash in their wallets, gas in their cars, toting kids that are fully dressed and they’re never in a rush.

An email came in the other day challenging the notion to “Make it fun and it will get done,” and it caused me to pause. The woman had said something about fun not leading to happiness and since I think happiness is the most important goal we can ever have, (I think it’s more important to be happy than to be organized) I had to think seriously about my definition of fun.

The word fun can conger up vacations, yachts, fast cars, parties and any of the stuff of brochures that lure us to spend money. The "brochure" brand of fun is great and it can make us happy for a little while, but it's happiness based on a condition and that brand of happiness is not lasting.

For example, last summer Terry and I won tickets to a Wine and Jazz Festival in a park in Vancouver. The brochure was glitzy! The thought of a Wine and Jazz Festival made me happy, but in reality I only like a certain kind of jazz (much of it reminds me of when I was a young mother with the relentless and repetitious sound of young kids saying, “Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama”) and I’m not into expensive wines that you're expected to taste and then buy by the case. It was hot the day we went to the festival and we’d never heard of the person who was jamming up on the stage, so we walked through the park and went home. Wheeeeee! 

Were we happy? Yes, but not happy because of the festival, we were happy because we practice being happy because we're alive and conscious of it. 

In this how-to-clean video, the Cleaner Guy, Jeffrey Jones

and expert on toxic-free living, Kristi Marsh,

talk about the chemicals in our bodies that shouldn't be there. It's worth watching.

Don’t you just love the idea behind the rosary? My granny was Catholic and she taught me the rosary prayers and I loved hearing her recite them as she felt each bead. When she handled her sacred strand she did it with such humility and she treated it like it was a gift from God.

I’m not Catholic, but I’ve always loved the idea of using a tangible item to remind us to be thankful, to be joyful and to love and praise God for our blessings.

Who thought "this little piggy" could bring you thankfulness?

That’s how I came up with the idea to use my feet like a rosary! Why not? So combining the This Little Piggy Went to Market poem we perpetrated on our kids and really makes no sense when you think about it, I decided to start a new morning routine using my toes while I’m still snuggled under the covers.

Here’s what I came up with, and I’ll tell you what happened after I did my rosary toes.

Starting with my big toe of my right foot, I held each toe the same way Granny held her rosary beads, and said the following:

After I did the toes on my right foot, I did the same thing with my left ones. When I finished with them, the thought came, ‘Why stop there?’ So I took a hold of both my feet (I was still under the covers) and I thanked them for all the places they’ve taken me and where they’ll take me today. Then I moved my hands to my ankles and thanked God for the miracle of swivel. It made me be happy.