Turn dreary into fun!

Make memories you'll talk about for years to come.

We who live in the northwest, have had to learn early on, we can’t let the rain dowse our fun outdoors. The main advice is make sure you have play clothes, so you don’t have to worry about messing up your good clothes.

Whether it's just misting or pouring rats and hogs make the most of the wet weather and play with your kids or grandkids in the rain using these family-tested outdoor activities.

1. Puddle Play

Mom, you usually discourage your kids from jumping in puddles, so they’ll be shocked and excited when you suggest a splashing contest. Get your play clothes and rain boots on and head out looking for the biggest puddles you can find. Let your kids get soaking wet! Let the child who makes the biggest spray, get to pick the movie the family will watch or be freed from some chore. Give points for the one who gets the wettest. If you’ve got dancers in the family, have them practice some steps they’ve learned.

Mom, come on; get in the puddles with them! Motherhood is not a spectator sport. Let your kids splash you. All it takes is saying, “Don’t you splash me,” in a way they know you’re daring them to do it. Oh and just think how good a hot shower will feel after the fun!

When you take time every day to be alone with yourself, away from phones, the Internet and noise, you'll be giving yourself a loving gift.  Get selfish about making time. Insist on it, and don’t allow anyone, especially yourself, to talk you out of it.

Here are what I consider six benefits of quiet time.

1. Lighten Up

When we get stressed out, it’s so easy to lose touch with that sweet calm that's always there for us to tap into. In a relaxed state, your mind quiets down and then you can connect with a deeper sense of purpose and good. Meditation and medication are derived from the Latin word medicus, to care or to cure. So a time of quiet calmness is the most effective remedy for a busy and overworked person.

Anytime you feel stress rising, heart closing, mind going into overwhelm, just bring your focus to your breathing and quietly repeat with each in-and-out breath: Breathing in, I am here; breathing out, All is well. If you have a set of words that help you relax and can be in time with your inhalations and exhalations by all means use those words. These are the words I use right now. They may change down the road.

Pretend to be a guest at your own home

Usually when we think of spring cleaning we think of getting out the buckets, brushes, rags and cleaners and cleaning the inside of the house. If you want to learn more about that, Google it. My blog this week is about sprucing up the place just before you go inside your home. You’ll have to go outside for this spring cleaning.

Your entryway is the gateway to your domestic life. It gives guests their first impression of your home life and quite frankly a little peek into who you are. After your guest rings the doorbell there’s “wait time,” and it’s a rather private period of scrutiny and judging for him or her. Here are my 8 tips for spring cleaning your entryway. 

In chapter five of “The Joy of Being Disorganized,” I talked about meeting Oprah and what fun it was to find out she was a self-confessed SHE (Sidetracked Home Executive)! It was a moment where a real life celebrity became just like you and me. Dining can be like that too. You don't have to eat at the tables of Paula Deen, Rachael Ray or Giada to savor gourmet tasting food.

You can make it yourself! In this cooking video I show you one of the easiest ways to bake salmon-- that heart healthy source of omega-3 fatty acids. Doctors call it “brain food” but I just call it delicious.

Throw in a sprig of rosemary (which always goes well with almost any fish) in and enjoy! Here's my simple recipe with video to follow.

Okay, it's been almost six weeks since you made a New Year’s Resolution to stop or start doing something to make a change for good in 2019.

If you haven't been true to your resolution it's NOT a big deal! It just means somehow you talked yourself into doing something you initially didn't want to do. We all fall off our wagons because it's part of growing up (and we never stop growing). What is a big deal is learning how to recognize the sabotaging part of you and develop a healthy relationship with it.

Today, did you talk yourself into doing something you explicitly did not want to do? And if you did, do you know who you were talking to?  Keep reading and also watch the video in this blog.

Sounds kind of nice, doesn't it?

But just think, if you had a tree that grew $100 bills in your front yard, you'd have to have 24-hour surveillance and security! Oh and if the press every got wind of it, you’d be dodging the paparazzi to your grave. No doubt you'd worry about how to keep the tree healthy, and keep the bugs from eating those precious leaves when they started to blossom this coming spring. You'd also fret about how to keep the money in your yard when the autumn winds threatened to blow your crop into the neighbor's yard.

You'd probably end up a nervous wreck. You'd never be able to leave home, or even get all the bills that were at the very top, unless you were a very good tree climber. Maybe it'd be easier to have a hedge fund than a money tree, but you'd still have to guard that too.    

With the advent of credit cards, many of us were tempted into living beyond our means. Those pretty, little rectangles made purchasing stuff so easy, especially when you didn't have the money yet! Before I met Nelly (my inner child) in 2002, I was in big credit card trouble. Because I'm a writer and was able to make a good living writing books, when I wasn't writing and the income wasn't there, instead of changing my spending habits, I used credit cards to pretend I was still making money. Fake prosperity. I actually looked at credit cards as income. "Oh, goody, the bank just increased my credit limit $10,000!"

When everything came to a head, I was faced with figuring out how to get out of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. I knew I had to raise my financial consciousness and get out of debt, but I didn't have a clue as to how to do that. What happened was a miracle and I wrote about it in "The GOOD Book: Get Out Of Debt." 

You can listen if you have a task and you need your eyes and hands.

Even in our instant news, instant photos, instant everything society, we still have to wait a lot and we don’t appreciate it. We get antsy when we have to kill time in the checkout line at the grocery store so they created jiffy lines to speed us along. We get cranky and horny (over use of the horn) waiting for traffic to budge during commute times and we sure don’t like waiting for our computers to download, upload, reboot and defrag.

It's January 29, 2019!

Since I write for food, I’m generally not inclined to sit down and write about my husband and me in a Christmas letter to friends and relatives, but this last Christmas I did receive a couple of those brag sheet newsletters that inspired me to write a little about what's going on with Terry and me, not for a Christmas letter but to let my internet sisters in on a recent life-changing event...our great grandson Cassius. 

My Aunt Tottie (my dad's sister) was extremely disorganized and she was also very creative and dramatic! My mother was a BO (Born Organized) and she used to roll her eyes over the way Aunt Tottie lived.

For instance, she was a lousy housekeeper, wore baggy clothes day in and day out, and rarely put on make-up, BUT when she did get cleaned up, she was a KNOCK OUT. Mom said when they were young; Aunt Tottie would get all gussied up to go out dancing and she’d make an entrance that would drop jaws.

One time when she and my mom were teenagers, hanging out at Aunt Totties', the future Uncle John dropped by unexpectedly and Aunt Tottie was still in her nightgown (it was five in the evening). Her hair hadn't been washed so it was greasy and she raced to her room so Uncle John wouldn't see her. Ten minutes later she came down the stairs in a cute summer dress and she'd wrapped a colorful silk scarf on her head like a turban. Mom said she looked just like Lauren Bacall. (Oh, and Uncle John looked just like Henry Fonda.)

My aunt loved to get a reaction from BOs like my mom. I remember one time; watching her in her messy kitchen, make orange juice from a can of frozen concentrate while she talked with my mom. She couldn’t find a clean spoon to stir the three cans of water into the orange lump of concentrate, so she just stuck her whole hand into the pitcher and stirred with it. My mother was horrified.

Seven ways to freshen up in 2019

In the movies when an actor delivers that line the scene invariably consists of the other actor to whom the question was asked, proceeding to the bathroom and closing the door and you don't get to see what they freshen. In all my television and movie watching days, the cameras have never taken me into the bathroom with that person.

In one of our books, my sister and I wrote about being guests at a woman’s home in Hollywood. She had a lovely, movie star type home and we were going to stay overnight. She said when we walked into her luxurious living room with our luggage in tow, “Would you like to freshen up?” “Yes,” we said, in unison, as she led us to her guest room with a bathroom. As soon as the door was closed, we looked at each other and one of us said, “What does freshen up really mean?” Should we take showers and do a really fresh start? Should we wash our armpits and put on deodorant or just put some more on over the old? Should we brush our teeth? Our hair?

We decided in that moment to consider washing our hands as the action one does to freshen up. We decided to take about five minutes (that’s how long Mom took every night before Dad came home from work). She’d say, “Oh girls, Dad’ll be home pretty soon, I’m going to freshen up!” and she’d shut the bathroom door and once again we didn’t get to see what she did in there, but she’d come out FRESH.

We both agreed we had “travel hands.” Our definition of travel hands is the same as for shopping hands only with distance added. It’s hands that have been busy outside the home where they can collect foreign substances our systems aren’t familiar with. They don’t have familiar stuff to wash off like kid related materials ie: vomit, snot, poop, peanut butter, jam and such. Travel hands have more subtle, maybe even microscopic elements to take care of.

So we took five minutes to wash our hands, sort of like how a surgeon would wash her hands before going into surgery. When we were through, we both looked at the beautiful monogrammed hand towels displayed on the counter and we couldn’t bring ourselves to use them so we wiped on the rug and went out acting very fresh.

On the subject of freshening up, here are some tips to consider in freshening up your home during this winter season that can seem dreary and dull.