Do you love your county fair?

Have you been going to the fair since you were a child? If you live outside the city, is there something in the air that tugs at your fair heart strings? What is it that you first think of when you think of the fair? The animals? The Ferris Wheel? The food?

There's a booth at the Clark County Fair in Ridgefield, Washington that's run by the "church ladies." They draw some of the longest lines, because the pies are homemade, fresh daily and delicious! Once you have a piece of the church ladies' pie, the memory stays with you forever! 

I love the Clark County fair and have been going to it since I was nine-years-old when we moved to the country.

Every summer, my parents used the fair as an enticement, with a list of extra chores I could do to make money for the rides, and trying to win stuffed animals and other must-have stuff kids want when they try to toss a poker chip onto a plate and have it stay there.

I don’t do the rides anymore, but I still love to watch others spin, scream, wave and occasionally puke up corn dog mixed with cotton candy. 

Stop Watching the News if it's Upsetting You!

If you stopped watching the news could you be happy for it?

Back in 1929 when the stock market crashed, we didn’t have CNN or FOX, or news or the Internet. Our grandparents (or great grandparents in some cases) didn’t get over-fed the news 24-7. They got a newspaper once a day (maybe) and they listened to the radio (maybe).

Because of this age of information we can be (if we choose) bombarded with bad news, because the access is as close as our finger on the clicker or the mouse on our computer. It’s one thing to be aware of what's going on in the world, our country and our community, but it’s quite another to watch the reruns and regurgitated opinions of “the experts” as they re-hash the re-runs while we click to another channel to watch the news covered from a different camera angle.

The GOOD NEWS is that to the media, the only newsworthy material is what is negative AND sensational. Dog Bites Man, is not “news.” Man Bites Dog (and don’t forget to put music behind the story) is. (I learned that from my journalist husband.) It's the extraordinary that makes “the news.” So most everything you see on the news is unusual and extraordinary. IT IS NOT THE NORM. But we, in our naivety (or stupidity) allow our sweet minds to watch what happened, not once, but on the hour until the next day when the next batch of bad news is ready. How many times do you have to watch the bank robber caught on tape? Isn’t once enough?

We cause ourselves needless suffering

I know we’re human and most of us are naturally curious about bad news.

All Kids Need Attention 

My reason for getting organized way back in 1977 was so that I’d have more free time to play with my family. I wasn’t having that much fun in my chosen career as a homemaker and it was mainly because of my disorganization and the messes it created. I knew that my attitude had to change about my life as a wife, mother and homemaker and once I nailed the reason to make the effort to change, everything fell into place (but not overnight).

I met Nelly, (my inner child; that part of me that’s about nine-years-old), in 2002 and in that meeting I realized she was behind my reason to get organized 25 years earlier. Over the last decade I’ve grown to adore her “take” on life. I see myself as her parent, always needing to monitor her thoughts and guide her into cooperating with all my “adult” plans and rules.

We just got back from a cruise with 3,000 passengers. I did a lot of people watching and I saw many well-behaved children and a few who were out of control. In every instance, I noticed that back of every child was a parent with either good or bad parenting skills. The well-behaved children stood quietly in lines at the buffets and the out of control children (they always stick out more) were always issued a variety of useless directives.

We were in line behind Jason (about six-years-old) and his parents and sister Becky (about four) and we watched him hit his sister when the parents weren’t looking, tug on his father’s shirt, kick his mother’s purse and sag to the floor several times in the five minutes we were in line.

But what about the Inner Child?

SHEs are passionate!

SHEs (Sidetracked Home Executives) are passionate people. There's nothing more true than this statement. Have you ever met a real SHE that isn’t? Oh, and we like to use exclamation marks too! One of my longtime SHE friends, LouAnn, was one of my guinea pigs for my Weight Loss book, The Mouth Trap: the butt stops here! 

She reported to me:

“Who knows, maybe my “passion” for eating is a package deal with my “passion” for other things in life. Somehow, I need to trust in the wisdom and love of my Creator to know this was the perfect “problem” for me and be thankful for it. I will never quit trying to look my best and take these pounds off, but I’m going to quit pretending I can do so without suffering.

I cannot. So, I’ve decided to turn this suffering into a prayer for others who are facing something worse. My neighbor works at Ronald McDonald House and has no shortage of stories about suffering far worse than a weight problem. I don’t have a child going into surgery today—but somebody does. My transmission is working—but somebody’s just went out—on the freeway.

So for today, I’m going to think about how wonderful it will feel to wear my
“skinny jeans” again and go fill up on steamed cauliflower. I’m starved and lunch is not for another two hours and that’s the pits. But, guess what else I get to do? I get to go hug my two healthy girls in the next room. Zero calories. I’ll take it.”

It's worth a try! 

You were probably thinking, when you read the title of this blog, that I was writing about drinking gin.

Well, this blog is about the card game called gin rummy. (Incidentally, this is my husband in his winning costume when we went to a Halloween party as Dow and Jones, during the stock market scare.)

Okay, I’m not a marriage counselor so I probably shouldn’t be going around giving advice to married couples, especially since I’m on my second marriage and so is my husband, but the idea of letting a little gin improve your marriage is really a good one, at least for Terry and me and I thought I’d share with you why it is.

You probably should know that Terry is a workaholic because that’s one of the reasons I came up with this idea in the first place. He’s never without his cell phone or IPAD and he looks at weekends as catch up days to finish all the work he didn’t accomplish during the week because of overbooking. It seems when each day comes to an end, his “to do” list is longer because for every task he crosses off, he adds a couple more jobs.

I don’t think guys like tricks played on them.

It's Never Too Late to Change

A woman wrote that she'd been married for 25 years. Her husband had cheated on her more than once and she'd “lost” herself and hardly recognized her home or her person.

It's never too late to change your life! This woman had successfully raised two happy sons and worrying about what her husband did and not focusing on what she was doing could very well have given him (in his dishonest mind) a good excuse for the affairs. Focusing on getting her act together, could erase that excuse and down the road, he'd wonder what happened.

When someone is unfaithful it's his/her problem. It’s only OUR problem if we make it ours.

The definition for “loser” depends on the circumstance in which a loser finds him or herself. One definition has to do with losing at a sport, gambling or some kind of game or competition.It sucks to lose, but if we’ve been raised by loving people who taught us how to be good losers, we spare ourselves being the “bad sport.”

So you lost at Monopoly and landed on Park Place laden with hotels, or you didn’t win the Miss America contest; boo hoo, big deal. It’s not like you fell off or climbed down from some social ladder, but you’re still considered a loser. Anyway, that’s not the kind of loser this blog is about.

SHEs are Natural Losers

I know for sure we SHEs (Sidetracked Home Executives) are losers, because we spend a lot of our valuable time looking for stuff. As SHEs, we’ve had a lot of experience calling the Lost & Found departments in various establishments like hotels, restaurants, theaters, airports etc. and like the guy who doesn’t take car maintenance seriously and becomes known by the local towing company in town, SHEs usually get to know the Lost & Found people in familiar institutions like the building at work, the kids’ school, your school, your gym etc.

In this blog, I’ll share two ways to curb the search for your stuff. In part 2, I share two other ways we lose; one from loss of loved ones through death or disease and one from theft.

No More All or Nothing at All

There's a huge difference between a drastic transformation and change that takes place as gracefully and gradually as a baby turns into a toddler. But when we're fed up with our old ways we tend to want an instant fix. That's what impatience is all about.

Take weight for example, we want the weight to come off faster than we put it on. We get frustrated with a loss of just one pound in a week, yet if we gained a pound a week, we'd gain 50 pounds in a year. I don't know anyone who's done that and you probably don't either.

As SHEs we tend to have that notion: All or nothing at all. When we want to get organized usually we've come to a place where every room is laced with chaos. When we decide to fix our finances it's when the power's been shut off or we max a few credit cards and sink into financial depression. When we want to lose weight it's usually because we've let it go so long that it has our attention. We're not like the frog that stays in the water as it is heated to boiling and cooks to death, instead, we schlep along until we snap.

To do, or to be?

A Clean Kitchen Sink Can Bring World Peace

I received an email from a dear friend in Indiana, telling me about a woman in her state, Elinor Ostrom, who received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics. What caught my friend’s attention was this comment by Elinor: "The family is a governance unit. And the kitchen sink is a commons." My friend is a journalist who wrote a feature story in the Los Angeles Times about Sidetracked Home Executive: from pigpen to paradise, the first book my sister and I wrote together. She is very familiar with my work helping homemakers get organized. That’s why the comment grabbed her. She sent me the article (which I read) and it linked me to Elinor’s talk at Indiana University (which I listened to).

The Crotchety Watch

One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to quit complaining and judging in 2014. But that was over two months ago and although I’ve cut way back, I’m not very proud of myself, especially because of what happened to me today; I had a wake-up call from CW (Crotchety Watch). It’s sort of a software program installed in my mind (upon request in prayer) on New Year’s Eve. It stands guard, monitoring my thoughts and although it doesn’t censor what comes out of my mouth, it sends a communiqué (and a small electric shock) which is supposed to train me to be aware of my thoughts and ultimately be nicer. Perhaps after today I should ask for the Deluxe Crotchety Watch which actually stops tetchy talk from leaving my lips.