Time Management Tuesday: A Merciless Purge

I bet you’re curious about what exactly I was doing this summer that required so much time and energy that I stopped working for two months. Well, one of the things I was doing was cleaning out an elderly family member’s house, one she’d lived in for more than fifty years. Now, this woman and her husband were not actual hoarders, mainly because they hadn’t bought anything since the nineteen-sixties. Superficially, the interior of their house looked normal. But they had accumulated a couple of generations worth of…ah…treasures. They never saw a family possession they didn’t think was a valuable collectible. I’ll spare you the details, because that whole mess is outside the scope of the time management feature.

However, this experience was intense and led us to initiate another purge of our own place.

Why Purge Possessions

This year we began with big stuff

I have written here before about:

The impact of our personal environment on our impulse control and our ability to control what we’re doing. 

How owning and caring for--or not caring for--a lot of things can take time and energy from work that means more to you than a bunch--a whole bunch--of knickknacks, bizarre dishes, old sports equipment, and the remains of every hobby you ever tried and tossed aside.
 

More big stuff

Working with that knowledge, in 2014 and again in 2015 here at Chez Gauthier we conducted October purges to make our environment more, I guess you could say, time effective. As a result of our experience this summer emptying that house full of things that should have been thrown away years ago, we decided to do another purge this year. And we couldn't wait for October. We started in August, and the plan was to be, as my husband put it, "merciless."

This Year's Purge

Side view of 2017 purged items

Front view of 2017 purged items

Ready for trip to transfer station

This year we included a lot of books, most of which will go to a library sale, family ceramics, some of which went to family, some of which will go to a church tag sale, glassware, and all the cassette tapes because why take care of old technology? I'm sorry, somehow I missed the picture that included the secondary chainsaw. Yes, we had two.

We had a workshop that was nearly unusable because of all the things stored in it. The same thing was true of the laundry/sewing room. And I know I'm not the only writer who moves from place to place in the house with her laptop, because her desk is covered with clutter and who has time to deal with that? Come on, I know I'm not the only one.  

A Different Result This Year

The big difference between this year's purge and other years' is that our month of purging ended, but we didn't stop. We're still working on the shelving in the living room. Wish I'd thought to take a before picture of that. We got rid of some items from the kitchen just this past week, and I have my eye on something in my office. In fact, some serious shuffling of office material could be in my future.

Also, the results are more obvious in a couple of rooms. There is a new work station in the workshop, for instance.

Of course, it remains to be seen how much imposing more order on our living environment will improve our work. But right now we're feeling as if we're getting more control of our surroundings, a step, I hope, to getting control of life again.
  

What Have You Been Doing These Last Two Months, Gail? Or What Happens When A Writer Can't Write?

Well, I did make thirteen submissions, six of them as part of the September Twitter Pitch Madness. I wrote seven blog posts. I made twenty entries in my idea journal. I came up with an idea for a new major writing project. So I can't say I did absolutely nothing.

 

However, I had a fleeting thought when I first stopped working back in August that I might do something meaningful…profound…even spiritual…while I wasn’t working. Then when I went back on the clock, I would be changed. In a positive way, of course, a way that would make me a finer human being, or, better yet, a finer writer.

Yeah, well, as you may recall, I dropped off the work bandwagon because dealing with various family issues meant I could only work three or four hours a week, and the effort to keep trying for more was making me nuts. Turns out that I can’t do anything particularly meaningful, profound, or spiritual in three or four hours a week. Though I did change my daily schedule around so that I no longer exercise right after eating. So there's that. That's kind of meaningful.

This Was Disturbing

 In the early days (many days) of not working, I had this fatalistic feeling that I might not ever be able to go back to work. (Given how this upcoming first week back in the harness is turning out in terms of still more family commitments, I wasn’t being melodramatic.) I didn’t actually want to work at that point, but at the same time I felt as if I was nobody and nothing without working. 

A couple of weeks in to my family leave, my husband was finally driving again after his shoulder surgery, which meant that after a meet up at an elder’s place, we went our separate ways. For the first time since May, I didn’t have some place I needed to go instantly. But, remember, I didn’t work. What was I going to do?

I don’t work, I thought. I don’t have to go home. I don’t have to go anywhere.

So I went to Michael’s and bought, maybe, three hundred of those little things for holding pierced earrings in your ears. Then I went over to T. J. Maxx and walked around and around and ended up spending eighty dollars.

This could be my life now, I thought as I dragged my haul to the check-out counter. 

This Was Disturbing, Too

I also didn’t know if I’d ever read another kids’ book. Or The Horn Book. Or Writers’ Digest. (The renewal form for that magazine has been sitting on my kitchen counter for a long time, a very long time.) Instead I polished off lots of adult books from my To Be Read pile and my Kindle. I don’t think I’ve been to the library since July to this day. I just couldn’t bring myself to read anything that wasn’t produced for my age group.

In An Odd Way, This Is Also Disturbing

One day I started reading a really good YA novel I'd just bought for my Kindle. (Except for The Little Blue Truck, I still haven’t read one for anyone younger.)  I started picking away at a Writer’s Digest, and a few weeks ago I realized I was reading a Horn Book. I got started on some blog posts for October. I got an idea for a totally new book and began working on an exercise to develop voice for one of the characters.  

I was working. Barely. And weeks early.

  

What Made This Experience Disturbing

This experience has been disturbing because being unable to work undermined my desire to work, or maybe I should say my ability to work. A case, perhaps, of use it or lose it. At the same time, not working was not satisfying. My identity is tightly involved with writing. I write, therefore I am. I don’t write, therefore I’m not.

The whole thing was like being sick, actually. Something was wrong, and I’m recovering, but slowly.

I'm Baaaaack. With Food. And "Company's Coming."

Today is Sunday, a day when I sometimes blog about food, and since I was saying when I left for what I'm calling family leave that this summer I was going to help give a baby shower, one with a children's book theme, I'm going to begin my return to blogging with that.

Now, if you go to Pinterest, you'll find that children's book themed baby showers are a thing. You frequently see some of the same books mentioned over and over again, and the other hosts of our shower, who were more on top of things than I was, picked up four or five of them right away. This left me going, What shall I do? What shall I do?

I have no recollection of how I came up with this idea, but to cut to the chase, I decided to cook something related to Company's Coming by Arthur Yorinks with illustrations by David Small.  I don't think you're going to find this one on any of the Pinterest baby shower boards or in a board book edition for baby readers. But I love this book, it had a big impact on my life, and spaghetti and meat balls figure in its story.

This almost alien invasion story most definitely deserves to be a baby shower staple.

Spaghetti Sliders Are A Thing, Too

So we're talking spaghetti and meatballs at a shower that was not planned as a sit down affair with a plate on a table. Meaning a thoughtful host shouldn't be forcing a messy meal choice upon her guests. How could I make spaghetti and meatballs into finger food? You know, like a sandwich?

Well, somehow I got from spaghetti sandwich to spaghetti sliders.

Feasibility study.

My computer guy had some serious doubts about this project and suggested I check out its feasibility. So the first step was the feasibility sliders, which I think I took to someone's house for some event, though I can't remember those. It turned out, spaghetti sliders are, indeed, feasible.

You, Too, Can Make "Company's Coming" Sliders

Spaghetti sauce, in case you can't tell.

When shower time came around, I began the sliders by making sauce. Instead of meatballs,  I used ground beef. Though Company's Coming describes meatballs, I didn't think they'd fit on a slider roll with spaghetti.

I didn't use slider rolls, either. Even if I could have found them, I thought I'd go nuts filling mini rolls. I used hot dog rolls instead and then cut them into sliders after they were filled.

I broke the spaghetti up into small pieces before cooking it, because the feasibility batch of sliders taught me that I didn't want enormous strands of sauce covered spaghetti dangling out of little rolls. Then I mixed it with some sauce before making the sliders.

Start big, then go small.

I scooped some bread out of the rolls to make a hollow for the spaghetti. I also brushed the rolls with some margarine and Italian seasoning, though garlic butter would be an option, too. Then I filled the rolls, put them together, and cut them into thirds, so they looked slider-like.

Finale.

I buttered the tops with some more seasoned butter, covered the baking dish, and brought it to the shower site where I heated it  just before serving. No, I don't know what I set the oven temp for or how long I kept the dish in the oven. But, come on, this isn't brain surgery. Heat the sliders at some temperature or another until they're hot enough to suit you.

Next Sunday: All the children's book shower food.


For the first time in nearly a year, I'm taking part in Beth Fish Read's Weekend Cooking meme.