Decorations are down; starting January with an uncluttered centerpiece

Well, the holiday decorations have come down.  The house begins to look a little empty this time of year, doesn’t it?  The barrenness made me sad for about five minutes, but then I began to embrace the look as an uncluttered start to the New Year.  It’s so much easier to dust and to vacuum without all the extra knick knacks, isn’t it?  I love, love, love decorating for the holidays, but as the saying goes,  to everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under the sun (that’s Ecclesiastes 3:1).

And the time for uncluttered simplicity is now!  Here’s a simple (and uncluttered) centerpiece I came up with for our table.  It’s just three candles, a bread tray, and a place mat.  How much simpler can you get?!  I think the result is a clean look:

Simple (and free!) centerpiece for the new year made with items already in our home.

I took advantage of the opportunity to re-arrange, and didn’t put items back in the exact place they were before the holiday decorations went up.  I like to mix things up about once per season (or more!) to keep things looking fresh.  I keep about three boxes in our basement of various decorator items (pictures, knick knacks, candles, etc.) and simply rotate them whenever I get the urge to re-decorate an area.  The bread tray and place mat used in this centerpiece, however, are simply items I had in my kitchen!

What kinds of centerpieces do you create season to season?  Do you like to change things up, or are you a traditionalist?  Or are centerpieces just things that get in the way during dinner that you try to avoid?  Share with us, please!

Playlists good for running

photo by davefishernc, Flickr Creative Commons

Well, it’s January 3.  How are you doing on that New Year’s Resolution of yours??

As you know, I didn’t make any resolutions, but have been making decisions based around some 10-year goals I’ve made. One of those goals includes being a healthy and fit mom and wife.  A short-term goal that will help me to reach this long-term goal is completing a half marathon in my city this May.  Yikes!  I have been running (okay, jogging) for about 2 1/2 years, but rarely for more than 30 minutes at a time, and I’ve NEVER ran more than 4 miles at a time.

I’ll say it again – YIKES!

I’ve been working for about five weeks to get back into shape enough to even start a training program for the half marathon.  It’s going well, and considering that I don’t start my formal training until the start of February, I still have another month to get comfortable enough with running to stand the training regime.

In the 2 1/2 years I’ve been running, however, I’ve been using the same workout playlist on my iPod.  Can you say boring? So today I sat down and weeded through my entire music collection on iTunes and put together a longer (and more inspiring) playlist to help me reach my goal.  Here are a few of the songs on the playlist that really get me going:

All About Soul – Billy Joel
Any Way You Want It – Journey
Children of the Revolution – Moulin Rouge soundtrack
Comin’ to Your City – Big & Rich
Crazy in Love – Beyonce
Fighter – Christina Aguilera
Gotta Get Through This – Daniel Bettingfield
I’m the man who murdered love – XTC
If I Never See Your Face Again – Maroon 5
Labels or Love – Fergie
Miss Independent – Kelly Clarkson
Single Ladies – Beyonce
Survivor – Destiny’s Child
I Gotta Feeling – Black Eyed Peas

And about a hundred other songs….right now I have 6.8 hours worth of music on my workout playlist.  My goal is to get through the next four months of training without getting bored!

BUT – I’m always looking for more song suggestions.  So please share – what are the songs that give you that extra pep to continue on the treadmill for just one more song??

Get a clear idea of your financial situation in less than 2 hours

Photo by Borman818, Flickr Creative Commons

I have absolutely no interest in most things financial.  True, I love having (and spending) money, but my head spins at talk of various retirement plans, CD’s, mutual funds, stock options, etc.  All my life, numbers have given me problems — grammar and writing have always come easily for me, but anything involving a number has usually been extremely difficult for my brain to comprehend.  It’s true – I often have a hard time remembering birthdays, phone numbers, and even my own salary!  Seriously – numbers just don’t make sense to my brain.

BUT – because I am a control freak above all else, it is important for me to know where my money is, how much I need and how much I can save, and whether or not I should be doing something different with it.  Being recently married, my financial situation went through some drastic changes during the last year.  My husband and I have a joint checking account, so suddenly my money was no longer just my money. I also changed my last name when I got married, and the process of contacting all the financial institutions where I have an account made me realize how spread out my assets were.  It was a bit overwhelming.

So, recently, I sat down with the intention of making a clear-cut list of our assets, as well as a rough estimate of our monthly expenses.  Just having a clear list of all these items has helped a lot.  I feel more calm and in control of our money, because I know exactly where all of it is.

When I started, the task seemed daunting, but truth be told – the whole process took only about two hours.

Want to get started on your own list of assets and monthly expenses?  Here’s where to start:

Listing of Assets

(List each account separately, noting the bank or institution at which the account is held.  Make note of the value of each of your accounts and assets)

*Checking accounts
*Savings accounts
*Brokerage accounts (including stocks, bonds, and/or mutual funds)
*Retirement funds
*CD’s
*Land or property holdings
*Whole/Universal life insurance policies

Go through your files to be sure you haven’t missed anything.  Once you complete the list, add up the amounts for each account to see your total asset value.  I recommend keeping the list out for a few days in case you remember to include something you had forgotten previously.

Now, move on to your list of liabilities.  I made a list of our major monthly expenses, as well as other expenses we pay yearly or quarterly.  I broke down those yearly and quarterly expenses into monthly expenses to keep everything equal.  This one took a bit longer to put together, but start with the obvious stuff first.

List of monthly expenses

*Cell phone
*Television/Cable
*Internet Service
*Life Insurance Payments
*Health Insurance Payments
*Mortgage Payments/Rent
*Property Taxes
*Car Payments
*Auto Insurance Payments
*Homeowners Insurance Payments
*Gym membership
*Electric
*Heat/Gas
*Garbage
*Water
*Newspaper/Magazine subscriptions
*Groceries
*Student Loan Payments
*Credit Card Debt Payments

This is (obviously) just a partial list.  You may not have some of these expenses, and you may have additional expenses not listed here.  This will hopefully get you started.  Once again, I suggest making a list of the expenses that come to you immediately, then keeping the list out for a few days to add in any expenses you forgot.  Some items may be difficult to break up into monthly expenses because they vary so much (electricity and gas vary greatly for us).  Since we pay these bills online, however, I was able to go back through the last year on our bank’s website and make note of how much we paid each month.  I added up the total and divided it by 12 – now we have an idea of the amount we spend on these on average each month.

You’ll note that this list does not include “indulgences” or spending money like shopping or your morning visits to the coffeeshop.  You can feel free to add those to the list if you like, but for my husband and I, those figures vary too greatly to include in the “rough sketch” we were trying to construct of our financial situation.

It’s also important to note that you’ll never be able to list all your expenses on this sheet, because crazy things happen to all of us – don’t they?  We have to have expensive dental work or extensive auto repair.  Or we finally decide to break down and purchase a snowblower.  But having a rough sketch of the monthly expenses that you KNOW you will pay each month helps give you an idea of how much room there is for all the other expenses that pop up in life.

We dated our list December 2009, and plan to return to the lists every six months or so, and update them.  This will be an easy way for us to track whether our net worth is growing or shrinking (here’s hoping it will grow!).

Forget New Year’s Resolutions – What are your GOALS?

Photo by Scottwills, Flickr Creative Commons

This time of year, everyone begins thinking how they might improve themselves in 2010.  We vow to lose ten pounds, finally get organized, increase our savings.  But it’s all pretty silly, isn’t it?  Why should January be any better than March or October, or any other month for that matter, to change your life?  And who really thinks of New Year’s Resolutions past February 1 anyway?  Not many.

So this year – forget about resolutions.  Think about your GOALS.  What do you want for your life?  I mean, REALLY.  Think about what you want out of your life.  We’ve only got so much time on this earth (I had a perfectly healthy mother who passed away at 58, and a perfectly healthy uncle who passed away at 62 — both from cancer), so the day to start living the life you want to live — or at least working towards what you want — is NOW!

My husband and I recently sat down to think about our goals.  We are recently married, and we both have accomplished several goals individually before our marriage (his goal was to earn in a certain salary range and buy his own house, mine was to earn a Master’s Degree).  Then, we became engaged and our goal was to get married and begin a life together.  Soon, we’ll start having a family.  But then what?  We realized that we had both come to the end of our goal checklist (check, check, check!).  Now what?

It was time to set some new goals.

So, we sat down and each wrote out some 10-year goals.  This was more difficult than I imagined!  I am currently 28, and to imagine what my life will be like when I’m 38 — well, it was a bit scary!!  But when I forced myself to really think 10 years down the road, and what I’d like my life to look like, I was able to come up with a pretty clear idea of what I’d like my life to be.  The list included three kids, a healthy weight and active lifestyle, a fulfilling career that challenged me creatively, a cozy and small’ish home with fine craftsmanship, and a few others.

Now, as much as I am a Type A person who likes to control everything, I have learned that you cannot plan out your life (see examples of my mother’s and uncle’s death above).  Life hands you curve balls all the time, and the best you can do is try to ride the wave and learn what you can from God’s plan.  But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to plan for the future.  Of course my husband and I know that maybe we won’t be able to have three kids, or buy a new house, or whatever.  But because I’ve made this list, we know that it is something we’d like to strive for.

Once we had both made our individual lists of what we’d like our lives to be in 10 years, we sat down and compared the two.  Together, we were able to form our two lists into one, and we now have a set of several goals laid out for the next stage in our life.  The good thing about setting long-term goals is that it makes short-term goals easier to set, and gives you a reason to really follow-through on those short-term goals.  Now, we are able to make large decisions with more ease, because we know the direction we are heading.  We really only have to ask ourselves one question – will this decision get us closer to, or farther from, our goals?

So forget resolutions — it’s time to think about your GOALS for your life.  Where do you want to be in 10 years?  Once you have an idea (even a vague one), it’s like having a roadmap for the journey ahead.  What kinds of goals have you set for your life?  How have the goals changed over the years?

Tonight, as you lay down: Count your blessings!

photo courtesty of "cosmonautirussi," from Creative Commons, Flickr.com

With a large snowstorm immobilizing most of the Great Plains, we’ve had lots and lots of time to take naps, watch Christmas movies, and think about our blessings.  This time of year always lends itself well to those things, doesn’t it?

I was watching an old favorite yesterday – “White Christmas.“  Have you ever seen it?  It’s a really fun musical number starring Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney. There’s a wonderful song in the movie called “Count Your Blessings.”

Have you ever done this?  It’s something I’ve started doing in the last few months, and it’s such a wonderful way to end your day.  Whether you crash into bed, barely able to keep your eyes open or if it’s one of those nights when you toss and turn, unable to turn off your mind.  Thinking of your blessings (and, indeed, counting them!) is a wonderful way to practice gratitude.  And practicing gratitude puts your mind at ease faster than anything.  I often find that all of this thinking of gratitude soon turns into prayer, which is another wonderful way to end a good day, or to improve a bad one.

So tonight, as you’re crawling into your warm bed – count your blessings instead of sheep!

Merry Christmas!

Our outdoor holiday decorations got a beautiful covering of ice last night.

Today is a special day for my husband and I — it’s our very first Christmas as husband and wife!  We are staying here in Nebraska for Christmas this year, and getting together with my hubby’s side of the family tomorrow.  It will be my first Christmas not in North Dakota in all my 28 years, but as I joked with my aunt, it will also be my first lutefisk-free holiday of my life!    Lutefisk is something my Norwegian and Swedish family has enjoyed all my life.  This year, I will be enjoying kase knoepfla with my husband’s German-Russian family!  It’s fun to discover what Christmas traditions other families have.

But their tradition is to get together on Christmas Day only, so we have Christmas Eve all to ourselves.  It’s been just glorious to think of what traditions we want to start for our very own family.  Our agenda for the day has included lots of movie-watching, book reading, video game playing, and a walk outside with our pup.  Here are a few photos I snapped of the ice as it covered everything in sight:

Icicle branches

Icy evergreens

Soon we’ll be off to church, then home to a cozy steak and potato dinner, then gifts and “It’s a Wonderful Life.”  We’re making scrambled eggs and blueberry muffins for morning, when we hope to find some treasures left by Santa.  Then it will be off to celebrate with family…..another year come and gone.  It’s been a good one.  A Wonderful Life indeed.

I hope you have a chance to kick back and relax this holiday, even if you’ve got a house full of kids and/or family.  Here’s a treat I always enjoy:  a small plate of Jarlsburg cheese, green olives, and almonds.  Top it off with a glass of wine or beer — pure heaven!

Kick up your feet, watch a few movies with someone you love, and soak in the leisure.  The busy start of another year will come soon enough — now is the time to savor the passing of 2009.

A few gorgeous finds on Etsy…cloth dolls

Okay, it seems as though I’m often late to the table when it comes to trends and fads and all things popular.  It’s true – I just recently started exploring Flickr.com about a month ago, and this weekend, I found myself browsing Etsy.com for the first time.  What can I say?  I’ve been busy.

But OMG!  The beautiful things to be found there!  Today I have to share with all of you the adorable world of Mimi Kirchner.  I learned about her by exploring the Etsy blog, where they feature various artists daily.  Here is the “Handmade Portrait” of Mimi:

Granted, when Mimi speaks of not being able to throw ANYTHING away, she does remind me of someone with hoarding tendencies (which is not really in line with my unclutterer tendencies), but nevertheless – Mimi is obviously a high functioning hoarder who has made her tendency work for her!!  Aren’t her creations some of the most precious things you’ve ever seen?

No doubt, these gifts would definitely be a “splurge,” but well worth it, I think!  I think that I may have to splurge on a few items as gifts to myself!  Two of my absolute favorites:

"Fantasy Island Pincushion" fits nicely into a teacup!

Three Babies

Aren’t they just precious?!  This is a perfect example of the kind of glorious craftsmanship and creativity to be found on Etsy.com!  You can also read Mimi’s blog to see what she’s keeping busy with.

Alternative ways to use Christmas tree ornaments

Use holiday ornaments to brighten up unexpected places in your home.

Christmas ornaments seem to have a way of multiplying, don’t they?  Perhaps the first year you had a Christmas tree of your own, you went out and purchased a box of colorful ornaments.  As years went by, however, that collection was added to by gifts received from others, ornaments passed down from family members, purchased ornaments to commemorate a special occasion like “Baby’s First Christmas” or your trip to Europe, and then of course there are those ornaments that are just too cute for you not to snag on a clearance sale in January.

But your tree is only so big, right?  And sooner or later – you find yourself with simply too many ornaments!  I’ve edited my collection down by putting what I think is a reasonable number of ornaments on the tree, and limiting it at that number.  From here on, whenever I receive a new ornament, another ornament needs to be delegated to another place.  That other place may be the Goodwill donation box, or it may be re-incarnated as another kind of holiday decor.

Here are a few new ways to use extra holiday ornaments you have that no longer have a place on your Christmas tree:

*Fill a glass vase (or three) with colorful bulb ornaments for a colorful tabletop centerpiece.

*Place colorful bulbs amongst displays or vignettes that already exist in your home to add a bit of holiday color in an unexpected place.

*Use them to trim holiday gifts.

*Hang ornaments off lamps, curtain rods, and bedposts.

*Hang a small ornament from your rear-view mirror for a bit of holiday beautification in your car!!  (Be sure it doesn’t obstruct your view, obviously).

*Choose durable ornaments to hang from planters or garden tables outdoors.

Use ornaments to adorn your holiday gifts.

Non-breakable ornaments adorn our garden table that sits just outside our front door.

So share with us – what other ways have you found to use extra holiday ornaments?

Recycle last year’s Christmas cards on this year’s gifts!

Using the front side of old Christmas cards as gift tags allows you to re-use a beautiful card you received, without adding clutter to your "keepsake" box!

Going to the mailbox this time of year is one of my favorite times of each day.  I love getting cards, photos and letters from family and friends scattered across the country and throughout the world.  What to do, however, after I’ve read and enjoyed them, and shared them with my husband?  Displaying cards is always a quandary — this year I’ve selected some of them to be strung along a ribbon and hung off the side of our bookcases, and other times I place them in a beautiful basket.  When family comes over to visit, they may flip through the cards themselves – but other than that, do I ever find myself looking through the cards again?  Sadly, I have to admit no.

One way to display your beautiful Christmas greetings.

So, after the first of the year, when I’m taking down many of my holiday decorations, I find myself looking through this pile of beautiful Christmas greetings and wondering what to do with all of them?  Many of the photo cards I end up keeping in one of our photo boxes – especially those of close family members and friends.  Cards with beautiful artwork covers, however, get recycled into gift tags for next year’s Christmas gifts!

This is a wonderful solution for re-using something you already have and love (the beautiful cards) in favor of buying something else new (gift tags from the store).  It is also a practical way to decorate wrapped gifts in a travel-friendly way!  Bows and ribbons tend to get crushed and untied when your gifts have to be packed in a car to be driven to relative’s houses for your holiday celebration.  Even worse is when your gifts need to be mailed or packed in your suitcase for a flight!

By using old holiday cards as tags, however, they double as a nice decorative touch on a simply wrapped gift, and they arrive looking just as adorable as when you first wrapped them.

This plain gift bag was embellished with the cover of a homemade card I received a few years ago. This way, the crafter's art gets to be shown off one last time as it is reincarnated as a gift tag.

This easy way to dress up a gift is a perfect solution for someone like me, who is slightly gift-wrap challenged.  It’s even better when I think that these beautiful cards are being used more than once, and enjoyed in multiple ways. (Confession:  I did the same thing with many of the wedding cards we received.  Sure, I’m keeping the sentimental ones, but many of them that contained no hand-written message, I clipped the beautiful cover off and will use them as gift tags for wedding gifts in years to come!)

Tell me – how do you display the holiday cards you receive, and what do you do with them when the holidays are over?

What do you do on a snow day?

Our first snowstorm of the year

Like much of the central Midwest, we are snowed in today.  Huge buckets of fluffy, light snow started falling yesterday, the wind roared and blew it all around last night, and today the sun is shining on our neighborhood, while everyone sits stranded in their homes, waiting for the snow plows to come dig us out!  Businesses and schools were closed yesterday afternoon and all of today, as our city tries to dig itself out from the huge drifts.

The first day of a “snow emergency” is always a mixture of excitement, fear (as we try to remember how to drive on icy/snowy roads), and then….boredom.  The first  12 hours of our isolation felt like an unexpected vacation.  We reveled in the chance to watch television during the day, stay up late reading, leaving all our work problems far behind as we focused on simply staying dry and warm.  The second 24 hours of our isolation is beginning to feel a bit like a prison sentence!  Good thing my husband and I are both introverts — I can only imagine what some of my more extroverted friends are feeling right now.

This feeling of boredom surprised me – wasn’t I always fantasizing about being able to stay home from work to do the things that I wanted to do throughout the day?  Isn’t this just like a surprise weekend in the middle of the week?  How could I not be LOVING THIS?  I realized that so many of my weekends start off with some plans — outings with friends, appointments, errands to run, projects to finish.  When I approached a few days without a “to do” list, and without the ability to go anywhere – to the gym, to the store, to the post office – to run any of my errands, I was somewhat lost.

What do you do on snow days?  I remember the snow days of my youth, where we would all bust out the doors with our sleds in hand and feeling on top of the world.  Sledding would still be fun as adults – but at the moment we have neither sleds nor a hill nearby.

Today, to battle the boredom, I returned to my trusty old friend, THE LIST. Yes, it likely speaks to my “type A” nature that I even approach a snow day with a list, but it helped me to organize my time and determine how I wanted to spend my day so that it wasn’t wasted.  I made a list of little projects I could begin doing, fun things that weekends never seemed to allow time for, and other general “snow day” fun activities.

Here it is so far:

*Enjoy some hot chocolate and take in the lighted Christmas tree, a pine-scented candle, and the blustery view out our front window

*Take our dog out to play in the snow, and snap some cute pictures of her while I’m at it

*Organize my “dish closet” – the place where we store all our fancy dishes and serving pieces

*Blog

*Finish the novel I’m reading

*Catch up on the laundry (boring, I know)

*Take some time out to enjoy the uninterrupted day with my husband

For all of you who have been stormed in before — I’m dying to know what you fill your time with when isolation is a must.  Fill me in!

Hopefully we'll be able to dig ourselves out soon!