feng shui and hoarding

    I'm having a get together this weekend and am frantically trying to get my two households (my mom's and mine) worth of clutter junk stuff under control. The basement in my house is finished off and divided into three rooms, what we call "the big room" that's at the bottom of the stairs and affords no privacy and two other rooms with doors.  One is my older daughter's room and the other is a library/spare room. Since we've moved in, the big room has just been a big storage room but the library/spare room has been set up and used by company twice. The other night, my daughter and I moved the boxes into the spare room (one with a door) and the futon and chairs out into the big room. The big room looks so nice as a family room- which it will be some day. It was so nice to be able to close the door on the stuff I haven't been able to go through yet. I thought of all the other stuff that I'm still trying to find a permanent home for and for a brief moment, I entertained the idea of using that room for a junk room.  Then I realized I would have to give up my quiet library and any overnight company would not have any privacy. Plus, I don't want to be a person who has a junk room- that room you just toss everything into and don't ever deal with again.
     That got me thinking about the claim that clutter creates negative energy and how some people feel  Feng Shui creates positive energy flow.  Most people who de-clutter their space will testify to feeling so much better mentally and emotionally.  When I was purging our stuff to get ready for our move from Alabama to Oregon, I had a great time getting rid of stuff. Our local thrift store put up a "No Vacancy" sign and I gave my friend's daughter two pick-up truck loads of stuff for a yard sale and I still have a room full of stuff at my mother-in-law's house I need to get rid of when we go back to visit.  I brought you through all that to bring you to this point- my clutter-energy connection theory.  I'm just wondering if it's not that the stuff creates negative energy but that being the person who holds on to things past their usefulness drains your positive energy.  Is it possible that being concerned with the management of your belongings brings unnecessary stress into your life and closes up your world just a little bit?  Maybe letting go of your junk frees up your time and energy for you to go places or pursue other endeavors that will move you further toward being WHO you want to be instead of being WHAT you own.

Dinner's ready

  I hate to be busy. I know a lot of people who seem to manage 3 or 4 activities in one day but I'm not one of them. Lately, my life has gone into overdrive. Or, as some people would put it- out of neutral. 4 nights a week, we have something going on in the evening which wouldn't be a big deal except my husband works nights and has to leave the house by 6:30.  I'm not terribly domestic to start with. When we were dating, J.R. took pictures of me cooking so he'd have proof that it did happen. Nobody would have believed him otherwise. I really thought that if God had intended for me to cook, He wouldn't have put so many take out places between my job and home. But, I digress.  
    Being busy in the afternoon/ early evening made dinner hectic to say the least. Not that the kids minded Ramen for supper. They thought they were on vacation- for the first couple of days. J.R. could only pretend it was Pho for so long.  So, today, while the kids played in our snow storm  squall flurry near miss, fought, drank cocoa, caught up on homework, fought,  went to derby practice, fought wrestled fought and watched The Flintstone's, I cooked. I made a double batch of pancakes this morning and froze the leftovers then got started on dinner. I made double batches of 3 dishes everybody likes and put them in the fridge and freezer.(I have no idea what I'm going to do next week because that was my whole repertoire of "stuff all 3 kids like") So now, we can either heat up the whole pan and all have the same thing or everyone can just pick what they want and eat buffet style.  Whatever they wanna do. Just so I'm not tearing my hair out at 5 o'clock.
  Of course, Sneaky Mom paid a very brief visit. She added flax seed meal to the pancakes for some extra omega-3s and encouraged me to try to find a way to incorporate more fiber and protein without making them dense and unpalatable. (If this makes me sound the least bit schizophrenic, don't worry, my kids think I am, too)  Then we ground up some carrots and kidney beans and mixed them with the ground turkey that I put in the Taco Mac- which I made with homemade cheese sauce.  She was going to puree some cauliflower into the mashed potatoes for the shepherd's pie but J.R. made them and she forgot to mention it until he was putting the cheese on top. I also made this chicken and noodle stuff that tastes a little like chicken and dumplings. We call it Chicken and Noodles (pretty clever, huh?). The original recipe calls for Velveeta (it's a Southern thang. Don't judge) and, sometimes, sour cream. But tonight, we used leftover, homemade cheese sauce and Greek yogurt. It was less processed, anyway, and that's one of Sneaky Mom's big goals. Now that that's done, I'm off to make matching clothes for the kids from some old drapes.