On a Cuter Note

Some souvenirs found on the famous lower level of the Kyobo Book Centre:

(Very) Late Summer Acquisitions

There's some gear I'd been meaning to get all summer, and finally did. Here's the cast-iron grill pan I bought at Paul's Discount a couple of weeks ago...just in time for the last CSA veggie share of the season.
Mmm, grill marks. Next summer, I'll be ready for all that zucchini.

And here are the bike fenders I had installed by awesome bike duo Cody and Steve at their shop, 30th Century Bicycle, last week...just in time for—today's first snow? What the hell?!
Goodbye, summer.

Hi Amber!

This one's for Amber, whose Google Reader is lonely because her friends aren't updating their blogs.

We got the kind of towels Amber recommended—Thomas O'Brien at Target. Our previous set of towels was five years old and looking most sickly:

Picking a towel color is challenging because we have a bathroom with ketchup-red walls and black-and-white floor tiles. Finally we went with the matching-by-not-matching-at-all tactic (a tactic I just made up): sea green.

I know it sounds super-consumeristic when I report on such things as towels, but I'm actually an oblivious academic who would probably never buy new towels for 20 years and this blog helps motivate me to do things that help me feel like my life is at least somewhat balanced! Really!

Before-and-After Pics Are So Satisfying, Non?

So, here's what I did with the Problem of the 1,394,287 Beauty Products. I bought these plastic boxes from Office Max—you know, the kind you might see in your supply cabinet at work, housing different kinds of pens and post-its—and used them to sort the millionish beauty products on my bathroom shelf. Now each cream and unguent is visible and accessible. Behold the before-and-after:


What's funny is that I think most people who know me would guess that I spend all of five seconds a day on a beauty regimen that consists of scrubbing my face with Ivory soap and a loofah...alas, we are all victims of the beauty myth.*

*And not-so-mythy sunscreen hysteria—which I wish I had caught onto years ago, as I would have fewer freckles ("age spots" according to my mom) now.

No Solutions, Just More Problems

I wish I could say that I've totally reorganized my recipe binder, but alas. I have not. Instead I have another clutter challenge to present: my shelf in the bathroom. For a girl who wears little to no makeup on a daily basis, I have a plethora of beauty products cluttering my bathroom. Where does it all come from? How embarrassing. I feel so vain.

So, that needs to be taken care of, and I need to take some anti-dust-mite action in the bedroom because I just learned I'm allergic, and I need to rake the fallen leaves in the backyard.

P.S. There is no time to do any of this and work on my dissertation.

Clutter Challenge #3: Recipes

I'm looking for a more elegant way to store recipes. Currently, this beat-up green binder is where they live. They are disorganized and falling out and the binder is getting too full.

I'm not sure where to go from here. I'd love to beautifully copy out each favorite recipe by hand onto a recipe card and keep them in card file, but who has the time? Maybe I just need to weed out recipes I never use and put the rest in some sort of order. That would help a lot, but it wouldn't make the green binder any more aesthetically pleasing.

If you have a great recipe-storage method, please let me know.

Clutter Challenge #2: Foyer Closet

My Sunday-morning task was to do something with the coat closet in the foyer, which I had grown afraid to open. When we moved in four years ago, we threw stuff in here and just kept doing so...So it was quite an archaeological project. ("Oh, there's my sleeping bag!") In the middle of the cleaning-out, the foyer looked tornado-stricken:

Two hours later:
Much better.

Antique Store Find

We scored this at an antique store/coffee shop in Mt. Vernon, Iowa. The owner said she had already sold the Gay toothbrushes.

Buy Nothing Summer Is Over, Baby

I started getting a paycheck again in September, plus I got a supplementary job as a grader for a lecture class, plus I just finished a freelance editing gig. I'm feeling flush. Of course, when the reality of bills and expenses hits, Buy Nothing Semester will commence.

But in that short window of opportunity, I went to the big mall in College Town. I'm now fully addicted to the thrill of getting shoes for $3 or a shirt for $2 at the thrift stores, but for whatever reason, the thrift stores aren't so good for workout clothes, so it was off to the mall.

It was rather a shock after the summer of thrifting. Anything over $20 seemed like a total ripoff. The saleswomen in this one teeny-bopper store were scary and Stepford-y and told me three times that underwear was on sale in the back. I found myself scoffing at entire stores of poorer-quality clothes than are on the $2 rack at the Mennonite charity thrift shop.

But I got out with my sweatpants and T-shirts, and even some of that sale underwear, and came home and, on a consumer roll, ordered these online. Can't wait till they arrive. It makes it sweeter that I waited all summer to get them.

Too Cute

I'm glad Buy Nothing Summer is almost over, because I'm so totally going to buy everything on this web site.

But seriously. Starting September I resume getting my grad student income, so I can do things I've been putting off, like calling an electrician to fix some light fixtures around the house and getting new sneakers. But Buy Nothing Summer was surprisingly fun. I had my doubts that it would work, because I never thought I made that many optional purchases to begin with, but it's amazing what becomes optional when you really think about it. And my bank account balance just stayed where it was, for days and days and days, which was gratifying.

Somehow I lived through the summer without: light in the back hallway, new workout shoes, a new swimsuit, a basket for my bike, the Vegan with a Vengeance cookbook, and a compost bucket. I know, I've been roughing it, huh?