{"id":17815,"date":"2025-03-20T15:45:08","date_gmt":"2025-03-20T22:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/?p=17815"},"modified":"2025-03-20T15:45:08","modified_gmt":"2025-03-20T22:45:08","slug":"organizing-things-and-watching-monster-trucks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/2025\/03\/organizing-things-and-watching-monster-trucks\/","title":{"rendered":"Organizing things and watching monster trucks"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago I began a home organization project whose goals were:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. To make me feel better about our home, rather than “argh, it’s always a mess!”<\/li>\n
  2. To make it easier for me to complete tasks, less “where is that form for school?” and “where is that 9 inch baking pan?”<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    And with the overarching goal of bringing back a bit of control to my life and feel less overwhelmed, which I’ve been struggling with lately.<\/p>\n

    I’m happy to say that I’ve been largely successful so far. I came up with a system for the kids so their school stuff isn’t just all over the place, and it’s easy to stay disciplined about putting away their papers and returning things on time. I also did some under counter organization, which has been incredibly useful so far, and we’ve kept it up for a few weeks!<\/p>\n

    <\/a><\/div>\n

    I joked that it’s funny that I’m “so old” that under counter organization excites me, but honestly, I’ve always been like this.<\/p>\n

    In other house news, the TV in our au pair’s room died recently. MJ was feeling industrious, so he bought a set of boards for that model online and did a project with Adam to replace them. Success! I feel a little bad that my first inclination was to buy a new TV because they’re so inexpensive, but replacing the board in them was even less<\/em> expensive in terms of cash, they had fun doing it, and it kept one more TV out of a landfill.<\/p>\n

    <\/a><\/div>\n

    As life continues to chug along, it’s noteworthy that eggs are very expensive right now. Bird flu has decimated chicken flocks for months and no end in sight. With federal efforts that would help that come to a conclusion being dismantled by a fiercely pro-business, anti-health federal government I’m concerned it won’t get better any time soon. Our local grocery store got to $15.99 for 18 eggs before I finally decided to haul myself over to Costco one morning (before they sell out for the day) to grab two dozen for $8.99. It’s still on the expensive side (California always is) but even for here the situation was getting a bit out of hand.<\/p>\n

    I’ve continued taking Tuesday evenings for myself. In early January I went to San Francisco to see Nosferatu at the AMC Metreon. I pre-gamed by watching the original Nosferatu from 1922, and I’m very glad I did. It is the same story, but the new one has some really great nods to the original and some beautiful scene recreations. The movie was beautiful and well-acted, and I didn’t find it too gory. It also doesn’t have the cheap jump-scares that are so popular in horror now, and which I don’t like. I want my horror to be beautiful and nightmare inducing, but I don’t want to feel anxious about it while I’m sitting there watching it. This movie really hit the mark. I also saw Flow at our local theater, and finally<\/em> saw Wicked! Another Tuesday evening I decided to go swimming at nearby Hayward Plunge, which has a $5 drop-in rate. That was a lot of fun, I love to swim and I’ve been looking for an outlet. Other evening activities for myself have included going to the library and reading, which satisfies my desire to have a calm evening to recharge. I have some San Francisco dinners with friends queued up after our spring break trip to Philly, which I’m looking forward to as well.<\/p>\n

    We observed Purim recently, which sadly got interrupted by Aaron having a cold that came with a side order of fever. That meant we had to avoid the event at the synagogue we’ve been hoping to go to more, but we did make Hamantashen! It was a smaller batch than previous years and we only did cherry filling, but everyone seemed happy with it and the boys had fun making it.<\/p>\n

    <\/a><\/div>\n

    Since we were home for the sick kiddo weekend, we spent some time finally putting some more paintings up around the house. It’s nice seeing things come together, and finally starting to free up some space in the garage.<\/p>\n

    <\/a><\/div>\n

    And then I promptly put a car in the garage. It wasn’t planned, but MJ’s 2000 Alero hasn’t been doing great lately. We had to recondition the battery recently after I neglected to take it out for a drive for a few weeks (oops). Once the battery was healthy again, I took it out for a jaunt to the car wash and grocery store, and didn’t make it past the entrance to the car wash. I put down the window to pay for the car wash, and heard a clunk. The window had fallen into the door. Unfortunately, it’s a relatively expensive fix, and with the overall condition of the car and usefulness to us, we made the sad decision that it was time to say goodbye. It’ll be a few weeks until we can actually part ways, so it’s basically taking up all the free space in the garage until then. It’s been amusingly weird having a car in the garage.<\/p>\n

    <\/a><\/div>\n

    The following weekend everyone was feeling much better just in time for Monster Jam in Oakland. I’ve never had any interest in monster trucks, but Aaron really likes them and I thought it might be a fun thing to do with the boys. We weren’t sure how they’d react to how loud it was, but we came prepared with noise dampening headphones. And indeed they did have fun! I could have passed on it honestly, which is funny because so far my own interests have been quite aligned with the boys, and this was definitely a departure. It was nice to be able to take BART there though and not have to worry about parking.<\/p>\n

    <\/a><\/div>\n

    Tomorrow we’re off to Philadelphia for spring break. Our house sitter gets to try her hand at keeping our new house tree alive while we’re gone, but I think she’s up to the task. In fact, given my track record with house plants, it may even be healthier once we return.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    A few weeks ago I began a home organization project whose goals were: To make me feel better about our home, rather than “argh, it’s always a mess!” To make it easier for me to complete tasks, less “where is that form for school?” and “where is that 9 inch baking pan?” And with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,25,41,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-food","category-kids","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17815"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17825,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17815\/revisions\/17825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}