Day 15

So, all in one day, I've officially made it past two weeks and just shy of finishing my first calendar month.  I think I've been doing well so far - not quite as well as I dreamed I'd do, but better than what I think a lot of people would have done.  I can already tell that sweeping and vaccuuming daily, as well as taking care of the dishes and laundry as soon as they're done are becoming habits.  Now that I have the laundry room decluttered, I even have a little work station to fold and hang the clothes as they come out of the dryer, which has helped a TON with my motivation to stick to that.  Kiga's allergies are continuing to show improvement with the increased attention to cleanliness, and it just feels *good* to not have hair and bits of hay sticking to my bare feet when I walk across the house at night :)

2 I've officially reached the boring part of the book - the very end, and where Podhajsky is explaining the Spanish Riding School.  Now, don't get me wrong; I would absolutely love to visit there (and ride there, in my dreams!), but I can only take so much of "We do this exercise here, and this is the part of the arena we do it in."  I guess I should have expected this part to be less exciting than the actual training sections, but it's been dragging out at a terrible degree.  Add to that, my computer ate the last two pages worth of notes that I took over the second phase of training, and I've decided that I'm about ready to be done with Podhajsky for now.  I love what I've learned, but I need to take a break from this particular work to keep from getting frustrated.  I think I'll slog my way through the last few pages and leave finishing my outlining for later.

14 I haven't actually put any words on paper yet for my fic today, but I've been brainstorming up how part is going to be written and am going to try to hammer it out before bed.  I guess that means I'm staying up late tonight... oops.

21 Finish my towel quilt
My towel quilt is something that my mom and I started the summer before I went to college.  It is quite literally a few towels, cut into squares, and patched together, backed by a flat sheet.  We got it about half of the way done and then just quit. After I got married, my mom told me to take it, because she didn't want to hang on to it anymore.  Well, my husband figured out why I had the idea to make it in the first place - it is *super* snuggly.  The only problem is that one of the ends isn't quite finished shut, so washing it makes it turn inside out and around itself, and sometimes it will nab you in your sleep because of it.  I'm currently using contrasting colors of yarn to outline each of the squares to keep the flat sheet behaving in a proper manner.  I finished most of the edges like that a year or two ago, but once I discovered that it's pretty hard to stitch along the middle of a big quilt, I decided to quit.  Well, now I'm back to finish it.  I got about 2/3 of the way through Zoolander and finished stitching through three squares of it.  This is gonna suck until it's done...

38 I began decluttering my office, which is going to be an absolute trip because I had been using it as my storage area for the stuff that was labeled "get rid of" from the other rooms so far.  It's also been holding a bunch of Christmas and Halloween decorations that missed getting put in their boxes and moving out to the shed.  I think I got a good 1/3 of the way through everything in there today, but the problem with "A place for everything" was that my piles of "get rid of", "trash", and "goes out to storage" that leaked into the hall had to get put back in a way that would make getting it back out easy again.  This room is going to take some time, that's for sure!  However, once it's done, I'll be good to start 43 (organizing my file cabinet) and 85 (inventorying my MLP collection).

51 My DIY project of fixing the electric fencing has been getting derailed by our horrendous heat indexes, and it's been super hard motivating myself to get out there and do it, since we're not currently using the pasture that is being fixed.  I might push this project off for a future month and concentrate tomorrow instead on putting up the weather stripping around the doors.  That's probably more important in the long run, anyway. 

87 I can't tell you the name of the antique shop that I found in Lee's Summit this month, but it was mostly full of stuff that was way too fancy for me.  You know, like the stuff that breaks when you look at it.  I was kind of disappointed with how fancy it was, as I kind of like finding junky booths (and the things I collect very seldom are in the nicer shops).  However, finding that place led me to a super neat home decor place that had some amazing art and very neat things to decorate with.  Not sure if I would ever need any of the stuff there, but it was a lot of fun to look at!

Today's 5 things

1. It was overcast today and we even got a tiny bit of rain.  We really needed a day with minimal sun.
2. I made a batch of super awesome oatmeal chocolate chip cookies <3
3. I get to work out tomorrow!
4. The critters in my life give me untold amount of joy :)
5. All five of my aquariums got cleaned today - yay!