Baby Steps

Mine, not my children's. I had been meaning to write this post, but Cheri's comment made me do it faster.

Fly Lady is great. It works so well for so many people. But not for me. It's not because I can't do it. She has a great method for building into it, and starting where you are so you are not overwhelmed. I however can't. I always just want to jump into ALL of it. Which is impossible when your house starts out the way mine does. I suppose if your house looked the opposite of mine, then you wouldn't need Fly Lady at all, because you would be good at managing it already.

So, what to do? I invented my own teeny tiny program. And the little program is the entire program, so that I don't have to feel bad because I'm not doing it all. The basis of which is stolen from Fly Lady though. 15 min a day. Ever. Oh sure, if I get into a project I go over, but I don't have to. I always have the option to stop.

Monday: Kids Room
Tuesday: Bedroom
Wednesday: Office
Thursday: Front room
Friday: Kitchen & Dining
Saturday: Bathroom
Sunday: Car & Garage

This way on Wednesdays when I have only decluttered the office for 15 min, I can take joy in knowing I'm done for the day, even if the huge amount of chaos doesn't look changed a bit. Or it assures that my front room gets vacuumed every week. It's strange, but it's hard for me to take baby steps when it comes to cleaning. I either have to do the entire huge project (clean out the whole office, vacuum the whole house, etc) or do almost nothing at all. The latter usually happens, resulting in any good cleaning intentions I had to come to naught.

Anyway the bottom line of my new program is that it is working for me. And that's a good thing.

What made everyone better made me worse

Or so it seems. I have long been a lover of taking pictures. I love film, I love developing film, I love prints in your hand. And then digital had to come and ruin my love of photography. That's not true, I still love it, just now I suck instead. Here are the conclusions I have come to:

1. Digital has made me lazy. Instead of thinking I have to get a shot right because each click costs money, I can take a billion and hope that one turns out.

2. From my research my digital SLR was supposed to be approximately the same as my beloved film camera. It's not. It cost twice as much and is half as good. Maybe I should get a new lens, that could help.

3. Photoshop, cropping, etc. I don't do a lot of this mainly because I'm lazy. But now everyone has beautiful pictures. [for which I am glad, I don't begrudge anyone their pretty pictures, I just miss mine] It seems like cheating for me, like I am betraying my photos [because photos have feelings and it would be rude to make them upset by changing them?]

4. I am mostly just being a whiny baby who is sad she can't take a good picture to save her life. Maybe I should find my film camera and go back. That seems like a pretty good [ugh expensive!] idea.