Super Cool Homeschooling Giveaway!!!

Lori at FreelyEducate is having a super cool giveaway.  She’s giving away a Friendly Chemistry Set ($135 value).  You have until Friday, March 27th at midnight CST to enter.  Go to the giveaway post here to learn more and enter!

Dining On A Dime eBook Sale!

One day only sale… $5!

No, I’m not getting any benefit for posting this.  I just happen to love their website and their books. 

Math Tutoring Giveaway!

FreelyEducate.com is giving away 5 1-hr online math tutoring sessions from ClickandClimb.com.  Good luck!

Goodness sakes…

It’s been way too long since I’ve blogged.

I really do have lots of things to say.  Hmmmm…

I’ve been kind-of distant from the cyber world lately.  Not doing much online.  Just now getting back into my yahoo groups.  Maybe my blog will be next.

On getting organized…

I thought I’d channel Kahlil Gibran with that title. If you never read “The Prophet” there’s no better time than now.

Back to the subject…

I’ve posted a little bit about my organization efforts. I’ve been reading “Organizing From the Inside Out” and decluttering a little at a time. For the most part, I’m pretty organized now. I still have a lot of things in a tiny little house and as I go through “OFIO”, I’ll get proper storage for my space. She’s already mentioned having to go vertical with space in small dwellings, so that’s what I’m prepared to do.

Here’s a funny story about just how unorganized I used to be:

So, you’re wondering just how unorganized I used to be. Well, at one time I filled nearly 10 extra-large rubbermaid totes with stuff from inside my house. 10! It was a disaster in here, I literally had paths to be able to walk through my house. Yeah, it was bad. But that’s not the funny part… it’s about the organizing book I mentioned above. I received it one year for my birthday. I thought, “this is great, I really can use this.” But as time passed, later on that evening, I came to realize that I already had that book (or so I thought. I was pretty sure that I had already purchased it for myself.) but when I got home, I couldn’t find it (which was expected. I couldn’t find anything in my house! That’s how I ended up with half-a-dozen hot glue guns… lol.) Sometime later, I was cleaning out my locker at work (I worked at Hobby Lobby at the time… easy glue gun purchase there… lol) and damn if if it wasn’t stuck at the back of my locker underneath a ton of other stuff. Thank God I’m not that unorganized anymore.

Oh, but be careful when you’re decluttering, too. We had this steam cleaner (you know the portable one’s you see on TV infomercials) that we NEVER used, ever. I think DH played with it once on the day he bought it. It sat in my laundry room for nearly a year. So during one of my recent purges, I packed it up and took it down to the local thrift shop. Damn if that man didn’t need it for the first time ever last week! And not for cleaning, mind you, but for work to be able to take wallpaper off. Ugh! I lied, and said I didn’t know where it was, being pretty sure that I had already purged it from the house but hoping that it was still here. So, after becoming fully aware that I no longer had it, I ran down to Walgreens (that’s where he bought it from) hoping that they still sold them. Blessings to them, they had 1 left! AND lucky me, they have a $10 rebate for it in their catalog this month.

BUT, at the same time, I’m also trying to organize my time. Having not yet read “Time Management From the Inside Out“, I’m doing what I can with what I know now. I already have the family calendar in place on the fridge (been doing that for years now, and I’ve found the best ones have large spaces to write and a pocket at the bottom for storage). I’ve had a *paying bills* system in place for quite a few years now, too. But it’s all these little odds and ends that I need/want to wrap-up into one place and one system. The Master Plan is that place and that system.  It has a place for everything!  Really!  And if you do have something that you’d like to add, you can do that because it’s fully customizable.  I’m sure Julie would also love feedback for her future editions.  :)  I love that it’s an interactive PDF, which means I can edit many of the pages and save them to the planner, then print them out if I so choose.  It even has homeschooling and unschooling planning pages!  You rock, Julie!

It’s on sale HALF PRICE this month!  Take advantage of that!  Julie said it will only happen once a year.

So, with The Master Plan, I can finally start to get all of those details organized and start my on pursuing my goals full steam ahead!

Now what?

My house is fairly clean…I’m no top of the daily stuff… the process of decluttering is moving along… I’m eating right and exercising on a daily basis… BUT because I’m no longer feeling overwhelmed by my house, I have all of this free time and I’m spending most of it on the computer reading blogs and stuff.  I think it’s time to make some goals, so that I can put all of this free time to use.

Another blog

I’ve started a separate blog for my back to health journey.  I’ll still post some updates here, but I wanted a separate place to track all of my progress… it reads easier that way on My Yahoo.

A New RU Blog Carnival!

Yeah, It’s a new RU blog carnival! Go check it out over at the Radical Unschoolers Network!

Using credit to get out of credit card debt

I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true. Those 0% APR on Balance Transfer offers that you get in the mail can help you get out of credit card debt BUT you have to be diligent about payments, pay more than you would normally pay per month, and NEVER pay late (even a day late will cause you to lose your 0% APR).

Check out #4 in this article on getting out of credit card debt:

Got Credit Card Debt? Ten Tactics to Use Right Now to Get It Under Control

I have done this a few times. The first time I transfered almost $4,000 from a few cards onto one card, and when that 0% APR time ran out, I moved that balance to another card. Today, I did it again, I’m determined to be out of credit card debt by the end of this 0% APR period. I started this quest to pay off our credit about a year and a half ago and we’re down to almost $1,000 now. As we get my DH’s student loan debt down to a transferable amount, we may transfer his balance to a 0% APR credit card, too. The extra time that the 0% APR period gives is such an advantage to getting the card paid off, without all of those extra fees tacked on to the balance.

Habit Change

In the past, I have been guilty of jumping into changes too quickly. I’d become overwhelmed and quit. Part of the problem was not preparing and part of it was not making changes that worked with my personality.

I started reading, “Organizing From the Inside Out” last night… this book teaches you how to organize your life in a way that flows with who you are.

Steve Pavlina over at stevepavline.com has a great post today about Habit Change. He equates habit change with chess strategy.

He says:

“Trying to change a habit overnight is like trying to execute scholar’s mate in chess. Scholar’s mate is a strategy of achieving checkmate in only four moves. It only works against total beginners. Against a chess player with an ounce of experience, scholar’s mate will fail. A botched scholar’s mate puts you in a disadvantaged position, so attempting it is usually a bad idea unless you’re playing against a complete novice.

Are you applying the scholar’s mate strategy when trying to change old habits or adopt new habits? Do you go straight for the kill, only to find your attempt shot down?

When you try to change a habit without devoting sufficient time to the early game and middle game, you’ll almost always fail to make the change stick. Only the very easy habits will succumb to this kind of brute force strategy.

The early game of habit change is education and setup. In the middle game, you execute some changes to support your habit change. Only in the endgame do you go directly for the kill.”

Go read the rest… Habit Change Is Like Chess