The Beauty of Transience

It snowed yesterday, and I couldn't help but notice how intricate the snowflakes were. It takes really specific conditions to make them into perfect little hexagonal crystals. The accumulating snow on the sidewalks sparkled like glitter. I captured these snowflakes on the sleeve of my coat, because they melt instantaneously upon coming in contact with skin. The snow is largely gone after a sunny day, and the impermanence of the otherworldly scene only further heightens its beauty.

January's Project: Simplifying my Cleaning Routine

Keeping the house clean takes longer than it should, even though I don't have that much stuff and it's only a two bedroom apartment. Being busy gets the better of me, and I put off chores until the house is a wreck. I then spend my entire day off cleaning, which is no fun for anybody. Some people genuinely enjoy housework. I am not one of them. So, in order to make more room in my life for living, I am going to minimalize my housework.

I'm already working on my cleaning products, so it's time to tackle the chores themselves. Regularity is the key to simplicity in this case, and so I will try and come up with a regular schedule for each chore so it doesn't consume my rare day off.

Weekly Chore Schedule:

Monday: Dusting sucks, but somebody has to do it. Lucky me!

Tuesday: I usually have half of the day free on Tuesdays, so this large block of time is devoted to my least favorite task: laundry. While the clothes are going, I will work on general tidying up and and hopefully gathering up more stuff to give away.

Wednesday: Thursday is garbage day, so I will gather up all of the trash and recycling to take out on Wednesday night.

Thursday: I also usually have half days on Thursdays, so I will use this time to clean the bathroom, as well as any residual laundry left over from Tuesday.

Friday: I have a bad habit of forgetting to use food that I buy, and I don't want this to happen. On Fridays I will take an inventory of the fridge, clean out anything that's gone bad, and plan meals for the next week. I will also do a general tidying up of the kitchen. This is a good day for it, since we usually go out for dinner, and I won't be dealing with cooking on top of the rest of it.

Saturday: I will get the grocery shopping done on Saturday. It has to happen fairly early in the morning because the supermarkets around here are a madhouse on the weekends.

Sunday: On Sundays I will attend to the floors. I love my hardwood floors but they show dirt and dust so easily. I guess it keeps me honest, but it requires regular maintenance. Once a week should work well.

A few other general habits:

• I once heard somebody say that you should never leave a room empty-handed, which I've found to be extremely true. There's always something that isn't where it belongs, and this helps to combat the chaos. I don't do this as often as I should, but I will make an effort to tidy up as I go about my daily life.
• My mother absolutely refuses to go to bed with dishes in the sink. I try to do this, but it's much easier when you own a dishwasher like she does. From now on, the dishes will be clean before I go to sleep, no exceptions.
• I will look for ways to make chores more fun, whether it's listening to music while I clean, or trying to get my fiance in on the action.

The goal here is to keep chores from overwhelming my life. As it is, whenever I'm not cleaning something, I feel guilty that I'm letting my house be messy. With the schedule, I know that everything will be done in a timely fashion. Once my chore of the day is complete, the guilt will be gone and I can enjoy a walk in the park, a good book, or a long phone conversation with an old friend. I'll report back after my first week of the chore schedule to see how it's going.

Synchronicity

After a couple of days of meditation and some casual reading about Buddhism, I had a chance encounter in a parking lot this afternoon. A woman who arrived at the same time I did asked for help using the pay kiosk, and we got into a conversation. Long story short, she handed me this card:

It's for Sokka Gakkai International, a Buddhist organization that has a meeting group in my city. I'm not the type to believe that something is "fate" or whatever, but I really think this came to me now because it's a time in my life when I'm truly receptive to it. Their next "Intro to Buddhism" meeting that doesn't conflict with my work is in a couple of weeks, and I'm definitely going. In the meantime I'm going to keep meditating, and read some of the stuff on their website to familiarize myself with their specific branch of Buddhism. I'm pretty excited!

Detoxing Cleaning Products and Homemade Dish Soap

January's project of detoxing my household products is underway! The first thing I did is take everything from under the kitchen sink and sort through it. Apologies in advance for the picture quality; my camera is AWOL at the moment so I'm using my phone.

I've been pretty serious about keeping cleaning products nontoxic for a few years now. Most of this stuff was here when I moved in, and I just hadn't gotten around to getting rid of it. I used the Household Products Database which is run by the National Institutes of Health to sort through everything. I got rid of everything that was scary and/or I don't use, and here's what's left.

It's a lot less, and I'm glad to have some of that junk out of my house.

Although the things I actually use are fairly nontoxic, you can see that most of it is still commercially made products. I like them, but they're expensive and come with too much packaging. As stuff runs out, I'm going to try making my own cleaners. Conveniently today I ran out of dish soap, so it's time to cook up a batch.

I used this recipe from Hillbilly Housewife (the second one). I went to Target first, where I found an olive oil dispenser bottle for about $3.

I looked for a bar of simple, cheap glycerin soap but everything that wasn't full of fragrances was stupidly expensive. So I went onto Whole Foods and picked up a bar of their unscented store-brand glycerin soap for $1.99.

The next step is to grate or slice the soap. After contemplating the godawful pain it would be to clean soap flakes out of my cheese grater (and the sad prospect of soapy-tasting cheese) I decided to slice thin slices of it with a knife instead.

I sliced 1/4 cup of soap flakes, as thin as I could. I added them to 2 cups of water in a pan and heated it on medium heat, stirring until the flakes dissolved. It took longer than I expected -- almost 10 minutes -- probably because my slices weren't as efficient as grating it, but it eventually dissolved. I let the mixture cool for awhile, then added 1 teaspoon of bottled lemon juice (the acidity from which supposedly helps cut grease). After cooling it completely I poured the mixture into my bottle. 

Et voila, the finished product! One batch of soap (minus the bit I spilled) completely fills the bottle. It seems to work pretty well so far, though I haven't used it on any seriously dirty dishes yet. The recipe says you can add some essential oil for smell, but it has a fairly neutral, vaguely lemony scent that I really like. It is more watery than commercial dish soap, so that may take some getting used to. This recipe used 1/4 of a bar of soap; the rest of the ingredients were of negligible cost, so one bottle of homemade dish soap was $0.50.

If this were etsy and I were some sort of creative dork, I'd put a cutesy label on it and decorate the bottle. But this isn't, and I'm not, so there it is -- dish soap. It looks like laundry detergent may be the next thing to run out, so I'll probably be making that next. Until then, adios.

UPDATE: After sitting overnight, the soap thickened considerably. I had to give it a good stir in the bottle to break it up a bit, and now it works great. I also used it on a sink of dirty pots and pans, and it cut the grease like a champ. Looks like this will be my go-to soap recipe from now on.

UPDATE #2 (1/19/2013): I just made my second batch. This time I used my microplane grater to shred the soap. It dissolved really quickly and it was actually very easy to clean the grater afterwards. I also added more lemon juice this time, maybe a full tablespoon, and this made the consistency similar to commercial dish soap and thus much easier to work with.

New Years and New Ideas

I realize that the new year is almost a week old now, but I've been avoiding posting anything because I was trying to coalesce my thoughts about what it means to me. This is going to be a big year - the beginning of law school and my wedding loom large, and I'm open to any other adventures that may lie on the horizon.

Rather than set a series of vague goals that will go unaccomplished and abandoned by February, I've decided instead to make a list of actions and projects that I intend to undertake, along with dates for implementing each. Without any further delay, then, are my projects for 2013:

January: Before the end of the month, I will detoxify and simplify my cleaning products, similar to what I did with my beauty products. I will sort through everything and dispose of all but the best ones. For now I'll stick with commercial products as necessary, but I will investigate homemade alternatives later in the year. I'll also make a regular schedule for housecleaning so I don't waste another whole Saturday on it.

February: I have been putting it off for far too long, and I'm getting serious about going completely vegan starting February 1. I will experiment with all kinds of recipes, and post pictures and assessments periodically.

March: I should be well into the swing of veganism by now, and it should be the perfect time to tackle a simplified kitchen.

April: My desk and work materials are perpetually in disarray. I need to come up with a new record-keeping and email sorting system. I will investigate various productivity systems and hacks, and implement some kind of system with periodic updates on how it's going.

May: As an update to my beauty products project, I will evaluate where I am, and consider some homemade beauty regimens. I will post my experiments and results.

June: Raw foods! It'll be summer, and I'll be hot, and no longer craving soups and other warm yummy things like I am now. I'll give the raw diet a good month and of course some updates.

July: My last full free month before starting law school, and I plan to spend it being more spiritual. I'll have to devote some more thought as to what exactly this means to me, but it's an undertaking I've been delaying for some time.

August: Sociability! I'm looking forward to being in law school and having an easy way to make friends. I've always been kind of a wallflower, but I will make an active effort to get to know

September: Productivity, part deux. As an addendum to April's productivity project, I'll tackle school work, and staying on top of things, to see how the tools I found apply to students.

October: I should be well into the swing of wedding planning by now, so I'll take some time to explore the true meaning of marriage and the theme of a simple wedding.

November: With the change of the seasons brings a re-sorting of the wardrobe, and the perfect opportunity to pare down mine. I try to do this periodically anyway, but I will make a concerted effort to really pare down things and clear out stuff I don't like or doesn't fit.

December: I know that simple holidays is a kind of trite theme in the blogosphere, but it's one I really need to undertake for myself. Even though I've tried to do things as locally sourced or handmade as much as possible, people are really damn hard to shop for, and they all seem to want expensive stuff from the mall. My Christmas bills are just now coming in, and it's a nightmare. For the 2013 holidays, I will undertake simplifying in earnest.


So that's the monthly breakdown of projects. I also have a few actionable steps I'm going to take in 2013:

• I will read a book a week, at least until law school begins. Hopefully this will pare down my shelves from the influx of books I received as Christmas gifts.
• I will meditate every day, even if it's just for a few minutes. I need to center myself and this seems like the best way to do it.
• I will go to the gym every day unless I have a good reason not to. Laziness, bad weather and something good on TV are not good reasons.

So that's the outlook for me. Be on the lookout for my cleaning products detox in the next week or so.