Made San Shoku Donburi -- or Tri-Colored Donburi -- today for dinner. Nom. (The three 'colors' are yellow from the corn, green from the peas, and brown from the gingered ground chicken, plus I added black shredded nori and red cherry tomatoes and shredded ginger. Or possibly it's not brown that's one of the colors but white from the rice. Must verify.) I'll do a full writeup tomorrow (am a bit tired right now), but I will say it was an unqualified success. Yum yum yum. (Also made salad with a miso-yuzu dressing, which was also successful although a bit too strong/salty -- I should have listened to the recipe and got some white miso to use for it rather than just using the red miso I had on hand. But still, it was very good.)

There are a lot of beatonna's comics that I could link you to, but this one really stood out:



I giggled and giggled and giggled.

I am back from Anime Expo. Tired, but happy. It was a good con -- some of the content was more lackluster than in years past (the AMV competition was a bit of a disappointment), but the company, the peoplewatching, and the general festivities were delightful. And I found a print of Rydia! Rydia! (Now all I need is to find a print of Celes....)

That said! Another Cora Dinner Theater poll!

We have pork chops (boneless center-cut chops, for the record) that need to be used up somehow. I have several lovely recipes for pork chops, and I don't know which one to use. How should I cook them?

Poll #1426968
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

pork choppin'

And it should be served with some combination of the following:

I'll post the recipe and pictures of whatever combination wins. ;)

Happy (slightly belated) Fourth, fellow Americans! (Well, happy day to non-Americans, too, just not specifically for the holiday.)

I'm having a great time at Anime Expo. Spent a fair bit, but that's what a con's for. ;) And I now have a lovely skirted corset for steampunk wear. (And it's reversible! And totally comfortable.)

Hope you're all having a good weekend as well.

At the end of September, I'm going to see a Dar Williams concert.

Then at the beginning of October I'm going to the Sirens convention, about women in fantasy literature, featuring two of my very favorite YA fantasy authors (Sherwood Smith and Tamora Pierce).

Then I'm going to Dancing Horse Novel Camp with sartorias (Sherwood Smith) and dancinghorse (Judith Tarr).

I'm so excited! Also, totally nervous. Wish me luck.

(And porfinn, though I've been terrible at replying to you, your 'how to be less totally shy' lessons have been a big help!)

I'm so glad I signed up for Sirens.

Look at the presentations and workshops!

And the events!

And the classes!

Squee.

I try not to spam too much with dreams, but yesterday I took a nap and dreamed that I was ice-skating with penguins.

The penguins were wearing bobble-hats and scarves.

It was a lot of fun. :D Not the strangest dream I've had by a long, long, long shot, but easily one of the most charming.

Last post! (For reference, the prior installments are: Part One: Caveats and Things You Can Ignore, Part Two: Things I Actually Do Use, Part Three: Things That Are Infuriating, and Part Four: Routines.) This is how I do 'zone cleaning,' which is the way you work your way around the house at 15 minutes a day, and hopefully reduce the need for cleaning sprees/spring cleaning in the process.

Zones are tied to weeks -- each week in a month has its own zone. This means that the first and last weeks of a month are often short weeks -- howevermany days there are between the first of the month and the first Saturday of the month, or the last Sunday of the month and the 30th/31st. That's fine. It just means you shuffle areas that need less attention to those days.

The official FlyLady breakdown goes like this:

Zone 1: Entrance/front porch/dining room
Zone 2: Kitchen/ back porch/laundry room/pantry
Zone 3: Main bathroom/extra bedroom/ kid's rooms/ craft room
Zone 4: Master bedroom/bath/closet
Zone 5: Living room/den/TV room

This list works great for some kinds of houses; it doesn't work so great for mine. For one thing, with a three-floor townhouse it makes a lot more sense to stay on one floor at time per zone. For another thing, the dining room isn't actually a separate room from the living room, and treating it like it is doesn't make much sense. For a third thing, the master bedroom doesn't need all that much maintenance, so giving it a full week and giving the living room a half-week doesn't fit. So, naturally, I just rearranged the weeks to my liking:

Zone 1: Entrance (including front closet)/front porch/garage
Zone 2: Kitchen/refrigerator/pantry
Zone 3: Living room/dining room/second-floor hallways
Zone 4: Office (including closet)/laundry room/bathrooms/third-floor hallways
Zone 5: Master bedroom (including closet)

The other thing you'll note is that chores that come up on the daily or weekly routines don't come up here. I roomba the bedroom as part of the weekly routine, so I don't have it on this list. I declutter as part of the weekly routine, so I don't have it on the list.

So how do I use these lists? Well, every day I have a fifteen-minute 'zone cleaning' slot (for me, it's right after work). At that point, I flip the Control Journal open to my current zone and look at the zone cleaning list there, then set a timer for 15 minutes. I pick a task and do it until I'm done with it, or until the timer has gone off. (If the timer goes off mid-task, I just put away my cleaning materials and stop then.) When I'm done, I cross the task off the list. If the timer has not yet gone off, I pick another task and keep working until it does. Many tasks take less than a minute, so I can often zip through a big chunk of the cleaning list in one go. The next day, when I'm in the zone cleaning time again, I pick an un-crossed-off task and keep going. I probably won't get through all of the cleaning tasks for an area in a week... but I will get through a lot of them, and over the course of a couple of months I'll eventually hit everything. If I run out of tasks before I run out of week, then yay, I get extra free time the remaining days of that week.

A side note on decluttering: if a room is really cluttered, the general recommendation is that you should just spend your 15 minutes of zone cleaning every day decluttering that room (when you're in its zone, I mean) until it's less clutterful. This is because it is hard to, e.g., vacuum a floor that is covered in stuff, or dust a table that is covered in stuff. For me, a hybrid approach works best: the kitchen is largely decluttered, so I do ordinary 'zone cleaning' in it every day. The office, however, is still only half-decluttered, so I alternate: one day I declutter, the next day I do cleaning. Back when the office was thoroughly cluttered (in that way where I couldn't see the floor), there was no point trying to clean around the stuff, so I decluttered every day. Your mileage, as always, may vary.

On to the individual zones. Remember: you can rearrange these however you like! If you have no laundry room, for instance, by all means spend that time somewhere else. If your master bedroom does need a full week, give it one, and stick something else in the half-week spot. Etc. Similarly, if you go 'wtf is with wiping down the front door? who cares if the front door is dusty?', then, well, don't put it on your list! Simple.

( Zone One )

( Zone Two )

( Zone Three )

( Zone Four )

( Zone Five )

And that's it. Every day I do a morning and evening routine, fifteen minutes of day-of-the-week routine, and fifteen minutes of zone cleaning or decluttering. It... does not result in an immaculate house! But it results in a much better house than I would otherwise have.

If you have any other questions about how I do it, let me know.

Since some people have asked, I'm typing up my routines, along with commentary. I hope they're useful. They will almost certainly only be useful with modification, so please, modify away. It's just one idea of how you might set up your Control Journal.

(As before, this will probably make more sense if you read the prior posts first. See Part One: Caveats and Things You Can Ignore, Part Two: Things I Actually Do Use, and Part Three: Things That Are Infuriating.)

( My Daily Routines )

( My Weekly Routines )

Zone cleaning plans will follow either tonight or tomorrow, depending on my level of energy. ;)

What should I try for my next bread experiment? (Backstory: I auctioned off twelve months of monthly bread for a charity auction last year. Every month, I make a trial loaf of the bread to make sure it'll come out okay, and then I make a loaf and mail it off.)

The 'base' dough is the "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day" master recipe, which is an ordinary white yeast bread with mild sourdough character. Since I have, like, five loaves' worth of dough quietly aging in the fridge, I'm not looking to create a new master recipe, so no suggestions that would require a new dough (like, "rye bread" or "whole-wheat bread"), please.

Poll #1420712
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

bread bread bread bread

(I've already done cheese bread, garlic bread, and herb bread, as well as an 'ordinary' sourdough loaf, and while I may revisit them, I'm not ready to duplicate yet.)

I need a baking icon.

(This post will probably not make a ton of sense if you haven't seen the prior "Cora Interprets FlyLady So You Don't Have To" posts, so here are direct links: Part One: Caveats and Things You Can Ignore, and Part Two: Things I Actually Do Use.)

I've had a couple of requests to see my routines and zone cleaning schedule, so I will provide that this afternoon sometime, when I get a chance to type it up after work.

But this post is for a topic that jonquil reminded me of, which is this: some of the things on the FlyLady site are not just aesthetically not to my taste or weirdly dogmatic about shoes, they're actually offensive. And while I wanted to keep the rant out of the 'here's what has helped me' posts, it would probably be a good idea to acknowledge that and warn you about the offensive stuff as well -- and tell you how I circumvented it.

After the rant-y bit, I'm adding additional notes on things I did to reduce or remove the objectionable biases from the method for my own use. I'll cut that separately so you can jump straight there if you want to avoid the politics and anger. ;)

This is not to say "you shouldn't use the system." I do, after all, since I think it's entirely possible to strip out the objectionable stuff and end up with a bare-bones system that doesn't make offensive assumptions. It is to say "you should maybe be careful on the website, and be aware of these things beforehand." If you want to avoid the website entirely, part of the reason that I laid out what I do use so, uh, verbosely is that ideally, you could use the stripped-down version of the method without going to the site, getting the e-mails, or otherwise subjecting yourself to the offensive stuff. So you can always save yourself some blood pressure by just avoiding it entirely. (That is, in fact, part of why I titled these posts "Cora Interprets FlyLady So You Don't Have To.")

( Things That Are Objectionable That You Might Want To Be Aware Of )

( How To Exorcise The Bad Stuff Without Losing Your Mind )

And that's it. Some things on the site are really maddening, problematic, and/or offensive, but they're not integral to the system, so I gleefully cut them out and consign them to the outer darkness. And the stripped-down version is simple enough that you don't even have to give site hits if you don't want to.

Okay, lunch break over. I'll post the routines and the zone cleaning stuff this evening. And anything else you think might be helpful, let me know.

So, having jettisoned all the stuff that doesn't work for me (see Part One: Things You Can Safely Ignore), what's left? (Note: You probably want to go read that one first, since it has important introductory information -- if nothing else, it will explain to you why I don't need you to enumerate why you don't want to use this system. ;) )

Basically, I use three parts of the FlyLady method: the Control Journal (which in turn is made up of sets of routines), Zone Cleaning, and the 15 Minutes Won't Kill You principle. Plus some miscellanea.

None of this is rocket science, and in fact many of you have probably independently invented a lot of these tips. But, as before, it's a set of systems that works for me, so.

( Details behind the cut. )

And that's it. If anyone is curious as to what's on my personal routines/zone cleaning schedules/etc, I'd be happy to share that.

Since a few people have asked!

First things first.

* I feel no desire to proselytize the system. If you have a housekeeping system that works for you, or can keep your home clean with no system at all, I am very glad for you and am not trying to get you to switch. If you don't have a system but don't want this one either, or if you are perfectly happy living in cluttery environs, that's fine too. This is just for people who have expressed interest in how I adapted this particular system, because it works for me personally. You don't need to explain to me why you don't want to use it. (And, in fact, if your comment is going to boil down to 'this is not useful for me and/or stupid and/or pathetic,' plz do not make the comment, ok? I'm pretty insecure about my housekeeping as it is.)

* Yes, the e-mails are twee, the website is ugly, the aesthetic is not cool at all. This is all true. It's also such an easy target for mockery that I really don't feel compelled to spend much time on that aspect of it. (Fish, barrel.) If you can't get past that, this is probably also not for you. (That said, you can pretty easily strip the plan down to its bare-bones and then 'reskin' it with an aesthetic that makes you smile, if pink and purple doesn't do it for you. My control journal has anime characters and snarky commentary. The principles work just fine in that context, too.)

* This system has made me a considerably, noticeably better housekeeper than before, and has made me more chill about it, too. That said, it still hasn't made me a great housekeeper, as those of you who've seen my place can attest. ;) The place is still often in disarray. So I am not trying to set myself up as an expert, just describing something that Worked For Me. I hope it's useful for somebody, but it won't be useful for everybody.

Okay, that out of the way!

The first thing that's important when tweaking FlyLady is to get rid of the elements of it that don't work for you. There will probably be a lot of them. They might not overlap entirely with me, but here's what I ditched, and why, and why you may or may not want to ditch it yourself. (The FlyLady is pretty vocal about some of these being Vital! I suspect they were vital for her, and that's why she thinks they're the most important things. They aren't vital for me. You can ignore the 'you must' statements on the website. In fact, if you're snarky like me, you may get a certain amount of pleasure out of ignoring them.)

(You actually don't have to go to the website unless you want to -- I'm going to try to outline what I use in the next post sufficiently that you could just use that -- but if you do, this is what you can/should ignore.)

( Stuff You Can Safely Ignore )

Next up: having ditched all of that, what do I use, and how? Onward to Part Two: What I Do Use.

I am kind of embarrassed to admit that the Flylady method of housekeeping actually, apparently, works for me. Embarrassed because it is possibly the least cool thing in the history of ever -- I mean, when you follow a system designed for and by middle-aged Christian stay-at-home moms, complete with twee inspirational messages and purple fairies on everything, you pretty much lose all claim to being hip. (Granted, I already have pretty much forfeited claims of being hip, what with, e.g., my tendency to go to bed by 11pm, but there you go.)

That being said, I feel much more satisfied with my "Control Journal" (basically, the list of housekeeping routines, shopping lists, etc., stored in a three-ring binder) now that I've replaced the cheery house-fairy image on the front with a picture of Riza Hawkeye and Roy Mustang (from Fullmetal Alchemist), and added another picture of Celes Chere and Locke Cole (from Final Fantasy 6) to the back. I may need a cute binder of housekeeping routines to keep the house in some semblance of order, but I can at least have asskicking women and the men who love them on it, dagnabbit.

(I may post more about my trial and error with the Flylady method, and how I've tweaked it for my own, non-mom, day-job-working, no-shoes-in-the-house, non-conservative-Christian self, later.)

The boy and I recently got a shiny new USB hard drive for purposes of backing up our fileserver computer. Hurrah! (I had already been backing up vital documents to an offsite location, but that wasn't really feasible for things like 100 GB of mp3 files.)

So I'm looking for an automated backup solution that will sync the fileserver hard drive to the backup hard drive on a regular basis -- nightly seems about right. Automated because if I have to do it manually it's going to happen less frequently than would be ideal. Nightly so that it can happen while we're in bed and not clobber the network. (The fileserver computer remains on all the time, so that's not an issue.) Does anyone have any suggestions? Is there a tool in Windows XP that I can use to set this up?

Free is great. Cheap is fine, if a little money will net me a vastly better tool. Pricey is probably more than I need.

Any ideas?

Does anybody still need/want Dreamwidth codes at this point? Or anybody's friends need them, or whatever? I have five.

In the interest of having some content in this post, in order to avoid totally spamming those of you who really could not care less: part of my farmer's market haul this week was garlic scapes, and so I'm making garlic scape pesto for dinner before we go to RENT. Anyone interested in the recipe (assuming it comes out okay)? (The farmer's market trip also netted asparagus, baby bok choy, baby arugula, baby Walla Walla sweet onions with greens still on, salad mix, fava beans, snow peas, yellow carrots, Yukon Gold potatoes, cherries, apple cider, and two kinds of pie for jmpava's birthday.)

I am searching for books on India -- history, religion, mythology, culture. General overviews would be great to start, since my background is woefully inadequate, but if you have any more specific books that you really love, I will not turn them down. (I realize that India is a big country with a long history, and I'm not being very specific, and that's mostly because I, er, don't know enough yet to be specific.)

I am looking primarily for nonfiction for these purposes, though if you have any great fiction to recommend, I will, again, not say no.

Books by Indian or Indian American authors are particularly desirable, but good books by non-Indians will work too.

Feel free to pass the request on.

Thanks!

This post on buying a house is very, very funny. If you need a smile, and especially if you've bought a house recently, go read it.

Quote:

Somewhere very early on, I lost sight of the house altogether. We've visited it a few times, sure, but we've spent easily three thousand times the hours with the documents than we have with the actual house. As a result, I keep forgetting that eventually we will supposedly, you know, have a new house. Instead, I dream of the day when we won't have any more documents to sign.

It's time for another round of What To Make For Dinner Theater!

Selections below are chosen on the basis of What Is In The Fridge That Needs To Be Used Up.

Poll #1413926
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

food options!

I was going through old files on my computer, and I found my thesis. Back when I was writing it, I posted this excerpt (from Charlemagne's "De Villis," in the capitularia). I still love it so much, so I'm posting it again:

It is our wish that they shall have in their gardens all kinds of plants: lily, roses, fenugreek, costmary, sage, rue, southernwood, cucumbers, pumpkins, gourds, kidney-bean, cumin, rosemary, caraway, chick-pea, squill, gladiolus, tarragon, anise, colocynth, chicory, ammi, sesili, lettuces, spider's foot, rocket salad, garden cress, burdock, penny-royal, hemlock, parsley, celery, lovage, juniper, dill, sweet fennel, endive, dittany, white mustard, summer savory, beets, hazelwort, marshmallows, mallows, carrots, parsnip, orach, spinach, kohlrabi, cabbages, onion, chives, leeks, radishes, shallots, cibols, garlic, madder, teazels, broad beans, peas, coriander, chervil, capers, clary. And the gardener shall have house-leeks growing on his house. As for trees, it is our wish that they shall have various kinds of apple, pear, plum, sorb, medlar, chestnut and peach; quince, hazel, almond, mulberry, laurel, pine, fig, nut and cherry trees of various kinds. The names of apples are: gozmaringa, geroldinga, crevedella, spirauca; there are sweet ones, bitter ones, those that keep well, those that are to be eaten straightaway, and early ones. Of pears they are to have three or four kinds, those that keep well, sweet ones, cooking pears and the late-ripening ones.

I could just roll around for hours in this kind of detail about everyday life and material culture. Hours and hours.

(Also, wouldn't that be a genuinely awesome garden?)