Winter Resolution

I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but I’ll say it again: I have a really hard time keeping up with housework. It pretty much seems like an impossible task. One of the things I had counted on doing during my vacation was giving the house a really good cleaning. That didn’t happen and it was a big part of the reason I was cranky going back to work last Tuesday.
You’d think that if it’s so important to me to have a tidy house, I’d just get it done. Sounds so simple. My mother always kept our house spotless. My sisters both seem to do okay. But the good housekeeping gene seems to have completely skipped over me. I want to keep things looking nice. I just don’t seem able to accomplish it.
I did manage to get the living room all neat and tidy in the last couple days of my vacation. Yep, one whole (tiny) room. And I remember sitting there that evening, feeling like a weight had been lifted. The mess and disorder stresses me out. I need to do something about it. I don’t need things to be perfect or spotless. I just  want to not feel like I’m in the middle of a disaster zone.
Part of the problem is that we have too much stuff in too little space. I get easily overwhelmed and frustrated. So I decided that I need to figure out the problem areas and come up with solutions. I don’t really do New Year’s Resolutions, but I am going to take this on as my winter project. Maybe if I can get things organized, come up with better storage solutions, it won’t be so hard. Maybe that is wishful thinking, but I’m giving it a shot.
Today’s project was to tackle the cupboard of baking supplies.  With dinner cooking away in the slow cooker, I spent the afternoon pulling everything out. I got rid of some things. I organized things in storage bins.
I ended up with this:

On the top, I used 2 large storage containers (stacked) and 4 small storage containers (stacked in twos). Hopefully this will make it easier to find things. Or else it will be really irritating when I need to pull out the storage bins. Remains to be seen.
On the bottom, I got rid of some things that didn’t need to be there. I used a couple of storage baskets for small items that were hard to keep tidy.
And then I straightened up the living room.

Baby steps.
One thing I did do during my vacation, despite being sick, was bake many batches of cookies. Most went home to my parents & In-laws.
But I also made a batch to try out these cookie cutters that Husband gave me last year:

It looks like there is a recipe on the back of the package, but since it’s in Japanese it didn’t help me much:

So I decided to try shortbread cookies thinking they wouldn’t spread much so they should hold the shape. I should also mention that it’s been probably….15 years since I’ve made plain shortbread cookies.
The cookies did spread, not a huge amount, but enough that I thought they might not work. And since I was feeling pretty crappy at the time, I just packed the cookies away in a container and forgot about them.
One good thing about being sick, I was able to forget about cookies. Not a normal state of affairs, I assure you.
But I finally had to give it a try and I actually did get some to work.
 
Kind of fun, don’t you think?
The cookies have been sitting around since the week before Christmas, and I know a lot of people say shortbread gets better with age, but I wasn’t sure. However, Husband ate one and said it was fine. So I guess now that we’ve played with our food, we can eat it.  :)