I am absolutely convinced that every single one of you who pops by here are impeccable housekeepers. I just know you are. Course, there are really only probably about 3 of you out there these days LOL!
Well, I, on the other hand, am not.
It is not that I don't love a clean, neat, organized, everything in its place, fresh smelling and dust free home - I absolutely do. And when I was a young gal on my own, and an even younger bride in my first marriage, I was probably a bit more obsessive about it. Now, housework seems to have fallen all the way to the bottom of my to do list.
I can blame blogging in part for that. Not blogging here of course at this poor little neglected corner of the net, but over at my food blog Deep South Dish. When I am not posting those recipes and banter over there, I am researching and developing them, writing them out, cooking and creating them and recording them in notebooks, typing them up, editing them, adding photos, and I also do all my own website coding, linking, indexing, cataloging, SEO stuff, and all the sidebar stuff. Plus I do try to still get around and visit other bloggers. In other words there's a lot going on behind the scenes over there that occupies a huge amount of my time these days. I'm not complaining - thanks to the growth of that blog I do consider it a business and my job now, and in this season of thanksgiving, I am grateful for that. This blog here though, it is supposed to be for my fun stuff, and as you see, maybe not so much fun stuff is goin' on right now. Poor little blog.
And then there's the housework. And, because the shelves in my closet need to be completely removed and the entire closet redone, I have clean clothes draped across the back of a chair in my bedroom and on top of the suitcase from my two California trips that, though emptied, still sits in the corner of my bedroom waiting for me to carry it to the garage storage room. The knick-knacks on the shelf in the family room that I don't even know why I own, and my mom's chandelier in the dining room both need dusting and cleaning and are both pretty big projects.
In truth, thanks to the collection of four legged critters of the feline and canine variety that live amongst these walls with us, most everything in the house is in sore need of dusting. And there are piles of piles of cookbooks by my work station because I am constantly researching and, frankly I have no place for some of them... because I keep buying more of them. There's that huge stack of catalogs in the corner that need to gone through and recycled, and the magazines are even worse. Junk mail is piled up on the table waiting to be shredded. Towels I just washed - folded up on the table. It all just accumulates and adds up so fast.
Don't worry... I'm nowhere near the level of Hoarders or anything, but the little spots of clutter here and there are clearly where my biggest and most constant problem areas are, with dust running a close second. Frankly I gotta feeling I am not alone.
So, I'm gonna try to pick up around here a bit now, and I thought about a few tips that I've learned across time that I remembered and thought I would share. Might help us all.
- Make of short list - only about 4 or 5 things max - of areas that need work. Anything more than that and you'll get overwhelmed. Might be that pile of clean laundry, a shelf you need to clear for those new books, tackling those stacks of magazines or catalogs, or maybe the accumulation of papers and junk mail and coupons and whatever that seem to land on the dining room table or kitchen counter, the cluttered side table by your favorite chair, or something bigger - like a closet, an outside storage shed, or ugh.. the garage.
- Pick one and tackle only that one area at a time and don't let yourself get distracted with other things. Stick with the task at hand!
- Take your clutter in small chunks of time. Don't try to tackle a whole area that is troublesome to you all at one time. You'll get frustrated and more important, distracted. Give yourself 15 minutes and set a timer even. Work on that for a straight 15 minutes, then take a break and do something else - even something enjoyable, like reading, or knitting, reading blog comments, or watching television - for another 10 or 15 minutes and only for that time. Set a timer again if you need to. I'm telling you these timers are great for this! Go back to that same area and repeat until the area is clean.
- Keep a small basket or box with you to put everything in that is out of place or not where it belongs. Don't be tempted to go and put it those oddballs things back where they belong as you find them. Although it's good exercise all that walking, it's time consuming, distracting and tiring. When you have finished the area you've been working on, or during one of those breaks if your box fills up, then and only then, carry the box around the house and put things up where they belong.
.
So one day when I was photographing some food for a recipe post at 
I have dealt with these mysterious yellow spots before. These aren't food stains from non-laundered linens that were put away dirty, but some sort of mysterious kind of spots that seem to pop up on clean, stored linens and even clothing over time. Some people call them age spots. Some say they are embedded stains on clean laundry, initially undetectable to the naked eye, but that pop out over time.
Many years ago, I had some perfectly good, nearly new, white panties that had been laundered with hot water and bleach but had set in blood stains that just would not come out. I was just about to give up the ghost and toss them out, but heard about this formula, and thought I'd give it a try first. To my amazement is worked! It removed these old set in stains without a trace of them left behind, and I got a little more wear on those panties.
of 
