I find that simple useful things usually have a great deal of beauty to them. Today I am singing the praises of simple white dishware, the kind you can find almost anywhere, stoneware, solid, usually creamy white in basic shapes. It is inexpensive, easy to clean, usually dishwasher and microwave safe and sometimes even oven safe. The essence of kitchen simplicity

But, its boring. Yes, sort of. If you are the type who has to have something colorful and exciting then I suppose they are sort of boring. Fiestaware or something might be your choice. But for me I like the simplicity of white.

Since you can find them anywhere they are very easy to replace. The five year old dropping a plate will not be a tragedy. White also makes for easy cleanup. Even a young child can learn to wash a dish. Unadulterated white makes it easy to see that a through job has been done.

On the flip side I love fine china. There is something really nice about having dinner on fine plates. I have three patterns that I collect when I have the chance. These are items that bring a good deal of pleasure to me, one set has been handed down from my father’s mother and the other are just two sets I love. My hope is that my daughters and granddaughters will also love them.

But for everyday use nothing beat those nice little white stoneware dishes.

I will admit that I have a horrible problem cleaning for extended periods of time. One part of this stems from my inability to pay attention to anything boring and the other is that when I am bored I have a tendency to be very distractible. Thus I will start cleaning the kitchen – say cleaning off the top of the fridge, I find a battery that belongs in the pantry and while there I see a dog leash that needs to be in the closet where my husband has left the book he just finished and that needs to be on the book shelf, which is disorganized so I start straightening it out… and “Oh, cool there is this book I thought I had lost”, and the next thing I know it is two hours later and I am sitting in the dinning room thumbing through a book from when I went through RCIA and the top of the fridge looks just like it did at the start…. minus one battery.

Three things I have found to be very simple and affective in helping this. First is to occupy my mind while my hands are working. This is amazingly simple. Audio books, the radio, listening to the children read their lessons, talking with my teen daughter. It all works. The goal is to make whatever I am listening to engaging enough that I don’t get lost wondering about something and end up on the computer reading about the crusades or some such thing.

The second magic bullet is a timer. I run a small home-based business writing code for websites. If you want to migrate a site over to a CMS, need an LMS, want a calendar or catalog on your website I’m your girl. Databases and custom PHP are my thing and there is always something new to learn. Typical to the nerd I am I hyper-focus. This means I sit down to write one or two little functions and four hours later I look up and say “Oh, crap, I haven’t started dinner. Did I have lunch? Did the children have lunch — where are the children?” The timer helps stop that, it also helps on the other end. If I have the timer set for 20 minutes I will actually stay in the kitchen cleaning off the top of the fridge… after all it is only 20 minutes and then I can do something more interesting.

Last, but not least by any means is the LIST. Lists are great for me. I like the feel of checking things off as they get done. I have lists of things that need done and lists of how to do thing. Some lists are long term others are “to do today” sorts of list. So cleaning the kitchen turns into printing out my “clean the kitchen checklist”, giving the eight-year-old his reading, and setting the timer for 20 minuets. I might not get the entire list down, but I will definitely do more than putting away one battery.

Lent is a good time to work on spring cleaning. I find myself in more of a mind to let go of things, to start new and to refocus.

My household is a busy place. I have a small homebased business, we have five children in the household and one who is in a residential placement, we homeschool and we are not naturally “stuff-organized” to start with. Our normal decorating style is “tornado just blew through”.

Enter Lent. I look around my home and think “something has to change”. I think this about once a fortnight, but Lent seems to give it a bit of added importance. Cobwebs need to come down, out grown clothing needs to be sorted for storing or donation, toys, books, papers, art supplies, kitchen gadgets all beg for attention.

There are many good organizational resources online if you are looking for a starting place search for “home organization” or “homemaking” a very popular site is “Flylady” I find the Flylady annoying, but I have friends who just swear by her methods. In all honesty her approach is very sound, but all those emails and the constant marketing of the latest “Fly thing” bugs me and it is a wee bit touchy feely for me… I don’t need to learn to finally love myself, I love myself just fine, thank you, but housekeeping is a bit overwhelming for me.

Our most pressing housekeeping issue is stuff. We just simply have to much. We have too many clothes, too many toys and – though it seems impossible – too many books. Storage isn’t a huge issue for us, we have plenty of space, but stuff is.

I am working on my Lenten Organization and Spring Cleaning plan. As I complete sections I will post them here in case anyone else finds them useful (and for easy reference for myself of course)

Picking up here where I left off Monday. I heard a snippet on the radio not long ago about modesty. The two most surprising things were that the spot was not talking about modest of dress per say but of modest as a whole and it was on a secular station. In reading a little bit more I found this article at webMd which discusses modesty as declining in an age where the cultural norm is to be assertive and self-promoting. I am actually very disappointed in the article. It neither describes the dangers of immodesty nor does it really sell modesty. Worse it attributed lack of modesty to a lack of self-esteem and advises “moderation” in modesty.. which seems sort of like advising moderation in health. Moderation is a manifestation of the virtue of temperance. One could be self-effacing, but but that is not modest at all.