You know we just moved into a new house, right? Well, so something’s--  wait, I can sense that you’re giving me an “I won’t respond to that” face right now.

Ok, so it’s been 15 months since we moved, but I have a hard time with change, you know, and I’ve been mentally dealing with this effing teenager who has turned out to be someone I don’t even know, plus our youngest, who is the ebola monkey, and is constantly sick, and I can’t possibly be expected to keep up with getting this house set up and being a mom to two effed up children* and keep up with my chores so that Mark doesn’t have to dip into his reserve underwear, plus write to you once a week, as well as write a book, and stay groomed, for the love of God, and I am doing my best over here.

I just want to sip lattes and browse fall outfits for my Bitmoji - it’s not like I’m asking for a kidney.

First things first, because I know you have questions: what are reserve underwear, you ask?

I’m so glad you asked, and you’re gonna want to stick around for this because it is good.

Several months ago Mark asked me if I was planning to do laundry any time soon.

To which I responded:

“Because I don’t have any underwear,” he lied to me.

“Yes you do. I was just in the closet and I saw that you have a whole stack of underwear in your drawer.”

“Nope.”

“Yep.”

Then we stared at each other for like 10 minutes.

“Those are my reserve underwear,” he actually said with a serious face, and how is that even possible?

“Excuse me? What the f%*k are **then, just really leaning in and using my favorite sarcastic tone with bunny ears** “reserve underwear?”

“They’re the ones I don’t like but I have to pull out and wear when you don’t do laundry.”

He said this all with a straight face, and even though I wanted to fall down on the floor laughing I was too mad and we ended up yelling terrible things at each other and didn’t speak for another two days.

We’re fine now, don’t worry. We’ve been together for a long time and we sometimes fight over stupid shit we say to each other (I changed the wording of this from, “stupid shit Mark says,” because our 23rd wedding anniversary is later this week and I don’t want to be an a-hole.)

What’s weird is that something’s recently lit a fire under me because all of a sudden I’m a hellcat about managing my time and about getting my house organized.

Like super organized, in a way that’ll make you a little envious.

I don’t know what’s gotten into me, I only know that it reminds me of the way I used to be when I was growing up. Mark never believes me when I say I used to be the one in my group of friends who everyone oooh-and-aaah’d over about how organized I was.

As I got a little older and started having more responsibilities to juggle (and possibly more of the OCD symptoms, which doesn’t make sense, because you’re thinking that people with OCD have super-clean houses and have all their soup cans stacked in alphabetical order, but sadly, the disorder doesn’t affect me in this way, and tends to make me use up all my mental energy with repeated, worrisome thoughts over some b.s. I see on the news), I’d set things aside instead of putting them away or tossing them, creating little piles of paper everywhere.

Semi-organized piles - I could still find things in the piles, but nobody else could. Things would be “filed” in piles according to a system that only I knew, until “I could get to them.”

As time moved along, I got further and further behind on things.

Organization. Laundry. Meal planning. Appointment making. Plucking hairs.

But I finally feel like I’m shedding that skin and getting back to my old routine-loving, organized self.

I’ve got a system cooking and I’m filling my pantry with those neat, clean acrylic organizing bins, cute but functional baskets to organize our closet including all the sets of underwear, and I’m finally finishing the IKEA faux built-ins that I started a year ago and promised to blog about, but still haven’t - it’s coming within the next two weeks!

I know it’s weird to go from piles shoved in drawers to a highly system of neat-and-tidy, with no gray area in between, but this is how my brain works.

I’m either highly regimented or an absolute tornado, with greasy hair, piles of newspapers in all corners of my house, no bra, and a cigarette with a long ash hanging out the side of my mouth.

Another way my brain works: completely opposite the way normal people’s brains. Most people think “spring cleaning.” I do a “clear out the old” in the fall.

I’m ready for my house to feel clean and cozy, and even though it’s still steamy here in Texas, I’ve started pulling out my fall-scented candles and I’m about to dig out the fall decor.  

And because I’m all about shortcuts, I’ve found that a quick and easy way to change the décor with the seasons is by popping some cute prints with festive sayings into frames around the house.

I made some for my house and I’m sharing them with my email subscribers - if you get my emails, you’ll get your fall printables in tomorrow’s email.  

You can sign up right here if you don’t get emails from me just yet.

OH! I recently watched a video from Erin of The Sunny Side Up Blog, and she had the best idea for cute decoration: she has three clipboards hanging on her wall in a vertical line by her desk and she’ll put her kids’ artwork in them to decorate her space, and to make it easy to change out.

I bought these black ones off Amazon - it’s a 6-pack, and my plan is to have three of them to sort-of float around for my son to do his homework on, and I’ll hang the other three like Erin did - and how adorable will it be to rotate my son’s artwork, seasonal printables like these, and printed photos? Right??

Alright, get ready for some before-and-afters of my pantry, coming to you hopefully later this week because I am on fi-yah 🔥 and I’m going to help you get your pantry turned around fast, too.

By the way, I finally got the comments section of my blog working - it was a super fast and super easy fix, I just never made the time to do it because I’ve been busy washing and folding underwear, but now you can drop me a comment below and we can just chat it up all day long.

*Did you see this? Now that my child has a Twitter account and follows my blog, I may need to start censoring my own posts. Or maybe I’ll ghost write on my own blog. Hmmm… 🤔

PS - Here’s a before-and-after on the new outfit I found for my Bitmoji. The one on the left is what she wore in the summer and the one on the right is her new outfit: Dallas Stars jersey! 😍

In case you don’t have one, here’s where to grab the Bitmoji app so you can make all your text conversations lively and fun.