You Are My Sunshine

The last few days we've had rain, rain, and more rain.  With all of the accompanying mud.  I've had to go out and play in the mud trying to drain horse areas by digging trenches through the mud. Yuck!

So I thought I would post some pictures from the other day when the sun was out and we had some beautiful blooming sunshine.  Daffodils!

Rain, Rain go away
Come again some other day

Like next month.  Please take a vacation somewhere else.

A beautiful end to a beautiful day.  This is looking out our upstairs bedroom window this evening.

Almost Spring

Spring is officially twelve days away, but today sure gave us a little taste.  Is was beautiful.  In the mid 60's.  Sun shining.  We're expecting rain after tomorrow, but for today it felt like Spring.  Here are some very early signs of Spring around our place.  I believe the pink flowers are a Flowering Quince.
 It's always the first things to blossom every year.

These tiny new little buds are from our Pear tree.

That's about all we have blossoming or starting to bud right now.  Not even the Daffodils are blooming yet, but they're getting close.

The cats were out enjoying the sun.  Here's Emma.  Rolling around being Emma.

And Grey Stripe.

Here is a picture of our side pasture.  Look at that blue sky!

And of course here's the horses waiting for lunch.  It's so hard to get two horses in a picture where both are somewhat still, have their ears forward,  and at a good angle.  And look at how dirty Skyler is.  She's hopelessly muddy.

Oh, and here's our hens, Lucy, Ethel, Poachy, Maria, Ruby, and NoName.

Looks like there's a couple of eggs that need to be brought in.

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood!!

 

Linking to The Farmgirl Friday Blog Hop at

Creating a Household Notebook

Have you ever felt totally disorganized.  Things are not getting done, meals aren't happening,  laundry's dirty, house is a mess.  When this happens I feel out of sorts, lacking energy, and just not good about life.  So this month I'm on a mission to get clean and organized.

So today my project was to put together a Household Notebook.  A Household Notebook puts all your "stuff" together in one place.  Your ideas, plans, goals, information, routines.  All that stuff that's floating around either on your desk or in your head.  And you can put anything you want into your Household Notebook.  Whatever helps you to get your life together.

My categories may not be the same as yours.  And mine may change as I use it.  I may need to add something or maybe combine some things.  That's the nice thing about using a binder.  They are easy to change.  Here are the categories that I put in mine Notebook to start with.

Routines: I'm still working on this one this week.

Lists:  This is just a place for all of my lists.  Things to do now or in the future.  Ideas.  Lists of whatever.  I'm a list person and seem to have a lot of them.

Cleaning:  This is a place for cleaning lists.  I have my Shaklee cleaning pages and some Martha Stewart Cleaning Checklists.

Goals:  This is where I write out some of my monthly goals.

Meal Planning:  This is where I have any meal planning things that might be helpful along with meals plans.  This is something I really need to work on.

Health & Fitness:  Any information on Health & Fitness. Eating right. Exercises. Stuff like that.

Home Maintenance:  Some more Martha Stewart Checklists and some forms for home and car maintenance.

Gardening:  Here I have some monthly information from OSU Extension Service.  This is also where I'll put garden info once Spring gets here and I'm able to start planting.

Blogging:  Here I have blogging stuff.  Ideas, info,etc.

Homeschool:  Homeschool forms, ideas, contacts.

Financial:  This is just for account and policy info.  I have another binder that I use for Bill Paying.

Medical Info:  This is for insurance, doctor, and medication info.

Internet:  This is for websites, usernames, and passwords.

There is quite a bit of stuff.  Some gets used more often than others.  But it's handy to have it all in one place.  I also have file cabinet for permanent storage stuff. A Household Notebook is for info and often used stuff.  And it's fairly large so it is not meant to leave the house.  That would be where a planner would work.

Here are some of the websites I've used for forms.

Life...Your Way  A lot of really great printables for just about everything.
Martha Stewart  Need I say more.

My next steps are to write out my routines,  fill out forms, and work on meal planning. 

Organizing Make up

 I don't wear a lot of makeup, but I do wear some.  I love the Bare Escentuals Mineral makeup.  It's not real heavy, but it has enough coverage.  As I'm getting older I realize that I can't cover everything and still have my skin look natural.  I also have a bit of rosacea and the Mineral makeup doesn't seem to aggravate it.  

But one thing I don't like about the BE Mineral makeup is that the labels are on the bottom of the jar.  You can't tell which jar is the right one without picking it up and looking on the bottom only to find that it's not the one you wanted.  I find myself always picking up the wrong one.  

So I finally decided to get out my label maker and fix the problem.  The top drawer is where I keep my BE Minerals.  In the morning I just pull out the whole drawer while I'm using it.

 Now my routine is quicker and less aggravating in the morning.  Always a good thing.

Horse Fun

We had beautiful weather this weekend.  Warm and sunny!  So I decided to get the horses out in the arena for a little bit of play time.  Here's Chase being very photogenic. 

Enough of that!  Here's some action shots of Chase having fun.

My camera couldn't keep up with him.  But then he settled down and we did some groundwork.  He definitely needs some refreshing, but he did pretty good.  

Then we got Skyler out.  She's not as photogenic as Chase, but she is so sweet and respectful.  

And muddy.  I keep her blanketed to minimize the mud.  Right now just her head, neck, and legs are muddy. But after Jessica worked with her we got her cleaned up.

Both of them have their winter coats and are pretty fuzzy right now.  And they're starting to shed.

Hope everybody else had some nice weather this weekend.  It was a nice respite, but today it's back to being overcast with a chance of rain.  But I know spring is just around the corner and the longer days are nice.