Pinterest

I know I'm kind of late to the game when it comes to Pinterest. I've been hearing about it forever, and I finally checked it out recently. I was impressed with the clean look of the site; for some reason when I imagined all those images it sounded like it would by busy and jumbled, but it's not.

Pinterest screen shot.

Pinterest is really lovely for visual people who respond to images and colors and want to be able to browse visually to get ideas. It's also fun for people in niche groups to find out what their peers are looking at and talking about. For organizing inspiration, there are dozens of collections of beautiful organizing shots. My friend Cari of Cari's Custom Organizing has some awesome ideas collected here.

I think Pinterest could be a nice organization tool in and of itself, helping us keep track of ideas thematically for future reference, or just for fun!

FYI, to fully use the site you have to get an invite or request an invite.

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Review: Good to Great

I finally made time to read Good to Great, the modern business classic by Jim Collins. My NAPO-LA book group made it our November pick, and we're discussing it this evening. Though I had trouble getting into it, once I got to the second or third chapter I found the arguments compelling and the anecdotes inspiring. I really liked the tone of the book and the message that we can go from good to great in any area of life, from business to personal goals to family life. Have you read it? What did you think?

Here's one of my favorite quotes: 

“I believe it is no harder to build something great than to build something good. It might be statistically more rare to reach greatness, but it does not require more suffering than perpetuating mediocrity. Indeed, if some of the comparison companies in our study are any indication, it involves less suffering, and perhaps even less work. The beauty and power of the research findings is that they can radically simplify our lives while increasing our effectiveness. There is a great solaces in the simple fact of clarity--about what is vital, and what is not.

If we organized the majority of our work time around applying these principles and pretty much ignored or stopped doing everything else, out lives would be simpler and our results vastly improved.”

Go from good to great with a professional organizer.

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A Thanksgiving Recipe

I'm so thankful for all my wonderful blog readers, so I'd like to share a family recipe with you, which I will be making for my family this Thanksgiving. These little morsels are huge crowd pleasers, so I usually double the recipe.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Swiss Cheese Tartlets

ingredients:
1 pre-made pie crust (in this recipe store-bought works better than homemade)
3 eggs
1/4 cup cream
1/8 teaspoon pepper
2 tablespoons very finely minced onion
1/4 lb. grated Swiss cheese
1/4 teaspoon poppy seeds (or up to 1 teaspoon as desired)

instructions:
Roll crust thin and cut out rounds about 2’’ in diameter. Press into greased or nonstick shallow muffin tins. (You can use a regular muffin tin as well, just press the crust in gently so it will be easy to remove later.) Beat eggs and mix in rest of ingredients. Pour 2 teaspoons of egg mixture into each crust shell. Chill for 30 minutes in the refrigerator. Preheat oven to 425 F. Bake at 425 for five minutes, then turn down oven to 350F and continue baking for 12 minutes or so until lightly browned on top and on edges and center is puffed up a bit. Best served warm. You can freeze and reheat in the microwave or oven, but they won't be quite as good as fresh.

Get help for the holidays from a professional organizer.

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Gift idea: handmade, but not by you

Sometimes the best gifts are handmade, but they don't have to be handmade by you. If you have an artist, writer or crafty person in your family, support them by purchasing (or trading for) their wares and giving them to others on your gift list. They might even give you a family discount!

A taste of Six Sapphires.

I'm lucky to have a wealth of talented, productive people in my family. My sister-in-law is a hugely talented jewelry designer, and everyone in the family delights in receiving something she's made. My mother-in-law is a photographer, writer and all-around talented person, and I've already earmarked one of her pieces for someone on my Christmas list. My brother works with plants and makes succulent wreaths and pots plants for wonderfully colorful, living gifts. Who in your family has a talent for creation?

Giving items made by someone you and the person you are giving to both love makes the gift doubly special.

Get help organizing your holiday gift list.

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Review: Partners in Crime

I read a lot, and one of my favorite genres is romance. I also love Christmas, and I've been binging lately on Christmas-themed romances which seem to be in abundance at my local library. One story,  Partners In Crime by Cait London, is about a professional organizer who gets involved with a undercover cop on vacation and a string of burglaries of Christmas presents in her small town. It was a cute story, but the way the author portrayed her main character, Cecilia Lattimer, as a fairly OCD person who thrust her unwanted organizational solutions on everyone from business owners to the hunky cop-who-she-thinks-is-a-drifter was a little off-putting.

I suppose I'm overly sensitive, being a professional organizer in real life, but it was hard to see her try to give advice to everyone about how their lives could be organized better. I would never presume to do that, since part of being a professional organizer is being non-judgmental about people's situations and stuff. By offering to "fix" their space for them, the character in the book is implying that there is something wrong with them, which is not only presumputous, but insulting and it doesn't get her very far with any of these characters, anyway. 

So, the takeaway for me is that even though it was neat to see the main character in a short novel share my profession, it made me wonder how others see the job I've chosen. I certainly hope they don't think I'm a nosy person who wants to fix their space whether they like it or not!

Want to learn what a real professional organizer does?

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