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Ah, life. What a fabulous jumble of absolutely chaotic experiences! Snapshot of this week:

• I put together a slideshow of pictures that the camera club took at the Cathedral. Turned out nicely. Was a great test of the monoslideshow flash driven photo slideshow. Wish I could share the slideshow - but the pictures aren’t all mine.
• Was voted in as Pres of the local camera club. Egads! The whole group must have all been thinking, “At least it’s not me!” (Actually, I’m looking forward to the next year ahead. It will be fun.)
• Caught a nasty bug that took me out for several days.
• Finished organizing daughter’s room. Will have post later on this.
• School is almost out. Have a fun summer planned for the kiddos and I.
• Resisted urges to rescue more orchids - even the one cruelly left un-potted in Walmart. (Sniff) Orchid care area is full for now - can’t properly take care of more. But VERY tough to say no.
• I haven’t taken many pictures for a while - NEED to take more! How can I get better at photography if I don’t practice!

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Christine’s challenge for Take 5 Friday got swapped out for me this week. Finally got around to donating the items from out of dear daughter’s room. Ran some to goodwill and posted some on Freecycle. The remaining items should be gone today. One room decluttering done! Yippee!

Considering that I don’t feel well today (Thursday), I was lucky this week’s challenge was easy. Odd stuff I found for this challenge:

• Left over dry cereal (in moist climate doesn’t last for next day). Why did I think she’d finish this for the next snack?
• Scrapbooking bits that my son left. (Nice - will have to continue the work on getting him to pick up his stuff.)
• Elefun game net. (Just the net. Hoop for it is gone.)
• Photography catalog. (I never look at catalogs - I always look on the net. Why was it here?)
• Odd little containers my hubby brought me from his last job. (I love containers - but these had no purpose. There was no “some” containers from him. It was - have him bring home all empty containers they didn’t need and looked interesting to him or none at all. No in between.)
• Magazine page with picture of a dress I want to make for my daughter. (Easier to deal with digitally, so I photographed it and put it in OneNote.)
• Papertowel tube that we saved for the hamster, who doesn’t chew the darn things. (hmm…)

In addition:

• I managed to sort through the stuff I got at the rummage sales today. (Gotta love neighborhood rummage sales.)
• I ditched most of the old role playing notes and papers on my shelf (this was a take 5 project in itself - I did it while hubby read to me). I do miss role playing - but our group is just not getting together anymore. I couldn’t toss 1 shoe box of stuff quite yet. At least gaming stuff isn’t threatening to take over my whole entertainment center now. (And this post gives more evidence that I am truly a geek.)

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A side note: I am becoming a big fan of listening to stories on CD from the library or being read to by hubby while doing dishes and tasks like the Take 5 Challenges. I get engrossed in the story and don’t want to stop what I am working on until I HAVE to quit.

Decided to accept this week’s challenge at Organizational Enlightenment, despite current chaos here. If I don’t make time to do these things they won’t get done. Cheallenge: Medicine cabinet. I don’t really have such a thing - but I do have a shelf and a first aid kit. So I tackled that just before lunch. Mostly just needed to do the right most container and ditch some stuff behind it.

Removed a few old medicines. Didn’t have much that was real old as I just organized this a few months back. Did find syrup of Ipecac expired March of 2005 - thus reminding me I need to check the first aid kit every once in a while.

Also labeled the containers the medicines, bandages, and what-nots are in. The contents of the bins seem to find themselves hopping from container to container fitting the whim of the person “returning” the item to the shelf. Perhaps this and a little coaxing will help the guilty family members.

Things that could be improved at some future point:

- The first aid kit. Have the one my in-laws put together for us when we got married. Needs updating. Probably should just go get a new one. (Edit - I found a happy little long lost first aid kit (hiding downstairs) that I’d bought for camping years back. This is no longer on my to do list. SWEET!)

- Consider if there’s a better way to store band-aids. I think I have about 10 boxes of them - very inefficient space use. (Yes, I do need 10 boxes - we go through all kinds of owwies here with kiddos and hubby’s current job.)

Taking up the Take 5 Friday challenge.

Things I’ve been doing to organize my computer: (this week and last - is that cheating?)

- Automated backups.

Using SyncBack (freeware version) on an external hard drive - which is working fabulously. About 5 minutes to install and setup. Quick instructions here.

Also testing out Carbonite for an off site backup - slow going for the initial backup, will see how it works afterward. Again less than 5 minutes to setup and start. Wonderfully simple.

- Putting all my notes and stored documents into OneNote, so I can find stuff!!! (Invested in MS Office Home and Student version. Was thrilled to see you can install it on up to 3 home computers. ) Takes longer than 5 min to install, but starting to jot your ideas down only takes 5 min.

I started several notebooks including an “idea dump” with tabs for “incubate/think on it”, in progress, projects to do, project wishlist, summer ideas, thoughts in general, drop the project (can go back to sometime), and complete. This has become a great way to manage project ideas and make myself have attainable goals.

And starting to convert the favorite recipes cookbooks to digital (a few recipes at a time) takes 5 min at a pop. The digitized ones are all in there and I can’t wait to start on my menu planning to see if it goes faster now.

- Sorting through all the fonts, patters, brushes and whatnots I download for use in Photoshop. First thing I’ve been asking myself is do I NEED this. I have this crazy want to collect all this stuft with no good way to catalog it for use. (Sounds like a project for another day) Sorting them was another 5 min at a time project - now I should be able to easy get to them and likely credit the creator of the brushes and whatnots when needed. Now as I download the things, I extract them into the right area so I don’t have the big mess again.

- Cleaning up my feed reader subscriptions. This may not be clutter “on the computer” since I use Google Reader, but oh much what clutter does it bring into my life (= distractions)? I had 99 feeds I was subscribed to. How in the world can I get much done and read or listen to all those? I cut it down to 69 and will see if this helps enough.