A New Challenge - with The Organised Housewife

Here comes September at a rate of knots and with it, a challenge that could not have been more perfect for our life right now!

I've sung (The Organised Housewife) Katrina's praises before - I love the way she shares her ideas, routines, and her always gorgeous printables. I also love that she's not afraid to admit that she's not perfect, and that sometimes life can knock you for six, and it takes an effort to get back into the swing of things.

Her 20 Days To Organise and Clean Your Home Challenge is the answer for the times when life gets in the way and you need a kick start. 

I had an epic EPIC meltdown on the weekend, one of the "Why am I doing everything and why can't you all just do things my way and for God's sake turn of that damn tv or I will stab you" emotional, screaming, messy meltdown.

I crave order and control and I have been let down enough to not feel like I can't rely on anyone. Everytime we start again, everything goes well for a day or two, maybe even a week, but then everyone dies off, the same old habits creep back in and we find ourselves back at square one.

I had signed up to Katrina's challenge as soon as I saw her post appear in my feed, and I'm glad that for once, we are not trying to navigate through a kick start on our own. This time we are going to make some new habits, and everyone in the family is getting involved.

Well, you know, she's not going to mend my fragile state, and glue the shattered relationship back together for me (oh if it were that simple) but a reset in our organisation - our day to day tasks, knowing that things are done so we can all get back to eating pancakes and going for long walks on Sundays - that's going to do a lot for my control freak head, and this little family's hearts.

And if you're not, you know, NUTS, like I obviously am, it's a good way to make Spring Cleaning a lot of fun this year!

There's still time to sign up for the 20 Days to Organise and Clean Your Home Challenge... you just need to go here:

What are you waiting for? Go join, I'll wait here.

*cue elevator music*

Okay, so it's pre-season week, and the first task is to set up a binder for all the routines, lists and lovely printy things that we will be using throughout the challenge. 

I have already repurposed every binder I own... so today I purchased a heeky lime green one that everyone can recognise easily, and which will match my kitchen, where it will live.

While I was over at The Organised Housewife I also downloaded the printable monthly calendar for September, which you can see poking out from the bottom. I have always told myself I would use these, but true to form I forget and by the time I remember it's almost time for the next month.

I printed it out and filled it in straight away and it's on my pinboard in the kitchen. No more excuses of the "I didn't know" or "I forgot" or "You didn't tell me" variety. And did I mention there are three different styles so you can choose the one you like best?

Katrina, you sure know the way to a stationery-obsessed girl's heart. 

Day Two of pre-season is to assemble your clean kit, so pop back tomorrow to see how mine looks, and share yours with all the budding "Organised Housewives" joining the challenge.

FFS Friday - the Where's My Freaking Tax Return You Bastards?? Edition

Oh hai! I haven't whined for a while. Stuff's been ok for the most part. This week has contained a noticeable build up of stupid though.

I finally got all our gazillion payment summary things and decided to do our tax myself this year. FFS.

WonderMan is going to get a tax bill. FFS.

I got a tax return. No FFS.

Turns out after WonderMan worked five separate jobs this tax year my Centrelink estimate was about $15000 short. FFS.

My tax return has been swallowed up by the overpayment, and there's still some to pay back. FFS.

So I put myself through all of that trauma of lodging online and I'm not getting a cent. FFS.

If I'd gone to an accountant I'd be at least $200 worse off but that is not much consolation right now. FFS.

Frog has returned to her factory default settings, all of which are "NO." FFS.

Every word I say needs a smart answer according to Tiger. Every damn word. FFS.        

WonderMan was supposed to sell his car three months ago because his work is just down the road, and I've just been forced to pay more freaking registration for it because he's still driving it to work every day, regardless of whether it's registered or not. FFS.

He insisted he would only drive it if it was pouring with rain and he didn't want to get me up. Every day for two weeks I've been sending him a text message that says "So I assume it's raining on your lazy arse because it sure as hell isn't here." FFS.

He is shitty because I drive to work. Well yes, I do, because I have to get two children to literally opposites edges of the town and get back to work in the middle. In heels. FFS.

I'm still a temp, and stuck in that terrible place between leaving to go to a permanent or full time job, and holding out because the company I work for are fantastic and I don't particularly want to go anywhere else. FFS.

I just finished reading 50 Shades of Grey. FFS.

I want to stab my eyeballs with a fork. FFS.

I would be much happier if the low intelligence life form who wrote it was forced to pay damages and compensation to those of us who have subjected ourselves to the torture of reading it just so we can shut up the various idiots telling us we are not allowed to have an opinion on it until we have read it. FFS.

I can't find strong enough words to tell them my opinion. It made me alternately murderous and desperately hopeless about the fate of the human race if the majority is excited by such gormless drivel. FFS.

I can't afford to buy a better book to heal my rotting brain cells because I'm not getting a damn tax return. FFS.

You should all go visit Dear Baby G, and share your first world whines too.  

Get thee away from me, Mercedes!

Have you ever had the feeling that you want to go out and do something completely insane?

Like sell everything you own and some of your spare body parts and get thee down to the local Mercedes dealership... 
 
And pick the biggest, stateliest one of them all and drive it out of there...

Picking up some atrocious pants and a set of ivory golf clubs along the way to the seaside greens...

I have a red hot tip for you.

Complete your tax online this year.

The yearning to be an accountant with a Mercedes and a gold membership at Seaview Golf Resort will shrivel up and die while you are still half way through menu 1, part IV.

I'm using the fee I would have paid an accountant to buy two big bottles of gin.

It was worth the pain.

 

It's the end of the world as we know it...

Our television blew up this morning.

WonderMan has started twitching already. His actual words were "The tv blew up, get on Gumtree and find another one."

The kids are being pleasant to each other in the knowledge that mum will make them play board games and scrub the toilet if they fight. 

It's absolute bloody bliss.

We are all one people

I have always been a lover, not a fighter.

I've watched the world turn, cried at the pictures on the news, felt the helpless pain in my heart.

I was a child when the Balkans exploded. I begged my mother to let me watch the news with her at night, because I wanted to see, I wanted to understand.

I forced myself to watch, to listen, to read. I spent hours screaming inside my head "WHY?? HOW?? THIS IS NOT RIGHT! THOSE BODIES ARE PEOPLE TOO!!"

My heart was born during those years. This heart that breaks in two at the prejudice and hate flooding this globe, faster than any rising sea.

I know I am one of the lucky ones. My experience of war comes to me via a television screen. The internet tells me of poverty. Famines are self imposed in order to fit into a dress in a week. 

I know I've said some stupid shit in my life too. No doubt I've been discriminatory and hypocritical. Definitely I'm naive and idealistic.

And despite life and all it's materialistic, self indulgent trappings, I still have the pain in my heart.

You know when you were a child and you shared a bag of Minties with your friends, and you spent the next twenty minutes tearing your Minty wrapper into a thin strip, making a tiny ribbon, fibre by precious fibre? 

My heart is the Minty wrapper of my life. Tearing slowly, oh so slowly, and when I come up against something I can't change, or yet another ostrich person with their head stuck in the sand the feeling is so agonisingly acute it hurts to breathe.

An explosion of memes and shared pictures on Facebook in the last few weeks has torn my heart anew. Like the moments of frightening excitement when you turned the corner of your wrapper and hoped to anything you believed in that it wouldn't break. And you held your breath.

How can clever, wonderful people be so bloody stupid? 

When did we stop caring, and start clutching hate and fear as if our lives depended on it?

This is my plea to to all of those who go through life with their blinkers on.

We are all one people.

We are all human beings.

We have one world, one beautiful, unique globe on which we live. 

We all have a heart. We love, we cry, we laugh.

A smile is a smile the world over.

When you reach out to hold another's hand it doesn't matter what colour it is. It doesn't matter if it's across the fence, across generations, or across the world. 

Those people arriving on our shores? Their hearts are broken. They need a hand to hold.

A child who dies because you didn't want your tax dollar to buy them food, they have a mother too. Just like you. 

A wise woman called Zoey heard my rage. Her words hit the nerve at the bottom of my pain. 

"I know if Australia was suddenly wartorn I'd want to be able to go to another country and ask for asylum."

I would too.

If I was being abused and exploited I wouldn't be deciding to accept help based on which continent it was coming from.

Just as we shouldn't be arguing about who to help and who to ignore. 

Pull your fat heads out of the sand and get out on the streets and help those elderly Australians who are "going without their medicine" that you're always bleating about. You know, the ones you think are worth more than another human being fleeing from atrocities you couldn't possibly fathom.

And when you finally open your eyes, you should go visit two wonderful women:

Cate Bolt and Eden Riley

I want to be just like them when I grow up.