Hasta La Ideas

While at her local Nordstrom’s Department Store, my friend spotted the piano player using a MusicPad Pro for his sheet music. It’s a digital device, much like a Officially, the product is a “music performance computer tablet.” My friend called me immediately to tell me about this space-saving and organized device.

Digital sheet music for the MusicPad Pro can be purchased and downloaded from the website FreeHandMusic.com. If I understand the information on the website, there is also a subscription service where users can have continuous access to a music library for around $50 per month.

Upon further research, I’ve learned that my comparison of the Music Pad Pro to a Kindle is actually quite common — so common in fact that FreeHandMusic has now made their sheet music available for purchase on the Kindle. Since the MusicPad Pro retails for around $900 and the spiral binding your music.

(Image of the MusicPad Pro via FreeHandMusic.com)

Janine Adams, owner of Peace of Mind Organizing in St. Louis, in her guest post today reminds all of us that we should make things as simple as we need things to be instead of uncluttering to impress others. When she’s not helping clients in person, she presents the electronic course Declutter Happy Hour. Welcome, Janine!

I had a dozen professional organizers come to my house for a social gathering recently. I’m a professional organizer myself, so that probably doesn’t sound like such a big deal. But it was.

I came to the organizing field by way of being a messy person who yearned to find organizing systems that work for me. I have huge empathy for my clients, which they love. I’m open about not being “born organized.” But there was something about a dozen organizers, whose homes in my imagination are beautifully organized (I’ve seen some of them and they are!) that made me quake in my boots. I’m president of the St. Louis chapter of the National Association of Professional Organizers, so I felt like I had to live up to some unstated standard of organizational perfection.

As I looked around my 101-year-old house, envisioning what the organizers would see, all sorts of oddities that had been invisible to me for awhile jumped out. Like the heavy oak door that had fallen off its hinges, so it’s resting on its side in the dining room. Like the cluttered sun porch that really serves as a storage space. Like the dead TV in the dining room that’s waiting to be taken to the recycling place. Like the kitchen, last renovated in the 80s, that any normal middle-income couple would have renovated (probably more than once) in the 17 years we’ve owned the home.

I thought about trying to whip the place into a more presentable shape before the party (though I knew there was nothing I could do about the kitchen). I did tidy and clean, and the house looked as good as it ever does. But I decided to let go of this notion that I should present my home as some sort of paragon of organization. I decided to leave the heavy things in place, to just take out the recycling that had gathered in the sun porch and leave everything else there. I let go of worrying about someone opening the bathroom closet and seeing that it’s been on my decluttering to-do list for ages. I didn’t even make the bed–I just made our messy bedroom off limits.

And you know what? It was all good. Folks complimented the beauty of our old home (its wood trim and stained glass windows really are lovely). No one even looked out the kitchen window to the sun porch. They were all focused on one another, on chatting and having fun. Oh, and on the delicious cake my pastry-chef husband made.

This is a great lesson for me. I now know I can invite people into my home even if it doesn’t look perfect. I don’t have to be who I think people want me to be just because of my profession or my standing within it. I just need to be me. I’m comfortable with having a door on its side against the wall in my dining room, and everyone else seemed to be as well. Who knows, maybe my less-than-perfect home made some of those organizers feel better about theirs.

Earlier this year, I had all of my old print photographs professionally scanned (I used scanmyphotos.com and it was around $150 per box of 2,250 pics). Next, I uploaded all of my digital scans to my Flickr pro account and to iPhoto (so far, I have decided not to upgrade to Aperture) on my laptop so that I have the files backed up in multiple locations in addition to having them on DVD. As far as these processes were concerned, the process was easy as pie. (Mmmmmm, pie.)

I am now comfortable with knowing that if my house burns to the ground, decades of photographic memories will not be lost.

However, I am a bit frustrated about the next step in my photo organizing process and I’m looking for some advice. I wish to enter all of the text that I have written on the back of the photographs into the corresponding image’s Notes/Description field. And, I wish to categorize the sets of images into meaningful groups. Doing these two steps, however, seems to be Herculean.

Does anyone out in the Unclutterer readership have a suggestion for how to speed up this process?

• What is the fastest way to enter data from the back of a photograph into a Notes/Description field? Should I enlist the help of a friend? Hire a neighborhood kid to do it? Streamline the process in some way?
• What is the most meaningful way to categorize groups of photographs? Is date order always the best method? What other systems do people use that have proven to be worthwhile?

Let me say, “thank you,” ahead of time, because this has been a bit of a nightmare for me. I look at the box of photographs that have been scanned and feel overwhelmed by the next step in the process.

If you’re tempted to buy home fitness equipment that might one day become clutter in your basement or garage, let me recommend instead that you check out the article “Perfect Push Ups Workout Guide: 35+ Exercises” from The Art of Manliness blog.

Instead of buying dumbbells to work on my triceps, I’ll be trying out this new-to-me style of push-up, the Tiger Style:

I sincerely had no idea that there were more than 35 ways to do push-ups. I am truly amazed.

Do you know of even more online resources for exercises to do at home without the need of any special equipment? Except for the expense of a good pair of tennis shoes, I love running as an inexpensive form of exercise. I’m eager to read in the comments your suggestions for ways to exercise without equipment.

I love that I’m back to reviewing books again and I was excited when I finally worked my way to Justin Spring’s The Itty Bitty Kitchen Handbook. Published in 2006, this gem is essential reading for anyone who finds themselves in a cluttered kitchen of any size.

From page six:

Since clutter is particularly toxic to small kitchen spaces, we’ll start with some purging (and even get a little touchy-feely about why it’s so hard to keep a kitchen clutter free), then move on to deep cleaning and organizing.

Clutter busting, cleaning and organizing — an unclutterer’s dream book!

Some of my favorite advice can be found in the first part of the book:

For Those Who Can’t Let Go:
Some Tips and Tricks for Kitchen Pack Rats

LETTING GO OF STUFF comes easier to some than to others. For those of us who have a really hard time getting rid of unused and unneeded kitchen stuff, here are some thoughts to keep in mind:

1. Rmember that much of the stuff you are now going to make a decision about was in fact given to you by someone who, however thrifty, secretly wanted to be rid of it–and finessed the job by giving it to you.
2. Console yourself that much of the stuff you are making decisions about was never meant to be held on to and has no great commercial value.
3. Beware of meaningless sentimental attachments.
4. Focus, whenever possible, on the possibility that by cleaning out your kitchen cabinets you will be giving some really good stuff to others. Your guilt about letting go of stuff (and your fear of unwittingly losing some really valuable stuff) can thus be vanquished through the reassurance that you are giving stuff to charity. Thrift shops that benefit specific charities are your best bet, since your stuff will find a good home, the proceeds from the sale will help a worth cause, and–hey!– you will even be getting a tax deduction.
5. Finally, and most important: remember that you are not so much getting rid of stuff as making room to live.

The second part of the book is full of recipes that are perfect for a small kitchen. Not necessarily that exciting for an unclutterer, but there are some tasty recipes in there regardless.

The book’s author currently lives in a small New York City apartment that has a 45-square-foot kitchen and grew up using a kitchen on a tiny family sailboat. His advice is practical and based on years of experience.