Well life has been chaotic to say the least! I had my first school committee meeting last night and it was very interesting. I have so much to learn. It is going to be a lot for a while I imagine! But I’m going to do my best!
Meanwhile we’ve also been busy with scouts and other regular life activities. Julius has been working so hard at gymnastics that his coach said he made the fall team! But the hours are such (9 hours a week, not even counting the weekend tournaments) that he is going to drop back to recreational gymnastics and ninja. It’s bittersweet. He’s been doing such a good job and improving, but it also already takes up so much of his time and is hard to schedule around. He’ll have more time to play during the week which is something he’s always complaining about! And we’ll have time to actually eat dinner at a reasonable hour more days of the week (maybe).
Patricia decided she wanted to start piano lessons so this will be her first week. I’m proud that she’s interested in trying something new. She’s very good at advocating for herself, which is something as a child (and to this day) that I struggled with. She’ll be starting kindergarten in just a few short months and she’s very excited! She rode the bus and had a blast, she keeps repeating all the rules of the bus to us. I can’t wait for her to get somewhere that will actually challenge her! I just hope she is motivated!
Will has gone all in on AI and is building his own RAG for board games, I’m sure those of you who care will learn of that when he releases it. Meanwhile I’m behind on crafts. Our last scout meeting was yesterday so I’m hopeful that I can start getting home stuff done! I spent the last several weeks cleaning out spice containers to use for cub scout crafts. I used vinegar, baking soda, the dishwasher and the sun to get the smell out. I think the sun worked the best… Yesterday the scouts decorated the cannisters and then filled them with 5 of the six essentials. The only one that didn’t fit was a water bottle, so we clipped that to the side with a carabiner. I used some jewelry floss, a square knot and a bowline hitch to tie a loop onto each bottle for the carabiner. The exact versions of everything I bought to fit in the container are below:
But that was just a silly side project! Let me tell you what lead to the surplus of bottles. I reorganized my spice cabinet! It’s always such a disaster to find everything. I have a cabinet up top where I store extra spices I buy but it’s so cluttered sometimes I forget I have an extra already. So I took everything out (I should have taken a picture it was insane), then alphabetized them all, consolidated them into these nice glass spice containers I have been collecting and then made a spreadsheet. In my spreadsheet I ranked everything by the order I used everything (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, less). Then I sorted the spreadsheet by most used and alphabetical order and was able to fit 24 (with one empty space) jars in the new rack I built. The rest I sorted by alphabetical order and put in my top shelf so I could easily find them later. Let me tell you it has been life changing.
Quick anecdote before I give you the details – I overheard this conversation last week:
Patricia (to Julius): Who’s your BFF Julius?
Julius: Probably you.
Patricia learned what BFF meant and this conversation ensued. Be still my heart.
Spice rack
I measured my cabinet and figured out that I could fit a 5×5 grid of glass spice bottles. I’ve been collecting the glass bottles from Morton and Bassett products for the last couple years. I originally wanted to make something more complicated than this, but I settled on the method of just effectively little tiny shelves.
First I cut two boards slightly smaller than the height of the jar just below the cap and as tall as the diameter of 5 jar caps stacked together.
Then I glued small 1/4″ wide trim on each side board, spacing 1/8″ larger than the jar lid diameter.
Finally, and this part needed to be pretty exact, from 1/8″ MDF I cut 3″ deep boards that were as long as the cabinet minus the width of the side shelves that you used (ours were 1/4″).
Slide these onto each shelf and fill with spices!
