taking our sweet time...smell the roses

or tulips, in this case.

so remember a while ago, i had the little dots of green starting to come up through the snow outside my front door?

well they've grown so big and tall now, and they're such a pleasure to walk by each morning and come home to each night. they open up so wide they look like they might drop. and then they do drop.

so it's occurred to me that the best way to really enjoy them is to let them open as wide as looks tenable outside and then snip them to enjoy inside. it only takes a minute and then you have fresh flowers (for free!) inside your home or to give as a lovely token to a hostess or friend. i loved this whole idea last summer too. it's a very barefoot contessa moment.

look around your home and see what looks ripe for cutting, because sooner than later, these early spring blooms go away. we have to get all the enjoyment we can out of them!

these grape hyacinths have bathroom bud vases written all over them!

taking our sweet time...unsubscribe

how is it possible that we get SO MUCH junk email in every single email account? i think many of us have figured out the paper junk mail system at home - either gotten ourselves off whatever lists we were on or we have a system in place for weeding it out right away. it's easier with junk mail that's paper - it takes up physical space, so we're sort of forced to do something with it. junk email is a little more insidious.

i know what i've done for years - each morning just delete, delete, delete - and while this solves the immediate problem of an overflowing inbox (and constantly dwindling mailbox space), it doesn't get to the root of the problem of getting off the lists, which can be more time consuming.

so here's what i've come up with. rather than deleting (and more deleting), i've started to relegate all my junk email to an "unsubscribe" folder in my inbox, and then when i have a little block of time on a friday afternoon or whenever, i go in and unsubscribe to a bunch of them. very satisfying. and...stops the insanity. and then i delete them.

photo from www.seniorbrigade.com

taking our sweet time...snap it

okay, so remember last week i introduced a new feature, taking our sweet time? it's something we can take just a few minutes to do that can change our lives for the better.

so in that spirit...today, take a few minutes to snap a picture of something pretty and springy, and then change it to be your phone's homescreen image, or your computer's wallpaper, your facebook profile picture, or all of the above!

i sort of stumbled upon this thought by accident, because i saw some amazingly open anemones and didn't have my camera with me so i snapped it with my phone's camera. though the picture isn't an award-winning one, it looks so bright and cheerful on my phone and each time i see it, i feel a little rush of happiness. cheapest thrill i've had in a while.

turning something as mundane as making a phone call or checking your email into a moment of pleasure...how's that for taking our sweet time?

taking our sweet time...overbooked

i have been cooking up a new feature for honey living called "taking our sweet time," meant to be something you can do in a small amount of time (think 15 minutes or so) that can change your daily life. of course this could be almost anything, but the way i'm thinking of it is as far as organizational things that are always there, lurking, needing doing, and often getting pushed off. those things are often the type where once you do them, you realize how easy they were and how liberated and fresh you feel to have it done. so here we go...

i have been driving myself crazy recently with my array of personal accoutrements - book i'm reading, datebook, notebook for personal stuff, notebook for blog stuff, notebook for counting weight watchers points...ENOUGH. i realized it yesterday morning when i felt the emotional equivalent of an eyeroll when i had to reach into my bag to find something. too much!

i don't know why i had resisted, but somewhere along the line, i got away from the idea of having it all in one place...well, bad idea. i'm now back to the one place, in the form of a pretty raspberry filofax (or "filo," as my high school self called them). i have a section for each category of my life with pretty lined paper and plenty of post-its to go around. to accomodate my new style, i'm going to go back to the one-week-at-a time point booklets which i can just slide right in the little pocket, rather than having a little book. sometimes it's little ways of rethinking the routines we get into that help to turn a problem on its side and come up with a different way of seeing it.

seriously, it's like a breath of fresh air. all in once place, organized, space-efficient, raspberry! doesn't it just look so much prettier?

what's in your bag? if it's a lot, does it bother you? could you condense?