Average Jane

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  • Average Jane Makes Coleslaw

    I've been a Kansas Citian my entire life – and the fact that I technically live in a Kansas City suburb now doesn't change that.

    One of the staples of my formative years was the creamy coleslaw from Jack Stack and similar local barbecue restaurants. This is not at all a healthy veggie side dish, but it's delicious, so I've been working on trying to make a reasonable facsimile at home.

    I found this recipe on Pinterest that appears to be the real deal. However, it turns out to be too sweet for my taste and the dressing preparation seems a little off, so I've been tinkering with it a bit. I think I've finally landed on a version that seems right to me.

    Creamy Coleslaw, Kansas City BBQ Style

    1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
    1/3 cup of sugar
    2 tsp. celery seed
    1 tbsp. minced onion
    1/4 cup carrot, peeled and grated
    1 cup Miracle Whip salad dressing
    2 quarts (1.5 lbs.) shredded or finely chopped green cabbage

    For the dressing, combine sugar, apple cider vinegar and onion in a blender or food processor and run for 20 seconds or until sugar is no longer gritty. Add Miracle Whip and process for another 20 seconds. Add celery seed and blend for a couple of seconds until mixed in. Put the cabbage and carrot in a large bowl and mix in dressing until vegetables are thoroughly coated. Refrigerate until ready to serve.

    This makes quite a bit (although I would dispute the "serves 10-12" notation on the original recipe). For the two of us, I've been halving the recipe with good success. 

  • Average Jane Starts Over

    I kicked off 2020 with a very ambitious yet manageable plan for making my house more livable. And it worked! For the first few months I followed my spreadsheet and did a lot of bite-sized projects and a few big ones.

    After I started working from home in March, I got away from the weekly cadence, but I still managed to eke out projects here and there. All told, I completed 25 of my planned projects and skipped 27. I also ended up doing certain things I wouldn't have thought of at the first of the year, like making my patio and deck more inviting. Priorities change, so rolling with new ones just makes sense.

    Last year was rough, and just getting my work done for my job and feeding us every day used up a lot of my mental energy. If there's one thing I've learned in life, it's the importance of resting when you need it. I feel pretty triumphant about accomplishing everything I did get done.

    So, back on the horse, right?

    In anticipation of another year of spending most of my time at home, I made another spreadsheet for 2021 so I can pick up where I left off. Actually, I'm basically just starting over, with a few tweaks. 

    2021-house-purge-schedule

    A lot of last year's progress will serve to make this year's tasks easier, and there's still no hurry to get to the tasks I missed the first time around. A few items were going to need to be done every year anyway (pantry rearrangement, anyone?) and I added some new ones to reflect changes in the way we're living in the house.

    What I learned was that small goals and incremental changes really work for me. Let's see if I can beat my record from this year and make my living space that much nicer.

  • Average Jane vs. the Wrapping Paper

    Yesterday I decided it was time to tackle the mountain of shipping boxes and bags in my dressing room and get all the holiday gifts ready for distribution.

    Over the years, I've reached the point where I have TWO plastic caddies for gift wrapping supplies: one for rolls of paper and the other for gift bags, tags, etc. But this degree of organization means that I can safely store everything for years and years and years, which brings me to the point of this story.

    GiftsAt some juncture in my life – and I'm thinking it has to have been a good 15+ years ago at this point – I purchased several really, really ridiculously long rolls of Christmas wrapping paper. One was green with penguins, another features a green, blue and magenta ornament design, and a third has an off-white background with holiday greenery. My niece and nephew (ages 20 and 15) have seen this paper under the tree throughout their entire lives. 

    This is not good quality paper. It's thin, tears easily, and sort of wads into place rather than folding neatly. But the lack of quality has been amply outweighed by the copious quantity. It's been my go-to for large boxes for more than a decade. Within the last couple of years, I finally used up the green penguin paper, but the other two are still going strong…and I hate them.

    Yes, I have purchased other wrapping paper and gift bags since I got the rolls of paper in question, but that just means they last longer. And even when I make a concerted effort to use those rolls as much as possible, there's just so much paper on them.

    There was a time when I took great pride in wrapping gifts beautifully. As a college student, I worked at Sears and enjoyed wrapping gifts with the heavy paper, double-sided tape and beautiful bows they had. This cheap, shitty paper ruins all that. Only with the squarest of boxes can I get a halfway good result, mostly from distracting the eye with a nice bow.

    But I'm thrifty and persistent, so I will use up those rolls of paper. Brace yourselves, family. Here it is again.

  • Average Jane Thinks Ahead

    Sunset

    As the COVID-19 pandemic continues apace with seemingly nothing to mitigate it other than our personal precautions, it strikes me that this is exactly the kind of situation that demands we get our affairs in order. This disease is unpredictable and there's no telling what might happen to a given individual if or when they contract it.

    Some people get sick and exhausted for an extended period of time. Others decline precipitously, go into the hospital, and may die. In either case, that person could be unable to fulfill their usual obligations – and they may also miss the opportunity to pass along certain vital information.

    With that in mind, I'm going to think out loud here about what would be necessary for someone to know if I became seriously ill or incapacitated or died. My list is pretty hefty because I'm in charge of running my household, but I think you'll be able to figure out how to pick out what applies to you and extrapolate additional items.

    Personal Lists

    Phone numbers and/or email addresses for:

    • Your supervisor at your job.
    • If you're a freelancer, your active client contacts.
    • Any close family members you would want to be aware of your situation.
    • Any very close friends you would want to know what's up.
    • Key representatives of various friend groups and clubs/organizations you belong to.

    You'd want to specify the circumstances under which you'd want someone to contact each of those groups.

    Household Lists

    • Every bill that needs to be paid, including the company name, account number, payment address, customer service number and what day of the month it's due. This means utilities, mortgage loans or rent, car loans, credit cards, insurance policies and anything else you pay on a regular basis. With paper bills increasingly uncommon, it could be difficult for someone to track down the information without some help.
    • All recurring payments that are automatically debited, such as online news subscriptions, streaming entertainment services, Amazon Prime, Patreon accounts, monthly charitable donations, and insurance policies. Include logins, account numbers, customer service numbers and other cancellation information, if possible.
    • Any regular deliveries such as standard weekly grocery orders, monthly pet food orders, recurring Amazon orders, prescriptions, subscription boxes, newspaper or magazine subscriptions, etc. Again, customer service numbers and account numbers would be helpful.
    • Names and phone numbers of the people or companies you regularly use for things like plumbing, HVAC repair and maintenance, electrical repairs, gutter cleaning, yard work, house cleaning, etc. If someone else needed to step in to get something done around your house, it just makes sense to use these existing resources.
    • You know that secret code your alarm company asks for when the alarm goes off by accident? Give that to someone you trust.
    • Write down the names, ages and descriptions of your pets. List what brands of food they eat along with their feeding schedules and portion amounts. Also include the name and contact information for your veterinarian or vet clinic and any pet sitter or boarding facility you use.

    Financial Lists

    • Company name, rep name and phone number (if applicable), account number and customer service number for every relevant insurance policy. Definitely any life insurance, but also health insurance, auto insurance, homeowner's insurance, etc. Make it as easy as possible if someone needs to file a claim or cancel a policy.
    • All investment account information: 401(k)s, IRAs, Roth IRAs, etc. Make sure anyone who's a beneficiary is aware that they are listed. For that matter, review your beneficiary lists and make any necessary changes now.
    • If you're employed, who should someone contact if they need to access any of the resources or policies you have through work? Make sure to also list the name and contact information for your supervisor and possibly their supervisor so someone with a personal stake can help.
    • Where to find important paperwork like wills and living wills, advance directives, and vehicle titles.

    Online Lists

    • Choose a password manager, put in all the account login information other people might need, and set up emergency access for the people you choose. 
    • If you want someone to be able to manage your Facebook account after you die, designate a Legacy Contact. It's listed under General Settings/Memorialization Settings.
    • LinkedIn has a process to request removal of an account if someone dies, but I personally don't think it would be worth the hassle.

    That's all I can think of off the top of my head but it's a lot, right? Think about how daunting it would be for someone else to have to try to dig it all up on their own. Some of these things would be impossible for anyone to know or find out if you didn't or couldn't tell them.

    I'm generally a pretty optimistic person, but we're all in the midst of a dire and unpredictable situation. Now that we've all stocked up on flour, yeast and toilet paper, this is something we can do to keep ourselves occupied and prepared in a different way.

  • Average Jane Starts Getting Unstuck

    Feel free to skip over this post if you're sick of hearing about my home organization project, but I can't stop writing about it because it's having such a profound effect on my quality of life.

    I am fundamentally a nester. Not that I'm a big horoscope person, but I've had people look at mine and tell me it's a wonder I ever leave the house. 

    This is my "starter house" and at some point this summer I'll have lived here for 25 years. I have no intention of ever leaving. In fact, if I were to suddenly get rich, my dream would be to bulldoze this house and build a nicer, more energy-efficient one in its place. 

    Two-and-a-half decades is a long time to live in one place. My husband and I have been pretty good about keeping the super-noticeable clutter at bay and we have a habit of renting a dumpster every five years or so to make sure. However, it gets easier and easier to look past the massive amounts of smaller stuff you're keeping for absolutely no reason once you've spent that long with it.

    This weekend, I crossed one of my extra projects off the list. I'd decided it would be nice to get an enclosed cupboard with a hutch to replace the open bakers' rack we've been using as a microwave and cookbook stand all this time. Nothing screams, "I decorated this room in the 1990s" like a bakers' rack.

    Fullsizeoutput_1385I found the perfect cupboard on Facebook Marketplace. It was a great color and it had already been marked down a few times by the sellers, who were clearing out their house in preparation to move out of state. I made the deal, measured the cargo space in my car and drove the 20 miles to pick it up.

    It didn't fit. If magic were real, you could have put them where they needed to go, but it was impossible to fit the second piece through the hatch opening once the first piece was in. Fortunately, we managed to load the cabinet part and there was nothing to be done but bring it home and arrange to get the hutch the next day.

    I did that and I love the whole thing enough that it was worth the 80+ miles and hours of driving it took to finally get it all home.

    Yesterday I cleared off the old rack. You guys, there was SO MUCH STUFF on there! Dozens and dozens of cookbooks, some dating back to when I was growing up. A bear-shaped cookie jar, sans head/lid for as long as I can remember, filled with cat grooming accessories and an impressive amount of catnip. Two sediment-filled bottles of plum wine that a friend made. My gigantic stack of recipe printouts that still need to be organized into a binder. The clay jar I use to store onions. I'm sure there was more I'm forgetting. It's truly a testament to how sturdy the rack is. I don't remember where it came from, but it's a quality item.

    I got my husband to help me set up my new cupboard. The previous owners had simply set the hutch on top of the lower cabinet and called it a day, but in this house full of rambunctious animals, I felt driven to buy a pair of T-brackets to make sure the top couldn't be tipped over. I also needed to cut a hole in the back of the hutch so I could run the microwave cord behind it. That was far more of a hassle than I expected because it's very solid piece of furniture that's made of actual wood, so it required some effort.

    Oh, and I dropped and broke one of the glass panes for the upper cabinet doors while I was trying to put it in. Getting a new one is now on my to-do list for sometime in the next few weeks.

    Even with the hassles, it's been unexpectedly lovely to finally have a place for certain items like my teapots that really hadn't had their own spot up to now. Lots of the items in the upper cabinet had once been just sort of hanging out on a counter or windowsill and now they're actually on display.

    I am so glad I started this home improvement project. Just imagine what I can do next year after all of these tasks are out of the way!

  • Average Jane’s Home Organizing Project

    If you're following the saga of my self-assigned year of organizing, I can report that it is going exceedingly well. I'm trying not to over-report about it here, but there are some developments over the past couple of weeks that are changing some of my mindsets in ways I hadn't anticipated initially.

    Deliberate Donations

    I knew that this project would involve throwing away, giving away and donating a lot of items from my house, but the purge volume is turning out to be much higher than I thought it would be. At first, I was just taking everything with residual value and dumping it at the thrift store, but when I got to my linen closet, I started thinking about better ways to get the items directly to people who can use them most.

    We have a charity in town called Sleepyhead Beds that focuses on providing beds and bedding to families and children. Once I pulled everything out of my linen closet and drawers, I remembered that I also had significant amounts of bedding stuffed into big plastic tubs in my basement. I'd already bagged everything up willy-nilly, but I realized it made more sense for me to unpack the bags, match up the pillow cases with the sheets, and re-bag the items that Sleepyhead Beds will take. I'll have my husband drop it all off during their business hours some weekday soon.

    I also ran across some towels I no longer use, so those will go to a nearby animal shelter, along with all of the cardboard trays that my brand of cat litter comes in. I have been letting them pile up in the basement out of sheer laziness, but it's a simple thing to remove the plastic to recycle along with my plastic grocery sacks and stack the cardboard trays for donation.

    Permanent Upgrades

    Cookie-sheetCleaning out the cupboard where I store my baking pans opened my eyes to the potential for getting rid of a large number of low quality cookie sheets and baking pans. I'm replacing them with two high-quality half-sheet pans that will probably serve me well indefinitely. One of my old cookie sheets is so warped that I once used it to bake a butter-heavy type of cookie, only to have the entire panful slide to one side and form a giant cookie Pangaea. 

    I don't think that will be happening again.

    Making Life Easier

    This whole project is ultimately serving to cut down on the nagging pull in the back of my mind of work I know needs to be done. A welcome side-effect is that every completed project makes some aspect of my home life more convenient. Call it feng shui or just good organization, but the upshot is that when I need to find something in one of the places I've already worked on, it's exactly where it should be.

    And One New Rule

    I'd already decided that if I did an assignment early, I could just skip that week when I got to it. Well, this was the week when I had to decide what to do if I didn't complete my weekly project. Between a lack of motivation on Saturday and a lot of other things to do on Sunday, it was clear that my task for this weekend wasn't going to get done. So I made a new rule that in these instances, I would swap the missed work project on the spreadsheet with the first one that had been completed early. That way, I get to move on to whatever was next and get to the skipped project later on.

    Why not just do it next week? I could have gone that route, but I suspected that my failure to complete an assignment might attach some psychological baggage. Moving it down the list to a logical but relatively random date helps ensure that I'll approach it with a fresher outlook. Plus, it maintains the spirit of my earlier rule by still giving me a week off – just not the week I originally would have gotten.

  • Average Jane’s “Lazy” Day

    QPzJ6ky%QkarB2bRa%89LgRolling into the three-day weekend, I decided there was no real reason for me to leave the house yesterday. In fact, I spent the entire day in my pajamas and robe.

    To the casual observer, it might have appeared that I spent the day sitting my favorite chair in the living room, goofing around on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. That almost feels true to me, but a quick inventory reveals that I also:

    • Baked a batch of chocolate chip cookies.
    • Wrote a blog post to share my sister's bean dip recipe.
    • Washed pots and pans and cleaned the kitchen.
    • Ran the dishwasher twice.
    • Cleaned the kitchen sink.
    • Did 7 loads of laundry, including a rare white load with bleach.
    • Cleaned out my main food storage cupboard.
    • Got on a roll and also cleaned out some lower cupboards that have been an annoying mess for a while.
    • Cleaned out a drawer above those cupboards.
    • Decided to swap the contents of two upper cupboards, so I cleaned them out as well.
    • Took a LOT of trash out.
    • Made a batch of popcorn and spiked some Orange Vanilla Coke with Jack Daniels to enjoy while watching the season premiere of The Magicians.
    • Put away all the laundry I'd done.
    • Filled a big cardboard box and a trash bag with items to take to a swap with friends next week.

    How does all that fit in with my year-long organizing plan? Well, three of the "extra" items I did yesterday were on the list for later in the year, so that gives me three free weekends to do other things. One of the drawers wasn't on the list, but it was definitely overdue to be cleaned out.

    Today I have plans with various friends for most of the day, starting with brunch this morning. In between, I'll be making the bean dip mentioned in the previous post so my husband can enjoy it while he watches the Chiefs game.

    That leaves Monday for the errands I put off yesterday. I like how this weekend is shaping up.

  • Average Jane Makes Bean Dip

    AE1U17G7TrqQhX1WwDVYvwWith the Kansas City team in the playoffs, naturally I need to make some football-watching snacks, regardless of whether I'm watching the game myself. Thus, I made a crockpot full of Rancho Gordo cranberry beans yesterday so we can have bean dip. Here's the recipe, which actually came from my sister.

    Delicious Bean Dip

    2 cans pinto beans or similar (If starting with dried beans, use 1 cup and cook in advance.)
    1/3 cup olive oil
    1/3 cup green or red bell pepper, chopped
    1/3 cup chopped onion
    2 cloves fresh garlic, pressed or minced
    2 tblsp. Worcestershire sauce
    4-5 dashes Tabasco sauce
    2 tblsp. ketchup
    1/8 tsp. cayenne pepper (optional, but recommended)
    1/3 cup cooking sherry or wine (optional)

    Heat oil in skillet on medium heat and add onion, pepper and garlic. Cook, stirring frequently, until vegetables are soft. Drain beans and add to pan along with the Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco sauce, cayenne and ketchup. Cook for about 15 minutes, then add sherry or wine and continue cooking until re-thickened (about 30 minutes). Stirring should produce the consistency of refried beans. If you want them smoother, allow the beans to cool somewhat and use a blender or food processor. Serve with tortilla chips. 

  • Average Jane Makes Progress

    In my last post, I laid out my plan to start tidying one part of my house every week. This is Week 3 (because I started the last week of December) and so far it's going swimmingly. 

    I was looking forward to this week because the project was to clean out the closet in my bedroom that I use as overflow storage for my kitchen. It holds cleaning supplies, serving ware, small appliances, kitchen tools, special occasion cookware, baking pans, and some odds and ends like canning jars, spray paint and a furniture dolly. 

    Here's what it looked like to start with:

    IMG_4737

    I mean, it's not HORRIBLE, but it's definitely jumbled and disorganized. 

    I took everything out and either laid it on my bed, put it on a card table I brought in for the occasion, or set it on the floor outside the closet. I had an empty box ready for useful things that I'll take to a swap with my friends. The next one is coming up in about 10 days and anything that doesn't get claimed will get donated.

    I started another box of items to donate to Habitat ReStore – mainly cleaning products that are full or nearly full. I had a lot of carpet cleaners, for example, despite the fact that my home has almost no carpeting.

    A few things needed to be thrown away, including the two cartons of oat milk you see on the bottom, left-hand shelf that expired two years ago. I got out a trash bag for those.

    Finally, I discovered a very full box of dead compact fluorescent bulbs that I will take to Lowe's for disposal.

    The end result:

    IMG_4738

    Voila! Much tidier. I even left room for some storage containers that are currently in use.

    I think I'm going to get some baskets to attach to the inside of the right-hand door that I can use for some of the things that are still kind of hanging out in there without a defined spot. That would be good for stuff like the ShopVac attachments you see on the floor to the right and the pile of cleaning rags that are stacked on top of other cleaning supplies on the shelf. 

    Even without the baskets, it's still in a much better place and it will definitely be easier to find things and put them back after I use them.

    One of the best things about this whole project is that most of the tasks are relatively quick and easy. Even today's project took less than 90 minutes.

    Now that I have it out of the way, it's time for me to make some pizza dough and bake cookies. 

    Hope you also had a productive weekend. And if it wasn't productive, I hope it was relaxing and fun!

  • Average Jane Makes A Plan

    StarIt's a little early for new year's resolutions, but I got an idea earlier this week and decided to run with it.

    I was thinking about all of the things around the house that need to be done but get skipped over because procrastination is a way of life. Some are large and some are small, but there are a LOT of them in my house (and probably in yours as well).

    So how do you ensure that you'll get to them? My mind went straight to spreadsheet.

    What if I made a list of every area of the house that needed tidying, put them on a spreadsheet and associated each one with a weekend next year? Breaking the work down into bite-sized chunks with two days every week set aside to get them done seemed more than reasonable, especially for smaller jobs.

    I opened Excel and pasted in the dates for every Saturday in 2020, marking off the weekends when I would be out of town or busy with a holiday. Then I started thinking of every drawer, cupboard, cabinet, closet and shelving unit in the house that needed to be reorganized. I put in a column for the room the problem area was in, another for the specific location that needed to be addressed (e.g. "upper drawer to the left of the sink"), and a notes column for more complicated projects.

    As I began adding projects, I developed some rules. One was that if I got something done early, I could either take off the weekend I had assigned to that task or use it to do something else early. As I was making the list, I kept thinking, "I should do this or that sooner!" Which sounds great, but without the list and the assigned date for accountability, history tells me I wouldn't get to those things ever.

    There's a pretty wide spectrum of difficulty and effort associated with the 47 weeks of projects I eventually listed. They range from cleaning out a single drawer to renting a roll-off container and cleaning out the garage. There are only 3-4 large projects on the list that will probably take an entire day or weekend. I tried to limit the scope of the assignment to tidying, rearranging and cleaning, but in one instance there will be a little light reconstruction under one sink.

    Only one thing made it on the list twice and that's organizing the closet in my bedroom, which is arranged as an overflow pantry. It gets out of control pretty quickly, so I thought I should tackle it once in the spring and once in the late fall.

    Now that I have the list set, I'm considering adding another section for additional projects outside of the original scope. For example, I have a couple of rooms I'd like to re-paint this year and I need to cut down some trees in my yard. Some general to-dos like taking the mower in for maintenance would be good to add as well.

    To kick the whole thing off, I gave myself two relatively small assignments this coming weekend. One involves cleaning out and throwing away an old side table so I can be ready to rearrange my bedroom furniture when the headboard I got for Christmas arrives next week. 

    I'm pretty pumped up about this whole idea. Next on the agenda is to print out the spreadsheet and hang it someplace where I'll see it every day. Heck, maybe I'll even get gold stars to mark the completed items.

    Have you ever tried something like this? Leave a comment and let me know!

    Photo by Jessica Fiess-Hill, cropped, used under CC by 2.o