Camp Sunshine

Hello everyone! I have a great idea to get as much out of the summer months as possible. To be honest, it’s based on a Flylady thing, but I filled it in to my own taste.

For the whole summer we are going to camp! Not literally, but I am going to pretend that our apartment is a cabin and the goal is to have a lot of fun instead of spending the whole summer doing chores etc. Because I tend to say to myself: hey just finish all this and then you get to play I usually miss out on a lot of sun. Once I finally get to go outside the sun is often gone. I want to encourage myself to live a little bit more freely instead of my usual duty-calls attitude. Therefore, the name of the camp is Camp Sunshine! Here’s the idea:

I do go to work, but will try to make it more fun: go outside on my breaks. Maybe wear my bikini underneath my clothes to work, just because of the idea. When at home, the Boyfriend and I quickly do the basic things that need to be done and then every day there is a camp activity.

Camp activities can be anything, as long as they are fun. They can range from a walk in the park or eating on the balcony to a full day out. The Boyfriend and I made up a huge list of stuff we like to do that are fun during summer (good and bad weather), so we won’t be like ‘I don’t know what to do!’ when we finally get to doing something fun after a long day of work.

Here are our/my camp activities so far:

4-6: lunch outside during my lunch break at work. Enjoy the sun!
5-6: visit the smallest city in the Netherlands (it has only 3 streets, but does have city rights!) which is very cute and old. The Boyfriend had never been there and I took him there as a surprise. He really liked the place too and we are planning to go there more often.

 

 

Will make more pictures to give a better view of the place next time!

We also bbq’d with my parents at night.

6-6 went on a bike ride to train. The weather was gorgeous so I really enjoyed it.
7-6 another bbq, but this time at work.
8-6 run in the rain. I was planning for another rest day after my tough workout on sunday, but I really felt like running. So I did! The last k it started to rain really really hard and I got soaked instantly! I was feeling hot because of the running so I didn’t mind and just enjoyed it walking home. People were finding shelter underneath a bridge and looked at me like I was crazy when I just continued, haha!
9-6 made myself a special breakfast, see my last post
10-6 I left all my household chores for what they were when I got home and just sat on the balcony reading for a while.
11-6 don’t remember!
12-6 sat outside and I made a trip to the library to get fresh books
13-6 another bike ride. I bailed out after 37k because I wasn’t feeling going further (physically), but I still had fun while it lasted. Also went to play pool downtown with the Boyfriend!
14-6 dinner on our balcony.

I will try to blog about future camp activities on a regular basis. There are some pretty awesome things on our list!

Got to go!

FlyLady- Last part

The last (I promise!) FlyLady thing that helps me so much in keeping my house organized so that I have more time for fun things is what she calls the Weekly Home Blessing Hour:

It involves doing 7 tasks for max 10 min. A few of them take less so in total in takes one hour to finish. I adapted the tasks a little to fit my homeThe tasks are:

• change bed sheets
• clean mess in house (like clothes on the chair in the bedroom and magazines I finished)
• empty all trashcans
• dust
• wipe stains and nose prints of doors, windows and mirrors and other glass objects like our coffee table using window cleaner
• vacuum
• mob

This one hour superspeed cleaning makes the house look a lot better. But the best part is that in combination with the routines it makes the house look good at any time and in combination with the daily 15 minute missions it makes sure that is actually clean and not just looks clean and that I don’t keep too much clutter.

So there you go! I know it may sound a bit complicated but in fact it is not at all, because it is all based on routines so I don’t even have to think about it.
An additional advantage is that it makes it fun. Any, really any task is do-able if you only have to do it for 15 minutes. And what is better than reducing your weekend cleaning to 1 hour?

So there you go. One of the reasons I posted all this is that it frees me up quite a lot, it makes cleaning much more time efficient and fun to do. It helps me with my perfectionism that made me clean most of my saturday. Another reason is that I want to show people what I am doing every day. I don’t want them to think, hey that’s nice seeing how she works out, eats, works and whatever, but does she never ever need to clean or do other things like that and how does that fit in? Well, now you know my secret hahaha.

So i am off now I have to do one of my sunday tasks and that involves: checking my administration. it sounds important but it really only is throwing out most of the mail we received, filing some letters and bills and paying the bills that need to be payed. A little extra that I have been doing lately because I want to make sure I know where my money is going is keeping a spreadsheet with expenses and income which is really easy to do because most of my spending is done with my debitcard and easy to track.

Talk to you later!

FlyLady part 1

Good afternoon everyone!

Activities
Yesterday eve the boyfriend really wanted to spend the evening at the computer so I watched some tv. Usually I only watch tv during dinner (even though I would really like to have dinner at the table, somehow we usually end up in front of the tv) or some kind of crime series before I go to bed because the boyfriend says he needs to watch tv before falling asleep.
First I saw some really imo 'dumb' stuff like 'How do I become a Gooi lady?''followed by 'Gooi ladies' and a part of 'paradise hotel'. Btw, a Gooi lady is someone who lives in the Gooi area of the Netherlands, a part where all the rich people with an attitude go live. It comes with a whole lifestyle that mainly involves socializing and see and being seen. I was flabbergasted by most of the stuff that they experiences as being 'normal' like spending a weekend in St Tropez. It all seemed very superficial to me, and made for a good laugh every now and then. Paradise Hotel was another program i had never seen. It was about a bunch of people trying to make friends only to use them for their own purposes, and lying, betraying, fighting was a common thing there. It was crazy!
Then finally it was time for the thing i had been waiting for: a dutch comedian. He told great stories that made you think and he made me laugh out loud, something I don't do often with these kind of programs!

Happiness
Last night I also started working on revising my Happy Journal. I enrolled in an organize-your-house-and- life program over a year ago, led by a woman, Marla Cilley aka the FlyLady. I think of her as the Martha Stewart of modern age. She developed a plan on how to get/maintain your house clean, but it's also applicable to other things in your life. The three main rules in her system are: routines, you can do anything for 15 minutes, and make it fun. Her system is mainly for disorganized people who make a mess and have trouble doing household stuff. We joined because it might teach the boyfriend, who is exactly like that, something, but he dropped out pretty soon and instead it taught me a lot. I used to be sort of the opposite of the boyfriend: cleaning like crazy all saturday and sunday and feeling horrible after. Well, that's over! And despite Flylady being a bit...well, uncool I guess, I don't mind because it helps me and household is not something that is cool in the first place! Flylady had me make a control journal, which I renamed happy journal because it's about making me happy and letting go of things. control journal sounded too negative for me. In it, or at least in my journal, are:
- my morning routine : things I do each morning
- my evening routine: things I do eacht night after work
- daily missions: each day of the week is devoted to a certain thing, for example watering the plants.
- ideas for detailed cleaning of your house.

I know it sounds a bit vague, but I will be explaining how this system works for me in the posts during next week. If you can't wait and want to know more, go to FlyLady's website and learn all about it!

Food
So what did I eat? yesterday we had thai curry, it was pretty good. Around 10pm I got hungry again though, and had some strawberry quark.
This morning my breakfast was the same banana oatmeal I was raving about earlier this week! It tasted amazing again!
My lunch was speltbread with pizzasauce and chees, grilled in the oven, mmmm!!

Ok, I am going to continue finishing my cleaning chores for today and on with my To Do list, which as a lot of things on it like: administration, work, and continuing on the chair I want to refabric (is that a word?). Oh, and I also want to go on a run today, but then it has to stop raining first.

But before I leave, and also to spice up this post, a picture of the activity of Chinta today:

She slept late. After spending the whole night on the bed at our feet (we prefer that over her scratching the bedroom door all night) she woke up for breakfast when the boyfriend got up and then came back. she was still there at 1.30pm when I started bothering her because I wanted to change the bed sheets. Now, she's sleeping somewhere else, lol !

'Till next time!