13 Virtues week 2 – Organization

 Organization is pretty high up on my list of virtues to improve. I chose planning as my first, but then organization is my very close if not equal second. 

Last week I enjoyed planning, my meals better, or at least I thought it would be a better way to plan my meals. Until I had to screech the brakes and put an end to meal planning since there was so much preparation involved, like chopping vegetables and planning for food, allergies like milk and, it was a nightmare. I didn’t realize it until my mom, who works alongside me at times, prepping my food for dinner, freaked out because it was just too much for her too. It made me realize that the way I was planning was less than virtuous.

Three days had also gone by since last Tuesday when I should’ve started my organization virtue work on Wednesday. Because that didn’t happen I feel like I was behind. I thought I could just prep and then the next hour work on organization. But I learned a lot about myself and managing my MS.

Now, when I get up pretty early in the morning, 3:30 AM, I’m able to have the energy to go to the gym. But it’s for a small time frame in my day, two hours, that that’s possible. I am in control of my environment and can control how much I have to stand or sit when doing an exercise. I have a lot of choice.

But when I have to stand by a counter, a lot of times, there’s just no way I can sit down and chop something. So it’s a lot of stand and sit. It’s exhausting for me and I didn’t realize it until this self development project.

Limiting my time was OK, I would work on the task at hand for an hour, but I had planned to move on to organization at 10 or 1030. That just didn’t happen.

It’s not like I was sitting around, there’s always something to be done, like working on bills to be paid, moving things around, ordering things on Amazon. I do a lot during my day if I wrote down all the things that I did, the list would be down to the floor.

So I was excited to start my organization project, and shifted it up by three days. The virtues project will now start on a Thursday.  I will work on one virtual week and take note of how I did, just like Benjamin Franklin did in his project.

Before I started the project, I took a picture of my disorganized cabinet before. The before, and after pictures, my looks similar to you, but they are so not.

My first step was to clean each drawer out, one by one, clean up the crumbs and any straight food pieces and get my foundation ready. I also threw out half open items. I know they had been there for a long time, but hidden by other things that I just couldn’t see. I also found items in there that I did not know I had because the shelf is blocked from my view at the very top and two jars of mayonnaise. We’re hanging out in the back having a party when I had a third in the refrigerator being used. That’s the problem of not being able to find what you need when you need it, and it just sitting in a pile.

At the very bottom of my cabinet on my plastic containers, and most recently I ordered food storage containers from Amazon that are meal prep containers. I will still be using these, the not in the same capacity as my fervent vegetable chop frenzy.  as I’ve been using them, and other people have been trying to open them and use them too, they are hard to open and you need to punch it to crack it open. This is pretty poor quality, but it was a quick fix. I won’t be ordering them again. Nevertheless, I organized my whole plastic drawer, and need to clean stuff out of my fridge as you can see it’s pretty empty. They are housing some leftovers in my fridge that are probably not going to be used anyway.

I moved up the cabinet one by one, and was pretty proud when I got to the snack door. My son loves to go and get a quick snack and I am pretty happy that they are healthy snacks to choose from. He will never have empty calories like cookies or chips, but at times he can have those I just keep them out of sight. It is pretty easy to check out what’s available here and this is my every day drawer for my family. Not just for me.

Above that drawer is my go to drawer for making my protein shakes, and any additional fixings like Chia seed, hemp seed, flaxseed, the stuff that I will be adding to things to boost up the nutrients, instead of sticking me hand in a container that comes from the manufacture, I put it in an easy to see container, with a scoop, if necessary. I also premeasured two scoops of my collagen protein for shakes. this is something I will be improving upon what requires organization of my freezer and refrigerator. If I want to make a smoothie, I usually have to stick my hand in a big bag of frozen blueberries with a measuring cup. Everything will be premeasured and organized. But at least they started here first. And this is day one.