A Very Valiente Clean Up

I take great pride in our home. The Yankee and I both take care to keep things neat and tidy, and clean. You are always welcome to check behind my toilet; I assure you, it's clean. I also enjoy being "grean," trying to reduce first, reuse second, and recycle third. I don't use bleach to clean, unless I am cleaning up a bodily fluid of some kind (chicken goo, normally). I don't even use bleach in the toilet, just a pump of dish soap and a daily swish of the bowl.

I used to replace my shower curtain monthly because it would always get so grimy and gross. I've since reduced that to annually, to try to save the earth a lil. I try to clean it periodically, but it never really looked that great.

I'm sure if you're on Pinterest, you've seen the magic cleaning combination of vinegar and Dawn. I am always happy to use green cleaners, as long as they work! So many times I've tried concoctions with mediocre results, only to reach for the CLR to finish the job. So when I saw the combo, I was skeptical at first but decided to give it a try after I kept reading how miraculous it is.

Ladies and Gentlemen, please try this cleaning solution as soon as humanly possible. Try it today if you can because it was no less than amazing. This solution is half hot vinegar and half Dawn, in a spray bottle. You don't have to reheat it the next time you use it, just swirl the bottle a bit.

Here are some before and after photos (do you know how difficult it is to photograph soap scum on a clear or white background?):

Tub- kinda dingy:

Shower curtain- how embarassing

I will admit that when you microwave the vinegar, it will stink to high heaven in your kitchen. When you open the microwave door, your eyes will water and your nose may run. But once you spray it on, give it a minute to work, wipe down with a rag and rinse, the vingar smell dissapates and your bathroom is all clean. The proof is here:

Nice, shiny tub

Completely clean and clear shower curtain:

Again- stinky? Yes.

Spray it on, let it work, wipe it off and rinse. And then write a blog about how great it is.

Happy Girl :)

A Very Valiente Food Rut

Los Valientes are kinda messed up about food these days. I used to be the most glorious of food planners. In San Antonio, we ate a variety of colors, flavors, and from various cultures. There are a mutlitude of things I could say about food, but I am trying to keep most of my blogs to about 4-5 paragraphs in hopes that people will actually read them, so I'll try to humorously summarize and propose a solution.

We are in a food rut- a serious one. I make a weekly plan that we stick to for about a day and a half, which means I cook one meal and we take the leftovers for lunch the next day- and then we tank by Tuesday. We are gone from home for about 12 hours a day, which makes cooking very unattractive after an hour and a half of subway-ness. We also walk to the grocery store and back home, which involves two flights of stairs each way. So the plan is to go shopping twice a week, but going to our ghetto food store after work on a Wednesday is exponentially less appealing than cooking.

You can get basically ANYTHING delivered here, including hamburgers. In San Antonio, we at least had to go retrieve our crap food. Here, all you need is cash and foods of all kinds will be brought to you. And yes, it's as bad ass as it sounds. But we eat burgers and fries at least once a week- which also means no leftovers for lunch the next day, do there is usually crap food for lunch, too.

Here's what happens every.single.weekend (and has happened for the past 2 1/2 years): the Yankee asks me what is for lunch on Saturday and Sunday and I respond that I don't know because I don't normally plan lunches on the weekend. When I say every weekend, I mean this literally happens 104 times each year. Since I don't plan lunches, I don't normally buy lunchy kinds of foods. Since we eat leftovers for lunch during the week (theoretically), I don't buy sandwichy things. We end up eating trash food all weekend as a result of our crappy planning. For example, today I have eaten an entire package of lemon sugar wafers and a pot of coffee using powdered sugar, as well as a Butterfinger, four pieces of white bread... and let's pretend like all the food I ate on Saturday never happened, okay?

This is a small deviation, but I'll bring it back around: y'all know I love to declutter. I hate collecting magazine articles and recipes, because I never read them or make them. This also applies to my Pinterest. I don't want a bunch of photos of things that look cool but I never make or do. That just kinds stresses me out.

In summary, I haven't been mulling over this very much and I don't have a grand theory to put out there as to how to resolve this. Some of the problem is laziness, part if true exhaustion, and part is a lack of inspiration. My only idea is to actually start cooking the stuff I pin on pinterest. This week I am going to make stuff from this board. Maybe this baby step will help me get back on track with good habits. Maybe I can blow the dust off some of my cookbooks next weekend. We'll see what happens.

A Very Valiente Wrestling Match

So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. Genesis 32:24

During my horse's ass phase, I wrestled with God ECW-style. I was mad at God for not going along with my carefully crafted plans! I took my life into my own hands, and once I came out of that phase, I knew I had to turn it back over to God. I decided to stop wrestling with God about the direction of my life.

I never anticipated the weighty feelings I have about my past. I am not a killer, drug user, thief, etc. But I treated a lot of people really badly for a long time, in various ways and I carry a lot of guilt and regret about that. I made some terrible choices and banked on being able to simply ask God's forgiveness and press on. I did not even consider consequences. When I went through my journals last weekend, so much of my wrongness and rottenness was in front of my eyes!

As I contemplate the concept of CONTENTMENT this year, I do believe I shall have to confront the weighty feelings about my past that I carry. This week I've spent a lot of time in prayer, simply repeating these words:

thank you Lord that my past is my past
and not my present
for today is indeed a gift
thank you that my past need not be my future
please help me to carry the lessons
without rehashing the details

And you know what? It's helped. The physical effects anxiety and sorrow that creep in when I dwell on old memories longer than a second have been noticeably decreased. I do believe this may be a life-long project, but this small prayer has been my spiritual leatherman this week.

Have a nice weekend, Lovelies.

A Very Valiente Recollection Collection

If you've spoken with me for more than about 30 minutes in the past month five years, you know that I have been uncluttering since the spring of 2007. I talk about it, write about, and think about it literally every.single.day. Today I finished reading five years' with of blog posts on Unclutterer, my new favorite blog. I generally prefer to offer items I am getting rid of to people I know, and I normally encourage people not to take my crap if they don't want it. I mean, I don't want it either! Generally when someone has given me a gift that I no longer plan to own, I offer it back to them.

So as I've been conquering my mountains and boxes of clutter, leaving my mother to wonder if I plan on owning any things once I'm done, I've had this stack of journals. The date back all the way through high school and chronicle some really rough times in my life. Sadly, though, they are penned from the perspective of a child. The accounts of the highs and lows of my family and my past are captured in those pages through the eyes of a teenager and then a very young woman. It's true to say that it appears I have recounted the facts of the events and seasons correctly; however, I naturally put my own spin on them. It is also true to say that if I were to tell the stories again, I wouldn't tell them in the same way that I told them in my journals.

So I've lugged this pile from Texas to Georgia and back, and again to New York. They've been bundled and hidden away; the Yankee graciously agreed not to read them. I have been holding onto them thinking they chronicled my story and growth. Today I confronted the pile. I went through them chronologically and skimmed the pages.  First of all, WOW were a lot of the entries just plain boring. I don't think my future heirs really care about a recap of a sick day spent on the couch. Second, they contained a lot of very, very personal details that I wouldn't want someone to read. Even in 20 years, I doubt I'll want any person to know how I felt about some of the events from my past. Third, they referred to people I don't even remember now. Lastly, they contained a lot of emotional baggage. Lots.

So I tossed them out. All of them, except one. I saved one that genuinely tracked my growth out of my horses's ass phase and into living a life of intentional decision making and planning. I also kept the one page I wrote on September 12th, 2011. I kept a portion of an entry that had a bit of reflection that I considered genuine. The rest are currently in my trash can. They are covered in coffee ground and applesauce, soaked with old beef broth that I chucked because it had been in the fridge for awile. The one that I kept is locked away and hidden. And it shall stay there.

One day I will convince the Yankee that we should only own six pieces of furniture. Until then, let the uncluttering continue!

A Very Valiente Excursion

This holiday weekend, the Yankee and I drove to Philadelphia for a quick weekend trip. Philadelphia is a very pretty city in the tourist parts with lots of one-way streets (score!) and independently-owned businesses. They also cater nicely to tourists with money to spend.

We planned to leave right after work, but there was an emergency that the Yankee had to tend to, so we didn't leave until midnight. A late start meant late rising on Saturday, so we didn't embark on our exploration until mid-afternoon. We took a bus tour of the city, which was pretty great. There was some random stuff on the tour that we didn't care about, like a museum where you can touch everything, but we also saw Betsy Ross' house and the Rocky Steps. We also saw the Liberty Bell and all the places that Nicholas Cage ran around and dismantled in "National Treasure."

We had a number of lessons-learned on our trip. I consider myself a fairly great budget maker and we are somewhat great budget-stick-to-ers. We were able to pay for the trip entirely in cash (thanks Dave Ramsey!) and stay at a really wonderful hotel. There were a few things that I had not considered when laying out the projected cost of our trip:

1. Tolls. Effing Tolls. Effing New Jersey and tolls. We paid about $50 in tolls that I had absolutely not even thought about.

2. Parking. The Gross family always tended to travel economy-style, which meant staying in hotels without a lot of "extras." These kinds of hotels tend to be located on the out-skirts of the places we visted, which means there is normally a nice parking lot. The Valiente family has tended to select the most baller hotel we can afford, but these kinds of hotels are normally smack-dab in the middle of the action, built vertically and not hortizontally, and happy to park your car for you. We spent over $70 in parking.

3. Breaksfast. The kinds of hotels with parking lots are often the kind with continental breakfasts. Radissons and Hiltons also have breakfasts and are happy to bring them to your room with little bottles of ketchup and itty-bitty salt and pepper shakers. Over $30 on one breakfast. Thank goodness we slept through breakfast on Saturday!

The Northeast tends to kinda hates letting you park or drive anywhere without paying for it. I consider this to be complete and total crap. I work in New Jersey, which means I pay taxes there. Why in the world do I have to PAY to drive on a highway if I've already given the state taxes? In Texas, they pay no taxes and there are hardly any toll roads, except in major cities. Northeast region, I call BS on you.

We ate some pretty fantastic food and enjoyed a gluten-free bakery that was okay. We also got a lot of rest and time to relax. We came home on Sunday afternoon with a list of fun things to do next time we go to Philadelphia- which I hope is soon. I also came home with a bit of sticker shock and will most definitely consider this when we plan our next trip (to Boston in the Spring).

A Very Valiente Commentary on Contentment

Last night over dinner the Yankee said he read the last entry on our my our blog and asked if everything was okay. We had a short conversation processing my views about contentment, which led us down a path of other conversation topics.

In August of 2010, the author of Unclutterer quoted Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man:

Even modern replacements for priests, rabbis, and Zen masters — the positive psychologists — have something to say on this point. That new breed of shrinks has discovered that happy people spend a lot of time being grateful for what they have and savoring their experience. They don’t rush through “now” to get to later. They don’t make taking care of themselves or taking care of their families something they have to get over with so they can get to the good stuff. Instead, they insist that this moment, whatever it is, is the good stuff.

 All my life, I've been in perpetual wait mode. Life consisted of my dad's next deployment, our next move, finishing a grade, finishing college semesters, etc. Then it was waiting to graduate, to get married, then to move to New York. So now we are here. We have some major life goals on the far horizon, but mostly we're just living life. We don't have any real deadlines for our goals, other than the fact that eventually my body won't be suitable for carrying children. It's hard to get out of wait mode, even if I have nothing that I am waiting for.

Please allow me to backtrack a tad and state that I am not unhappy. I have a joyful life that I love. I am, however, restless. I'm generally more comfortable in motion; I don't care to spend a "lazy day" on the couch, watching TV. I prefer to take an alternate route if I can avoid traffic, and I'll call it a short cut. I want to enjoy my life, here and now.

A Very Valiente Delegation of Suckitude

Delgation. That's a pretty word for "do this because I outrank you." Kinda. Delegation is important because you don't want a CEO spending time filling out his expense reports when he has a company to run. You don't want the head of an accounting department trying to fix the printer. Or even touching the printer. Delegation is also important because it's also how you teach, which is important for getting promoted; a good way to get promoted is to learn a new role and teach someone to fill yours. Penelope Trunk of Brazen Careerist says here that managers should delegate the good stuff as a way to teach. I agree.

There are a few kinds of delegation: genuine delegation, bitch delegation, dirty delegation, and BS delegation. Let's explore these.

True, genuine delegation means that a project or responsibility is broken up and handed out which frees the person at the top to focus on something else, while allowing others to learn or even stay employed. After all, if the people at the top can do everything (including admin work), then why do they need administrative workers. This might be something like testing a process or assembling binders for a presentation.

Bitch delegation really means assigning bitch work. Crap work. Grunt work. Sometimes this has to be done. Like Judge Elihu Smails said to Danny Noonan, "The world needs ditch diggers, too."

Hanz Finzel gave me the term "dirty delegation" in The Top Ten Mistakes Good Leaders Make. This is when you say something been's delegated, but then you tell the person exactly how to do it and breathe down their necks making sure they follow your process and run everything by you.

BS delegation is the cousin of bitch delegation. BS delegation is when you "delegate"people really really crappy things to do while creatively explaining how it's really their job to do it. The problem with this form is that you're not genuinely "delegating" here. You're really asking for a favor and sometimes just being bossy. It's kind of like saying "that's not my job." Here are some examples of BS delegation:

• Calling someone into your office and asking them to retrieve a file from you. A file that is located in your office.
• Walking past the scanner/copier/fax machine and asking someone to scan one single page to you.

It takes people of all levels in a team, department, or company to make the world go 'round. Someone has to make the coffee and someone has to create an operating strategy. Sometimes the person who makes the coffee ends up being one of the movers and the shakers of the company after working his/her way to the top. Delegation is important to this structure. And sometimes it's just plain old BS.