Maybe this will make me productive.

I'm a serious procrastinator. I have items on my Stickies to-do list that are so old, I've had to transfer them across THREE computers -- no joke.

Sometimes I'll look at an item on there and not even remember what I'm supposed to do. The other day, I noticed a note that said "Jenn conf." Um? I know six Jennifers, four of whom I might actually need to do something with or for. Did I have a conference? Did I need to confirm something? Finally, I remembered that I needed to send my hubby's cousin a confirmation card. Woohoo, my memory serves me again! Well, except that the card is still sitting on my desk, unwritten. I'll do it tomorrow. It's on the Stickies.

But if there's one thing that can cure my procrastination, it's a time crunch -- maybe because I've been working on crazy deadlines for the past 12 years. Which could explain my newfound obsession with this site, which I read about in Tim Ferriss' Four-Hour Workweek (awesome book!) about three years ago and, um, have been meaning to check out ever since.

The site is http://e.ggtimer.com/, and it's nothing fancy -- you type in a time limit, it counts down and beeps when time's up. It's really loud. A few minutes ago, I did a demo for hubby. I set it for 30 seconds, started clicking around the web and managed to get so distracted that when the timer went off -- again, 30 whopping seconds later -- I jumped out of my chair.

But anyway. I've found two fun ways to use it:

1) to limit my FB stalking. I set it for 10 minutes, and when it beeps, I log off. Haha, just kidding. I reset it for another ten minutes. But just like the snooze button on my alarm clock, it eventually guilts me into getting up and doing something productive.

2) racing myself. I've been picking annoying tasks on my to-do list and saying, "Can I get this done in 5 minutes?" Some things I can do in five minutes: follow up on old invoices, check my wireless statement, make a pork roast.

Who knows what boring things I'll accomplish tomorrow!

CLEANING TIP: DIY Recipes for Natural Cleaning Products (and Cool Uses for Vinegar)

A few days ago I washed my hair with vinegar. On purpose.

The inspiration came while reading my friend Whitney's DIY blog. Whitney is one of those crafty super-moms -- like, "Oh, yesterday I photographed a water birth, knitted eleventy baby hats, and redecorated my son's nursery." Most of the projects on her blog are so out of my league that I get to line two and I'm like, "Fat quarter whaaaaa...?"

But I was psyched when she recently posted recipes for natural cleaning products, for two reasons:
1) I hate the smell of cleaning products, which is one of the key reasons I almost never clean, and
2) They all seemed easy to do.

Click the pic to check out her post:





One catch -- so far I've come up dry in my quest to find castille soap. Well, I found it at Whole Foods, but it was $16, which is way more expensive than my current strategy of not cleaning at all. I found some on Soap.com but just need to figure out how to fill out the order minimum to get free shipping, because I haaaaaaate paying shipping :)

But her post did inspire me to figure out other ways to use natural products I have lying around the kitchen. I read several places that vinegar made a great hair rinse for breaking down soapy residue, which my hair desperately needed. So I diluted a tablespoon of cider vinegar in a cup of water, brought it in the shower, and tried it.

Two things happened.
1) My scalp immediately froze and I thought, "OMG! This shit is like menthol! It's reacting with my scalp!" Then I remembered that I'd diluted the vinegar in cold tap water. Duh.
2) It smelled like Easter egg dye. My first instinct was to mask it with conditioner, but I figured that would defeat the purpose. So I rinsed and hoped for the best. The good news: When I got into bed, my husband didn't say "Why do you smell like salad dressing?!" or anything like that.

Best of all, it actually made my uncooperative hair look shiny. And it bought me an extra day or two between shampoos. Woohoo!

A few other cool uses for vinegar:

• spray it on weeds in your driveway
• spray it around your door to prevent ants
• pour some down the kitchen drain to deodorize
• clean your hairbrush (same basic principle as the hair rinse)
• soothe itchy bug bites (I live in mosquito heaven -- this TOTALLY worked!)
• leave a bowl out to neutralize a nasty odor (smoke, puke, etc)

Happy vinegar-ing :)

So, this is the first post.

If you're reading this post, it means one of two things:

1) You're friends with me, related to me, married to me, or otherwise contractually obligated to act interested in my blog before I've even loaded any content onto it.

2) You're bored enough to have read through every post in at least one category to get back to the beginning. You might be feeling a sense of accomplishment mixed with shame, kind of like when you eat an entire pizza by yourself. (I speak from experience as someone who's read the complete oeuvre of Hyberbole and a Half and considers any pizza under 16" a single-serving pie.)

Which category you fall into is basically a function of how long ago I wrote this post:

This graph doesn't help you in any way. I mostly just drew it in lieu of folding the two loads of laundry on the living room floor.

Anyway, this is my blog, and this is my blog's awkward first post. Glad that's out of the way.