Three Little Things...

Three Little Things that got me through this week!

Besties, if you’ve been listening to the podcast, you know my living space has been chaos. You know it reached a chaotic breaking point when, for my birthday, my fantastic husband Matt, bought me a mini-fridge for my office/closet room. One little mini-fridge, no matter how mini, was one thing too many to stuff in that mini room. But it was a gift that made me feel really validated, and seen and, like, official. I’ve never lived in a dormitory and so, my one real shot to have my own private miniature refrigeration device was only ever gonna come with an office. And yes, I envisioned that office seltzer storing situation happening at NBC Universal or some other big entertainment company that needed to make sure my creative brain was 100% hydrated at all times. But my office is at home and I am cool with that. Anyway, the fridge gift started us on an odyssey of trying to make the room work better for me in all ways. I nabbed a set of second-hand vintage wall units that were custom made. For the home they were in. They were also seemingly custom made to absolutely not fit in my home unless every door and piece of trim around every door was removed so it could squeak down the hall. When I say squeak, I mean it literally. That’s the noise they made as my older son Eli and Matt bent time and space and defied all the rules of physics and geometry to get those beasts in that room. Let’s not talk about how many times I then rearranged their configurations. Let’s just say that they seem to be all in their best places for their best purposes now and THE FRIDGE FITS! Rejoice!

Here’s the new prob, though. Because I am me, I was like, “Since we’re messing around in here, the way the closets themselves are configured isn’t really working. Let’s fix ‘em!” There are 3 closets, which sounds like a luxury, and in many ways, they are. But they are wee 1954 reach-in closets with sliding doors. Not the worst, but Cher Horowitz would not be impressed. When we moved in, I quickly installed an inexpensive wire shelving and rod closet system, but if I’m being honest, even as it was going up, I think I knew it was gonna stink. Many rods and many shelves have collapsed on me. Yes, actually ON me. So, thanks to the money I earned on Cameo (THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR ORDERING THOSE VIDEO GREETINGS!), I decided to purchase some solid closet components from a brand we’d used back in Connecticut that I thought worked perfectly. They cost more, but by doing some internet sleuthing I discovered that a major retailer sells a less-expensive house brand that looked identical to the product we’d used before. When it arrived, it became immediately clear that it was actually just the exact same product we knew and loved, made by the same company. YAY! This was gonna be a piece of cake!

Well, not usually, but…sometimes…a piece of cake is…kinda bad. I’ll save the full dramz for the pod, but suffice to say, every piece of clothing I own is now everywhere. Stacks of shoe boxes, piles of sweaters. I have to stretch-step over a mountain of socks to get to the mini-fridge that started all of this. And I weeded a bunch of cute things out to sell on Poshmark, but those are in a ginormous box in the middle of my living room because I STILL HAVE TO LIST THEM ON POSHMARK! (I didn’t realize what a daunting task it would be to photograph everything and write detailed descriptions. I feel like a one-woman J. Peterman Company.)

I don’t respond well to living in this much pandemonium. And since I don’t have an office at NBC Universal to escape to every day, I am literally living in it and among it, 24/7. As far as problems go, this is very minor. It will all be fixed and put back together eventually as soon as some unanticipated problems are addressed and my husband has time off from work again to help me. Maybe by next weekend! That being said, while I am 100% accustomed to falling over while trying to put underwear on too fast, I do not enjoy falling over all of my underwear because it’s in the middle of the hallway. I’ve almost lost my cheese many, many times this week. However, I cannot lose my cheese, especially since I did this to myself.

Anyhoozle…it’s times like these when I lean pretty heavily on cherishing the “little things” in life. Sometimes the little things can be a cup of tea with a friend, or a nuzzle from a kitty. More often, for me, they are things I impulse buy in the checkout line that are cheap and wind up performing services far beyond my very low expectations. I’d like to share with you three little things that have helped me make it through this environmentally frustrating week. (These are not advertisements and we don’t get paid anything if you buy them. They’re just recs of stuff I like and use.)

These pump bottles. Super cheap. I got them for under a dollar each. While I was hiding in the one place where clothes aren’t currently being stashed…the shower…I realized that the many bottles of products my family uses were also visually chaotic. Different sizes, different shapes, different colors, ugly logos. You all know I hate screamy product logos! Plus, and this will maybe give you a real window into who I am, we have hard water that makes splotchy marks on anything that isn’t white. It’s aggressive and makes your shower look, I don’t know, haunted? But also, I don’t have a bottle wiping butler, so it was just kind of a fact of life I wasn’t willing to deal with while also, clearly, silently hating the sight of. Enter a bunch of identical white pump bottles! The plastic is recyclable should I ever tire of them, but if you’re against plastic, I’m sure you could find glass or ceramic pump bottles that work just as well. I did not label mine because I wanted to see…nothing. I can mostly tell what products are in each bottle because of the dot of color at the end of the pump top, but worst case-scenario, someone messes with the careful order I lined them up in and I wind up washing my face with shampoo one time. Worth the risk, in my opinion! Now, at least, for the ten minutes I am showering every day, my eyes can just rest, and not send images of disarray to my occipital lobe.

Since we’re in the bathroom, let’s stay there. The next thing that I absolutely luxuriated in this week are these fuzzy little microfiber face cloths. No, not the microfiber cloths you buy in a bundle to clean up around the house, though I am also a huge fan of those. These are specifically for your lovely mug. There is an expensive name-brand of this type of cloth, but these are just little cheapies you can buy in the cosmetic section of the drug store or in a 3-pack at TJ Maxx where you get the Maxx for the minimum, minimum price! They are sold as makeup removers and, guess what? No lies detected! I wear a particularly stubborn brand of mascara that, before discovering these, seemed to only be able to be removed by my pillowcase, which it then permanently stayed on no matter how many subsequent washings. Not a problem, anymore. Some of the various packages of these say they work well without soap, and I think that’s probably true, but I also use them with oil cleansers and foaming cleansers and they’re fantastic. (I don’t think they would work with Micellar Water for scientific reasons we can get into another time, if you are also a science nerd.) I love having a clean face that doesn’t feel brutalized by the nubby washcloths my family favors and even if I haven’t worn makeup, I still wash my face thoroughly before bed with one of these guys because it gets off all the other gross stuff I don’t want to take to bed with me. Perhaps two of my favorite things about these, though, is that they wring out to be almost dry when you’re done, so they don’t drip on your bathroom floor if you hang them anywhere AND, they launder really well. These are over a year old and have been used to remove so many Mikayla Nogueira-inspired looks with so many colors and they always come out of the wash looking brand spanking new. Immediate yes.

And finally, for my third small thing…

Lily’s Gummy Bears with less than one gram of sugar. Listen, I am not a real Gummy Bear Bitch, at all. And I’m kind of particular about sweets in general. However, there is a reason I am into these guys, beyond the fact that you can eat the entire pouch and it’s fewer calories than 1/3 of a Snickers bar. I’m not a real calorie-counter EITHER, but I would prefer to get most of the calories I’m supposed to eat in a day from nutritious food that isn’t candy. However, I do not always succeed at that. We’re supposed to eat 5 fruits and veg a day? I don’t think I am able to do *anything* 5 times in one day. The pressure! So, between the clothes-splosion in my house and my petulant refusal to eat a daily 4th or 5th serving of damp microwaved broccoli, I’ve been having the equivalent of traveler’s tummy, even though my life is one big long permanent staycation. And the real reason why I love these Gummy Bears is because one serving, the entire bag, has 25g of dietary fiber, AKA 88% of your daily recommended intake! You tell me what else you could eat that has 88% of your daily fiber and tastes better than pulped wood! These are that. The ingredients are corn fiber, allulose, pectin, citric acid, sodium citrate, natural flavors, sustainably sourced palm oil, coconut oil, color added (apple, blackcurrant, carrot, lemon, pumpkin, radish, saffron concentrates), carnauba wax and stevia extract. Pretty wholesome, but if you’re sensitive to any of that, Lily’s does carry other treats that also seem to have a fiber boost, but none as powerful as the Gummy Bears that I can tell.

Please know that I tried for a really long time and ultimately abandoned the idea of getting a “Does a bear shit in the woods?” joke into that last paragraph. But I guess all of my recommendations this week did, ultimately, fall into the bathroom category. I hope you try one or all of them and enjoy them if you do.

Now it’s your turn to share, assuming you got this far. What’s one little thing that got you through this week?