October is such a beautiful month and in order to fully enjoy it, you might want to eliminate the happiness sappers that get in your way of the joy you were born to experience.

1. News: News is just official gossip. My definition of an investigative reporter is: an authorized, nosey gossip. I stopped watching or listening to the news after 9/11. I figure Terry, who was a television reporter, will inform me if I need to pack up and head for the hills.

2. Gossip: Since I’ve cut out the official gossip, why would I want to indulge in any unofficial info?  

3. Calendar that’s too small: A big happiness sapper is having a calendar that’s so small you can’t read your personal shorthand. “3pmTk grm Dr. rmb t tk nts.” A month later when you're trying to figure out what the heck you’re supposed to be doing on that day, chances are you’ll never figure out you’re supposed to take Grandma to the doctor and you need to take notes. Say goodbye to little squared happiness sappers.

Organizing kitchen can start with THE JUNK DRAWER.

How long do you think it would take to clean out that junk drawer in the kitchen? If you timed yourself, you could do it in 15 minutes. See if you can do it in 15 minutes and see if you can actually have fun doing it. If you hear yourself saying, "I don't know where to start," just watch this short video and head to your kitchen junk drawer.

In this short video clip, you'll learn the key to dejunking may start with an actual key.....and asking the tough questions like: “What hole do you go in?" "Am I successfully brewing?......and twisting?”

My sister Peggy and I show you what to get rid of in the junk drawer you’ve been meaning to clean.

September 19, 2014 by Pam Young

For most of us, autumn ushers in a certain crispness in the air, cool breezes, and lots of opportunities to share delicious food with our friends and loved ones. The grocery store produce aisles are brimming with greens, yellows and oranges like the fall leaves swirling above us. That's when I think of potato salad—but not the kind you're used to making. Potato salad can be a favorite summertime picnic treat, but you'll want to enjoy my low carb version every day of the year!

As I wrote in my book, “The Mouth Trap: the butt stops here low carb edition, overhauling high carb recipes can make you feel so much healthier. I call this invention my no potato- potato salad and you won't believe how delicious it is! You could say that potato salad just got a face lift. Or maybe I should call it an eye lift? But any way you scoop it, this new treat definitely beats the old high carb concoction that you’ve made in the past. The secret? Trade those old brown russets for a head of snowy white cauliflower. Yes cauliflower! We toss in oodles of crunchy goodies and lots of my favorite Bubbies. Your friends and family will gobble it up and you'll love how quick and easy it is to make. Of course... plucking a tune on the egg slicer is optional as you’ll see in my video today.

I think you'll love my easy recipe for low carb pizza. Because there is no flour in the crust, I’ve been able to slash the carbs. Your taste buds will swoon and you’ll discover that even on a restricted carbohydrate diet you can still indulge in pizza.

About twenty frozen tomatoes

¼ cup water

Penzey Italian spices or taco seasoning and Lawry’s Season Salt and salt and pepper if you wish

Simmer for 3-4 hours or more. Skins pull off tomatoes easily when done

Blend sauce in a blender when it’s cooked down. You can keep tomato sauce in fridge for a couple weeks.

Fry a pound of Italian sausage and drain.

Posted September 11, 2014 by Pam Young

Does procrastinating make you happy and stress free? Of course it doesn’t, so why do we do it? Take it from an expert! As a woman who has done her fair share of procrastinating, I’ve come up with 7 steps that I hope will open your eyes to how silly it is to put things off. Before you read the 7 habits pick something you’ve been putting off and hopefully at the end of my blog you’ll take care of it.

I think you’ll love my recipe for homemade, low carb pizza. It starts with the most sumptuous, delicious sauce that I make from my own tomatoes-- even the crummy looking ones you thought you had to chuck! Then, of course I show you the secret way to get rid of the skins on tomatoes just like you were a master chef at the Ritz. And the crust? Wait ‘till you see how we'll make one without rolling out any dough. It's so simple and fun you'll wonder why you thought the only way to serve pizza was to take or bake something in a cardboard box. Never again! Ummmm, the smell is heavenly when it's baking and the gobs of sausage, salami and olives are too yummy for your family to resist. It's time to say "ciao" to the best ristorante in town...your kitchen!

Low Carb Pizza

Fresh Tomato Sauce

About twenty frozen tomatoes

¼ cup water

Penzey Italian spices or taco seasoning and Lawry’s Season Salt and salt and pepper if you wish

Simmer for 3-4 hours or more. Skins pull off tomatoes easily when done.

Blend sauce in a blender when it’s cooked down. You can keep tomato sauce in fridge for a couple weeks. Fry a pound of Italian sausage and drain.

 Crust

Two cups parmesan cheese

½ half cup almond flour

Mix together and fry the mixture on medium high five to six minutes on each side. Cool on a rack.

Build the Pizza

Put crust on a cookie sheet, smear sauce on crust. Put on Italian sausage and other items you choose. Salami, pepperoni, olives etc.

Top with cheese if you wish.

Bake in oven at 400 for five or six minutes.

You can also make bread sticks or croutons out of the pizza crust.

Marla Cilley, also known as Flylady, has helped millions of women get organized using the systems my sister and I created over the years.

By Greta Heddy

September 4, 2015

As I explained yesterday in Part I of my blog for you, I do not like exercise. I don't like to sweat either. "Exercise" is a four-letter word in my vocabulary. And, yet, exercise is good for us. Even if you don't buy into the weight loss benefits of exercise (which I don't), exercise is still good for building muscle, gaining strength, and pouring those wonderful endorphins into our brains. Exercise helps us sleep better at night, be more emotionally stable, and all around helps us be a better us. Most exercise articles give lists upon lists of ways to exercise, places to exercise, and with whom to exercise. This is not that kind of article. As I did in Part I, I'm going to list some more ways for you to get your unique self in your unique situation to exercise for your unique reasons.

1. Get Others Involved

Make a pact with a friend. Find a goal she wants to work on, and then set up a time every day to call or text each other to say if you did it or not. Give each other whatever encouragement you can. No yelling allowed. Currently, I am in an 88 Day Challenge with two friends - one who wants to declutter her house a little each day, and one who wants to get back to exercising regularly. It's fun to report successes and great to have a sympathetic shoulder even when you don't need one. Use the "Oh, yeah?" Principle. If someone tells you that you can't do something, you say "Oh, yeah?!" and then work hard to prove them wrong. Pretend that someone has said that to you and then prove them wrong! Get an exercise buddy if that will help. Or join a gym, class, dojo, etc.

by Greta Heddy

September 3, 2014

I do not like exercise. I don't like to sweat either. "Exercise" is a four-letter word in my vocabulary. And, yet, exercise is good for us. Even if you don't buy into the weight loss benefits of exercise (which I don't), exercise is still good for building muscle, gaining strength, and pouring those wonderful endorphins into our brains. Exercise helps us sleep better at night, be more emotionally stable, and all around helps us be a better us.

Most exercise articles give lists upon lists of ways to exercise, places to exercise, and with whom to exercise.

This is not that kind of article. I'm going to list some ways for you to get your unique self in your unique situation to exercise for your unique reasons.

1. Know Who You Really Are

Ask yourself what worked in the past. Think back to your childhood. Kids never "exercise,” they play. Whether it’s a sport or game like tag or hide and seek they have fun. Biking around the neighborhood, climbing trees and fences, building tree houses and forts, hiking in the wood, running everywhere, they have fun at it.

Ask your inner child (that little girl who still resides in your psyche) what might be fun to do! Are you a morning or night person? Do you like to exercise outside, or inside at a gym or at home? Do you swim and are near a pool with hours that fit your schedule? Would you prefer to sneak exercise into your routine, like having an exercise ball instead of a chair at your desk, or walking up stairs instead of the elevator, or would you like the camaraderie of a martial arts class after your day in the office? Do you like to exercise with your children or prefer exercise to be alone time? Do you like a personal trainer that bosses you like a drill sergeant or would you prefer a kinder, gentler instructor? Only you know for sure. Choose exercise(s) that fit into your current situation three to five times a week.

I’m a hermit exerciser. I loathe working out with others with the exception of dance classes which don't feel like exercise to me - they feel like fun! I get easily bored with routine activities. I have a flexible work schedule, which makes planning exercise time a challenge.

My favorite exercises are reading, knitting and watching movies, but recently, I decided I needed to really exercise. Though I've successfully gone to a gym in the past, this time I chose some aerobic/strength-building exercise videos by Teresa Tapp, plus a yoga video for "inflexible people." I have the benefit of an instructor but on my own time schedule and in my own living room. After I memorize the routines, I plan to mute the videos and listen to audio books, music, or movies while I work out so I don't get bored.

Aug 23, 2013

Quiz Time!

House Fairy here! I suggest you have a pad of paper and pen available so you can write down your kids’ responses, because you may learn something about them that you didn’t know. You could also be ready to ask them some questions of your own, after the House Fairy asks hers. By the way, did you know your kids will love to be “interviewed,” and they’ll feel so important when you take notes? 

"The first hunk was just like mud!"

I'm torn by what happened today. It all started when we got in the Subaru to head to downtown Woodland, Washington and my husband Terry said, "Uh oh, there must be a mouse in the car! Look at those pumpkin seed shells all over the floor board by your feet." He pointed to a little scattering of shells on my side of the car.

Now I'm a big fan of Mickey Mouse, but he doesn't blaze through space when you least expect him to. It's that scurrying that mice do, like a flasher at a wedding, that scares me to death, and the thought of a mouse in our car made me ready to spring like, well a set mousetrap. "Where do ya think he is?" I asked, as if my  mouse husband were a big deal mouse expert.

"I don't know, he could be back at the house getting more pumpkin seeds."

That thought calmed me as we drove into town.

Just as we pulled into the bank parking lot, I sneezed (no I'm not allergic to mice) and reached for a Kleenex in the glove compartment. That's when I saw IT! The mouse had made a nest out of the Kleenex! I screamed, slammed the glove compartment door, wiped my nose on my sleeve and took some big, deep cleansing breathes to calm myself. Terry was hysterically laughing as I continued to try to regain my composure.

 And for the rest of the story……

Have you heard people say, “The kids today have short attention spans. Because of quick-paced television, they’re used to watching three to four-second bites and become restless when the action is diminished.”? HOG WASH! As I sit in an Amtrak station waiting for a train that’s now 38 minutes late, I’ve been watching a grandmother read Curious George to her five-year-old grandson.

From my vantage point, she appeared to be a rather listless reader, void of expression, sound effects and lifted eyebrows accompanying some of Hans and Margaret’s incredible thoughts, yet the child was glued to his grandma’s side listening to the story.

When the book was finished, he pulled another from his backpack and she proceeded to read it. The train turned out to be an hour late and the child remained interested in books the entire time. So much for the short attention span.

So here are what I believe are 6 benefits of reading bedtime stories to your children.

1. Cultivates Imagination

Now that visual stimulation is served up via television, IPads, IPhones, Xbox etc., children rarely get to tap into their imaginations unless we read to them, or until they can read. As a child, I loved radio (it was before we had television) because my imagination provided the visuals. Because we don’t have kid radio, unless we read to our kids, their ability to use their precious imaginations and be able to visualize will weaken.

I remember one Christmas, my daughter Peggy bought a bunch of children’s books at a neighborhood garage sale and recorded reading them on a cassette tape recorder for her non-reading cousins as gifts for Christmas. As adults, those cousins still speak of how they loved her gifts of being read to.

My husband Terry and I recorded books on CDs, the same way Peggy did with a cassette recorder. This way our grandchildren could listen to us read the books we gave
them as gifts.

God knows we humans get bored and I think that’s why He made seasons for us. But when it comes to kids, sometimes the seasons are just too long! By now, I’m sure you’ve heard those dreaded two words: “I’m bored.” And you know telling your kids to go outside and play just doesn’t work.

I scoured the Net for new ideas to help bored kids and I got bored with the same old stuff I’d read in magazines when my kids were young; like read a book, watch TV. I did find a few out of the hundreds I read, which I share in this blog, but I’m also going to tell you about some things I did with my kids when they got bored, that still work with my grandkids today.

Blame it on routine

We can blame boredom on routine and that’s probably why we love to go on vacation to break away from the everyday grind of routine. As a reformed slob I know that when I was in a pigpen, it was my disorganization and lack of a routine that put me there. But I must say I was never bored in those pigpen days!

I escaped the pen by creating a routine that had my kids and me up, dressed and fed by 7:00 and in bed with a clean and tidy home by 8:00. I love what Flylady says, “Routines and habits are the backbone of a peaceful life.” Routines and habits breed success, but they are also the perpetrators of boredom. When boredom creeps in, it’s time to shake things up.

A Lesson from the bears

There’s a place in West Yellowstone, Montana called Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center. The Center offers every visitor to Yellowstone a chance to uniquely experience the world of grizzly bears and gray wolves. All the animals at the Center are unable to survive in the wild and serve as ambassadors for their wild counterparts. Terry, my husband, took this photo at the Center.(I promise this has something to do with boredom.) If you plan to go to Yellowstone don’t miss this place. But what does it have to do with boredom? Hold your pants on, it’s next.

Animal behaviorists have discovered that bears in captivity get bored. Have you ever seen a bear pace back and forth at the zoo? (There’s a polar bear at the San Diego Zoo that does it and it’s heartbreaking.) A pacing bear is a bored bear. There are no pacing bears at the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center, because they experience change every day. When you think about it, Nature is always in flux. That’s why it’s so good to get out in Nature as much as we can.

At the Center, visiting children are each given a bucket of food for the bears and they’re allowed into the bear’s cage to hide the food (the bears are put in a holding cage while the children are hiding the food or else the children would be the food).So your first boredom-buster is: