organization, please!

Does anyone's closet really look like this?

Where things that are hanging are not packed together as tightly as possible, and shelves have stacks of only two or three items, perfectly folded?

I'm sure you are sitting there saying "no."

I hope you are sitting there saying "no."


With a little work last night, my closet went from this...

...to this...

Perhaps you see no difference, but after replacing the lightbulb with a brighter one, straightening clothes, organizing them by type (and color), stacking flats, and purchasing some nice bins from Target, it feels much better. There are still piles that are a little taller than I would like, but can that really be avoided? Not to mention that beautiful dresser we painted is packed to the brim with all the stuff that didn't fit in the closet. Sometimes the drawers don't close. (Really I just need to get rid of the ridiculous amount of t-shirts I have accumulated over the years.) That is still on the list of things to do.

Is it strange that I have dreams of having only wooden hangers in my closet? No more plastic garbage! Especially no wire, please.

I also had the thought of creating a closet pole that has evenly spaced indents so that your hangers will always have the perfect distance between each other. When I told Aaron, he said "There is a niche market for that." What he meant was, "There are plenty of other freaks like you who would get extremely excited about more ways to micromanage their closets."

So what? I'm proud that I can make my closet look better. However, I still haven't figured out the best dirty laundry system. Right now I have mesh pop-up hampers from my freshman year in college that are ripping apart. Not to mention they are all different shapes and sizes and take up an awkward amount of space on the closet floor. (Not pictured due to dirty laundry.) A hamper thing with 4 containers at Target costs $50. That seems a little much for dirty laundry receptacles, but maybe that's just the way it is. 

Any brilliant hamper ideas for a limited space closet?

9:15 a.m.

I feel wonderful this morning. Why? Because it is only 9:15 a.m. and I have already done the following:

-Made Aaron a sandwich to take to work for lunch
-Went for a quick jog, which included running up and down the stairs to BYU three times until my lungs burned
-Watered the lawn
-Took a shower
-Cleaned the bedroom which had piles of clothes everywhere due to the recent removal of our dresser for re-painting
-Did about 45 minutes of article writing work
-Made a delicious breakfast of steel cut oats with buttermilk, brown sugar, cinnamon, and flax seeds while I swept the kitchen floor, put the dry dishes away, and got myself ready for the day
-Ate the delicious breakfast with a glass of OJ
-Read my scriptures
-Brushed, flossed, and mouth-washed my teeth

How long will I be able to keep up all these positive, healthy habits? Who knows.

What is the plan for the rest of the day?

-Continue article writing work for a few hours
-Perhaps pull some of the weeds that are growing outside our window
-Bike to Riverwoods for the first day of Yoga Teacher Training Certification
-Buy a yoga mat, and some yoga books, and get really excited to learn more about yoga and be able to do headstands
-Take a yoga class
-Bike home to Aaron
-Eat leftover Cafe Rio that I made last week which we have been eating every night since
-Wash the dishes, relax, lay on the couch while Aaron does stuff on the computer, and go to sleep

i. love. curriculum. vitaes!

yes. i, rachel louise robison, have been quoted to say, with excitement in my eyes that i love curriculum vitaes. that isn't actually the plural of curriculum vitae, it might be something like curricula vita.

yesterday was martin luther king jr day. it mostly consisted of homework for me, and homework, band practice, and group meeting for aaron. we had planned to go to midway to see the "ice castles" in the evening, which we did...but it was a pretty hilarious event.

the whole escapade began with a little song that i wrote on the spot. "we can take our pasta, to go, to go." it was funnier when i was carrying aaron around our kitchen on my back while doing the conga line dance.

we didn't actually take our pasta to go. we ate dinner at home, then left for midway. first we had to stop for cash. oops. aaron didn't bring his debit card, and neither did i. it's okay, chase is supposed to give us cash advances for atm withdrawals. that didn't work either. so we go home again and i get my debit card. by then, however, we figure we can find a bank up in midway.

boy were we wrong.

first we go to a gas station. the atm is out of cash and they don't do cash back. then we go to a grocery store. the grocers says they give cash back on debit transactions. we buy five chocolates for one dollar, i swipe my card, it goes through as credit. no cash back. the grocer, in fact, knows nothing. seven eleven? they also don't do cash back. finally we succumb to use an atm with a $2.50 fee. bah.

but finally we make it to the ice castle. a make shift area was set up in downtown midway where some man sprinkles water on structures and makes these ice-dripping things.

don't you think you could get lost in there? it looks like an awesome ice cave.... and these next guys on top of the structure, they remind me of the russian dancing flowers from fantasia. anyone remember them?

boogey men?

we really only walked around for about 20 minutes, mostly trying to set up the camera so that it could take a timed picture of us. we only really got one semi-success...the one posted above.

notice the grainy pictures? someday i'll be good a taking pictures...or maybe a better camera would do the trick. but that's beside the point. it was a fun evening in celebrating of martin luther king jr. and i had a crazy dream that night...

Ice Cubes of Oranges

rachel is a very detail oriented person. she likes to plan and is also very organized. I have known this for a long time. I've observed her comb through her itunes library and meticulously assign an album artwork to each of the albums in the library. Ive seen her color coordinate books. Ive seen her many lists and her urgency to check as many things off as possible. the list could go on.rachel took it to a new level recently. A week or so leading up to us leaving for arizona, rach began to ration our level of juice and milk intake. She was set on us leaving to arizona with no liquids left in the fridge. At first I thought we were trying to draw out the life of the juice and milk, in order to avoid an awkward trip to the store one or two days before leaving the state; however, on the day of our departure I quickly realized we had a surplus as I see Rach leaving to the car with a giant filled-to-the-brim glass of juice and milk jug in hand. oh.... all after also having filled our ice tray with remaining juice. so we began to chug on our drive out. the fridge is clean.

confessions from a closet obsessive complusive

So Aaron is always pointing out my weird, obsessive, usually organizational quirks. Like needing to have the the fronts of the shirts hanging on hangers all facing the left. He got used to that one.

On Tuesday, however, I learned that Aaron is a closet obsessive compulsive. I brought home a bag of assorted chocolate candy and left it by him to tempt him to eat it. When I came home, I found that a lot of the Almond Joys were missing. Naturally, I asked Aaron if he loved Almond Joys. He said that he didn't especially love them.

That's when the truth came out.

He confessed that when eating assorted chocolate candy, he has this desire to keep the colors balanced. His candy of choice was Hershey's, but he found that the bag was lacking brown and was heavy on the blue, so he had to eat some Almond Joys. You can see how this then spread to eating more Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and Kit Kat's as well.

I think it was all a ploy so he could eat lots and lots of chocolate.