Caught In The Whirlwind
Posts tagged organization
Meal Planning Update
Sep 1st 2009
As I mentioned yesterday, I’m looking for ways to better organize our large recipie collection in an attempt to create a master list of all the stuff we (my roommates and I) can cook to aid in meal planning. I’ve tried out a few OS X based recipie organization apps and I think I’ve settled on SousChef. It’s $30, but, in our situation, I think it’ll be money worth spending.
The big thing for us is it keeps track of when a meal was last cooked, so we can see stuff that we haven’t had in a while. And we can search by ingredient so if something is on sale, we can get a list of stuff that uses that particular item. Another cool feature is a cooking mode that displays the recipe full screen mode in large type so you can read it from afar. It also responds to voice command so you can advance through the recipe without getting the laptop all icky.
I think it’ll work out well. Our meal planning process was taking much longer than it should have and something like this should help out a lot.
Now to enter all our recipes into the system…
Food. Like Eating It. Hate Planning It.
Aug 31st 2009
One of the most dreaded times in the week for my roommates and I is the time where we go to decide what we’re going to eat for the next week. We hate doing it…it’s hard to plan that stuff in advance and we always tend to forget the types of meals we do. Always. It takes forever, sometimes it gets pushed off a couple days which throws off the schedule…it’s just icky all around.
So this evening I am tasked with helping to fix this situation by coming up with some way to list out and track all of our meal options and when we last had them. It’ll be a lot easier to slot in meals, I think, once we have a big list of stuff we can do. I’ve had the thought before, but now I’m motivated to actually do something about it.
I could just create a little spreadsheet for this, but I think I’m going to be investigating some applications built for the purpose. I want to have a centralized recipe storage location as well…to make things a little easier to manage and hunt down when the time comes to make the food. I’ve been eyeing MacGourmet as my option of choice so I’ll be checking it out tonight to see if it’ll work…
WE HAVE INTERNET!!!
Apr 2nd 2009
Last night was a very important part of the process of moving into a new apartment. We have…the internet. The cable guy was there by the time I got back to the apartment after work and after some little hiccups regarding the stupid way the old cable company in the area did the wiring for the apartment, we ended up having cable.
He was a good cable guy too. Sometimes the installers can be very hit and miss, but this guy knew what he was doing and he did all the wiring and stuff too, including my room which was difficult because of the location of the cable outlet. He even stapled the wire along the wall over the closet.
Yes, that's right…for the first time I have cable on my personal TV. Yes, it's just standard cable and it's a little fuzzy since it's not digital. But it is cable. I watched Futurama last night! I'm very much enjoying this new apartment for it's little conveniences. Cable, the ability to control the air temperature, dishwasher, garbage disposal.
So far so good. We're actually way ahead of where I thought we would be in the organizing department. Pretty much the entire downstairs is set except for the wall art and things of that nature. I might end up doing something with the chest my 6 gallon fish tank is on as far as securing it to the wall. it's a bit tippy because the floor is slightly uneven so I'm feeling a bit apprehensive about it tipping over if somebody runs by or vibrates the floor in just the right way. I've been researching some things that might work for it though, so we'll see.
Upstairs is a different story. My bedroom is almost organized, as much as I can without having access to my night stand. The spare room is a bit of a mess, but we'll get it settled eventually. That's the next project in line. It was looking organized but then I moved my 20 gallon fish tank into there and there ended up being a lot of associated crap that I haven't quite found a spot for yet.
I Need More Organization!!
Feb 9th 2007
I’ve been trying to come up with a system to be a little more organized, as far as keeping track of things I need to do, how important they are, etc.
I’ve tried using my Treo and it’s built in to-do lists and such, but the problem always comes back to the fact that I never really look at them after they’ve been entered in, so there’s really no point in it.
I really do need to find a system that works for me, as I’m feeing very overwhelmed right now with all of this stuff that I need to get done (and not really accomplishing much of it).
I’ve been messing around with a website called stikkit which is kinda an online productivity app thing that’s pretty hard to explain properly without actually using it. It works based around the premise of sticky notes. You have something you need to remind yourself to do, you’d write a “stikkie”, ant type in something like “get books from bill smith” which the website intelligently figures out is a to-do item, so it throws it in your to-do list.
What’s more, since it’s detected “bill smith” in there, it’ll check to see if you’ve got a “peep” named bill smith and associate him with the sticky as well. if not, it’ll create a record of the person so you can keep track of who’s doing what.
There’s a lot more too it…it seems really interesting, especially since it offers e-mail reminders for events and to-dos.
Not sure if it’ll solve the problem of never looking at things, but…I’m willing to give it a shot.
Recent Comments