Ruly Humor: “Messy Room” & October Recap

Messy Room

Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
His underwear is hanging on the lamp.
His raincoat is there in the overstuffed chair,
And the chair is becoming quite mucky and damp.
His workbook is wedged in the window,
His sweater’s been thrown on the floor.
His scarf and one ski are beneath the TV,
And his pants have been carelessly hung on the door.
His books are all jammed in the closet,
His vest has been left in the hall.
A lizard named Ed is asleep in his bed,
And his smelly old sock has been stuck to the wall.
Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
Donald or Robert or Willie or– Huh?
You say it’s mine?
Oh, dear, I knew it looked familiar!

-Shel Silverstein (from A Light in the Attic)

We are at the end of another week and a month as well! Thought I would start the weekend off with a smile with a favorite poem from childhood. Shel Silverstein always captured the human spirit and taught us to laugh at ourselves. After a busy week, there are several rooms in my own home that I am choosing not to recognize too!

Since it is the end of the month, I wanted to review what we have discussed so far. First, we had the Ruly Challenge, where I asked you to clean off the items from your desktop and select a background image that inspires you. Did you succeed? I took my own medicine and did it on my new laptop as well. My young daughter instantly commented on the picture. The desktop background is one of the most unused pieces of computer real estate. We so often just leave it to the plain standard that comes with the computer or completely cover it over with all the files we have quickly saved there for convenience. I know at least one of my readers completed the challenge as I received this private comment:

“Well, it took me forty minutes and made me realize how many other folders on my computer that I need to also clean out, but I did it!”

With one day still left in the month, you still have time to complete this challenge too if you have not done it already!

We discussed Peter Walsh’s book “It’s All Too Much” and used some of Walsh’s principles to think about storage options for Halloween costumes. We also commented on recent news stories related to organization.

We tested Google Reader to see if it saves us time keeping up with blogs and websites. So far, I have to report that my test drive with Google Reader has saved me some time but I have a few complaints. As a visual-oriented person, I wish the Reader captured the formatting/color schemes of the websites in addition to the content or that there was a button more clearly designated for “See this post on the original website.” It took some time for me to realize that if you click the title of each post, it will take you to the website it came from. Unfortunately, I have also found that some of my feeds are not being read correctly and that sometimes a site will have updates not recognized in Google Reader. Google Reader and I are working on our trust issues in this area. I am starting to learn which websites I still need to manually check.

On Monday we start a new Ruly month and will post a preview of what is to come! Have a wonderful weekend!