I just had the most delightful morning. My teenagers are out of town, I slept in late, drank iced tea on the porch, and read two Martha Stewart Living magazines with my feet up. I lazily made myself scrambled eggs and ate them slowly. After I’m done with my chores today, and before I leave for my friend’s birthday party, I am going to go back out on the porch with a stack of magazines. Entertainment Weekly, Time, Food & Wine, and Gourmet. My recycling bin is going to be full after this weekend!

QUICK THINGS TO DO TODAY:

• Get your grocery shopping and errands done, if needed. I’m trying to do all my errands in one fell swoop, to save gas. I’m going to a neighborhood strip mall that has a video store I can drop my rentals off at, a grocery store, a gas station so I can fill up, a dry cleaner I can drop my clothes off at, and the post office is just one block away. I should be in and out of there in 25 minutes or so.
• Nine weekends left of summer. Do you have fun plans for most of them? I was thinking about holding a garage sale, but why waste one of my nine Sundays?
• Look over your schedule for next week. Do you have a weeknight you could host an impromptu small cocktail or dinner party? A very casual one that you can easily throw even after coming home from work? Inviting just one to three friends? Summer weekends get so busy for everyone, this is sometimes the only way to catch up with people.
• Need to run the dishwasher?
• Doing any laundry today? I’m doing a load of musty blankets from the linen closet, then a load of my bedding, then one of darks.

TODAY’S PROJECT: Under Stairs Closet; Airing Linens

Do you have a closet under your stairs? I do – that’s where I store blankets, throws, colorful pillows I swap out seasonally, board games, and the tool chest. It’s been smelling very musty lately, to the point that recently laundered blankets smell bad after spending a couple nights in there.

So today I’ve removed every item from that closet, and I’m airing the blankets and pillows outside in the sun. My grass is dry, so I just laid them on the grass, where they’ll stay for six or seven hours. If I was overly concerned about them getting grass stained, I would have put them out on top of old sheets. I’m not concerned about the bright, hot sunlight fading their colors, since the pillows are just out for a few hours. I have a few of the throws hanging on my deck railing, and I’m doing a load of the worst smelling blankets. In a few hours I’ll go out and turn over the pillows and blankets so their other sides get exposed to the sun, too.

I found a few surprises in the closet – an old sewing machine I’ve been looking for, a stack of nine hideous huge framed pictures I hope to sell for 25 cents each in a yard sale someday just to get rid of them, a set of purple Halloween rope lights that need to go into my holiday decorations closet, and my picnic basket. I’ll keep that in front from now on so it’s easily accessible.

I’m taking inventory to see if I can throw anything away.

• Picnic blankets (old, soft, faded, and delightful): three. Nope, I need all those.
• Moroccan-style colorful beaded pillows from Target (used for gypsy, Moroccan, India and magical-themed parties): Nine. I don’t like two of them -one a velvet teal and the other a forest green. They’re perfectly good and still new, so I don’t want to just throw them out. They were only $20, so no point selling them. Too big to fit into a box for a soldier who might want to decorate her barracks. Hrm. I must think about this.
• Purple pillows I use for the living room couches in Spring: 5. I love all of them. One pillow per seat, perfect amount.
• Outdoor pillows in orange, yellow, hot pink and red: four. I have one for every chair that sits around my fire pit.
• Light blue, yellow and light green pillows I use in the living room in summertime: Five. One per seat. I love all of them, especially the striped one.
• Cranberry colored pillows for Christmas/Valentine’s Day seasonal decor in the living room: Eight. One per seat downstairs, and I’ll use two of the cushions on my new upstairs couch when it arrives. That leaves me one to store in the cupboard waiting for another $19 pillow to get old, ripped, and thrown away.
• Soft Throws: Two white, one light blue that generally gets used outside, one a dark blue that doesn’t match anything, but usually gets used in the dark wintertime in a darkened living room while watching movies, so who cares. I thought I owned a yellow throw, which is missing, probably up in one of the teenagers’ bedrooms.

Now that everything is out of the closet, it already smells better. I’ve thrown some of that nasty powdery, flowery scented carpet freshener on the carpet, and I’ll vacuum it up in about four hours with my Dyson.