Lunch boxes are not just for kids

As back to school time approached this year, we set out to find the perfect "cool" lunch box for my niece Paige.   Since what she wanted was a Disney's Frozen lunch box and Disney has decided to make everyone miserable by not making enough Frozen  merchandise to meet the demand, our search ended up online.

Paige did get her lunch box thanks to Aunt Stephanie so all is good. But during the fruitless online searching, I came across a product called LunchBlox by Rubbermaid. I was immediately intrigued and had to head out to Target to check them out. Why, you might ask?

Well, let me tell you about a little known fact that comes along with chronic illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. You can not only be too tired to prepare food for yourself, you can actually not have enough energy to eat it. Yup...too tired to eat.

This actually happens to me a lot. My energy is actually at its lowest during the day. My natural body clock is off. The technical term for this is sleep phase disorder. Or as my family will say, I am part vampire. I struggle to go to sleep before 3am because my energy is high at night. I also often get hungry and want to eat when everyone else is sleeping.   This can lead to bad food choices during the day when my energy is at its lowest. It is not unusual for me to either not eat at all or snack on unhealthy food. I just don't have the energy to make a healthy lunch.

But wait...I do have energy at midnight. Hmm. Maybe I need to pack myself a lunch for the next day?  So what if I am not actually leaving the house. But what to pack and how to pack it?  I don't like sandwiches. I prefer to snack on small amounts of a variety of food.

Enter LunchBlox. These Rubbermaid containers are various shapes and sizes allowing you to the freedom to pack a variety of different foods. There are snack size, entree size, sandwich and salad size etc.   That's great right?  But how are they any different that the millions of disposable food storage containers sold in most grocery stores?

First off, these containers are sturdy, wash well and can be microwaved. But the novelty and cool factor of LunchBlox is that they are designed to fit together like puzzle pieces so all you containers of various shapes and sizes don't end up a jumble in your bag. And most come with a reuseable ice blox to keep your food cool.

So how do I use them and why do I love them?  Tonight I was hungry and since it was the middle of the night my energy was high. So I decided to make myself a salad. I thought to myself, it would be nice to have one of these for lunch tomorrow but I will never have the energy to make it. So out came the LunchBlox. I made two salads. One to eat now and another seperated into the different LunchBlox containers. So when I want to eat lunch tomorrow, all I have to do us open the containers, dump everything together and eat. 

These are the four containers I used for tomorrow's lunch. They are they salad set, a snack size, and two small containers. I like a bunch of stuff in my salad so the salad set alone was not enough for me

In the three smaller containers I packed cucumbers, black olives and (if I had been leaving the house) dressing. 

This is a side view of the salad set. It has a space for lettuce and then a tray for accessories. 

In the tray I have croutons, carrots and a small container that is meant for dressing. Since I like a larger container for dressing, I actually put bacon bits in it.

 

This is the cover of the salad set. The grooves in it are what allow the other pieces to snap in place. 

Here it is all assembled. 

The last piece that you would use if you were taking this on the go is the specially designed ice pack. 

The entire set snaps right onto the ice pack to keep it cool. 

Pretty neat huh?  And it does all "snap" together. They are made to fit together like puzzle pieces. Some people say they snap together so well you do not even need a bag. I don't know about that. With my limited hand strength, I don't always get them clicked into place so I would like a bag if I were going anywhere. Although, just for this blog post I did managed to click everything together tight. 

Yes, I am in fact holding the entire system upside down in this photo. Like I said, this feature does not always work for me, but really, how often do you need to hold your lunch upside down?  

So far the only two drawbacks I have found to the system is one, finding a place to store the containers. I will likely just go buy a bigger Rubbermaid bin and toss them in it rather than try and jam them into our already full cabinets. Right now they are in a reuseable shopping bag. 

The second drawback is that since the containers are of various shapes and sizes, it can be hard to fit them in standard lunch bags.  Rubbermaid has thought of this and sells bags specifically designed for the LunchBlox system. They come in two sizes. If you want to be able to pack the salad set shown above or any of the larger containers, you will need the bigger bag.   

I can not tell you how the bags are because, as of right now, I primarily use the LunchBlox at home. Living on a very limited income, I have not been able to justify the expense of buying the bag.    But who knows, maybe Rubbermaid will see this post and decide to send me a free large bag to review.  Ah, it is nice to dream.

Being able to prepare a healthy lunch when my energy is high and eat it when it is low is a big step toward eating better and improving my overall health. And the LunchBlox is a great tool for that. 

The moral of this post is to think outside the box and you will find new ways (and sometimes new products) that help you take advantage of the times your energy is higher to make life easier for the times when the energy is gone.

What worked for me

This post is an update to my previous posts from so long ago. Since it is over a year later, I wanted to share what worked for me and what didn't.

1.  Email clean up to songs. This worked wonderfully for me. My email box now rarely gets over 100 emails. Once I got it under control and unsubscribe from emails I did not want, I no longer had to clean it daily. But if I see it inching toward 100, on goes a song and down goes the email count.

2. Mail sorting boxes. OK so this failed horribly. We are still buried in paper. The boxes filled up in a week and broke. But the thing is, the idea was not a bad one. We did sort what came in and get rid of what we did not need. But we had no good place to put what we needed to keep or deal with at a later date so it just accumulated in the boxes. So we are still struggling with this. I have a feeling this will be the last part of our house that we get under control. But we are making progress and I am hopeful that once we find a place that works to store the paper we need, then the mail trays will actually be useful. So this is still a work in progress.

3.  Litter genie. Yup I still love it. In fact, we have added an elderly hamster named Abner to our household. He was surrendered to our shelter already 3/4 of the way through his expected life span and my heart broke at the thought of him living out his few remaining months in the shelter. Thankfully my amazing niece felt the same and decided he should be her first ever small animal pet regardless of how long (or short) the rest of his life would be. So now not only do we use the litter genie for the cats, we use it for the debris from the daily spot cleaning of Abner's cage.

4.  Sunrise lamp. It does still help. I am currently going through a horrible sleep phase, one of the worst in a long time. It is a result of the multiple courses of steroids I was on in the year my asthma was out of control. And my new asthma med makes breathing easier but sleeping harder. But I still notice that it is easier to wake up on the days I use the sunrise lamp. My sleep needs to improve if I am going to continue to make progress but I will take it one night at a time.

5.  The black hole that is my closet. Is still clean!  This is a HUGE accomplishment for me. I could not keep my closet clean even when I was "healthy". It is not totally uncluttered but I can find what I need when I need it.

So that's about it for updates. Coming soon in what works for me, I will tell you about a cleaning product and house cleaning system that has made it possible for me to contribute to the house cleaning in a small way for the first time in almost 10 years.

And in the months to come, I hope to share my attempt to regain some of my strength and balance while I work to find an exercise program that works for me regardless of my multiple chronic illnesses.   Right now I am way to close to being bedridden. I can only tolerate being up for a few hours at a time without needing to rest. So there is no question this will be challenging but I am determined to try.   Wish me luck!

Down but not out

So to say have I not posted in a while is an understatement. It has been almost two years.  And it has been a very rough almost two years. One thing after another combined to knock me down again and again.

I won't bore you with all the details. Just that I was hit with major blows in all areas of my well being. Financial, mental, medical, family, etc. There were good times of course, but they seemed few and far between. My health took a turn for the worse and I ended up with frequent emergency room visits for severe asthma flare ups. I had to pretty much withdraw from life as I knew it to try and stabilize my breathing. And the final blow was when my mom, my rock, passed away a few months ago.

It is like being down a dark dirt hole and having the dirt bury you deeper each time you try and climb out.

I am still feeling like that some days but the major turning point is that I am slowly regaining my determination to not let my health get the better of me.   After many many doctor visits, my asthma is starting to respond to my new treatment plan. I am back on pain medication for my chronic pain, which I hate but it is a necessary evil while I can not exercise.

Any unlike so many others, I have the support of a loving family who, while they may not truly understand what it is like to be me, they believe in me and are there for me no matter how hard it is.

So in the words of Thomas Jefferson, I plan to : "Do what you can with what you have, where you are. "

I may be down but I am not out. I will work my way back into the life I want. One day at a time.

Escape from the black hole

This week I found a black hole in my bedroom.  I had an idea it was there but figured if I ignored it, it would go away.  But I have realized it was not going to go away without some work so I finally bit the bullet and dove into the black hole with my only goal being to come out alive.

What is a black hole you might ask?  According to Google it is a region of space having a gravitational field so intense that no matter or radiation can escape.  I have a slightly less wordy term for it - my closet.

My closet is this horrible place in my room that I just like to forget exists.  My life changed when I had to stop working.  I no longer use the business clothes that were the staple of my wardrobe for so many years.  Now I wear animal friendly clothing (pants and t-shirts that are sturdy and easily washed) since I never know when I might be dealing with a suddenly messy kitten or getting unwanted medication spat back at me.

I am pretty happy with where my life is now and do not miss dressing up to go to an office every day.  But for some reason, all these clothes are still hanging out in my closet.  Why I do not know.  Terms like "Someday", or "Just in cast" come to mind but that still does not justify keeping clothes I do not wear.  I knew in my mind that there was a lot of emotion behind hanging on to these "work" clothes.  No one wants to be told in their early 30s that they can no longer work and are "disabled".  It is a huge hit to your self-esteem since we live in a society that judges people not by who they are, but by what they do.

To be ready to let go of the old work clothes I had to come to a few realizations:
1.  I like who I am.
2.  I love what I do as an animal foster parent and shelter volunteer.
3. Even if someone waved a magic wand and cured all my health problems, I would not want to go back to the person I was when I had to stop working.
4.  I am not a big fan of shopping, but if I suddenly need dressy work clothes again, I was going to want to go out and get new ones.
5.  Most importantly, there are people out there who not only want, but NEED the dressy clothes that are just gathering dust in my closet.

So it was time to dive in, clean out, and send them on to where they would be appreciated - which I did.  It took a few different decluttering sessions and some hard looks at what I would wear and what I WISH I could wear.  And I did hang on to one or two things purely for sentimental value.  But I am thrilled to say that I now have three big trash bags with "work" clothes ready to be passed on to women who want them and more importantly, will USE them.

So now what?  What do I do with these bags?  Well if you are like me, they tend to sit around the house getting in the way while you find a place to donate them to and then actually remember to take them there.  Which means they sit for months and months.  NOT HAPPENING!

I was determined it was going to be different this time.  And it seems fate was on my side because in the mail that same week was a postcard from the New England Epilepsy Foundation saying they were doing a donation pickup in my area this coming week and explaining how to schedule the truck to stop at my house.

Wait...someone who was going to be in the area the same week I wanted to get rid of stuff?  And who would pick the stuff up?  And to benefit a cause I support?  (My nephew is Epileptic).  Sounds like a match made in heaven to me.  I jumped on the computer, went to their website and added our house to their scheduled pick up route for Thursday.  Now all I have to do is put the bags out by 7AM that morning and they will take it away.  I love it!

So if you have a black hole in your house, get ready to tackle it.  Do it in short 15 minute sessions and you will make progress.  And if you are having trouble getting motivated, schedule a charitable organization to come to your house for a pick up - just make sure that pick up date is a few weeks away.  Knowing that someone will be showing up expecting there to be bag to pick up is a great motivator.  My three bags of unwanted work clothes has grown to six bags of various types of clothes from the whole family.

I am so excited to have begun the slow process of transforming my closet from a black hole into a useful storage place.  I still have a ways to go because there is more than just useless clothes clogging it up and that stuff will either have to be donated or if I really need it, find a new home outside of my closet.

For now, I am satisfied that I have cleared two very big hurdles that have always stood in the way of a clutter free house.  I have learned to let go of things that are not useful to me without guilt.  And I have learned how to get rid of it in a way that can help others. 

Sunrise, Sunset

Recently I have been having trouble falling asleep before 3-4am.  This is nothing new to me.  I have always been someone who would rather stay awake until sunrise and sleep during the day.  (No I am not a vampire, do not be alarmed). Beside naturally being a night person, a lot of my health conditions are worse at night which makes it harder to fall asleep.  Now, I am used to this and do have medication to help.  The problem is that it does not always work and even when it does, it leaves me feeling like a zombie in the morning.  I just hate that feeling. 

For a while back in 2005, I was awake literally all night long, and would only fall asleep after sunrise.  This was also the same time that my doctor told me that working was no longer an option for me and my general health was horrible because of multiple chronic conditions.

I had told my doctor that the combinations of medication all my specialist had me on  made me feel horrible and I wanted to come off anything I could.  Don't get me wrong, I did not turn in to some new age lunatic who wanted to treat everything with tree bark or some such nonsense.  I am a severe asthmatic and know that there are certain medications that I need to keep breathing.  I also have severe allergies so I carry an epi pen.  And when I am in pain, I want pain medication.  I just wanted to be on the lowest level of medications I needed to keep my health stable without overloading my system with too many drugs.

Thankfully I had recently switched to a new doctor that believes in mixing traditional medicine with more natural solutions.  So when I told her I was have such trouble sleeping, instead of just upping my sleeping medication, she told me that I likely a circadian rhythm problem causing a sleep phase disorder and would I consider trying a sunrise lamp.

Huh?  Yup that was my response.  A very simplistic explanation of your circadian rhythm is your natural body clock that tells you when to sleep and when to be awake.  She explained that people like me, sometimes get their rhythms off kilter from side effects of medications like prednisone or just having trouble sleeping due to health problems.  So my circadian rhythm needed to be reset.  I needed to learn to wake up to sunrise and fall asleep to the sunset.

That's where the sunrise lamp came in.  It is basically an alarm clock that simulates sunrise and sunset.  You can program it to go off at the time you want to sleep and the time you want to get up.  It sounded a little out there but at that point I was willing to try anything to get some sleep at night.  So I ordered the lamp and started using it.  And imagine how shocked I was when it worked!  In less than a year I was able to stop taking the sleeping medication unless I was having a night where severe pain was keeping me awake.  Then I used both the lamp and the medication to get the sleep I needed.

After a while, my circadian rhythm was reset and when we moved into a new house, I decided to stop using the lamp.  (OK, truthfully, I packed it in a box while we were moving and promptly forgot it existed).

Recently, I had a very severe flare up of my asthma and spent a few weeks on prednisone.  I was back to not falling asleep until almost sunrise and struggling to get through the day.  After being annoyed and cranky for a while, I remembered the sunrise lamp and dug it out of storage to give it a shot again. 

For some reason, I was skeptical that it would help.  I know, I know, it helped before, but I was so much sicker then and I figured it was just a placebo effect.  Oh well, whether it is a placebo effect or not, it is working for me again.  I am slowly starting to fall asleep earlier.  But more importantly, the quality of sleep that I am getting is better than without the sunrise lamp.  How do I know?  Well, last night was the first day in the last month that I have forgotten to set the sunrise lamp and I have felt horrible all day.  And based on how my family has been avoiding me, I suspect I have not been the most cheerful person to be around either.  ;o)

So, if you are having trouble sleeping and are willing to gamble some money (the lamps are not cheap) a sunrise lamp might be the thing for you.  And yes, I know it still sounds like a bunch a new age garbage, but it works for me.

The lamp I use is made by sunrise systems.  I have the lamp and alarm all in one unit.  There is one that can be plugged into a regular table lamp which I have never used so I can not say how good it is. 

A word of caution: I believe this is a European based company.  The link above takes you to a photo that most closely matches my current lamp, but it is the European model.  If you decide to purchase a lamp like this, make sure it  will work with U.S. style plugs if that is what you need.  I believe the U.S. style lamps are available on amazon.com. 

And since it is now close to my bedtime, it is time to set my sunset and get some sleep.

Happy Sleeping Everyone!

What is that smell?

There are currently three cats in my household.  Doyle, my "baby" who is three years old; Charlie who is two years old (my 7 year old niece's best friend); and Nigella, a one year old former feral foster kitten who never really socialized enough to go up for adoption.

Doyle

Charlie

Nigella

I am an animal person and if my life and energy level were different, I would probably have dogs or bunnies or any number of other types of animals.  But life being what it is, cats are the best possibly pet for me.  Good thing I love them so much.

I am a big believer in the health benefits or having a pet.  They truly do help improve your state of mind and over all well being.  This is especially true for anyone with any sort of chronic illness, disability or anxiety.  Thankfully, I am one of the lucky few that still has the ability (and family support) that allows me to have my animals around me.

That being said - kitty litter stinks!  I would never put my cats outside, it is just not safe for so many reasons.  And since two of my three cats were born outside and were on their own for a few months, they have no desire to go out.  In fact, Nigella (who was outside until she was 4 months old) runs and hides when we open the door.  Since I do not believe in outdoor cats, I am stuck with the litter box.  Or litter boxes in my case since we have three (one for each cat).

The problem with litter boxes is that they smell no matter how careful you are about cleaning them.  The scooping and disposing of the clumps is annoying.  Even if you scoop the box every day (which is recommended) you still have to find a place to dump the clumps until trash day.

If you put it in your regular trash inside, the whole house stinks.  If you put it in the garage, the garage stinks.  And if you put it in the outside trash can you have to run outside in the freezing cold once a day (at least during a New England winter).  And for someone with severe asthma like me, this is always a problem.  The end result is that, although my foster's litter boxes are always 100% clean because they are babies and make a huge mess all the time, my own adult cats' litter boxes did not always get scooped as often as I would like.  My cats did not seem to mind, but I did.

Then, as I was roaming around the pet section of Target on Christmas Eve while waiting for my prescription for prednisone (severe asthma flare up on Christmas Eve, oh joy). I came across a solution.  The Litter Genie.

The Litter Genie is a litter disposal system that you can put the daily clumps in until trash day and according the the box, there is no odor and it is very easy to use.  I was skeptical to say the least.  It looked very like the diaper disposal systems we had when my niece was young that was annoying to use, did not contain the smell and that we stopped using way before she was out of diapers.  I also knew there was a similar product out there called a Litter Locker that had gotten reviews for being expensive, annoying and hard to use.

But it was Christmas Eve, I was short of breath and my niece would be heartbroken if "Santa" forgot to bring the cats something for Christmas.  So instead of spending $10 on cat toys that we so did not need (we have tons), I took a chance and spent $15 on the Litter Genie instead.

So what do I think of the Litter Genie?  I think it is a little Christmas miracle.  I love it!  It did take me a bit to figure out how to set it up initially.  But truthfully I do not know if that is because the instructions were confusing or if it was because I was doing it when I was lacking oxygen due to my breathing problems.

Once it was set up, it was small enough to fit in between two of our litter boxes, and so easy to use.  You scoop the mess, drop it in the top, pull the handle, the mess drops down and DOES NOT SMELL.  And since everything is contained in the litter genie, it means no ice cold trips outside which my asthma really appreciates. 

So far the only drawbacks I have seen is that at some point I will need to buy refill bags for the systems since like the diaper genie and the litter locker, it can not just use any bags.  But Target has a two pack of the refills for around $15 which is not too bad.  I have three cats and it has been two and a half weeks and I am still on the refill pack that came with the system so the bags do seem to last for a bit.  The second drawback may just be specific to my house.  Since I am now scooping every day (sometimes more) I am going through litter faster.  But that is primarily because I have a 19 pound Maine Coon cat who is not all that agile.  I have to make sure the boxes are weighed down with enough litter at all times or he tends to accidentally knock them over.  What can I say - he is not the most graceful guy but I love him.  :o)

Anyway, like I said, I am skeptical of all the "make the litter odor go away" tricks on the market.  My general feeling is, you have a cat, it has a litter box - deal with it.  And if you don't want to deal with it, you should not have a cat.  The love they give is well worth the hassle of the litter box.  But so far I am really pleased with the Litter Genie. It does make dealing with the litter box easier.

In fact, I plan to go out and buy two more for the areas in my house where I keep foster kittens.  Note:  you do not need multiple genies.  It does have a handle that makes it easy to carry from box to box and it is not that heavy.  But since I found a coupon for $10 off the system on the Litter Genie Website (making it only around $5 for the whole system) and carrying anything can be hard for me when my health conditions flare up, it is just easier to have more than one. 

The best indication to me that it works was a conversation I had with my roommate the other day.

She said, "What is that smell?"
"The litter box", I said. 
She replied, "But the litter genie thing stopped the smell."

Well yes, but only after you scoop it.  So I went and scooped. Bye bye cat box smell. 
Hello Litter Genie.

Buried Alive!

Now that I have a better handle on my email inbox I have decided that it is time to try and get control of the avalanche of paper that has taken over most of our house.  Whether it is notices sent home from school, newsletters, updates, bills, important notices, or the dreaded "junk mail" we seem to be inundated with reams of paper all the time. The problem with that is we have to figure out what to do with all this paper.  And we are very bad at this in our house.  We have mountains of paper that just sits in our house waiting for us to go through it and figure out what to do with it.  And quite frankly, it is all too overwhelming to deal with right now.  Maybe sometime I will come up with an idea that will help me deal with the avalanche of old papers in my house but not now.

Instead, I decided to try and figure out a system to deal with any NEW paper that comes in the house from now on.  The new system is nothing revolutionary - just get mail sorting trays for each member of the family and sort it as soon as it comes into the house.  And make sure that junk mail goes right into the recycling bin.

In order to do this, I needed to get mail sorting trays.  So what kind should I get?  Where to get them?  Should everyone have the same one, or different ones for each person?  And wait a minute, these things are expensive and I don't have money to spare.  For a minute it looked like my organizing venture was doomed.

But then I thought -  these trays were just for our family and were meant to reduce the stress of clutter around us.  They did not have to be Martha Stewart worthy.  Just just had to work.  We could just make trays.  We must have something in all this clutter that would work.  And then I hit on the perfect thing.

For those of you who don't know me, my family and I foster kittens for a local animal shelter.  We love doing it and love helping the high risk kittens that come through our home.  Because we take the odd cases we have kittens in our house pretty much year round.  That means we have canned kitten food in our house all the time.  A lot of kitten food.  Cases (and cases) of  kitten food. 

We recycle the cardboard cases in a variety of ways.  They make good temporary litter boxes for kittens who need to be in a crate for a few days.  They also make a good tray for containing the mess of paint, glitter and other art supplies during kids craft projects.  And of course, they can go right into the cardboard recycling.  So when preparing yet another empty case to go into recycling it occurred to me that with a little work and some markers, these could be turned into mail trays.

So yesterday, I sat down with tape, markers, stickers, computer paper and my 7 year old niece and went to work.  The funny thing is that what started as a way to avoid going to the store and spending money on an organization system that might not work turned into a fun family project.  And in my humble opinion the end result is better than anything I can get in a store because it truly reflects the individuality of my family.   Here they are:

Front view

Side view

Will the system work to help control the incoming mail?  Only time will tell.  But if nothing else, we have fun.  And that makes it worth it to me.