Crazy 'Bout a Sharp-Dressed Man

My dear husband is flying out today for his first residency interview.

As I helped him come up with shirt and tie options for the dinner tonight and the interview tomorrow, I was thinking how awesome it would be to have a collection organized like this:

From this cool dorm room

Previous to his 3rd year of med school, J didn't have a lot of need for ties. Last year during rotations I discovered he really likes wearing ties (and dislikes wearing scrubs, which is the whole reason I sometimes wish I was a nurse/doctor/in some kind of medical profession, so I think that's a total waste).  Now whenever I'm at T.J.Maxx (which is a lot), I stop by the tie section and try to find one I think he'd like. (You can beat that most of them are around $10, compared to the $30-40 price tags still on many of them.)  

J's idea of organizing his small collection is laying them out on a chair in our living room...maybe I'll come up with a new system while he's out of town. I have this crazy idea that they should be located in his closet (some training will be involved), and I just need to figure out what will be best to use where they don't slide off the hanger.

Friction Tie Rack and Scarf Hanger, $7

via Houzz

I may even go wild and organize his closet so he can actually get to the ties. I need something to feel some control during this interview process where there is pretty much no control in where we end up! (Which has definitely

Everybody's Working for the Weekend

Or at least I am.

What's on tap: taking my nieces birthday shopping, some Spring cleaning, hanging out with J, and hopefully meeting up with some friends for some much-needed laughter and libations.

Some incentive to tackle my jewelry box via Blue Hydrangea

My Digital Brain

Do you have as much trouble saving and organizing all of the inspiring goodness you come across on the interwebs as I used to? Are you frustrated by having notes scattered everywhere? Boy, have I got the app for YOU! Everyone loves Evernote! You'll have fun organizing up a storm with your new notes and at a moment's notice, find exactly what you're looking for!
How's that for my infomercial pitch? But really, I have found Evernote so helpful. The first time I tried it was when I downloaded the iPhone app, and I didn't really get its usefulness and ended up deleting it off my phone. (Green elephant, I'm so sorry.) When I ran across some articles about its functionality, I gave it another try and am so glad I did - I feel like I finally have a system to keep notes for everything in my head: to do lists, decor inspiration, recipes, gift giving ideas, shopping finds I want to remember for later...

Some of my fave features:

• Notebooks and tagging
  
  I've always saved some shelter mags and pages from catalogs, but wedding planning was when my need for some kind of organizational system to store ideas exploded. I ended up using Google Notebook to store all of my wedding p0rn, as opposed to saving images to my hard drive and then trying to decide what to name the file so I could find the website where I got it from again as well as which folder to store it in so I could even find it. (Which led to the creation of whole folders for crazy things like "Reception Decor - Cocktail Napkin Ideas", full of personalized, mouth-wiping goodness. Never mind that I never got around to ordering said napkins.)
  
  I liked having the ability to access my notes from wherever I was browsing, but it's hard to move them around and quickly view them in G-Notebook. I've tried tagging and starring things in G-Reader as well, but also found them cumbersome to remember/retrieve. (Google, I still love you.) Evernote has the same concept as these, but it's easier to look through everything because you can see the preview of all notes for a given notebook or tag as well as search across your notes. (Since Google is no longer developing Notebook, If you're an existing user, here's a tutorial on how to import existing G-Notes into Evernote.)
  
  
• Clipping website content
  
  This is where the real genius comes in. You're browsing a website and you want to save off an image and/or some text. You use the clipping feature, and voila, your note is auto-created with a title and a link to the original website. This is great for blogging, where you want to provide credit back to the source. Here's a video of how it works:
  
  
  
  

• Image text extraction
  
  If an image has text on it, Evernote somehow magically extracts this and makes it searchable. The example they tout is taking a photo note of all of your business cards. You can then search through your contacts and recycle the cards. Geek Sugar just did a post on using Evernote to track your spending by taking photos of your receipts. I don't think I'll use that in terms of tallying expenses (Quicken, you're my main man for that), but I think I'm going to start trying to snap photos of my receipts for item returns, warranties on big-ticket items, and come tax time. You can sort chronologically to find the newest one, and there's less worry about losing an important one. (And many can go straight to recycling!)
  

It's a free service, with a monthly upload limit usage (I've never reached it), or you can pay a nominal monthly or yearly fee for the premium version. You can download the desktop version and one for your phone, as well as just going straight to the website, so you can enter something on your computer and bring it up on your phone later. If your phone is GPS-enabled, it will capture your location, so if you're out at your favorite restaurant and want to bring up the pic you took of the bottle of wine you had last time so you can order it again, it will find you the notes taken in that location.

Right now I have 3 notebooks: a general one (my default), Decor Inspiration, and Recipes. (You could accomplish this just as easily with one notebook and just use tags to find everything.) I'm trying to figure out how to better categorize everything so the tags don't get out of control.


How do you keep your life organized? What kind of categorization do you use?

(By the way, I'm not being compensated in any way to promote Evernote, but just wanted to pass on something I've found helpful. Let me know what you think if you try it out. Here are some tutorials to get started.)

I've Died and Gone to Office Heaven

The Hubs is leaving Sunday for a 6-week rotation in Corpus Christi (more on that later). My goal while he is gone is to get the house organized. (Yes, we've lived in our home for over a year and I sitll can't find things. I am so embarrassed.)

An office like this is just the kick in the skirt I need:

Note to self: add vintage locker bins to Craigslist search terms

I seriously lust after card catalogs. (I think I've devoted more than one blog post to these babies.)
Every one that shows up on eBay is never in Texas.
Texas, what did you do with all of your old card catalogs?!!!

I also need a card holder like this. (I may have blogged about this before, too.)

Must be a need vs. want then, right?

I also need a good camera. Love the colors!

My problem is that I will never round up enough of my like-type junk to realize they could be placed in collections like this.

Obsessed with Cubby Holes

Wayyyyy better than a bookcase, I am so wanting something with cubby holes...

Found here, I think it originally came from design*sponge

My mom used to have a collectors shelf like this on a smaller scale...I am emailing her right now to see if she still has it. Something like this would be perfect for my sand collection.

Apartment Therapy
So I could keep display the pretty pretty dishes and vases out in the open.

I'm still in love with the Expedit bookcase from Ikea - if only I have a blank wall big enough for it:

Both featured on Desire to Inspire

Punching the Clock

I love this idea to hold cards, mail, whatever your heart desires.

found on Cafe Cartolina

This totally beats the mail holder I was eyeing earlier.