Are you difficult to work with??

I have been thinking about this a lot lately...

 A.) am I a difficult person to work with and 

B.) why are some people so difficult to work with. 

And in this thought process, I feel like God really revealed something to me. And you might totally disagree, but I feel like this is one of those things that could change my whole way of thinking when it comes to this sort of thing. I realized that, really if I were to get honest, people or myself really aren't difficult to work with. It's really all about my thought process (or the person I'm working with if they were to think that about me). People are perceived to be "difficult" to work with because they aren't doing what I want or how I want it done. 

Notice the word I?? 

It's a control issue. 

And it's really not fair. 

You may just be a 3rd party looking in at someone being frustrated with another person, two difficult people not getting along, right??  And now I'm getting frustrated. 

Because why?  

Because now TWO people aren't acting the way I think they should. 

It's all a choice...you just go with the flow or you try and control everything. Simple as that. 

So next time I, or you, think "wow, this person is really difficult to work with!", I will try and re-examine the situation. Am I putting my own expectation on the situation?  Am I wishing I could control it more?  Am I going to get cranky and frustrated or lovingly make some positive suggestions?  

I think if we could just put our own unfair expectations and desires to control, we could all get along much better in this little time we have together. 

Just some thoughts swirling around in my head this week. 

DIY spice organization

I have been wanting to better organize all my spices for a while now and last week I finally decided to do it!

All my spices are in containers and when I pull out the containers all I can see are the tops of the jars. So I was having to pick up each jar to see what was in it. With the exception of one brand, none of them have the contents on the lids, so it was a pain. Especially if I was in a hurry to find something last minute to add while I was cooking. Some of the spices are in small jars and were stacked on top of each other, which made more of a pain.  I also really wanted to eliminate plastic jars and have everything stored in glass. Some spices were already in glass, so I wanted to be able to continue using them. And finally, I had some duplicate spices and I wanted to combine those into one. 

So. 

Now I just need a plan of attack. I started buying a few glass jars here and there at Target that I liked and that gave me the idea of just copying the Target jars and putting a chalkboard label on top. A few days later I just decided I would spray paint all the lids with chalk paint and forego the label on top. And so that is what I did!!

Plastic and metal lids were painted with 3-4 light coats of spray paint. 

I didn't want the old labels on the jars anymore either, so I emptied the contents out into a bowl, pealed the paper off, then soaked the jar for a few minutes in very hot water. After soaking, the labels were very easy to scrape off with my fingernail and/or a pampered chef stone scraper. I did have a few that were more difficult and I just scrubbed them several times with glass cleaner until all the residue was off!

I then used a funnel and added all the spices back into the jar and once the paint was dry on the lid, replaced the chalkboard painted lid. 

I wrote the contents on the top of each lid with a white sharpie paint pen and that was it! 

Here you can see I'm in the middle of the process, some have green lids, some have black...now they are all black and easy to write on. 

Don't work on too many at a time...you don't want to mix things up and forget what is what.  I also wanted to try and keep the spices in the same lids and bottles they were originally in. I did 5 or so at a time and everything went smoothly!

I do need to make some labels for the front of the bottles and I will be working on that later this week...I will post the finished product soon!

This was a very easy and inexpensive project that anyone can do!

Happy Monday!! 8)