December 2023 - Organization Pending Newsroom - Upper Arlington, Ohio
Welcome to Organization Pending's Newsroom, December 2023: Enhancing Your You edition.
This month, take a look at upcoming Columbus Winter and Indoor Activities for adults and kids, and focus on ways to enhance the you you already have. Find: a DIY home and rental improvement podcast episode recommendation featuring The Trans Handy Ma'am, multigenerational home organizing tips and discussion from someone living it, a way for adults to keep up to date on popular science news, and a new digital Ohio-based library serving the LGBTQIA+ community. Don't miss Organization Pending's Company News for upcoming savings to help you start your pending decluttering and organizing projects for 2024!
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Columbus Winter and Indoor Activities
Stop by the Miller Park Branch of Upper Arlington Public Library until December 30 to donate or swap your gently used coffee mugs during their Coffee Mug Swap event!
Friday, December 15, 6pm-9 is Mozaic's Holigays Homewarming, "a welcome to our new space on the first floor of Equitas King-Lincoln Medical Center". Join them for a taco bar, cookie decorating, vintage clothing bus outside, free clothing closet inside, and drag performers doing makeup for first arrivals! Keep up to date on Mozaic's events with their Linktree.
Columbus Gay Men's Chorus is wrapping up their season with Holiday!, "singing and dancing through your favorite sacred and secular music that will leave you feeling gay and bright!" Performances are Saturday, December 16 at 7:30pm, and Sunday, December 17 at 2pm. Tickets can be reserved online - pricing varies $10-$47.
Learn about the history, machines, and different aspects of tattooing and body modification from artists and historians at COSI After Dark: The Art of Body Modification on Thursday, January 11 from 7pm-10. Tickets are $20 each for this After Dark 21+ event.
The co-founders of Columbus Collage Collective will host an afternoon of cutting and composing at the Workshop and Material Swap Saturday, January 13, 2pm-4, at the Main Branch of Upper Arlington Public Library. Tools, glue, and select materials will be provided - bring your own to swap and share at this registration free event.
Do you have a young one, wondering where the birds have gone for the winter? Grange Insurance Audubon Center has an online Bird Migration Explorer, letting you explore "the heroic annual journeys made by over 450 bird species, and the challenges they face along the way." Learn more about Species Migration, Conservation Challenges, and explore specific Bird Species and Featured Locations. Need help learning how to use the map? Visit their Learning Resources page for video instruction. Need more information or activities? Take a look at their Resources for Young Explorers and Teacher's Guide!
Need the inside scoop on local long runs, short but steep, and most challenging sledding hills? Upper Arlington's Parks and Recreation put together their Upper Arlington Ultimate Sledding Hill Guide on page eight of the Winter 2024 Activity Guide.
Podcast Recommendation: Mercury Stardust, The Trans Handy Ma'am on Struggle Care
Tabi Berkey
Are you interested in DIY home repair, but you find the language in them to be overwhelming? With over 15 years of experience as a maintenance technician and performer, Mercury Stardust, the Trans Handy Ma'am, has found a way to make home repair accessible for all through their videos and recent book, Safe and Sound: A Renter-Friendly Guide to Home Repair. This common sense guide also includes Resource and Emotional Reset QR Codes, ensuring you have access to the information you need, and reminding us we all need mental health breaks while learning and working. As KC Davis put it during her recent Struggle Care interview with Stardust, "Who you are, and the fact that life can be hard - you don't have to check that at the door just to get access to some basic information."
Familiar with Stardust's work, I was happy to see this episode, talking about Stardust's "Gentle DIY" philosophy and how they got into the handyperson field, learning how to take care of their emotional and mental health as a prominent trans person on the internet, and why they show up authentically without pretense and perfectionism. "Their hope is to inspire a new generation of queer youth to live their truth boldly, for allies to protect the most vulnerable in the community, and to teach others life long skills for their homes in order to be able to provide themselves with a safe sanctuary in a tumultuous world."
Podcast Recommendation: Multigenerational Home Organizing
Tabi Berkey
Maybe you're temporarily living in a multigenerational home with family staying over the holidays. Maybe your home is always a multigenerational home, and you're looking for a few ideas on how to keep the peace. From caregiving in the "sandwich" generation, consciously merging households for support, or life circumstances - multigenerational living has more than doubled over the past five decades, according to a Pew Research Center study in 2022.
Lisa Woodruff from the Organize 365® Podcast explored the tips and tricks she uses for her own multigenerational home in episode 530: How to Organize a Multigenerational Home. Starting with the tips she learned as a child, remembering her own grandparents, when her grandmother passed away and aunt and uncle moved in with her grandpa, surrounded by her cousins. And her grandmother on the other side of the family, after remarrying, had five adult children and everyone would stay over the holiday season. Watching these multigenerational relationships in her own life as a child made the transition to living with her own adult daughter and grandson in the present a bit easier, and Woodruff urges listeners to consider three points when organizing for their multigenerational homes.
Create Zones: Everyone, no matter their age, need their own spaces for sleeping and for hobbies/working. Creating these zones ensures that everyone's spaces are able to be maintained by them, and keeps personal items out of communal items. Creating zones in communal areas for groceries, dishes, or kids' items could be a necessary step in this process.
Create Personal Spaces: Woodruff and her husband created personal spaces with physical zones, but also with how the spaces are talked about. For them, downstairs is their daughter and grandson's home, and they invite their grandchild over to "Lovie and Pop-pop's" upstairs, with the first floor containing communal areas. Or when Woodruff's great-grandfather moved in with her grandmother, she established two rooms, "grandpa's sleeping room" and "grandpa's den."
Establish Rules: Do you employ a cleaning service, or have an established cleaning day? Talk about it in a household meeting, making sure everyone knows when tidying needs to happen. Use household meetings to establish laundry schedules, cleanliness standards, and to keep the household calendar updated!
YouTube™ Recommendation
Partners in business and life, "Greg and Mitch are queer educators who mash together science, art, and pop culture to impact people and the planet. ASAP Science is a colorful intersection of art, science, and pop culture where anyone can learn, participate, and grow." Meeting at the University of Guelph, studying Biological Science, Mitch and Greg use their background to "push the boundary and evolve the field of science communication to inspire and empower those who have otherwise been disenfranchised by it," "fighting for diverse voices in STEM and climate activism," keeping subscribers updated on the latest scientific research that affect our daily lives.
Using colorful illustrations and humor, ASAP Science talks about Why your phone is making you sad, The Biggest Lies about Veganism and Carbon Capture, what happens when you quit sugar or salt, and a tiny device that could reforest the entire planet. Check out their playlists on Optimizing Your Brain, What's Happening To Our Planet?, Sex, Drugs, & Body, and more to stay up to date on the scientific findings in the science community that impact you, and check out their New York Times bestseller, AsapSCIENCE: Answers to the World's Weirdest Questions, Most Persistent Rumors, and Unexplained Phenomena.
LGBTQIA+ Resource
"Queer Liberation Library fights to build a vibrant, flourishing queer future by connecting LGBTQ+ people with literature, information, and resources that celebrate the unique and empowering diversity of our community."
In July, The Buckeye Flame reported on the Queer Liberation Library (QLL, pronounced "quill"), an "Ohio-based digital library focused solely on carrying queer-related eBooks and audiobooks." Available on Libby/OverDrive since launching on October 23, community members are able to browse the collection, or apply for a QLL Membership to borrow materials for free.
Check out their resource page for health and safety hotlines, physical queer information centers in the US, digital and online queer information resources, and other resources.
Company News
Organization Pending LLC is celebrating 2 years on January 7, 2024!
Starting January 1, receive 20% off your work session when you schedule a free virtual assessment through January 31: email organizationpendingllc@gmail.com, using code OPG BIRTHDAY2 in the subject line to claim your savings.
Already a client of Organization Pending? Text or email Tabi OPG BIRTHDAY2 to receive a discount on your next session in January or February!