FlyLady and the Dinner Diva — whose columns start running in Utah Valley Life today — believe in the same thing: there's no messing around when it comes to staying above the clutter and chaos.
Leanne Ely, a native Californian who now lives in North Carolina, is the Dinner Diva. The FlyLady is Marla Cilley, a former county commissioner in Transylvania County, North Carolina.
Both women have published books and have popular Web sites: www.flylady.net and www.savingdinner.com.
Ely has written the best-selling "Saving Dinner" and "Saving Dinner the Low Carb Way." "Saving Dinner for the Holidays" will be released in September, 2005.
Cilley also writes for Attitude magazine and has published "Sink Reflections."
The FlyLady tag comes from Cilley's love of fly-fishing. Her Web site, the cover of her book and her column sport a cartoon of the FlyLady persona that has wings — and a fly rod.
The Dinner Diva picked up her nickname from her colleagues. Her book "Saving Dinner" came about because "dinner is in danger of becoming lost and because readers tell me I've saved them time after time," said Ely.
The two met after a particularly hectic week that left Ely buried in household debris.
She asked Cilley to help her dig out, and Cilley turned to Ely for the answer to the age-old lament: "What should I fix for dinner?"
"We became good friends in five minutes," Ely said. "The FlyLady's husband was our circuit court judge, and I was doing a newspaper story on that angle. I got caught in a snowstorm at her home and ended up staying all day. She was warm, wonderful, even served us hot cocoa."
The personal and professional relationship grew from there. Ely started writing articles, and eventually the two realized they should collaborate. They currently have 250,000 registered online readers, or "FlyBabies," as Cilley calls them.
"I get the kitchen clean. She puts dinner on the table," said Cilley. "We're joined at the hip. It's just amazing. I'll call her with an idea and she's already been working on it."
"We totally think alike," Ely said. "We want to cut to the chase."
Ely mentioned a household cleaning tool the FlyLady promotes — an ostrich-feather duster — as an example of a no-nonsense device that is a real time saver. Because it has no oil in the feathers, it collects the dust quickly and then shakes it out with a brisk flip.
"It works. You don't have to dust just to dust again," Ely said.
Cilley's FlyLady career started with an appointment to the county commission in November 1998.
"I woke up in January 1999 and said, 'I've got to get organized!' " she said. "So I got out my card file, which is an 18-inch card file, and started to sort the cards into piles: things to do daily, things to do weekly, the morning pile, the afternoon pile, a pile for every room. I got so overwhelmed I couldn't do anything.
"So I decided to take one habit for the month of January. That was keeping my sink clean and shiny. That's all I had to do that month. But in doing that, the counter got cleaned, the dishes got done, the dishwasher got emptied because I had to have a place for the dishes so my sink could be clean and shiny.
"This shiny sink put the rest of the kitchen to shame. Pretty soon, the stove said, 'Clean me!' It was contagious," Cilley said.
Cilley started collecting and sharing the things she was learning.
In 2001 she started the FlyLady Web site, which promotes a no-nonsense approach to housekeeping while having fun.
"I'm real tough on people. No whining is allowed." She promotes taking 30 seconds while in a given room of the house to clean up along the way. "Wipe down the counter, swish and swipe the shower, make the bed as you slide out. No multi-tasking because we've all been trying to do two things at once for too long. It's just a 'do it now' attitude."
E-mail: haddoc@desnews.com