Sisters
Sleepover With My Best Friend
Sleepy Girl
Venice Someday
He sketches as a hobby, and challenged himself to do a sketch a day for a year while his wife did a photo challenge. He decided to do sketches of himself and his wife doing everyday things. The result is beautiful.
Filed under Curtis Wiklund Sketches for US, drawings
It’s TOO cool and rainy here this morning! It’s 41 degrees F., gray, breezy, and rainy.
Cliff and his guys from Safe Elite Transformations 479-849-0520 are due here at 10:00 to re-install a board that trims the ceiling on the porch for us. When they made a new ceiling for us and painted the porch not too long ago, Cliff told me that there wasn’t much to attach the trim to. He’ll try to figure out a way to remedy that today. I can’t say enough about him and his group. If you need work, remodeling, building, or repair done in our area, you won’t find a better, more honest or hardworking company.
I will continue my repainting of the back of Wonder Wart-Hog, the mailbox decoration that was damaged when it was up on the mailbox for the first time. Someone really did a number on the back of it. It has been sprayed with ‘something’ that wouldn’t come off. I put a first coat on the green and white parts of the painting yesterday. When Cliff and his guys finish, if it’s not pouring, I’ll go out to the shop and see if I can get the second coat on. I’m hoping I can repair the damage. I’m disappointed that someone would do this. We have been putting the decorations up on the mailbox for years and years now without a problem. I hope we don’t have to stop.
CoolFunnyQuotes.com
One Green Planet
I’ve been upstairs in our master bathroom most of the afternoon. I have filled half a leaf bag with things I’m throwing away. I have things I can donate to others. I have gone through ONE of the floor-to-ceiling shelves, pulling everything out and going through, deciding what needs to be done. I have cleaned the shelves and put things back. I have taken things downstairs to be thrown away. A bag of things is by my office chair to be added to the donation list. Other things have been moved elsewhere.
My husband won’t be able to tell I’ve been upstairs or done anything. It will probably take me through the weekend to finish going through the second set of floor-to-ceiling shelves, medicine cabinet, and then clean the bathroom. THEN my husband will mainly notice that our counter top looks neater and that the rugs have been vacuumed.
I’m lucky that he DOESN’T notice a lot of things. Lots of people would go crazy with all the STUFF we have, or the fact that I’m such a lousy housekeeper.
Having him finally notice a difference when I’ve been cleaning for several days is good enough. :0)
Reader’s Digest
We have several errands this morning, and more this afternoon, so I might not get ANYTHING else done today.
In about an hour, we’ll leave 4 leaf bags of trash at the bottom of our driveway for pickup. (I made my goal of finding 2 extra bags of things that SHOULD have been thrown away a long time ago. I’m hoping to continue this each week.) We will also get our mail.
We have been experiencing serial failures of our fluorescent light fixtures this year. We have changed out the ballast transformers on many of them. Now we are replacing the switches that control them. We will pick up those at Yeagers. We will stop at our co-op to see if they have lettuce plants. (I’m hoping to pull out the spent tomato plants in the long brick planter by the house and put in lettuce plants.) Then we will stop and check the new Real Food store on the way home, hoping to find some frozen meals to buy and try.) Later, we’ll go back for my husband’s hair cut and a quick trip to the clinic for a shot for him.
I got lazy yesterday and didn’t do anything outside. This afternoon I’m planning to mix up EIGHT bug killer and will hose down my raised bed, square foot garden planters before I even THINK about trying to harvest the rest of our onions. I am finally healed up from the attack of the fire ants that I discovered living among my onions, so I’m ready to wage war. If I’m successful on getting the lettuce plants, I’ll take some pics for you.
I finally got an email from Amazon Handmade, confirming that I have been accepted to list my work there, and giving me some directions on how to get to a place I can register. When I have a calm space of time, I’ll try to follow them. Fingers crossed!
I hope you had an enjoyable Labor Day and that you make today a great day, too.
PROJECT # 1
Amber’s feeding station is a pretty well-designed heavy rubber/plastic? thing that is in two parts – the upper part that holds the water and food bowls, and the lower tray part. Amber is creative, though, and immediately decided that she would take the upper part (the whole thing – full of water and food) away to ‘somewhere else.’ This led to my husband screwing it into the wall.
This was really gross, with dog hair, white water dental hygiene additive residue, dog slobber, etc. I was able to get the tray out from under the screwed-in top part and scrubbed it in the kitchen sink. I tried to unscrew the top part, but the screw wasn’t in straight and I was afraid I would mess up the whole thing trying to get it out. I just brought all the cleaning stuff to the station and did the best I could.
It isn’t perfect, but at least I’m not cringing when I walk past – several times a day – now.
PROJECT # 2
My kitchen is a busy place in our house. I try to clean as I go, but it gets to the point where I need to scrub the stove, scrub the sink, move everything off the counters, etc. Today was the day.
The only problem with all this is that now I don’t want to mess it up! :0)
Filed under Housekeeping - Maintenance, I'm a slob, Lewis projects
We call this the “Go Out Table” because we stage things we need to take with us for errands, etc. It also houses my husband’s diabetic supplies. Under it is a bin with stuff going one way or the other from the booth in town I rent with my friend.
As I’m embarrassed to show you, it becomes a catch-all for a lot of other ‘stuff,’ to the point the stacks may decide to topple and slide off any minute.
This was today’s project.
(I had to slip my work on it in because my husband’s project was in the basement and he wanted my help there, too. )
My husband’s question was, “Where did everything GO?”
Now we can pick something up when we leave the house without an avalanche. :0)
I have this nice little desk in our kitchen. The shelves above are a combination medicine and first aid supplies area. All too often it becomes a catch-all area, piled up with various things. Today’s project was to clear off the desk, go through the things on the shelves, look for expired meds, and reorganize.
Things are more organized now and much cleaner. :0)
I love my recliner in the living room. Beside it, I have a wealth of things I’m either using all the time – or PLAN to use – as I sit. And that’s the problem – WAAAY too much stuff on the table. It gets to the point where the piles start falling. This is yet another example of why I have to admit I’m a slob.
Trying to clear this off, clean the table, and make sense of what was left was today’s project.
It took awhile, and many trips to either relocate or throw away a lot of things, but here is the result. My husband exclaimed, “What is that? Is that a table?” And yet he lives.
It is not perfect, but it’s MUCH better than it was! :0)
I’ve been tackling my part of our home office a bit at a time.
I FINALLY got our important records and monthly bookkeeping caught up yesterday. Today I tackled the rest of the filing, my desk, and my shelves.
A nice thing happened as a result of this, I started feeling the wish to get rid of some stuff!
I’m going to declare victory on projects for the day, since I FINALLY have my work area reasonably organized and clean, and I will go do my yoga session for the day.
But, I’m pleased that the urge to purge is beginning to sprout. I’ll ‘water’ it and see if I can get it to sprout, starting tomorrow.
My two feisty gold fish have a new lease on life since my husband pitched in and helped me clean the aquarium out today. I usually do this alone, but my husband is feeling sorry for me since I caught my toe on the corner of our bed and am limping around.
Together we can do the whole job from start to finish in half an hour.
The fish don’t complain when the water needs to be changed, and they don’t praise us when the water is squeaky clean, but I KNOW they appreciate having new decorations, as they check everything out thoroughly each time we change the water.
They both got in the corner of the tank, wriggled their bodies and blew bubbles at me until I fed them again – even though I fed them as usual this morning.
Happy, feisty fish are a lot of fun to have in a family.
Filed under Family, Housekeeping - Maintenance
“Here’s lookin’ at YOU, kid.”
My fish don’t say much. They don’t do tricks. I need to clean their aquarium out once a week, even with the two filters I’m running now. But they DO gather in the corner when they see me coming, wriggling their little bodies and blowing bubbles at me, hoping I’ll drop flakes in their tank.
I lost one recently. :O( He had the balance problem I read about. I was sad to lose him, but I’ve learned a lesson that will help the other two – not to sprinkle the flakes on the surface of the water. An article I read said to put the flakes in some water from the tank and saturate them completely before adding the water and food to the tank. This is supposed to avoid the development of the balance problem due to gulping in air along with the flakes.
I’ve cleaned out the tank so much now that it is almost down to a science. I can empty it, change out or clean everything, and have the fish back swimming in about half an hour.
Filed under Family, Housekeeping - Maintenance
I told you that two of the 14 brick planters we have built up on top of our ridge line collapsed suddenly. We knocked the rest of the bricks down and tried to prepare ourselves to rebuild them.
We found that 25 years or so makes a huge difference in our stamina and ability to work in the heat. We ended up mixing one bag of mortar each day, laying one layer of bricks with it, then cleaning up for the day. We did this for five days, finally completely the first of the two planters. We put the potting soil we had saved back into the planter. My husband recently redid the plastic PVC pipe irrigation piece for the first planter, so technically it’s ready to plant. With a heat index of 105-110+ degrees, we have ignored the problem.
I’ve been trying to find a real brick layer to rebuild the planters. We had the bricks and the mortar, so it was their time, labor, and expertise we were paying for. The only man who came to give us an estimate knocked our socks off with how much he would charge for the two planters. We told him, ‘no thank you,’ and built the first one ourselves.
As you can see, it looks pretty awful. It DOES hold the potting soil. The picture doesn’t show the new irrigation piece, but it’s ready for planting now.
This is the second planter. We have been mowing and weed whacking around this the whole spring and summer, hoping to find a brick layer.
FINALLY, yesterday a wonderful man named Jose Aguirre came up and looked at things. He rejected the mortar we had bought, both the sand version and the one with small pebbles, and gave us an estimate. I was overjoyed that it was reasonable, AND we can do it!!!!
He will come out tomorrow at 8 in the morning to do the job!
I can’t tell you how relieved I am that my husband and I don’t have to do it. I was trying to gear up for it mentally, thinking that when we start getting up at 6am each morning (trying to adapt for the school year with Alessandro, our 16-year-old soccer playing student from Italy comes to live with us and go to school this year, starting August 6th) – that we could get right out and lay one row of bricks each day while the temperature was still in the 80’s.
If our wonderful luck holds, tomorrow we will have a newly rebuilt, good-looking planter to enjoy!
I’ll take pics. :0)
Filed under Challenges, Changes, Gardening, Housekeeping - Maintenance
The brick-lined rectangular slab on the right used to be a planter. We built it several years ago, along with 13 others, and all of a sudden it wasn’t happy, its sides bowing out a bit. One other planter just like it at the opposite end of the house needs to come down, too.
We weren’t planning to do anything about this until the spring. :0(
My husband decided he would dig out one of the hydrangea bushes in it, and the whole front of the planter collapsed, forcing us to get things to a reasonable point before our winter got serious. We lucked out, getting a few days of spring-like weather, so we knocked down the other bricks, hauled them to behind the well house where we stacked them up, dug out the potting soil and put it on the tarp to the left of the photo. We spent part of several days demolishing the planter. We’re a bit long-in-the-tooth now and sledge-hammering, shoveling, and hauling bricks tires us out pretty quickly.
We got to the bottom layer of bricks, but no matter what we used, they wouldn’t budge. This means we’ll do the brick laying to rebuild the planter ourselves, since no pro would touch it. We wrapped up the potting soil in the tarp, got another one to put on the top and held it down with bricks – to save as much of the potting soil as we can. Just in time, since the rains came and now we have the smallest rectangular ‘lake’ in the world – the bricks holding the water in on top of the concrete slab.
We bought replacement bricks several months back, so when the weather is cooperative and warm enough for the mortar to set well, we’ll try to demolish the other wounded planter and then get busy with the rebuilding. Since we’re now seriously heading into winter, this will probably be it on the planter project until the spring.
Filed under Gardening, Housekeeping - Maintenance, Lewis projects
Yale Medicine
We have carpet cleaning people coming at 1:30 today to clean the carpet in our living room, office, and foyer on the first floor.
I’ve been moving the small stuff, but my husband insists he doesn’t want them to move anything except our chairs, as far as furniture is concerned.
Even with all the purging I’ve been doing over the past year, I’m amazed at how much STUFF we have on the floors!
I’m almost ready for them now. I vacuumed yesterday, but I know they’ll find a huge amount of dust, hair balls, and maybe even pencils, pens, cat toys, etc. under the heavy chairs. I’m hoping that they have really powerful vacuum cleaners when they come.
I chose a company called ChemDry because they don’t use nearly as much water. Their chemicals are safe for kids and pets (our two doggies and two cats will thank them for that. Our four fish are up on the divider between the kitchen and the dining area, so they don’t say much one way or the other.) The carpet is supposed to be dry in 2 hours.
In the office, things are pretty unmovable, so we’ll just ask them to clean the areas that they can get to, moving only our chairs. We have huge metal file cabinets, my old desk, shelving, roll-around carpet pads, etc. If they can just make the areas they can get to cleaner, we’ll be happy.
The foyer is fairly clear of stuff. We’ll put the dogs out on the back porch. I’ve already moved their huge bed out there (along with a gazillion little things that were on the floors). My husband and I will probably stay in the dining area, reading books, while they work.
I feel the same way today that I do when someone replaces an appliance, and years worth of YUCK are under and behind them. I feel SURE that every other housekeeper in the world gets under and behind everything with a toothbrush, leaving the areas pristine. I’m a slob, finding all kinds of things I would rather do than clean house.
I’m still trying to get up into my art room and play, but I tend to zone out when I’m up there, so it won’t be this afternoon.
All appendages – plus my eyes – are crossed that – once they get over how dirty our carpet is – they will be able to do a good job for us.
Filed under Housekeeping - Maintenance, I'm a slob
Yesterday I cleaned out four more kitchen drawers.
We have always had what we call a ‘junk drawer’ in any kitchen we have. It’s the place we put nails, screws, twist-ties, tools, and other odds-and-ends We might need.
The problem with living in a nice home for over 30 years is that – unless one is a good housekeeper, which I’m NOT –
ONE junk drawer morphs into FOUR!
(The one we had set up got too full, so my husband moved some stuff out of the drawer next to it and put the new junk in there. And then, the next, and the next….)
Now we have FOUR junk drawers in the kitchen –
shutterstock.com
Drawer 1 – this is the ‘original’ junk drawer
Drawer 2
Drawer 3
Drawer 4
I know. We’re slobs. But we ARE trying to do better.
Today I will take EVERYTHING out. I’ll pitch a lot of things, relocate other things that shouldn’t have been there in the first place, and then try to organize what we’re keeping.
I’ll try to keep it to TWO junk drawers.
Junk drawers will never be ‘neat,’ but we are wasting lots of valuable space.
Original copyrighted work by Betty Ming Liu
(These aren’t MY kitchen drawers, but I wanted to give you a feel for what I’m dealing with.)
_________________
I’ve been through my kitchen and pantry once last year and made a lot of progress. Two drawers in our kitchen island, in particular, were jammed full of ‘stuff.’
I pulled everything out. I washed out the drawers and lined them with rubber sheet liners so things wouldn’t slide around in the drawers.
There were things in the drawers I honestly had no idea what their purpose was! I like having more than one of something, but enough is enough as far as duplicates.
I filled a large leaf bag with stuff from the two drawers, plus some things on my counters, plus things from a decorative wooden bar my husband mounted over the island where we have things hanging.
We took a donation to the Disabled American Veterans Thrift Store yesterday – two leaf bags of Christmas decorations, a two-piece 8-foot-tall fake Christmas tree and stand, and the leaf bag full of kitchen stuff.
Here are the two drawers after the purge –
Drawer 1
Drawer 2
Today I’ll do more in the kitchen purge, but I feel good to have a start on Phase II of getting rid of ‘stuff’ from our over 30-year-old home!
I have been through my kitchen and pantry once in the past year, after 30-plus years of living in our home on top of a ridge line in Greenwood, Arkansas.
Last year I promised myself I would start somewhere – anywhere – and work my way through our home, taking everything out of a drawer, a shelf, a closet, and keeping what I wanted, giving away what I thought others might use or enjoy, and pitching the rest. I made it through everything with the exception of our garage and our shop – areas my husband protects with his life. He doesn’t actually stand at the doors and guard, but he does it verbally.
Now I’m in Phase II of the big clean-out.
Today’s project is going through the drawers in the kitchen. Too many of them are full of ‘stuff,’ – gadgets that haven’t been used, too many duplicates, etc. Too many ‘junk’ drawers!
I’m going to see how much I can accomplish this afternoon. I have a donation ready for us to take to the Veterans Thrift Store in Fort Smith tomorrow, but I might be able to fill another large leaf bag before then that I can add to the list and we can take at the same time.
I hope that you are starting 2019 with energy. I’m trying to make each day count.
We have about half of our first floor done in tiles – walk-in pantry, kitchen, dining area, utility room, and two half-baths. I have been working on this project all day and am about half finished.
I scrubbed all the counters, polished tables, cleaned window sills, harvested lettuce, put out a few Christmas decorations, etc.
This is the kitchen. I’ve scrubbed everything up top now, and the stove parts are in the dishwasher.
This is looking from the kitchen out toward the dining area. (You can see my lettuce plants in the background.)
These are a few of our Christmas decorations on the divider between the dining area and the kitchen.
This is the dining area and my moved-inside-veggie garden. I still have lettuce and some celery plants.
The next step in today’s project is to vacuum all the tile and then mop.
I’ll try to take pics of more Christmas decorations when the light changes.
I hope you’re having a good day, too.
I am almost finished with the DVD project. These are the remaining DVDs that are my personal collection. These are the ones I want to keep, regardless of whether they are on the new, fancy movie storage thingie my husband got, and that we are enjoying now via Roku. Roku has made noises about not offering the access port after the first of the year. We’re not sure if this means they won’t offer it to new members or are doing away with it altogether. We’re hoping that since we have it now – this change won’t affect us. Since we have been on the wrong side of percentages in the past, I’ve elected to protect MY group by keeping the physical DVDs.
Now we have four empty shelves on the left side of our TV,
and at least 3 on the right side. It’s nice to have the freedom to rearrange our ‘stuff’ now. :0)
Meanwhile, I THINK I can finish going through the remaining DVDs in the office today, either listing them on Amazon (we’ve sold 7 so far) or bagging them up for a donation to our local library for their next fundraiser.
If all goes as planned, we’ll be making donations to the Veterans Thrift Store in Fort Smith, and the library in Greenwood tomorrow.
After Phase 2 of my decluttering/reorganization efforts, I now have a whole column of cubbies free.
I put three pairs of boots on the shelf above my tops and scarves, but the whole shelf on the other side (not pictured) is empty, as well.
After getting into my ruthless mode, I am donating 12 pairs of shoes to the Veterans Thrift store. I still have more shoes than any two feet can wear, but – HEY – I’m worth it!
Phase 3 of this effort will be putting things ON the shelves above my clothes and the empty cubbies, but that is a low priority thing.
Pesquisa Google Pinterest
Actually, yesterday was the biggest push on this. My closet is as organized now as it ever gets – cool and cold weather clothes in there now. I filled a whole leaf trash bag with clothes that were TOO LARGE yesterday – my reward for the day. I’ve spent SO many years moving too-small clothes back and forth, ignoring the problem. The past couple of years I’ve only moved the ones I had SOME chance of getting into by the NEXT season, or things I really loved that I just couldn’t face giving away. As I told you yesterday, I’m still grinning that a deep purple sweater with leather front decorated with leather flowers finally FITS!
The remainder of the closet project will be done today, since it’s STILL raining and too cool outside for comfort (45 degrees F.) I moved the warm/hot weather clothes into the guest room closet. I’ll get them arranged a bit better, with room for our son to hang stuff up when he visits (sometime this winter!) And THAT will finish the closet project.
I have now finished going through my closet with my hot weather clothes, all my shoes, purses, scarves, etc. For me, this is good. Before, my shoes were all over the floor, for example. To the right of the shelves you can see my scarves and a hint of my purses.
My shoes are actually in the shelves for shoes now!
Casual tops are on the top. Dressier (as far as I GET dressier) on the bottom.)
I’ve tried everything on and have brought a LOT of stuff downstairs and dumped it in the foyer corner until I start listing and bagging things for donation to the Veterans Thrift Store in Fort Smith. THAT’S for another day, though.
I’m going to go put my feet up and dive into another book. :0)
coolanimalspics.blogspot.com
Yesterday we had a pop-up shower in the afternoon. Apparently, this energized my husband because the rest of the afternoon into the evening was filled with outside work.
How is it that the person you love most in the world is also the person you consider killing from time to time?
I was hostile, but he was standing there, looking SMUG, saying, “I told you it wouldn’t be a problem.” This was only the beginning, since we needed to cut the whole tree up and drag it to our growing wood pile that we’ll burn ‘sometime when it’s safer.’ It took us another two hours for my husband to chain saw the tree into pieces and me to drag all the pieces and heave them onto the pile.
We limped back to the house, shed our yucky clothes directly into the washing machine and took showers. It took me a bottle of water, shower, and resting for about an hour before I felt human again.
Needless to say, the bird bath project remains unfinished. I do have plans to use some of the decorative stuff I took out of the bird bath in the aquarium next cleaning. I’ll enlist my husband’s help when we get back from the Breakfast Bunch to help me with the hose and the potting soil for the planter. I hope to plant some pretty flowers in it today.
And GUESS WHAT! – we have MORE rain in the forecast for this afternoon and evening…
Filed under Housekeeping - Maintenance, Lewis projects
National Treasure Film Set-Wikipedia
Somehow the ancient, old, chaotic feel of this photo reminds me of my art room right now. I’ve pretty much finished gathering things for donation, though I’ve started another bag. I’m down to the nitty-gritty of going through things carefully, getting ruthless about whether I actually plan to USE whatever it is, and then deciding its fate.
This is harder because I’m finding lots of things, like pictures torn from magazines, that get my juices flowing. I’ve decided to pare these down to about 1/4 or less of what I currently have. I’ll make files of what I keep so that I might actually be able to find them later.
I’m finding ‘treasures’ though – things I’ve had for years that have been buried. I’m loving this – but the finding of wonderful things makes it harder to make significant progress on my efforts to purge/give away/throw away/clean and reorganize.
I did finally uncover a chair, so I can sit in the middle of the chaos and go through things. I put in two sessions yesterday and will do at least that much today. I’m hoping to be able to share pics with you soon.
In the meantime, who knows what treasures I’ll find today!
creativeartworksblog 