Household

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Cleaning House

For the third day this week, I’m scrubbing floors, disinfecting toilets, and de-fuzzing ceiling fans. Sound like fun? You bet.

It’s a good thing that company’s coming, or this house would never get cleaned. I can think of a zillion other things I’d rather do—like be stuck in traffic, or yank out the spiny thistles threatening my garden—without gloves. (Though it’s interesting that I’m using the housework to avoid balancing the checkbook.)

Three days to clean one house sounds a bit extreme. I can do enough to make things look nice in a few hours—dust, vacuum, swish a brush around a toilet—and that’s what I usually do. And that’s the problem. All the surface stuff looks clean and shiny. The places where guests usually go is neat and clutter-free. Just don’t open the closet.

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Mnmlist

My daughter was all excited about a promotional give-away. Seems you can register online at the HGTV website to win a “green” (as in “environmentally friendly”) house, car, and $100K. She had already entered and was urging me to do so too.

I have to admit, my first thought was “Wow, we could really use $100K!” But that was quickly followed by a bunch of other considerations. We’d have to sell the house. Houses are not selling well right now; it could take months or even years. Most of the money would go to cover taxes on the whole deal. The vehicle was nice, but not one we’d normally choose for ourselves. Even if we beat the odds and won (a very remote possibility!), it would create a ton of work!

As I pointed all this out to our eager daughter, I explained that I was choosing not to enter the contest. We just didn’t have the time or energy we’d need to deal with the prize.

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More Blessings… (I think)

Last week I wrote about the many ways God was gracious to us on our California adventure. Even through I wrote more than usual, there was no way to fit everything in. It was truly a trip to remember, and I’m very, very thankful.

Eventually you have to come home. We finally walked through the door at midnight, Tuesday night. We dragged our bags up the stairs, ran through a quick shower, and crawled into our own bed. Coming home can be pretty nice.

It wasn’t until morning that we discovered God’s next “blessing”—the kind of blessing you have to examine closely before you see the good part.

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There’s a Mouse in the House!

 

Eew! What was that horrible smell? Even with chronic congestion associated with my being allergic to nearly everything, I could tell something had died. Following my nose, I wandered downstairs, then into the corner of the basement with the seldom-used utility sink. As I got closer, I realized the deep sink was completely full of dirty water  that lapped at the faucet and threatened to spill over the counter and onto the floor. I hastily ran upstairs to alert my handyman husband.

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In Praise of Cluelessness

I am somewhat “culturally challenged”—or, as my kids might put it, totally clueless—and it’s my own fault.

The problem, if you want to call it that, is that I have disengaged from much of popular culture. I don’t watch much TV. I don’t see many movies. We ended our newspaper delivery after the paper shrank to a few pages of information I can easily find online. The only magazine I get now is “Outdoor Photographer,” although I used to subscribe to a couple more. Ever since a generous friend gave me an iPod, I have listened to that instead of the radio. I stay current with the topics I choose—enough politics to vote intelligently, national and international headlines, local happenings, environmental issues, the state of the Church—through my iGoogle page… and I don’t have to read anything I don’t want to.

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Look What’s Coming

January is a time for new beginnings. From making (and breaking) resolutions, to making new plans and starting new projects, January brings the hope that whatever happened last year, this year can be different.

While there is a certain amount of list-making at the end of the year—everything from “The 10 Best Android Games of 2010” to “The Worst Fashion Trends of the Year”—we usually forget all that come January 1. Especially in our culture, what’s past is past, and what’s important lies ahead. Overall, I think that’s a good thing.

As my history teachers liked to remind me, studying the past can provide valuable lessons. Yet, there is a difference between learning from the past and wallowing in it. Yes, someone may have offended us. Our cause might have lost an election—or a battle, or even the war. (I get a mental image of the civil war reenactment in “Sweet Home Alabama”—an actual, if somewhat dated, cultural reference!) We might have had a bad childhood, and bad marriage, or a bad year at school. It’s good to learn from mistakes, be them ours or someone else’s.

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Make a Christmas Tree Dimmer Switch

med bright tree 5596-2After years of debate, dead needles, and adamant kids (“It has to be real or it’s not Christmas!”), we finally broke down and bought an artificial tree. The cost of a fresh fir has gotten out of hand (and they sure didn’t last very long in our dry climate), plus our kids and their husbands had their own places, and could make their own fake-or-fresh decisions.

We looked long and hard to find a tree that looked as real as possible, and I’m happy to say that it fools many people. Even better, it came with the lights already integrated into the branches. No more tangled strings of lights, with all the reds in a clump and whole sections of tree dark. No sirree, things would be easy now. Continue reading →

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Creating Great Passwords

My sister-in-law’s online email account was hacked recently, and now everyone on her mailing list is getting vast quantities of incredibly annoying spam. She’s not the only one—apparently some [choose your own derogatory adjective] [choose your own insulting noun] decided that we all needed more useless email. (Does anyone actually buy from spam emails?)

In any case, it turned out that her password was too easy to figure out, at least for a computer with a lot of time on its “hands.” This led to a discussion about how to pick a good password. Here is what my very knowledgeable husband had to say:

  • A GOOD password is easy to remember, hard to guess
  • Change it regularly, but not so often that you can’t remember all the passwords you need to know (which usually means both current and recent ones)
  • Never write it down. If you have to write it, it’s either too complicated to remember or you have too many passwords to remember.

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Paddle Your Way to the Best Travel Prices

Summertime is vacation time. Perhaps you want to go to the beach. Or maybe you’re committed to visiting that aunt and uncle who always pinched your cheek as a kid. Maybe you have a week off and just want to get away, anywhere, preferably cheap and romantic.

Pete and I have long been using an extremely helpful website to help us get the most for our travel dollars. Yet, as I’ve talked to friends and relatives, I’ve realized that no one seems to have ever heard of it. Don’t start with the airline, rental car, or hotel website. Don’t even bother with Expedia, Orbitz, Priceline, Cheaptickets, or the like. Rather, combine your searches at one site: www.Kayak.com.

The beauty of Kayak.com is that they search all those cheap sites mentioned above, and a whole lot more. They do the comparisons so you don’t have to bother. Then they summarize the results in an easy-to-read chart.

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Snake Oil Additives

Each car you own is a huge investment, one of the biggest you’ll ever make. It stands to reason that you’ll want to take proper care of it, to make sure it lasts as long as possible. Yet, most of us don’t know all that much about proper automobile maintenance. (I’m grateful for a wonderful son-in-law who is an expert in these things.) There are plenty of companies who are eager to take advantage of our ignorance.

Ads for oil additives target our concerns about engine longevity. By claiming to reduce friction, add a protective coating to the metal, and/or prevent the build-up of engine deposits, and they supposedly protect damage incurred by “cold starting” your car, as well as increase gas mileage and horsepower. Wow, that sounds great!

So, should you be buying those cans of Slick 50, STP, and Tufoil? Do they actually do what they claim to do, or are they a waste of money? Worse, can they damage your engine?

I found a very helpful article that answers these questions. While I certainly can’t recommend everything* on this website, in this case, I think the author is spot on.

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* Sadly, author Robert T. Carroll denies the existence of God and clearly holds His followers in disdain.