Everyone has been talking about bedbugs the past week or two. All the news outlets are running articles, the morning shows are interviewing people, and the Internet is full of search results about how to get rid of these pests.
Evidently it is very hard to get rid of bedbugs from not only your bed but also any upholstered furniture you have, and even clothing and coats. Today I read a warning about buying bedding or furniture from flea markets, as items from those places have a high likelihood of bringing bedbugs into your home.
This won’t work for bed and large pieces of furniture, but if you happen to have any clothing, stuffed animals, or coats that show signs of a bedbug infestation, you can put that item into a large ziploc bag, and then place the bag into the freezer for 3-4 days. That will kill both any bedbugs and their eggs, as they cannot survive being frozen.
I’m always looking for smart storage ideas. I’m a pack-rat, and I admit that I have a hard time throwing things away. But often times the things that I want to hang onto have no real value other than sentimental. And that is a real problem, because I’m a Virgo, and I need to be practical in everything that I do.
And I suspect that no matter how large a house I had, I would still fill every nook and cranny up with more and more “stuff.” I just hope that I don’t end up on some reality television intervention show like “hoarders!”
Having said that, I’ve been thinking about using some glass racks in my kitchen to help me to better utilize my kitchen storage space. I’m thinking that I could put a stemware rack on the underside of one of my cabinet shelves and then store platters underneath the glasses. And I’d like to get a wine glass rack to organize all of my wine glasses. It seems that too often I am pushing them around in the cabinet to find something else, and then one of them falls out and breaks. Then I end up with a bunch of mis-matched glasses, which annoys me to no end! After all, I am a Virgo!
I spent well over an hour cleaning out my refrigerator this morning. A jar of pickles managed to tip over some time ago and has been leaking, the trickle down effect, big time. So I started just trying to clean up that mess and ended up cleaning the whole darn thing. Don’t get me wrong, it was in need of a full pledged cleaning, it’s just that first thing on a Sunday morning it’s the perfect time for me to tackle something like that.
Sometimes I get in the mood for a good healthy salad. A good bountiful salad can make for a great meal. Right now people’s gardens are producing and folks are giving away produce like crazy, which is awesome for folks like me that don’t have a garden but enjoy the harvesting of others.
I like the spray salad dressing that they have available. You can really control the amount of the dressing this way. There is nothing worse that putting way too much dressing on your salad and then it becomes a soggy mess. A nice find spray is perfect!
Have you ever dreamed of having the perfect fantasy kitchen? I do, all of the time! I’d love to have custom made cabinets with customized kitchen spice racks in it. I love the spice racks that hide inside cabinets that swing out to give up the goodies that are hiding deep inside. I think that they are just about the most clever spice rack ever designed!
In my current kitchen, there are cabinets on all of the walls so there is no way that I could have a wall spice rack in my kitchen; I’d have to go with the kind that mount on pantry doors or hide inside drawers. Right now I have a lazy susan inside my pantry that holds most of my spices. I hate to admit that it is overflowing a little bit.
In my fantasy kitchen, I’d have at least three times the room size, and two food prep areas. I’d have hanging pot racks and a double oven in a wall. I’d have two kitchen sinks, and one of those microwave ovens that keep your food refrigerated until it is time to cook it, and then automatically cooks it. If I had one of those, I’d think I’d died and gone to heaven!
All of my life I’ve been adamant about keeping my doors locked. Both at home and in my car. I used to keep my bedroom door locked when I was growing up to keep my siblings from going in there to steal things from me. Fortunately my parents gave me a locking door knob after I caught several of my siblings stealing from my piggy bank!
My concern for my own safety increased when I became a young adult and was attacked and almost raped in my own apartment! I started taking karate classes and tried to get my apartment’s management to look into the installation of a REAL security system; not just a chain lock on the apartment doors! Back in those days, however, security systems were unheard of for individual apartments! So I ended up persuading the manager to give me an exception to the “no pets” rule and buy a dog for protection.
Ever since then I’ve been a strong advocate for having a dog or two in the house for security. I think a barking dog will scare off a burglar faster than any alarm system will! But then again, you don’t have to walk and feed and groom and scoop up after an alarm system, do you?
Recently I’ve been reading a lot of articles that give tips on how to stay safer at home. I like the one about using motion detection lights around the perimeter of the house. I also like the one about using timers to turn lights on and off at various times through the house.
I hate getting a tick on me. I have gotten three ticks on me so far this year and I’m hating life. It has been months since I removed the last one and the darn thing still itches like crazy and I’m tired of scratching it and looking like a pervert when doing it, since it is at the top of my left thigh! At least I got the bugger off quickly. I read on the Internet a few years back to put liquid soap on a cotton ball and place it on the tick, so I did and the little bugger came right off.
I’m so proud of my mother, since my father passed she seems to be holding up so very well, she is, and always has been my hero. Not too many daughters can say that about their mother. I do worry about her each and every day. I’m sure that she will be with us for a long time, but she certainly isn’t a “spring chicken” if you know what I mean. I try and get over to her place as often as I can and help her out around the place. It is a lot for her to keep up with all by herself and all and my other sisters do what they can as well.
We are currently trying to encourage her to purchase a new address plaque for the front porch. The one that is there now is so old and faded that we are concerned that if she needed any type of emergency assistance that they wouldn’t be able to read it and it could delay any type of help that they could offer her. We have all heard how important it is to have your address plaques and numbers in good order for just this type of reason. And I’m sure that the pizza delivery people would like to be able to read the address sign as well it is hard to read, especially at night and lord knows that my mother likes her pizza nice and hot upon delivery, me too. Putting it into the microwave to re heat it is just nasty.
I think that I will go online and start looking at home address plaques and see if I can come up with some suggestions to show her and possibly get the ball rolling that way. I love my mother and want to keep her around for as long as possible and I hope she knows that.
I’ve always loved flowers. I’d much rather tend a flower garden than a vegetable garden. I think that stems back to many years ago when I would plant a vegetable garden and then have to go visit out-of-town relatives the exact same week that the vegetables were ready to harvest! Talk about a waste of time and energy! So it didn’t take too long for me to figure out that I’m better off just buying my vegetables and just grow flowers at home.
I especially love the look of window flower boxes on a house. I think that having window boxes full of cascading flowers, like petunias, add a beautiful cottage feel to a house. I can remember when I lived in New England there was a barber shop near where I worked that always had the entire front of the building covered with beautiful cascading petunias! Try as I hard as I could, I could never get a window box as beautiful as that barber shop’s boxes! I wish I knew their secret!
Ever since I can remember, I’ve been interested in conservation. Not just conserving energy, but conserving wildlife, and conserving the environment. I can remember going on field trips while in elementary school to places that taught the importance of conservation, and I was very impressed by it all. That’s one reason why I’ve become interested in rain harvesting as a way to conserve water.
I think that if enough people used a rain water barrel to collect rain and use it to water their gardens, that we would not have as many drought-related water restriction days during the summer. I’ve seen quite a few really nice rain barrels on the market lately; some just look like fancy planters and actually make the outside of the house look nice! So you can conserve water and look good doing it too!
I can remember when we first moved here from New England, that my hubby asked me to run the Wal-Mart to buy a couple of tarps for him to use. The ones we had brought with us from New England were finally starting to wear out and he wanted to put a fresh tarp over his newly acquired jet ski. Off I trotted, (or should I say drove) to the nearest Wal-Mart to buy him one. I was so shocked when I got there because I could not find one anywhere in the store!
Finally I asked one of the Wal-Mart employees where I could find some, and they suggested that I try the Tractor Supply Store. I had never been to one of them before; we didn’t have any in New England. But it was there that I found a nice selection of blue tarps to buy. Since that time, I’ve found other places to buy them, but I have to admit that my faith in the giant retailer to have everything we needed has been badly shaken! Now Wal-Mart is not the first place I turn to when I need to buy something!
Every few days, when I’m backing the car up in the driveway from its parking space, preparing to turn it around so I can drive down the long driveway without having to drive in reverse the whole time, my eyes catch a glimpse of the newest collection of planters that seem to be appearing from nowhere in front of the house.
I would have to say that my hubby has been very busy lately, quietly setting up some decorative planters alongside the corner of the house. Today I noticed a new outdoor planter hanging from a shepard’s hook that he had filled with hens and chicks. I’ve always liked hens and chicks but I never had good luck with them. My hubby, on the other hand, has a magic touch with them. I don’t know if I pay too much attention to them, or not enough. I suspect that I over water them.
I have to give my hubby a lot of credit for trying to make the place look nice.
Guest blog written by Darcy Kindle
The basement was getting wet every time there was a lot of rain. The water would leak through the cracked cement of the part of the driveway nearest the garage door. The driveway was angled which didn’t help. The drainage hole could not handle the amount of water and when filled it ran over the hole, through the garage into the playroom and through the floor to the sub basement.
It was an expensive but good job that was finally accomplished. The French Drain was put in and it has never leaked since. It was a couple days work on the part of sears home pro improvement. The driveway had to be broken and the pipe from above had to be put in and then down to the basement. The perimeter of the basement floor had to be broken as part of the construction of the French Drain.
It is a pleasure not having to check downstairs every rain and especially during the summer and fall downpours. As a way of explaining better, the water comes down the pipes into the sub basement and back into the soil. When the rain is just too much and the French Drain fills, there is a pump already installed for the below ground bathroom which pumps the excess water away.
To be perfectly honest, it has been over ten years since I took any math classes in college. And what you don’t use on a regular basis, you lose. I can remember when I was taking my math classes that I was also helping my kids through their classes with their math homework.
I like to think that my taking college courses while they were in school provided some inspiration, some “leading by example” about good study habits. And since I was taking math classes too, I could provide my kids with all of the free math tutoring they needed at the time.
But last night my nephew asked me for some Calculus help and I had forgotten everything I ever knew about calculus! That was rather embarrassing, to have to admit that my math skills were so badly rusted that I really couldn’t help out with his homework! I wonder if I should take some refresher courses!
I like to buy several new perennial flowers every spring and fall to add to our garden. I figure that way, over a period of time, we will have acquired a gorgeous garden without creating a hardship to our budget.
I also enjoy looking through the catalogs that come in the mail all of the time, they help me to plan what I might like to buy – they give a lot of helpful information about what types of plants do well in our area, and which plants are deer resistant (which is important.) The local nurseries are opening for the season, I am looking forward to going there and picking through their selections, buying a few plants and bringing them home!
