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.

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 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!

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!

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.

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 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!

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!