Back to Basics

It always takes me so long to figure this out. It's a lesson I've learned over and over again since my first babies were born. I always tell myself that I won't forget it, but I invariably do.

We have gotten dreadfully off routine. In fact, I don't think I can even find a vague hint of what our daily routine is half-heartedly pretending to be! The effects of this have been absolutely devastating. No one is getting along very well and it is entirely my fault.

So, today I change myself. Already, with just a few changes this morning, I have seen a drastic change in the twins (Sarah is still sleeping). They have been very kind to each other and more helpful and courteous.

I'm looking forward to a great day!

No Heat

I turned my heat off completely a full three days ago. The current temperature here is 38 and I know it has gotten colder than that over these past three days, yet my home has not dipped below 68 for all that time. It keeps between 70 and 72 throughout the day, depending on if I'm cooking or not at the time.

I wonder how long I can keep this going?

Cleaning House

There is a huge pile of stuff out at the curb for garbage pick up today and another pile waiting for FreeCycle members to pick up. I think this purge is starting to get addicting. Everything, including me, feels lighter!

Wow, I Really Can!

There's a lamp sitting on my dining table. It's the only source of light for that half of the room and without it we can't see our food. Well, we can see it, dimly. We just can't really tell what it is. So, when we have a guest or two who need to sit at the table, someone gets a lamp-tan. . . usually me. After all, it's not nice to make a guest deal with our strange lighting and I can't bring myself to make the kids or my sweetie sit under it.

I've been on the hunt for a chandelier that A) plugs into an outlet since we are in a rental and I'm not about to pay an electrician to work on a rental and B)is not $250. I found one. At Ikea. The white paper thingy didn't really go well with the craftsman style dining table and our new, lovely red wall. On the plus side, it was only $8. But it only had one small socket that only allowed a 40 watt bulb. Not enough light.

So I discovered that they sell something called a Swag Light Kit at your local home improvement store. It lets you wire any lamp to be a chandelier and to plug into your wall outlet. COOL.

Then I asked on freecycle for anyones old chandelier. A kind family had just replaced theirs and they had a lovely simple one with 5 arms that hold 5 candelabra bulbs and each is topped with a cute little shade. Know what color the shades are? RED!

So, yesterday, I sat down and rewired that lamp. Yes. I rewired it myself with only a little help from the internet. Know what else is cool? It actually works and it didn't explode or catch fire when I tested it!

Once it gets hung over the table, I will show you a picture of our 10$ light (had to buy the wiring kit . . .)

Today

Today I'm going to make my kitchen sparkle. It's quite drab and uninviting. Certainly not an inspiration for creating wonderful meals for my family. So: Sparkling kitchen.

Then I'm going to make more blackberry jam. What's that? You want to know how I do it? You'll just have to wait until a little later today for the recipe, complete with step by step pictures!

And lastly, I should really vacuum that living room rug. I've neglected it for days and it's going to start talking back to me soon if I'm not careful.

Something New

Sam has his own chair!








We are the benefactors of a very generous family near us who were getting brand new furniture and needed to find a new home for their 'old' new furniture.





So now our room looks like this:





No more broken, dirty, difficult to clean, white couch! Now there is plenty of seating for everyone and it's all very comfortable.

And it matches our red carpet and red wall.

All we have to do now is paint the rest of the room (oddly enough, something similar to horse butt tan) and maybe find an entertainment center for the TV area. Or at least a better solution than what we have now.

Finally, 4 years after moving in, our house is coming together into a pretty home!

Divine Coffee

I have a couple of small bags of whole bean coffee in my cabinet. They've been there for a while, so they aren't the freshest beans I've ever met, but I have been saving them for a 'special' occasion.

I've had several occasions that could have counted as 'special' but somehow my whole beans never made it to the party. So I decided that we are special enough and need wait no longer.

This morning, I brewed a pot of freshly ground Gevalia traditional blend coffee. I'm usually a Maxwell House girl, since theirs is the tastiest of the cheaper and readily-available-in-your-grocery-store varieties. This morning, however, I had such a delicious and rich cup of coffee that I'm sure I could easily fall in love with expensive brands.

I'll have to do a little experimenting. Was today's coffee so good because I ground my beans right before brewing? Or was it the fact that those beans cost about $18 per pound? I don't know the answers to these questions, but I think I'll have a little fun finding out!

Smelly Laundry Tip

If you've ever done laundry, you know that if you forget a load in your washer for too long it will turn dreadfully smelly. I think it depends on your particular atmosphere where you live as to how long this takes. I used to be able to forget for about 24 hours and still be able to dry the load without any negative side effects. Lately, though, it's been a matter of hours.

I have found that simply re-washing the load is not enough to overcome the odor that takes up residence in my clothing. I must first dry it, then re-wash it and finally dry it again.

I discovered, however, that baking soda removes that extra step. It really does work! A cup of baking soda in with the wash removes the smell without having to dry everything first.

I highly recommend that, if you don't already, you keep a steady supply of baking soda in your laundry area.

The Full Effect

I know I've shown you our lovely red wall. But now it has a tasteful smattering of pretty accessories:





In order to get the full effect, however, you'll need to come over for tea. And scones. And maybe a few little finger sandwich thingies!

Dishes Everywhere

It all started out innocently enough. There was a little drip coming from the dishwasher. Not a big deal, really. We told the landlords about it when, after a full washing cycle, there was a small puddle on the floor. Rich checked it out for us and cleaned a few things and I've had very little trouble with it, though it did still occasionally drip. Then, a few days ago, I came home to find that the dishes I had set to washing while we were out weren't clean. And, there was a ton of water still in the bottom of the dishwasher. Dirty water.

Somehow, the machine isn't draining!

Sam took it apart to check hoses for clogs. Nothing significant. He cleaned them all out anyway, but a quick test told us this was not really the issue. When it's supposed to be draining it actually lightly sprays the water back up onto the dishes. Somethings amok with my dishwasher.

So I'm left to wash the dishes myself. I'm not so good at getting dishes done when I have a machine to do the dirty work, let along when I have to do it all by hand. I have a kitchen full of dishes.

I'm off, now, to clean those all up before I have to get dinner started. The landlords will be here tomorrow, after all, and I don't want them to walk into three-day-old dirty dishes! Nor to I want to live with the smell they will surely create if left untended. But I do so hate washing dishes!

There must be a way to turn this around in my head. Maybe I should be grateful that we have dishes. And food to eat on them. And babies to make more messes. Yeah. I'll try that.

RED

Primed And Ready

The First

Still Wet . . .

. . . but much less sticky!

Many moons ago, Katie got her hands on a bottle . . . a BIG bottle of pancake syrup. It was the giant warehouse club sized bottle. She playfully dumped about half of it on our living room rug before I could get it away from her. Many, many attempts at cleaning it failed, so we finally called in the professionals.

A very nice Stanley Steamer guy came Friday morning and sucked all our syrup away! (Except the syrup still in the bottle. But he locked that in the closet so we can't ever use it again . . .) He gave us some cleaning tips, just in case our children find something else to coat our world in, a big bottle of spot cleaner and left us with a still wet carpet.

It's still damp this morning, in certain spots. Mostly in the ex-really-sticky parts. But it's so nice to be able to walk across the living room without getting my feet stuck to the carpet!

The Landlords Are Coming, The Landlords Are Coming!

I really can't believe it's been a year already. Last year, when the landlords came by for a yearly inspection of the house, we went over a few things that needed to be fixed. Some of them they agreed to do. Others were up to us, though they would let us take the cost of parts off of our rent. Pretty good deal. However, we've done almost none of the things we said we would. None of them are terribly important. The house won't fall down if we don't change a faucet, but it would make washing up in the morning a little easier!

So, over the next week or so, Sam and I will be doing lots of work around here. Even possibly painting! It should be nice, once we're done. All those things we've been wanting to do but just never made time for . . . Oh, and a cleaning guy is coming on Friday to get rid of our big syrup blops on the carpet. Very cool! They've been there for months, despite my efforts to banish them.

On My Decore

. . . or lack thereof!

Jennie commented on my carpet and white walls. Actually, my living room walls are not white at all. Half of them are an ugly wallpaper with tiny flowers all over them, and the other half are a dirty cream. This is something we are going to remedy over the next couple of weeks, as our landlords are about to come and do an inspection and we've been meaning to do this since they were here last year.

The carpet . . . well, it's red. And yucky. And even if it didn't have big syrup blops all over it, it would still be yucky. We were given permission, when we first moved in, to take it up, but who knows what lies beneath? So we've kept it. I'm working on getting a nice big area rug for under the dining table, though. That might help some.

I'll take pictures when we are done with the renovations!

Doing Something Right

I love plants. I love having flowers blooming on my kitchen counter and herbs growing by the window. But somehow I always manage to kill them.

I buy pretty plants, full of blossoms. I read the directions and try to water them just the right amount. Somehow, though, I never keep them for more than a few months. I have never had an indoor plant flower for me after it was done with the flowers I purchased it with.

Look:







Do you see what this is? It's a house plant: a little cyclamen. After looking sickly for a few weeks, convincing me it was going to die, it started to come back, growing new, green leaves and now:




NEW FLOWERS!

I don't know what I did, but I must finally be doing something right!

On Purchasing A House

We spend an ungodly amount of money on rent. Every month we pour half of our hard earned money into the pockets of our landlords. Don't get me wrong: They are nice people and, as far as landlords go, I don't think we could conjure better ones. I just don't like handing over all that cash!

So, we've been looking to buy a house. Given the number of children we have and the fact that we want to work from home, once KJS takes off like we all know it will, we are looking at homes with 3 or more bedrooms. We could live with one bathroom, as we do now, but would prefer at least 1 & 1/2. And there are two more things we are looking for: A decent garage and a little bit of space.

We have some credit issues. But we also have a few lenders who say they can work around that and still get us a mortgage. How big a mortgage? I don't know. We have no down payment. Though we are trying to save something it's really hard with all that money going to the landlords! I've been assured that there are ways around that, too. We have no money for closing costs. Again, the creativity of our lenders seemingly knows no bounds!

Biggest problem: Houses here are so incredibly expensive! We don't really want to move far away from our families. My parents live 3 miles away and Sam's live about 10 miles away. We get to see everyone nearly weekly. It's a lovely thing and I'm so glad that my kids know their grandparents! But why, oh why did they all have to choose to live in one of the most expensive places in the country???!

Houses that are within the size we need/want start at about $350,000. The houses priced this 'low' are usually in need of some major repair or are in the middle of nowhere. The houses that are priced low enough to be considered for our monthly budget are so tiny, you wonder how many clowns you can fit inside.

So, we are renewing our lease for another year. We will work hard to build KJS and save some money. And maybe, just maybe, houses will be a little cheaper next year.

Plan:

I've decided to keep a basket. Either in the laundry room or in the baby room, I can't decide. This is where I will toss clothes that don't fit anyone anymore. Too many tiny clothes end up in drawers that just shouldn't be burdened by them.

Anyone else have any tips for keeping up with outgrown clothes?

Distractions

It has been far too easy, these last few days, to allow myself to become terribly distracted from my job: Making a happy and comfortable home for my family. Sam has been given notice at his job, which we were expecting given his boss' inability to commit to anything, and though we have a plan in place, it needs work and lots of it. We will be starting a business together, as well as looking for another full time job for Sam, and it's very time consuming to deal with all of that.

As a consequence, the house is a mess. I let things go last night that should have been cleaned up before bed in favor of discussing a business plan with my husband. A worthy endeavor, to be certain, but I should have found a way to accomplish both. So this afternoon, I will catch up on my chores and prepare a beautiful dinner for my very deserving husband, who is feeling far too much stress these days. This afternoon, with a little inspiration from my usual sources, I will reclaim my home, light a few candles, and make it a haven for my sweetie to come home to.