things around the house « Inking My Thinking

Posts Tagged ‘things around the house’

House guest

Sunday, January 22nd, 2012

I was sitting on the couch a couple days after getting back from Minnesota (which is relevant only because the Christmas tree was still up and the fake ficus tree was behind the couch) and heard a weird rustling sound from the ficus tree. I looked over and tried to figure out what could be making the branches on a fake tree rustle while inside and away from any ventilation.

I saw this:

So I looked closer.

Can you see it?

He’s kinda little. Let me zoom in a bunch. Here you go:

Lizard!

I’m not sure what he was doing, but he looked pretty happy. It’s not like he’s going to cause any trouble, so I left him be. It’s kinda chilly outside right now. When it gets warmer, we’ll put the tree outside and let him run away, if he hasn’t done so already. I haven’t seen him since we moved the Christmas tree out of the house and moved the ficus back closer to the door.

Coffee!

Friday, January 6th, 2012

How to make coffee using a single-serving hand-held drip-coffee maker:

Things you will need:

Coffee cup and spoon, coffee dripper, coffee, filters (this dripper uses #2), some way to measure out the water, and boiling water (not shown).

Put the filter in the dripper.

Put the coffee in the filter. I’m using 3 teaspoons for this cup.

Put the dripper on top of the coffee cup.

Wait for the hot water to boil.

Measure out the water for your coffee. You can do this by using another coffee cup the same size or by only boiling as much water as you’ll need, but I found that this coffee cup uses just about 1 1/3 cups of water and I need something with a spout on it so I don’t end up with water all over the place. So! Measuring cup it is.

Pour hot water over the coffee grounds. Make sure to get them all moistened.

Coffee will drip out of the bottom of the dripper and into your cup. I lifted it up here to show, but this usually just stays resting on the top of the coffee cup. And it sits very securely. I haven’t been at all worried about it falling over.

Keep pouring water over the coffee grounds until you run out of water. This is why I measured out the water first — there’s no way to see when the coffee is near the top of the cup without picking up the dripper and checking the cup. It’s easier just to know ahead of time how much to use.

It starts to get sluggish toward the last of the water. I’m impatient and squish it around with a spoon, but I’m not sure it really helps at all. It just gives me something to do.

Eventually there is no more water left in the dripper.

Remove the dripper and you can see a beautiful cup of coffee.

Sweeten to taste and enjoy!

The filter and grounds go into the garbage and the dripper goes into the sink for a quick wash. It doesn’t take up any space on the counter, which is good because we don’t have any left. And I get to go enjoy some coffee! Total time it took to make this cup, with taking time to take pictures, was 10 minutes. So it’s not something I have time to do while getting ready for work in the morning, but I get free coffee at my new building anyway. This is for weekends when I’m at home and craving coffee. And it’s awesome!

Tags: lessons learned and shared, things around the house, this post contains pictures
Posted in Living! |

First day of vacation!

Friday, December 23rd, 2011

Today was my first day of my vacation and I did what I bet about half of you do/would do on your first day of vacation, too: I CLEANED HOUSE. Okay, first I slept in, but when I got up and out of bed, the first thing that came to mind as being my Task For The Day was serious cleaning of the house. Dusting. Vacuuming. Putting all those things that have been put not quite where they belong actually back in their correct places. AWESOMENESS.

There was a brief interlude toward the beginning of my cleaning quest when my fantastic husband took our Miele vacuum apart to figure out why it wasn’t working. Turns out the problem could have been fixed by replacing a $100 part OR by putting in a $1.50 rubber washer. Guess which one we did? Woo! $1.50 fix! And nobody lost an eye to the crazy spring in the cord reel mechanism! WIN!

So Justin fixed our vacuum and I went absolutely to town on the cleaning. I dusted, I mopped, I finally got the bedding off the sofa bed that’s been on there for months and months, I dragged all the random stuff that’s been piling up at the bottom of the stairs piled up in my office where I can figure out what to do with it all, I finally strung the Christmas light up the banister of the stairway, and, happy day, I vacuumed! The vacuum has been broken since before we got our Christmas tree. This place has been in serious need of cleaning.

I finally stopped when it just wasn’t as much fun anymore, which was maybe 4 or 5 hours of cleaning? I’m not sure. But the living room, dining room, kitchen, stairway, and bedroom are looking awesome! And tomorrow I’ll tackle my office and laundry and getting stuff back up into the attic and maybe pull some of the leaves out of the bushes in the front yard. I’m not totally sure yet. I still can’t find the stupid key to the storage closet outside, so I can’t get to the rakes or big trash bags. And we have been looking all over the place for that dang key! It’s getting seriously annoying.

Justin thought I was a little crazy because I wanted to clean and I didn’t mind that he wasn’t doing any cleaning to help. He did help (awesomely) fixing the vacuum and helping take care of the light/fan fixture in the living room. And tomorrow he’s going to help with laundry and he’ll clean the bathrooms (I hate cleaning bathrooms) and getting stuff into the attic. But it felt SO GOOD getting the house clean again! It’s like all this static noise is gone and I can think about other things. I don’t look in the living room and see how much the end table needs dusting and that there’s bedding on the bed and all the pine needles on the floor. Instead, I’m thinking about all the mess in my office right now, and how there’s paperwork that needs to get addressed and boxes that need to go into the attic and handwash clothes that need to get washed. I’ve reduced the mess that I need to think about down to just a handful of places and that’s such an enormous relief I don’t think I can explain it.

After tomorrow, the mess should be small enough that I won’t have any of that static at all and I’ll be able to focus on other things — like getting ready to see everybody over the holiday!

Our neighbors are having a party tonight — I can hear loud bass music pulsing through the walls and people chatting outside. Justin just went to the grocery store to buy a frozen pizza for dinner. I’m sitting on the recliner in his office typing this in my pajamas, freshly showered after all that cleaning.

It’s been a wonderful day and I’m looking forward to a continuation of the wonderful for the next two weeks!!

Tags: i love my husband, things around the house, what i did with my day
Posted in Living! |

I am why we can’t have nice things.

Monday, November 7th, 2011

I hope everybody had a delightful weekend!

Mine consisted of the following highlights: Watching Justin play BioShock 2, shattering the side of a glass decorative bowl, taking down the Halloween decorations, and watching several episodes of Terra Nova with Justin.

It was a quiet weekend, which was good because Justin’s knee is still bothering him. He’s been icing it and taking Advil and it’s getting better. But he’s not able to move around on it a lot yet.

And I had to work several hours of overtime on Friday, putting the whipped topping on the end of a stressful week, so I was perfectly happy to sit on my butt on Saturday, watching Justin play a creepy video game. We did spend some time getting the house back in order, but then we sat back down again with pizza and watched the first couple episodes of Terra Nova. It’s a fun show! It sounded kinda corny to me, looking at the previews, but I’ve been delightfully proven wrong.

After church on Sunday we started cleaning up the Halloween decorations. I put so much time and effort into cutting out the bats that I didn’t want to take them down right away – but it’s been more than a week and they needed to go. While working on un-decorating, I accidentally broke the glass bowl that was sitting on the table – it’s one of those rounded ones that we used on the tables for our wedding. We have a dozen more of them out in the closet, so I’m not heartbroken about it or anything. But it scared the snot out of me!

I grabbed the edge of it, forgetting that it was full of sand and rocks and REALLY HEAVY, so when I tried to pull it, it gave a loud POP! and I ended up with a fistful of glass shards. I was standing next to the dining room table, so I shook the glass from my hand onto the table and ran upstairs to wash my hand under water and see how badly I’d hurt myself. Amazingly enough, I only had one tiny little cut just below the bottom joint of my index finger. But my heart was racing so fast that the cut was bleeding profusely. I got Justin to bandage me up because I was too shaken up to do it with one hand, and got him to pull the sliver that I found afterward, and then I just sat still for about 30 minutes until I was calm again. I don’t know what it was, but it scared me a lot. I break things all the time, but they don’t usually make me shake the way this thing did.

Justin, wonderful man that he is, cleaned up the glass for me, vacuuming the floor and the carpet and the tablecloth, so I didn’t have to worry about cutting myself during the clean-up. I could have done it myself, but it works better this way – he gets to feel all defender protective of me and I get to feel protected. What girl doesn’t like to feel protected now and then by a man wielding a vacuum cleaner?

What’s the phrase? “No woman has ever shot a man while he was washing the dishes.”

Tags: babbling about nothing much at all, i love my husband, things around the house, what i did with my day
Posted in Living! |

And that’s it for October

Monday, October 31st, 2011

Oy, a week gone already?

Okay, since last week, my back has gotten a lot better. Of course, Justin’s back has been killing him in a completely different way, but he’s been sitting on the heat pack. We’ll go back to the chiropractor’s office again tomorrow.

Work has been nuts, but it’s only going to get worse as we go through November. And more on that later, probably.

I did not, however, work on Friday because we had a party here that evening and Justin and I spent the day getting ready. I’ll do some pictures at the end. A bunch of geeks we know get together every month or so to play card games. We switch between who hosts, but it was our turn this time, and it was a whole lotta fun! I cut a ton of bats out and hung them from the ceiling. Justin wanted to dress up as Count van Count from Sesame Street, so I dressed up as Countess von Backwards (I’m not making her up) complete with the purple skin and all. Can I say? That was a lot more trouble than it was worth.

Anyway, we had Indiana Jones and a cowgirl, a Valkyrie and a dead Norse warrior, a couple renaissance girls, a hippie, an Arabian prince, and a guy who said he was Jimmy Buffett but who just decided last minute to come to the party. And we had lots of food, played Gloom, roasted marshmallows and told stories over the fire, and had, all in all, a really fantastic time.

Meaning, after all that, on Saturday Justin and I were completely zonked and didn’t get out of pajamas all day. We showered and put on clean pajamas. I spent the whole day reading a library book that was due. And that was it. We didn’t even get around to cleaning until after church on Sunday. And then we had friends over again on Sunday (sort of a recurring event) and we played a game of Munchkin with them.

So much of last week was spent getting ready for the party. I spent a lot of time cutting out bats and getting the house ready. It was definitely worth it because a lot of people, even kids trick-or-treating tonight, commented on how great the house looks. But it’s a relief to not be working on that today.

Anyway, stepping back to talk about work for just a minute, we’ve got six or seven projects in the works for November, so it’s going to be crazy busy. And add to that, a job offer was dropped on my lap today and if I say “yes” the guy offering it would want me to start transitioning over to it as soon as possible — like next week. It’s an other department at work and it *sounds* really exciting, but I haven’t decided yet. And the guy offering it asked me to not talk about it, but I think he meant not talk about it AT WORK and I’m pretty darn sure none of my coworkers read this. (And if they do, they haven’t said anything yet, and I don’t expect them to start now.) I have to let him know by the end of the week, so you’ll all know as soon as I decide, too.

And now pictures from the party!