things around the house « Inking My Thinking

Posts Tagged ‘things around the house’

Favorite things: Candle

Sunday, September 25th, 2011

When I went out shopping with Justin’s grandma a couple weeks ago, I found this candle at a surprisingly expensive store with fantastically friendly women working the sales. I kept being surprised that the prices were quite so high, and then finding something that was really adorable, and then having a delightful snippet of conversation with one of the ladies working the floor. I found the candle in the back of the store in a section full of things on sale for 50% off. I was looking it over when one of the ladies came over to tell me that she’d bought two of those and she *loved* them. And when I couldn’t find a price on it, she ran over to find that out for me, and when she told me how much it cost and I said I had to think about it a little bit, she told me to think hard because it was a really nice candle.

I bought the candle. And she’s right, it’s a REALLY good candle.

And here’s the fun bit: it runs on two D batteries. Yeah, it’s a completely fake candle. On the bottom of the candle, it has an on, off, and timer function. On and off are self-explanatory, but the timer bit is the really awesome thing about this candle. When it’s turned on using the timer function, it will stay on for 5 hours before turning itself off. And then 24 hours after the time it was turned on the first time, it’ll turn on again. Which means that sometime between 7:15 and 7:30 every night, the candle turns on, and then it turns off five hours later.

It’s AWESOME! I wander into my bedroom in the evening and find a cheery candle burning on my dresser. I go to sleep to candlelight and don’t have to worry about burning the house down. I don’t have to worry about smoke or chemicals being burned into the air of my house. And I don’t have to think about lighting it or blowing it out! It turns on by itself, a helpful, cheery little flickering sweetness.

It is, for certain, one of my favorite things in my house lately and one of my favorite things I’ve bought in a while. And I really didn’t expect to like it so much. I thought “Hrm, candle. Looks pretty.” And now I’m all “Battery powered candle!!! Best invention ever!!!! I want to have more!!!”

And I’ve seen some terrible fake candles, so to prove my point that this is awesome, I’ve made a quick 34-second video showing that it looks really realistic. There’s no sounds — the whooshing sound in the back is just the air-conditioning blowing, and then clicks as I try to figure out how to stop my camera from recording.

(I’m not sure it’s working in Chrome, but it does work in Firefox. And I’m not checking IE because I hope none of you use that.)

Isn’t that great! There’s no way I’d be able to burn a real candle that close to a beloved childhood teddy bear. But it sure looks like I am!!

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Delicious day

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

Today I didn’t work overtime, which was what I was expecting to do all week until suddenly I wasn’t going to have to work overtime! It really came as a surprise. So today, instead of working overtime, I slept in. Which was especially good because I was up in the middle of the night with an upset stomach that felt like I had swallowed tacks, either as a side-effect from my flu shot on Thursday or because I gave in to my craving for Cheetos. (Delicious radioactive orange chemical and carbohydrate crunchies!)

But sleeping in felt wonderful and my stomach felt fine when I woke up. I went downstairs and I did yoga for about half an hour, which is half an hour longer than I’ve done yoga in the last couple months. My goal for the next couple weeks: get back on track with the Couch to 5K program (we got out of that when I hurt my knee), walk three of the other days of the week when we’re not running, and get back to doing my yoga. My flexibility is completely shot.

We showered, dressed, breakfasted, relaxed a couple minutes, and then tidied up the house a little bit. I sat down to write the post here about credit reports (you really should check yours) and watched some TV with Justin. And then we went downstairs and cleaned the kitchen, which we’d put off earlier in our tidying, and I started a loaf of bread in the breadmaker and worked on making a pie. We had apples and pears that were past their prime, so I baked them into a pie following this recipe. Delicious! And I love baking. I love the patience of it and the intricacies of it and just the movements that go into pealing and slicing apples and mixing that with sugar, flour, and spices, and filling in a pie crust. It’s like singing, except I get to eat it in the end. And that analogy probably doesn’t work unless you understand how I feel when I’m singing.

Moving on. I got that started and asked Justin to make sure it got out of the oven okay, described what it should look like in the end, and then I went for my walk. See? Goal: yoga and walking. Accomplished! I took an umbrella with me because it looked like rain and about 10 minutes away from getting back to the house, it did start to rain. I ran into three women who were sheltering beneath a tree, waiting to see if it would stop. I told them I didn’t think it was going to end very soon, and they started back to their homes. We ran into Justin about a minute later, coming to look for me with the biggest umbrella we own. Because he’s wonderful like that and he wasn’t sure if I’d taken an umbrella with me.

We got home and I changed into dry clothes so we could go to our chiropractor appointment, saw an enormous rainbow on our way, and then we came home and started meatloaf for dinner and caught up more on television shows that started last week. He’s been catching up on How I Met Your Mother and Modern Family and I’ve been watching NCIS and NCIS: Los Angeles.

And then, finally, we got a piece of that pie! It was amazing!

And really, I’m just writing all this because it was a wonderfully relaxed, delicious kind of day and I wanted to write it down.

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

Highlights from my weekend

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011

I didn’t work on Friday! So I got up early-ish and went outside to do yardwork. We got an email from our landlady saying that the Property Owner’s Association (POA) had contacted her to say that the front yard was a patch of weeds. So I weeded it up and now it looks great.

I also mowed the back yard until I found the BIG SPIDER that had moved from where it was previously living near the trash bins to up in between two bushes along the side of the property. At that point I decided that Justin could do the weed whacking and I quickly cleaned up everything and went inside to shower. Where I tried not to imaging large spiders crawling up the shower curtain and failed.

And then had to read a book for Book Club and forgot to call Erica.

We didn’t go to Game Night because Justin wasn’t feeling well.

We did go to Book Club on Saturday where we once again disappointed our friend Elizabeth, the leader of the club, by not enjoying one of her favorite books. And we were the only ones who showed up. So when they told us they had double-booked the room, we introduced her to a burger at Five Guys and then invited her back to our house where we watched the new Star Trek movie and an episode of Sherlock and basically hung out chatting until it was almost 10:30 and she needed to head home.

And then she came over after church the following afternoon to watch the second episode of Sherlock with our friend Julie. Our friend Becky eventually made it over as well and we all ate pie and chatted for a while until it was time to decide whether they were going to stay for dinner or head home and do their jogging for the day – they went home. Elizabeth, however, fell asleep on the couch. She woke up around 9 and we fed her and made sure she was awake before sending her home.

Earlier in the afternoon on Sunday, Justin decided that since I’d done so much work on the yard while he wasn’t feeling well on Friday, he would tidy up the house for me. And that made him the best husband ever because I could focus on paying the bills and then hang out with my friends in a clean house.

Monday, which I know is past the weekend, but I didn’t get around to posting this yet, was a fairly easy day at work and then we started up our running again in the evening, making for a tired and cold Kylene for the rest of the evening with very little cogitating power. One of these days I’ll figure out why I drop so fast after exercising.

And today was another pretty easy day — I’m just waiting for the shoe to drop at work. I know it’s coming. I just don’t know when.

And I finally went to the Christmas site and put up my votes. Justin will, hopefully, vote on that tomorrow and we can get that moving again.

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

Happy birthday, Erica!

Monday, August 8th, 2011

Happy birthday to my wonderful sister, Erica, who I totally tried to call earlier but who didn’t answer, even though it was only, like, 4:30 in Minnesota and who I must therefore assume was out rocking the town because by my count she’s turning 30 and that’s absolutely the birthday for which you should go out and rock the town. Yea!! So I’m not going to call her back tonight because now it’s after 8:00 there and I’m really hoping that part of her birthday also means that she actually gets some sleep for the first time since JD’s birthday (doesn’t that sound like a fantastic birthday present?!) and besides that I don’t have any cell service at the house and she’s not on Skype right now (again, hopefully either rocking the town or sleeping) so I don’t actually have a way to call her and I’ll just have to catch up with her some other time.

BUT! I really do hope that your birthday was ABSOLUTELY OFF THE WALL FANTASTIC and I’m sorry I didn’t send you anything, but I hope Tim got you something AWESOME and we’ll totally have to catch up later this week.

I wasn’t even home on Friday, when I would normally call. Friday, I got up and went to the church offices to do my monthly cleaning there, and then when I got home, Justin and I ran down to Savannah to run a couple errands and catch a showing of “Cowboys & Aliens” (really fun movie, by the way) and then drove straight from there up to Beaufort to go to a board games party at a friends house. And we were there until after midnight so I started to fall asleep on their couch, which was why it wasn’t until we were nearly all the way home before we realized that I’d forgotten my purse, with our house keys, back at their house. 45 minutes away. But luck! I stuck a spare house key under the bumper of the car! And fail — the key didn’t actually work. We have no idea why it didn’t work, but the dang thing wouldn’t turn. So at 1:30 in the morning, Justin borrowed our neighbor’s extension ladder and climbed in through a window on the second floor of our house.

Saturday, I was fighting off some bug because I slept a lot. I tried to stay awake and managed a couple hours at a time, but then would fall back asleep again. It was really annoying, actually. I slept through most of Sunday morning, too, failing to go to church, and then took it pretty easy for the rest of the afternoon. Friends came over in the evening to collect boxes from our attic for moving and we fed them dinner in exchange for ice cream and Justin fixed the power supply on one of their computers, too, and some other computer work.

And after they left, because the air conditioning unit refuses to blow cold air, we set up the bed in the living room and slept down there. The a/c unit upstairs hasn’t been working right for the last week or so. It was working in the evenings, like it was exhausted from the heat, too, and decided that it would just work its best overnight. And then it stopped doing that, too. The downstairs unit is working, so we’ve got a box fan at the bottom of the stairs, blowing air up to another fan that moves it closer to either Justin’s office or the bedroom, depending on where it’s turned, and a third fan that blows air up from the floor into faces. But it’s just not quite cutting it. So we’ll be camping out downstairs for a couple days. We have an appointment set up for a guy to come look at it on Friday, which our landlady set up a couple weeks ago for regular maintenance. So when he comes, hopefully he’ll take care of the problem.

And how’s that for about the most random post ever?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MAE-MAE!!

Tags: friendships, happy birthday to someone i love, health and wellness, i love my husband, mentioning my family, things around the house, what i did with my day
Posted in Living! |

Well, I feel good about that anyway.

Saturday, June 18th, 2011

Do you ever get to the end of your day and realize that you’ve only crossed off four of the twenty-odd items on your checklist? But you know that you’ve had a successful and productive day, even if the list doesn’t show it? Like, the floors in my house are so clean right now! And that decorative thing that’s been broken for a couple months is finally fixed. And I can actually find things in my jewelry box again and all the pendants that were separated from their chains are all back and hanging where they should be again. And my bra drawer isn’t exploding all over the place anymore. And the bedding for our guests on Sunday is downstairs instead of sitting in the corner of our bedroom.

And it really was a fantastic day, with some sleeping in, and some working up a sweat getting the house cleaned (I even washed the patio doors!) and projects getting done (moving a couple thousand songs onto a petulant music box) and even a bike ride (where some guy threw us out of his neighborhood — but that was the only non-fantastic part of the day). I feel like I got a lot accomplished, even though when Justin asked what I’d been doing for the last couple hours while he was working, the only things I could think of were the music box thing and the jewelry box, but I’m sure there was something else I did with that time.

Another storm is threatening to thunder overhead. There’s been lightening and thunder for the last hour or so, but still not any rain. I hope that it comes over this way a little closer and gives us another soaking. The lawn is looking a little better — the weeds are getting higher and in need of cutting. But the grass could still use a lot of help. I’m sure it’ll start coming down in buckets as soon as I drift off to sleep, jerking me back awake in surprise. Just like the phone will right just as you take a bite of food and the movie will start just as you realize that you need to pee.

Tomorrow we’re heading down to Savannah for a haircut date. Justin’s scheduled a haircut and we’ll get dinner and then go see the Green Lantern movie. We’ve got a couple other errands to run while we’re out, too. But mostly it’s haircut, dinner, and a movie. On Sunday, two of our friends are going to be in town for a conference on Hilton Head Island. They’re going to crash here for the night instead of driving the 40 minutes back home and then back again for the conference the next morning. So it’s going to be a fun-filled weekend!