Hot Spots

November 21, 2009 at 1:39 am (CHAOS and Control)
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A hot spot is defined as  “an area, when left unattended will gradually take over.   If left unattended, the hot spot will grow and take over the whole room as well as making the house look awful. When you walk into a room, the hot spot is the first thing you see.  The rest of the family see this as a place to put things when they do not want to put them where they belong.” (Fly Lady)

In effect every flat surface in my house is a hot spot.  Things just get stuck places and that becomes their home.  Well this week I decided to tackle the most obvious hot spots in my house:

1.  My computer desk in the T.V. room:

Usually looks some version of this:

Here it is today:

 

2.  My pass through window to my kitchen was home to a basket full of junk:

But now it looks like this:

3.  The top of the TV cabinet had collected all manner of things.  I don’t have a picture of the before, but here is the after (please ignore the dust):

And since beginning this post, the pass through has acquired a baby monitor and the computer desk has grown a fully developed dirty mug.  The challenge isn’t getting them to this stage, it’s getting them to stay that way.

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Tell Me: Why Do I Do These Things?

November 16, 2009 at 9:34 am (CHAOS and Control)
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Way back before I had children, I LOVED to help throw a party.  I loved doing tablescapes, and decorations and centerpieces and menu planning.  I was childless, so it wasn’t uncommon for me to be tying rafia on glass bottles at 1 in the morning, or driving to a WalMart at midnight to pick up supplies.  One time I drove to Macon at 11:00 pm to pick up turkey breasts.  It was all part of the adventure, and when things turned out well, I always forgot the late night shopping runs, and instead remembered the pretty party.

Well, as you can imagine, I haven’t hosted an event in several years but when my friend Danielle got pregnant I just so desperately wanted to be a part of her baby shower.  I didn’t volunteer to do the whole event.  I didn’t offer to make individualized corsages or hand painted linens.  I said I’d do the games and, because Tera, our cake queen, moved to Wisconsin, I said I’d do the cake.

Now I didn’t volunteer an extreme “ace  of cakes” or “food network challenge” cake.  The cake was supposed to be an umbrella, baked in a round mixing bowl with a hook coming from the center.  Simple, easy, cute.  I even bought some little toys with which to decorate – I wasn’t about to venture into fondant sculpting or anything crazy.  I thought I was being realistic.

Friday afternoon I mixed up the white cake mix – easy peasie – and died it pink with food coloring (baby girl needs a pink cake) and then thought “Oh.  How cute would a pink and chocolate marble cake be?”  So I mixed up a batch of chocolate cake, and poured the two batters into the mixing bowl.

I baked it

I let it cool completely.

I inverted the bowl over a cooling rack.

The cake came out in pieces, split along the marbling.   AAAAAH.

After examining the cake, I cut it into four slightly lopsided blocks, hoping to make them look like building blocks, but to make a hemisphere into cubes removes a lot of rounded cake.  It wasn’t going to be enough.  So at 11 that night, when Jonathan got home from work, I was mixing up another pink cake to have enough cake.

Saturday morning I awoke to find my second cake had collapsed in the center while cooling, leaving a crater in the center of it.  Jonathan asked what I was going to do.  I answered, “Stick this baby doll in the center, cover it in fondant and call it a bassinet.  It’s all I can do.”

He gave me “the look” and said, “Go buy a cake.”

Cake choices are limited five hours before an event, so I went with the only cakes I could find that had pink icing on them.  I had the lady at Publix pipe “Welcome” on one and “Baby Catudal” on the other.  My brief cake making foray was over.  I had admitted defeat.  But the experience was to deal one final blow.

Loading the van for the shower, I made the ridiculous decision to stack the cakes (in their plastic domes) on top of one another.  Turning the final corner of the trip to the shower, the “Baby Catudal” cake slid into the door and tipped on its side.   We had two cakes that read, “Welcome Bahv squish”.  I must admit, I responded in thinly veiled rage at my own stupidity.

In the end, I scraped the worst off, and threw the toys I bought to decorate the first umbrella cake onto the store bought wreck.  I put the nicely preserved “Welcome” cake up on a cake stand and nestled the smushed cake in its shadow.  Everyone, including Danielle, said the cake was cute, and everyone who heard the story said, “Oh, I hear a blog post!”

So, if you want a cake I’m not your gal, but if you want a spectacular failure documented in an entertaining way by all means give me a call.

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Wholey Wheat? (An Audience Participation Post)

November 3, 2009 at 6:41 pm (CHAOS and Control)
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Today I baked burned a batch of bread.  Three of the four loaves were salvageable, but the last loaf is just a bag of bread nuggets pulled from the center of the blackened crusts and labeled “bread lumps for stuffing” in my freezer.  I should really do another batch but I’m out of whole wheat flour.  The reason I’m out of whole wheat flour?  I can’t find anywhere in the entire West Central Georgia region where I can purchase a bag of whole wheat flour larger than five pounds.  I buy the 25 pound bag of bread flour at Sam’s Club which lasts six to eight weeks but I can’t find whole wheat in large quantities.

All of the people I know who bake with whole wheat on a regular basis grind their own from wheat berries they purchase through a local co-op.  I don’t have (and can’t currently afford to purchase) a wheat grinder because I didn’t see the need, so now I’m wondering: do all the people I know grind their own wheat flour because flour is hard to buy in bulk, or is whole wheat flour difficult to buy in bulk because all the people who use it grind their own?

So I have two questions for you, my faithful few readers:

1.  Am I seriously missing a mother lode of whole wheaty goodness somewhere?  Can I buy 85 pound bags of ground whole wheat at some obscure little store here in our corner of Georgia and I’m just too new to this cooking my own food thing to know about it?  If so, PLEASE enlighten me!

2.  Where do you fall on grinding your own flour?  If you’re for it, please try to convince me, and if you’re against, please present your arguments on that side.  Is it worth my time and money?  Are the health benefits really as good as everyone says?  Do I *really* want to add “grind my own flour” to my list of out of the mainstream things I do?  Is the price of a grinder really worth it?

So come, post, make your voice heard.

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Needed Inspiration

October 30, 2009 at 12:24 am (CHAOS and Control)
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My aunt sent me this great poem, and I just HAD to share it all with you.

Cleaning Poem

I asked the Lord to tell me
Why my house is such a mess
He asked if I’d been ‘computering’,
And I had to answer ‘yes.’

He told me to get off my butt,
And tidy up the house.
And so I started cleaning up…
The smudges off my mouse.

I wiped and shined the topside.
That really did the trick…
I was just admiring my good work.

I didn’t mean to ‘click.’

But click, I did, and oops – I found
A real absorbing site
That I got SO way into it -
I was into it all night.

So nothing’s changed except my mouse.
It’s as shiny as the sun.
I guess my house will stay a mess…..
While I sit here on my bum.

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Wait . . . Where Was I?

October 26, 2009 at 11:04 pm (CHAOS and Control, Just Life)
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Family sickness with kids is sort of like having someone push “pause” on your life, while everything else goes on and piles up around you and you can’t do anything about it.  While I was only sick myself for less than 24 hours, every time I turned around for six days I was stripping a bed and re-making it, cleaning up vomit, putting a toddler on the toilet (okay, that happens every day, but when the flu hits the lower intestine, the visits to the toilet get a little more . . . intense . . .) keeping the electrolytes up in whatever member of my family was losing fluid from whichever end of the intestine was affected at the moment, and washing clothes.

If you don’t know how much I hate laundry, you must be new around here.  As much as I hate this intestinal plague we’ve been experiencing, I hate laundry more and I have been doing laundry all week because we’ve been experiencing the intestinal plague .

On Tuesday, the mackerdoodle went through four sets of clothes while she was throwing up, as well as managing to throw up in her bed AND mine.  On Wednesday evening I managed to go through three sets of clothes in an hour partly because of the cheesedoodle’s cheerful projectile puking and I don’t want to talk about the other experience.  Thursday I had to strip both beds again.  I’d rather not talk about it.  You’re getting the picture.  In four days my daughter alone went through ten pairs of pajamas, five pairs of pants and I lost count of the panties. It was all I could do to get clothes out of the dryer, just to put the next load in.  At some point the pile quit growing and just went into recycle – remove the sick clothes or towel or sheets, place in washing machine and replace with whatever could be salvaged from “the pile”.

At the end of gastroenteritis homecoming week ‘09, my living room looked like this:

The Pile

Oh the humanity.

I haven’t got it all folded yet, just like I haven’t managed to get the rest of the house back into order, but it’s on the way.  Jawan asked me today if I feel normal yet.  Whittling the pile down to two baskets went a long way to helping me get there.  Our bodies may be healed, but my house has yet to recover.

I bet someone will want to look at the house on Tuesday.

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Milestones and Minor Miracles

October 20, 2009 at 6:55 am (CHAOS and Control, Family and Friends)
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The Kids Table

The Kids Table

Living 3000 miles away from our parents (until mine moved) and all of Jonathan’s siblings, means that we don’t host many family holiday meals.  In fact, in fourteen years of marriage we have hosted family for 3 Christmas meals (2003, 2005, 2006) and one Easter meal (2001) with my parents, a US Thanksgiving meal (1995) with Jonathan’s parents and youngest sister and now a Canadian Thanksgiving.

One of my major achievements in life is marrying a man who can cook far better than I can.  The overwhelming majority of our hospitality over the years – including all past holiday meals -  has featured the culinary delights of my talented husband.  He brines and roasts turkey, he makes sweet potato casserole and stuffing and dressing and gravy.  I cut up vegetables and set the table and serve as sous chef and hostess.

All of those traditions were busted up last Monday.  It was Canadian Thanksgiving, and with my sister and her family here we took the opportunity to cook and celebrate a Thanksgiving meal – our first time hosting them for a holiday meal.  We also invited our good friend Allison to join us in a meal that she didn’t have to cook herself.  With Jonathan’s weekend being Sunday/Monday Monday was his only day to do all the boy things he and Brian had planned, so in a total reversal of roles I cooked Thanksgiving.  Okay, my sister helped A LOT (like made the pumpkin pie completely) but Jonathan didn’t so much as touch a vegetable or stir a pot.

In the interest of full disclosure I did have a minor flop and a total fail.  Total fails are the worst kind; with a minor flop you can recover, and with a spectacular failure you can all laugh together, but a total fail is just embarrassing without the salve of humor.  In my case, I made a squash casserole but forgot the liquid – you know the thing that STEAMS THE SQUASH and makes it edible?  Yeah.  Without it, the top got all crunchy and the squash was sort of chewy.  Ick.  Everyone just sort of pushed it around on their plate.  I also dumped about 1/2 a cup of cinnamon into the sweet potatoes when I opened the wrong side of the lid, but I was able to recover from that one.

In the afternoon, as I was finishing up some last minute things and periodically basting the turkey, Jonathan, Brian, Melissa and the three children we took to calling the little ones (seen above at the kids table) went out to pick up a few things they needed.  While they were at WalMart, my sister happened to notice some fresh flowers marked 50% off.  She asked her loving husband, Brian, if any of their grocery stores ever marked down their fresh flowers.  In a classic male response, Brian answered, “I don’t know.  I’ve never checked.”  Melissa just laughed, and bought some flowers and arranged them into this lovely bouquet.  Not only did they make a beautiful centerpiece, but they have been a gorgeous reminder of my sister all week whenever I have walked into my kitchen.

There was a brief moment that made us think we weren’t going to have our celebration.  During lunch we got discussing the third installment of the latest Batman franchise and Johnny Depp’s role as the Riddler.  The family gathered around my laptop as Melissa searched out the trailer.  Just as she was finding it, the power blinked and then went out.  After a moment, Brian laughed and said “I guess we’re having Chick-Fil-A for Thanksgiving.”   As if insulted by the idea, the power returned and behaved itself for the rest of day.  At the end of the evening, as we were putting full children to bed, my oldest nephew Zam asked Melissa: “Mom, how come when you looked up the Batman preview it made the power go out.”   I love that he’s a conspiracy theorist at 8 years old.

So that is the major milestone of my life right now.  One more step in my journey from home making ineptitude to adequacy.

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Better Than Sales and Coupons

October 5, 2009 at 6:31 am (CHAOS and Control)
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As you know, things are a little tighter in our budget than they have been in a while, and I’ve been working very hard to keep our costs down.  Today I thought I’d share a couple of things that have been working for us.

1.  I’ve been making my own laundry detergent.  Laundry is a necessity but even the cheapest detergent is expensive.  I was stunned to see that Walgreens is offering their 50 load bottles of detergent this week buy one get one free. That is 100 loads for $6.99, which is the cheapest I have ever seen.  My recipe does approximately 170 loads (using 1/4 cup per load)  for less than $1.50.  Think Walgreens or WalMart will ever beat that?  I don’t.

I use the recipe at this blog, but with one change: I use Fels Naptha soap that I ordered from here.  I read that you can use any pure bar soap, but I don’t know enough about soap to know if it’s pure or not.  I purchase the washing soda and Borax at any grocery store in my local area.  It takes less than 30 minutes to make and my last batch lasted more than three months, which isn’t such a bad time investment for the pay off.

2.  I hate bar soap.  It looks dirty after the first use, and it leaves scummy patches on the sink.  It’s so nasty, but it’s so much cheaper than liquid soap.  This week Walgreens is offering either 1 bottle of liquid dial body soap, or 8 bars of soap for the same price. Here’s the thing: you can make the equivalent of 2 bottles of liquid soap from one bar.

Grate the soap with a soap grater (the same one for the Fels Naptha if you’re making the laundry detergent.) into four cups of steaming water.  Let the soap melt completely, then remove from heat and let cool.  Once cooled it will be very thick.  Gently stir in warm tap water until you achieve the thickness you desire.  Pour it into a bottle (I use a clean 1/2 gallon milk jug, as unglamorous as that looks) and use as you would any liquid soap.  I use it in the shower as a body wash and put it in the pump dispensers to be used as hand soap.

3.  I use the dishwashing detergent recipe from the same blog as the laundry detergent recipe and mix 2 parts of it to one part commercial dishwasher detergent.  It works just fine and makes the detergent last so much longer.

So there are three ways I’m keeping my consumables to a minimum.  What works for you?

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New Skills

August 15, 2009 at 11:49 pm (CHAOS and Control)
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Before I post on my newest SAHM discoveries, I need to say that my post on Thursday possibly was more depressed sounding than I intended it to be.  I’m sorry for that, and I’m sorry for having the total lack of discretion to post about our finances.

I have often looked in awe and wonder at the stay at home moms  around me who have hobbies like gardening, sewing and automotive restoration (yes I really know a woman who restores cars).  I have looked at their lives, compared them to mine and wondered, where to they get the time?  This week I realized, hey, the difference is: they’re at home.

I have been at home more in the last week than has been the rule in my 14 years of marriage and suddenly tasks that once were daunting are no longer so.  In fact, on Friday I got everything done on my to-do list except mop the floor (and that needs to wait for sleeping kids), so I took the kids outside, and I did some gardening.  Yeah, I voluntarily did gardening.  Weird.

I planted a tree and some ground cover in the front planting beds, and even though it needs mulch or something (which it’s unlikely to get right now), this:

looks a lot better than this:

Am I right?

I also staked up my diefenbachia because it was leaning over and looking messy.  Now it looks like this:

And my ivy is really filling out too:

I’m certainly not planting a rose garden, or considering buying a hobby farm, but I’m understanding how women who spend their days in their homes have time to care for those homes and do some extra.  All of a sudden the command to be “busy at home” is feeling a lot less daunting.

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Work

October 27, 2008 at 1:02 pm (CHAOS and Control)
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After almost a full week of sickness in the house – first with the mackerdoodle, and then with me – compounded by the afternoon nausea and fatigue of pregnancy, my house looks like it has been sacked by Vandals.  Well, Vandals who do laundry, but don’t fold it.  It is at times like this that I get so overwhelmed that I am paralyzed.  I don’t even know where to begin.

When people are in dire financial straits and don’t even know how to begin fixing the problem, they often begin fantasizing about a sudden event that would provide money from the sky – a gambling win, the lottery, death of a heretofore unknown, and unloved, but independently wealthy relative.  When people are in the grips of obesity and they often hope for a disease, or a parasite to give them that “45 pound kick-start” to losing the weight.  When my house looks like it does right now, I begin fantasizing about Harry Potter house elves and the sudden discovery of enough money to hire a maid for two days.

But like the other two examples, in the end it comes down to me.  I must load and unload and load and unload the dishwasher.  I must fold and put away the laundry.  I must scrub the toilets, and dust the ceiling fans and swiffer the floors and . . .

And if I do it one step at a time, there will be fewer steps left, and eventually it will be manageable again.  The key is to pick a step, and do it.  Then move on to the next step.

And not to stop to blog about it.

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See and Raise

August 15, 2008 at 8:32 pm (CHAOS and Control)
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Jawan posted today about her fantastic savings using Check It Out on Facebook.  I was inspired, so I printed my own coupons and headed out to WalMart.

Jawan, I see your savings, and I raise . . . my blood pressure.  OH MY WORD!  True, I saved substantially.  So much, in fact, that three (yes, THREE) managers had to examine my coupons.  Finally, I asked what the problem was.  The answer:  “Ma’am, we can’t pay you to shop here.”

The tally looked like this:  6.00 off coupon for a 5.25 pizza, 3.50 off coupon for a 2.73 package of cheese, one free package of Orbitz gum, 4.00 off coupon for a 4.22 bottle of cranberry juice.  It brought the total to something like $1.30 change back to me.  So they just gave me free pizza, free cheese, free gum and made me pay .22 cents plus tax for my cranberry juice.

It wasn’t that I begrudged paying the .22 cents for more than $13 worth of groceries.  I just hated that it took me ALMOST AN HOUR to do it.  They kept looking at me like I was doing something illegal.

So I’ve come home and printed more coupons.  I mean, I paid less than a quarter for supper this evening.  That’s worth a little scrutiny.

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