live from sublurbia

For other WFMW tips, visit our lovely WFMW carnival hosts!

Sorry, boring and quick this week, but one I figured out by accident – folding the napkins in the dryer.

I usually just toss our cloth napkins in with any old load of laundry. This leads to a pile of randomness going from the panlaundrium to the sofa, and napkins getting lost along the way.

What I figured out yesterday, however, is that I can tilt the dryer tumbler to have a flat surface – and put folded napkins atop that surface. They are up and out of the way while I hang (sometimes) the other clothes up or roll the clothes (more likely) into a waiting panlaundrium basket.

Then, before I re-load the dryer, I tuck the folded napkins into my pocket, or make a trip to the little baskets I keep around for holding the napkins until meal time.

No Comments »

And it’s way, way too quiet. I’d been hoping the roofer would be out today, finishing my leaky roof, but it’s after two and still no materials have been delivered. Sigh.

Meantime, I’m crocking up some beans and some enchilada sauce for dinner tonight. Mmmm, enchiladas. Just like mom used to make, and now I make my way. I’m sure as the years go on I’ll develop my own quirks for the recipe, but for now, I’m sticking to as close to her formula as given (the basic formula – the long version is a multi-page treatise on various chilies and their preparation into the fire-nectar of the buds.

We have a first tomato! I bought some sad looking plants a couple weeks back and they look to be in shock (I’ve not yet transplanted them). Despite that, I’ve got one tomato, red and ripe and ready to eat – except for the small matter of its freckles. Hot tar splashed on the poor thing, so I guess it’s unfit to eat. But I’ll compost it back for other garden karma, maybe among the flowers.

Otherwise, it’s a nice lazy day near the end of summer. Within the next day we’ll be swarming with another pile of cousins and I can hardly wait until they arrive.

1 Comment »

Between getting organized for guests coming and going, sorting out all of my fabric into type for sewing, sticking close to home to tend roofers and kids with summer colds, I’ve finally rid myself of the giant laundry basket in the den, our seven-year old portable playpen.

Over its lifetime, it housed kids and cats, toys and laundry, bolts of fabric and the occasional birthday gift. Despite the manufacturer’s claims of less than a minute set-up time, negotiating all the bits into position usually took at least ten more minutes and three more inches in height than I have. Nothing like trying to ratchet the “pull and twist” mechanism while trying to not fall into the pen.

Despite the mostly fond memories, the time has come for departure and recycling. I hope someone picks it up to sell the metal tubing for scrap – but we have quite a parade here on Friday mornings, so I think it likely. If I knew where to recycle/sell the tubing or we didn’t have the informal pickups before the formal pickups, I would have taken a sledge and knife to it myself for recycling.

I can’t pass it on, because the wear of a dozen children, pets, and my own rough assembly finally caused something to give and break about a year ago. Not enough to get out of letting it hold “some laundry” for “just a little while”, but enough to catch all the clutter I could throw its way.

Two weeks ago, we finally broke it down, and disabled it as much as possible to discourage its unsafe reuse for children. If I’d thought it through enough, I would have kept the netting to reuse for a project; I didn’t think of one until I finally laid it on the curb for bulk pickup. Too little, too late.

Goodbye, Clutter Catcher of Doom. Good riddance, and dang you held a lot of laundry.

No Comments »

[Think of a something Thursday!]

Growing up, we had a huge cake box full of cookie cutters. We’d get them out once or twice a year, taking over the kitchen to make COOOKIES. Great busy, messy fun during the summer and winter breaks. But excavating them was a major chore. And the box usually sat around until all the cutters were washed and put up – usually a few days or even weeks (eep!).

I was pretty good about cookie cutters at first, but they seemed to take up an awful lot of space in the “whatever” drawer (Which reminds me – any use for corn holders? I’ve given up on those little stabby knobs.). The cutters spread to the boxed lunch area (cute sandwich shapes!) and the toaster oven (ghostest toastest with the mostest!). I did a quick purging of the kitchen and came up with a count of seventeen, and I know that doesn’t even cover the ones in our art bins. Continue Reading »

No Comments »

_{For more WFMW ideas, go visit this week’s Carnival at We Are THAT Family!}

Apple. Tree. You know the old saw.

I meant to blog about garden plot markers months ago. A number of websites suggest old vertical blind slats be used to tell our turnips from our carrots in the early planting stages, save used popsicle sticks, and suggested uses for other reusable items. I made a mental note to try and talk my SIL out of her old blinds to follow that advice, until the new coffee machines showed up at the office.

One of the first things I did was to take it apart and see how it worked.
After some trial and error, I finally figured out how to stock it, and worked to free the plastic sliders the coffee packs ship on. Three or four of the sliders sat my desk for a week or so until I finally took them home to sit on my desk there. Then one morning, as I racked off six more flavors of coffee, it struck me – white, plastic – I can use them in the garden. Continue Reading »

2 Comments »

Although, to be fair, Laser Beam is a head taller than me, so he’s actually rather big for a birdie. We’ve got family coming and it really needs doing.

[picture of paint cans]

It’s been a crazy crazy couple of weeks since the audition and I feel as if I’ve gotten nothing done. Some logo work, some paperwork, wear and tear tests. PHEW! I feel bad because I haven’t really emailed any of the cool inventors I met last month. I need to do that, soon.

And I’m still doing part time writing work, looking for full-time work, coordinating getting a new roof on, and getting ready for family visiting/staying/traveling from now through the end of August. Double PHEW!

Anyway, birdies. I’m on Twitter now, and you can follow me here. I’ve also put together a very basic official “me” page on Facebook here. I’m trying to link them together, or not. Trying to figure out what to do with it all, keep this a mom/idea blog but I guess it’s turning more into an invention blog, which is kind of the point I was going at with the [TOAST] (Think of a Something Thursday) posts.

More birdies – we are at the halfway mark of when the inventor show producers said they’d start talking to people about being on the show. Wooo! Continue Reading »

No Comments »

I was going to talk about file sharing and information sharing on the net, but I’ve just heard that Vimeo is going to start deleting source content of “free” users August 1. Download it if you don’t have it, folks!

They state they won’t delete the files they convert to Vimeo content for free users, but they can’t hold the “big” original files any more. It makes sense, but … that’s really short notice.

So, download it to have it, choose to upgrade your account, or just panic. And stop counting on “free” services as your only back up, if you have. :-) Good luck!

[TL;DR version - big files go in, little files are made. Big files will start to go away - back them up now and/or upgrade your account.]

For more cheerful WFMW tips, go see the host at We are THAT family.

3 Comments »

And I’ve always been envious of Moon Landing Day babies (I wanted one or more, but none of my babies were “ready” then), but this year, we can all experience the moon landing “live”. I’m going to put this on every computer in the house for the next few days.

GO SCIENCE!

1 Comment »

So the hub sent me this interesting article this morning out of Scientific American. Swearing when you’re hurt does help, it seems. But only with pain – not frustration (darn) or on mechanical objects (double darn), or loose hemlines (yay staplers!).

But I need to save it for really bad dings, and I need to be less clumsy:

There is a catch, though: The more we swear, the less emotionally potent the words become, Stephens cautions. And without emotion, all that is left of a swearword is the word itself, unlikely to soothe anyone’s pain.

As for pain, it looks like nursing my kids during immunization jabs was the right thing to do. They’re good laughers, and we often reduce them to giggles as a distraction from the daily bumps and thuds that raise voices and little bruises. But they wiggle enough that it won’t do much good at shot time.

Last time through, I talked to them about it and promised them a rare treat – ice cream out at an ice cream shop. For next time, though, I’ve got another idea: topical anesthetic. We had it for one round at infancy, but it never occurred to me to do it for subsequent administrations. Then I read about a numbing cream (prescription, your doctor) I could apply ahead of time – brilliant, and why didn’t I think of it before?

No Comments »

FYI, South and West county to be mosquito sprayed Friday night. If you have veggies and rain barrels you’d rather not be sprayed, cover them up.

Don’t forget to cover or keep circulating rain barrels and other water sources, or continue other methods of mosquito abatement. Reading Mother Earth News this month reminds me how much my childhood fowl did to keep the bugs down, but we’re not zoned for that kind of help.

No Comments »