Things That Make You Go "Duh!" - Saturday 5/9/2009

I picked up the round cookie sheet that I've been resting the sprouts on, and found this huge rust stain on the counter.

Duh. Took a lot of scrubbing to get this up.



During cleanup, I stacked too much stuff in the sink. As the pan on top filled with water, it tilted suddenly and dumped about half of its contents on me!

It's a two-duh day!

The Anti-Bacterial Question - Wednesday 1/7/2009

Last night, Kitty and I talked about the over use of anti-bacterial products these days. I think she was relieved to hear that although I do have a bit of a mania about clearing and wiping off my kitchen counters before bed, I don't routinely swab them with microbe-annihilating potions.

But then I had to admit to her that I use them at work. The hand- and dish-soaps are provided by the office, and I recently added the Purell to my desk.

This is due to the nasty habit we have in this office of passing around colds. Yesterday, 4 of my 7 coworkers were either working sick or out sick.

To avoid the thrill of this particular merry-go-round, I started using my own glass, bowl, plate, cups and silverware rather than share the communal stock a couple of years ago.

When I started here, I was kind of excited at the thought of an all-female office. I just assumed that would mean that everyone would do her own dishes, wipe her own exploded soup off the insides of the microwave, scrape her own burnt cheese off the bottom of the toaster oven.

Not so, my friends.

But at least I was made aware of and made to release that sexist little nugget.

I started using my own private utensils because I was fed up with always carting other people's clean dishes back to the little kitchen area. And if they want to leave a bowl soaking until smelly creatures colonize it's surface, it's not my problem.

The water we have to wash dishes in doesn't get very hot, so I want to just limit myself to my own personal germies, thank you very much. I even have my own (nice clean) dishtowel so I don't have to leave my dishes in the drain rack (which is in the same room as the toilet...don't get me started on what The Today Show would say about that!)

Every year at some point a cold (or two) gets shuffled around the office, bolstering my separatist inclinations. When one person is out sick, it's almost a given that I or another coworker will have to go to her desk and work on her computer or get her USB drive to work from. I unabashedly wipe everything at her desk down with those Kirkland anti-bacterial wipes.

I'll admit that it's doing a number on my hands, drying them out a bit more than usual even for this time of year.



Other than that, I think I'm handling the situation quite rationally.

Out with the Old - Sunday 1/4/2009

What are these things anyway?

Hydra was going through his closet and came across some of my old computer games. I thought I'd see if this one would still run. Ha! It's on 5 1/4 inch disks! (Also on the smaller ones.) And it it can be run on either Windows or DOS 3.0 and higher.

When I first started working on computers in nineteen-hundred and eighty-nine, we had a system called NPS at UCLA that used 8 inch floppy disks! It went away shortly after I arrived, and we modernized to these 5 1/4 inch babies.



We took the toys and lights off of the tree and then suddenly there was just this big tree lurking a bit awkwardly in the living room.

When we wrestled it into a huge plastic bag and hauled it outside, I felt like we were kidnapping it! Eek.

Oh, and FYI, I had a personal best this morning at the gym: 60 minutes of cardio level elliptical machine "running" (heart rate between 145-150 the whole time), for a total of 5.52 miles! My longest both time and distance-wise.

This was to rid myself of my end-of-vacation / beginning-of-the-new-year screaming hollowness. It didn't really make me a better person, but it made me feel like one.

You Probably Had to Be There - Sunday 11/7/2008

This is the before shot.

This is supposed to be an astounding example of how well the environmentally safe method of cleaning silver with a damp cloth and some toothpaste works.



Trust me, it works really really well, even though it's not as obvious in these before and after photos as it was in real life.

The tarnish starts coming off as soon as you start rubbing it on the metal. Use a white tooth paste, not a gel.

I discovered that the souvenir spoon on the right--which is from Hydra's family--wasn't as badly tarnished as I thought. It actually was gold--or maybe copper?--plate over silver. The underlying silver shined up pretty well.

Cool Thing: Borax. This is another environmentally friendly thing to use to boost your laundry (brighten it) and to soften your water. It can also be used to gently clean china and porcelain, deodorize things, and preserve dried flowers, and to make candle wicks! Check it out on the website.

Publish Post

I also like it because it's the famous 20 Mule Team Borax, and it's dug out of the ground about 60 miles from us, in Boron, CA.

How Clean Was My Cupboard?

I was in the midst of reorganizing my kitchen cabinets when Dodger went missing. Where could he be?

Turns out, he'd claimed this one as his own. He's swinging his head back and forth in full on defensive mode.

I meant to take a photo of this cabinet post-reorg, but haven't gotten around to it. It's so much less cluttered now.

Oh, and the parrot infestation has been taken care of.

Fruitful Friday - 12/21/2007

Whoo! Festive, huh?

Why don't I ever think to take a "before" picture?

Maybe because they tend to be kind of humiliating.

I am forced to admit that I might have a slight compulsion about saving paper and plastic bags and glass jars. It was like ankle deep in here when I started. Naively, I thought it would take about 2 hours to clean up.

Har dee har har har. Six--count 'em--six hours later, viola! No jars that have no lids, no lids that have no jars. No boxes full of bags. Just a renewed conviction to not mindlessly accept the paper and plastic our friends the cashiers want to give us.



Outside the pantry door things are a little more jolly. If we've received your card, it's here! Thanks so much for helping us decorate.

My cousin Bells, reminded me that our grandma put cards up on the inside of her front door. My mom did this too. I guess I've always done it. Except that we have a big leaded glass window in the front door, so I wrap the pantry door with gold paper and tape the cards on that.

I had a very productive day. Wrote just a tiny bit in the early a.m., completed two more hand made gifts, and started two more. Yay!

The Tee Shirt Project - Part Two - Sunday 12/2/2007

Isn't this cheery? I'm not letting go of this one yet. It's one of my favorites to do yard work in. Given to me by a coworker/friend shortly after we brought Dodger home. Of course, he's a much more somberly colored bird, but his spirit is definitely this bright.


Mona! Hydra gave me this tee shirt a few years ago. I love Mona because she is at once high art and high kitch. I have a Mona Lisa soap dispenser, a Mona Lisa salt & pepper set, etc.


From the first year Hydra and I particpated in the Revlon Run/Walk for women's cancers. At the time we were supporting DeeKay and remembering Hydra's mother. By the next year I'd be walking for Gia. This coming May, sadly, we'll have more names to add to our support list.

It was very emotional walking into the L.A. Memorial Coliseum for the first time. Being serenaded byJapanese drummers into the tunnel and then emerging onto the playing field, which has been in use since 1923.




From The Museum of Jurassic Technology, a truly odd museum on the west side of Los Angeles. I think I have to go back as I'm still not entirely sure what happened to me there. Worth a look if you are interested in unique experiences.



Yeah, I have a tee shirt from my new home town, Acton. This is how the town likes to see itself. I like it too.

This project suggests many more projects! The Mug Project. The Matchbook Project.

Stay tuned, Clutterbusters!

The Tee Shirt Project - Friday 11/30/2007

Tee shirt from the now-discontinued Art of the Wild workshop at Squaw Valley. What an amazing week that was. Very empowering workshops and panels, and I took a raft tour of the Truckee River with a geology prof from UC Davis for my field trip day.

I'm taking the advice of this show I used to watch on BBC America, where an organization specialist went to people's homes and helped them get rid of their clutter. It usually had to do with emotional attachments to stuff not because of the items themselves, but the memories they held.

So. Today I start taking photographs of my tee shirts so that I can keep the image and the memory in a little photo album instead of filling up my wardrobe. Some of them have the collars cut out of them (because they're more comfy for working out, not because they are actually from the eighties) or are stained and can't be donated. A few I'll keep, and some I'll give away.




From the first L.A. Times Festival of Books. I went to the first three. They didn't expect a big turnout the first year, but 50,000 people showed up. Was this the year I saw Charlton Heston read from Hemingway and the Bible on an outdoor stage with no reservation needed? Or maybe the next year. Whatever his politics and talents, that was a very interesting reading.



Yeah, I worked at the UCLA Engineering & Math Sciences library during the Northridge Quake. If there had been people in the stacks, there would have been deaths. When I finally went in to work a week later, we reshelved books that had fallen into the spaces between shelves three feet deep. Mostly bound journals. Very heavy.



I didn't realize that Wolf Lake was Noble County's oldest town till I saw this. This was the closest town to us when I grew up (still is to my Mom), about 5 miles away and about 150 people strong. My dad owned and operated a service station there with his brother. I won a dance contest at this festival in 1978. Boogie down!



I was working at UCLA's Rosenfeld Management Library when it moved from the old building to the new. We moved the rare books from Special Collections across campus on hand trucks. This was the last place I worked at UCLA. During most of my lunches I went to the pool in the Women's Gym nearby and swim. That and discovering the Fowler Museum next door are my two fondest memories of that job.