I’ve purposefully been elusive about my employment status. Family and close friends know most of what I’m up to, but even they haven’t heard the latest. So here’s a summary.
The State of Things
housework
5 Itty Bitty Housework Hacks to Save Time and Money
I don’t care for housework. I understand it’s a fact of life and I do get a feeling of accomplishment when everything is clean.
Thirty seconds later, the boys (and/or Howie) come home from the park and undo it all. Oh well, at least I tried, right?
Over the years of keeping my own home, I’ve come to rely on numerous “life hacks” that buy me a few minutes of time savings (and sanity) from housework.
Allow me to share with you some of the smaller, more subtle housework hacks that I have come to rely on. I’m sure these tips exist already, and many of you will say, “Well, DUH! Who doesn’t do that?”, but for me, I found some of them genius! And if you try some of the ones that seem new to you, you might ask yourself in a few weeks, “Why did I not do that all along?”
They Multiply…
The images you see in this post are snapshots from around my family room and kitchen on Tuesday, January 7, 2014. Those piles have since moved around and spread out some. Today my sons went back to school after 19 days off for the holiday break. That is by far the longest grade school break … Read more
Major Mom’s “Back to Basics” Campaign: 30 Days (Almost) Dryer-Free!
Just before I left for vacation in June, we got a power bill and it was a doozie! The weather had been warm so the air conditioner had been running at full-tilt, but as I always do after a higher-than-normal electric bill, I start to look for where to trim the excess power consumption:
- Close my garage door: I have a habit of leaving our garage door open. The morning sun comes screaming in heating up the space. This makes our garage fridge work harder.
- Turn off extra lights. MOST of our house uses CFL lightbulbs, but not all of them. The bathrooms have many incandescent bulbs and we need to be better about turning them off.
- Don’t use my big oven when I can use my toaster oven to do the same job. If I’m just baking chicken breasts, I can pop them in our smaller toaster oven, which does the same job in a smaller space.
But the biggest — or at least a top 3 — culprit is probably our clothes dryer. I saw a couple friends take part in a 30-Day Dryer Challenge earlier this year and at the time I thought to myself “No! Never!”, but after (a) this past power bill and (b) driving through the back roads of Lancaster County on a laundry day, I began to mellow to the thought.
Major Mom’s “Back to Basics” Campaign: Homemade Laundry Soap
Has anyone else noticed the prices of laundry detergent skyrocketing?***
How about Tide for nearly $12 per bottle (24 loads)??? Or $12 for 40 of those new Tide Pod thingies? I’ve been paying about $7-8 for a bottle of All Free & Clear, which advertised 64 loads of laundry for the size I bought. I only use about 1/2 of the recommended dose (really, it doesn’t take much detergent to cut odors and do cursory cleaning). So lets say I get 100 loads of laundry for $8. So $0.08 per load, right?
I figured I’d try this classic recipe for homemade laundry detergent, using less chemicals and additives than what’s in the popular commercial laundry detergents. I first saw this detergent referenced by the Duggar family several years ago…they had made a documentary years before TLC picked them up for a reality show. In the show, the Duggars covered some of the basics of their household: how they did laundry, how the kids chose their clothes, how they grocery shopped and how they cooked. They made brief mention of their homemade laundry detergent.
There are several variations on this recipe, and there are different schools of thought on using a liquid vs. non-liquid version of this recipe. If you want to keep it easy, just run the bar soap through a food processor (get one at a thrift shop expressly for grinding up soap so you don’t have to have soapy food) and combine it with the washing soda and borax. Store it and use about 1 TBSP per load of laundry. The thing to watch for with the non-liquid detergent is that the soap may not dissolve too well in cold water washes. If you use cold-water for laundry, I recommend you proceed with making the liquid version.
Major Mom’s “Back to Basics” Campaign: The Quest for Homemade Bread
These past two months have been a blur to me. I was busy with both boys in baseball, and my responsibilities with the Hurlburt Spouses’ Club ramped up, as I was in charge of organizing the elections of next year’s officers and a biennal review of the Constitution and other legal documents.
But now it has all wound down, with the new Hurlburt Spouses’ Club officers installed a couple weeks ago, the boys’ baseball and Cub Scouts having come to a close and I have a summer season that I can dedicate to my family.
One of the things that really came to a screeching halt in April and May was normal cooking for the family. Our dinnertimes became dominated by the “quick and easy”, from chicken nuggets to Firehouse Subs.
With the help of some inspiration from several friends who have embarked on similar cooking/eating journeys, I am going to try to go “back to basics” with our eating. Not a “fad diet”, per se, but just trying to reset my cooking and eating habits a little.
A Geeky Experiment: Converting Mowing the Huge Lawn into Mileage and Calories
This is about 1/2 of the backyard in view here. You can also see our backyard on our weather webcam here. For some reason the homeowner removed every…single…tree…and…shrub from his lawn. On Google maps you could see an area of pine trees in the middle of the backyard, but no longer. More for me to … Read more
Extreme Couponing? Not For This Military Family!
How many of you have seen Extreme Couponing, the reality show on TLC? Or is it Bravo? A&E? Heck, they all seem to run together to me now… By the way: When did the word “coupon” become a verb? I tossed the show on my DVR a couple weeks ago and watched a few … Read more
Like Watching Paint Dry
Paul and I have gone nearly a week uploading to each others’ computers with CrashPlan. It’s been quite successful, in that we are successfully connecting to each others’ computers consistently. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I’m seeing just how slow my AT&T DSL network is. I purposefully selected a data plan … Read more
CrashPlan Update
Isn’t Schoolhouse Rock the BEST???? I Googled images for “Hooray” and this scene from the episode on “Interjections” appeared. Yesterday we had success! Paul and I did a couple more tweaks with our respective firewalls, and after dinnertime, the grey lights turned green on our CrashPlan GUIs! This point-to-point uploading is going much much faster … Read more