The Junk Drawer

Several weeks ago I promised you all a walk through my junk drawer. I know all of you have been losing sleep awaiting the reveal!  Well, wait no longer. Here is a smattering of what is contained in my junk drawer. (Mind you a very small smattering, I know you don't have all day.)

Save the Date!

For some reason I have held onto a save the date card for the wedding of my friends Holly and Seth!  Mind you this card was sent on New Years in, drum roll please, 2006!! Now, the card is cute and all, but really!

When people send me things with my name and address I find it very hard to throw them away, even though i don't actually use them. The movie gift cards I know I received prior to 2004!  I wonder if they are still any good.

Dear people that I know. Please please please do not give me joke gifts!  They are fun and cute when I get them, but I do not know how to get rid of them!

Love Love loved these sunglasses. They were my favorite pair forever. I think I got them for free when my brother used to do work for Smith. Unfortunately, one of the arms broke off and I they cannot be fixed - ever! However, it seems that I loved them so much that I have been waiting for them to magically regenerate in my junk drawer (the missing arm is there too!) Still waiting. Maybe 2013 is my lucky year.

 We've already had the rubber band conversation. And you never know when a film roll canister will come in handy - okay it hasn't yet and I haven't used film since 2000 or so, but you never know!

A couple years ago, when I got my super cool bamboo 'white' board (see It's Bamboo), it came with these white plastic jobbies. I couldn't figure out how to use them and managed to hang the board just fine without them. Still, they may  come in handy. Actually, there are two sets of these in the drawer. There was a smaller grey pair as well.

 Blackberry paraphernalia from the Blackberry that bit the dust when the bus ran over it, you remember that story, right? (see Blackberry). And yes that 10/10/09 and no, neither have been used since!

 Uhm, how many times have I used this and why on earth did hammer even decide to send them out.

The drawer was full of receipts. You're supposed to keep receipts, right? This one was very key to save.  It's for a card I purchased on 9/11/06 for god knows what??!!

And this, this is actually useful!  A sunglass screwdriver. I had no idea I owned one. This could come in handy if it wasn't hidden away from the world in the bottom of a junk drawer. Of course, where else would I keep it?

And we'll leave you with the cutest boy ever.  He was not in the junk drawer, though many of his things were - a dog toothbrush and peanut butter flavored tooth paste, brushes and combs from old dogs, a treat fanny pack I used when we went to training, a clicker I could never use because he was scared of it, and a doo hicky for his collar - it's flashing lights that you attach to the collar so when it's dark and you're walking your black dog you can find him - every time I am out in the dark I wish I had it!

So, that is the tour of my junk drawer. I know most of you sane people are saying throw the shit out already. I know. It did throw some things out, but it's hard when you're missing the gene.

Happy Monday!

'Oh. Pan', another happy homemaker blog.

Jealous much?

After a couple years of playing around with my cast iron skillet, enjoying it but not being able to attain the ultimate surface, I have finally achieved perfection!

Perfection recipe:

Season: wipe it down with some sort of fat (I used beef tallow) and stick it in the oven at 350 or so for an hour.

Now, after each use: I wipe it down with the scrubber part of a sponge while it's still hot. Then, I wipe the excess water off with a paper towel and melt a light coating of grease on the top (I either wipe off this grease or leave it in).

And, the final trick that has proven to be the true path to perfection: I store it in the oven. I used to just leave it on the stove, but the dog liked to jump up on the stove and lick out the grease. (I know, gross, huh?) So to solve that, I just started putting it in the oven. What happens is that 100% of the time I forget it's there when I go to cook something. I turn on the oven and when I'm ready to put whatever in, I open up the oven and say 'oh. pan.'. So every time I cook something the pan get a little extra seasoning love.

At the moment the pan is 100% non stick perfection!  It doesn't matter what I cook or if something burns, I can just wipe it off. Just like Teflon with no chemicals.

And get this, between the liver pate and the cast iron skillet, my iron levels are semi normal for the first time in forever (even with no supplements)!  Win win win win win!

In completely unrelated news, it turned back into winter in Seattle. The cat and dog are NOT happy.

Otto and Daisy butt to butt.

AND, I got my highest score ever in WWF!!!

And yes, I played vomit!

Will This Ever End

Let me start this blog with a disclaimer.  I know that remodeling my kitchen is an amazing and exciting opportunity. I am very lucky and happy to have the means to not only remodel my kitchen, but do it exactly as I would like...

And with that, let the complaining begin!

OH MY GOD, REMODELING YOUR KITCHEN SUCKS!!!!
So many details.
So many decisions.
So many trips to various places to look at and insane number of things.
So very very many words!

Yesterday, I went to look at sinks and faucets. After waiting 20 or so minutes for the sales associates to work with other indecisive folks, it was my turn. I think people who work in overly priced home showrooms are all of the same cloth. Maybe it's the clientele they work with (people who have the time and desire to pour over every detail). Anyhow, as the sink/faucet guy was talking to me, all I could think was 'HOW CAN THERE BE SO MANY WORDS TO SAY ABOUT A SINK'. And after 15 or 20 minutes when we still hadn't considered all the details we needed to consider and as we rehashed some details I thought we had finished with, all I could think was 'we haven't even started with faucets, I will be here for the rest of my life'. And secondly, 'isn't it time for a nap'?

It's a sink. Essentially it's a A rectangular piece of something (probably stainless steel) that will spend its life filled with dirty dishes. How many decisions can there be to make about a sink? And, even more importantly, if you have to think so hard about a sink, how much will you have think about the truly complicated things?

I may never actually have a new kitchen, instead just an insane number of squandered hours!

This? 

This?

Is there any F&&^^%%#*ing difference?

Sigh, okay, I'm off to look at more sinks, faucets, refrigerators and dishwashers!

Bad Genes

One of my mom's favorite sayings is 'in my next life'. When we were kids, it was frequently something like, 'in my next life I will have kids who (insert the appropriate perfectly behaved kid behavior here)'. Well, in MY next life, I will learn how to throw things out!  This is a skill I have certainly not mastered in this life. I know, all you clean organized people say 'just throw it out'. It's not so easy, I'm not programmed to do that. What if I need it.........

In preparation of my kitchen remodel, I decided to do a little cupboard cleaning. Let's take a gander at some of the things I found (mind you, these are only the things I  wasn't too embarrassed to photograph)!

WTF!  How many (if any) plastic utensils does one need. 

 The above have not yet made it in the garbage, because you never know when you might need a plastic knife or two.  Of course, it may be a long time before I need 14 plastic knives. They are sitting beside me as I contemplate their future. I know you are saying THROW THEM OUT!

When was the last time I ate regular sugar?

 One of the three of these made it into the garbage. The two unopened boxes are back in the cupboard.

Ack.

 These spices were a present that came with some indian recipes. Some were empty containers (because you know I might need a cute tiny rusty tin container one day). The others are filled with spices that I'm sure some day I will learn how to use.

Once I sprouted things, maybe I will again some day.

You never know when you need a tie thingy or a tiny plastic bag!

 These made it into the trash today!  Phew!!!

I blame my inability to throw out rubber bands, even impractical ones, on my mom!

All this and I haven't made it to the junk drawer yet. Maybe that can be it's own very special blog.

In more cheerful news after a full day of sun worshipping yesterday, today Otto was out bright and early to find the little corner of sun hitting the back yard.  Happy spring!

There is sun out here!

I will run from your camera! (Missed the super cute shot of her and Otto!)

Bad Hair Month

Sometime early March I decided I hated my hair. It was rare that I could get it to look even remotely decent. The left side was usually semi acceptable, but the right side was hell. It has this annoying cowlicky thing that could not be combated. The entire month all I could think about, dream about, fantasize about was a pony tail. As in, please god, let me put my hair in a pony tail!

 So, when I got my hair done a week or so ago, I had this brilliant idea that I would not get it cut, in order to speed up the ttpt (time to pony tail). Unfortunately, this had the consequence of not only giving me bad hair, but giving me really grown out bad hair! I do not look good.


Today in desperation I managed a teeny tiny baby pony tail. In order to illustrate, I thought I'd google baby pony tail. The picture below tells the tale (tail) perfectly (though I carry none of that movie star swagger)!

This is about the size of my baby pony tail. Also displayed is the amount of hair that does not make it into the PT.

In other news, for some reason when you google baby pony tail you also get the two following pictures. One an example of the pony tail I would love to have, but will never manage and is not even remotely a baby pony tail and the second, well, I can't even begin to explain the second.

Only 3.5 weeks, 24.5 days or 588 hours until my next hair cut!

Ch-ch-ch-changes...

Turn and face the strange.

Well, I guess fun fact week will not be concluded. Yesterday was busy. I ran out of time and energy! We had a good run though, huh?

Today we'll move on and speak of forced technological change. Say a good bye to the Google Reader. Apologize to Heather. And bring up a topic that may now be keeping me up at night. (Woo, all that in one blog!)

So Google announced this week that it is killing the Google Reader. For those who don't know, the Google Reader is a way to maintain a list of websites one is interested in. For me specifically, it is the home to all the blogs I follow. When I first found out my friends had blogs, I had a ritual in which every day I pulled up each blog to see if there was a new exciting post waiting for me! With some bloggers, Heather for example!!, you could expect this excitement daily. Others (and I won't name names), go months without updating!  This made it hard to want to pull up their blog daily - risking continual disappointment. It also made one likely to forget about their blog, risking missing out when they finally got around to saying something.

Google reader came to the rescue. Enter a blog address in Google reader and every time someone blogs, their new blog will pop up to the top! Issue solved. And, now that I'm following about 30 blogs, it saves space in my more poor brain for other things (ie I don't have to remember all the blogs I want to look up). Phew!

So, now that the reader is disappearing, I (along with 500,000 others according to news articles), moved over to Feedly. Feedly offers a similar service and allowed me to put in my Google login credentials and transfered all my blogs over for me!  Sweet!!  The only issue is getting used to new navigation and a new layout AND some weird something. There was a list of blogs I follow on the right, the top one being my friend Heather. I clicked on something that I thought would allow me to see her blog, instead it swooped her blog right off my lists of blogs I follow. AND when I click the lists of actual blog entries, her latest posts are no where to be found. I keep trying to add her, but Feedly just says I am already following her.

Hmmmm. As the girls on the bachelor say (and they are all 'girls'), I can only hope and pray her blog reappears when there is a new update. Sorry Heather!

And finally, all this stress has introduced a new worry into my life. Google's whims and blogspot. What if Google decided to get rid of their blog site?  (This is a particular worry, as the Reader and Blogspot are very integrated.) What if all my 4.5 years of blogs, some of which are pure brilliance, were gone in a swoop of some Google employees keyboard. That would make me unbelievable sad!  How can I save these?????

FFW, Day 6

On today, this sixth day of fun fact week, actually fun fact friday, the only fun fact I have for you is that I am much too tired to come up with a fun fact of my own! 

Instead, I will leave you with some nonsense currently being sold in a hardware store in Belfair, Washington and (I'm sure) other fine establishments in the more upscale neighborhoods of this country.

Yes, it's anti friction powder for your butt.

And I think no further words are necessary or even appropriate!

Happy FFF!