The complicated toaster and the people who use them

My mom bought us a new toaster for Christmas. When I opened it, I told her it felt like I was getting married. Toasters are soooo Bridal Shower, aren't they? Along with the blender. 

So we set up the toaster today, my husband and I, like newlyweds + the background of kids screaming for their dinner, and I figured I could just plug it in, stick in a frozen waffle and the kids would be nourished. Looks like these items have gotten high tech and come with directions - aka a 10-page user manual that actually contains four (4) lined pages for "notes."

Like I'm at a toaster convention and I need to jot down the best setting for my pumpernickel.

So for shits and giggles, I read it outloud starting with Step 1: remove the toaster from the packaging.

It reminded me of when my mom told me that newspapers are written at a 5th grade level. Toaster manuals are written for people who time traveled here from the year 1620.

I think we can safely assume that if you managed to pull out the directions from where they were hiding, chances are you've already taken the toaster out of the box.

Engrossed in all the different possible toast-concoctions and completely ignoring my kids pleads for food, I went straight to Frequently Asked Questions. 

A memorizing array of choices ...

I have a FAQ! Do you really think anyone is taking notes on your toaster? And you omitted the toast instructions for pumpernickel!

FAQ 1: My toast isn't toasting? Answer: have you checked to make sure the toaster is plugged in? Have you pressed down the lever? Have you taken the toaster out of the box?

FAQ 2: I like to spread my toast with peanut butter and then pop it in the toaster to melt a little. Is this okay? Answer: No. You are the reason offices have banned toasters from the tiny office kitchen. You are probably the same person who steals other peoples yogurt from the communal fridge.

The fact that this made it to the FAQ #2 spot right ahead of "what do I do now, my bread is jammed in the toaster!?" frightens me on the state of toaster-users across America. If you want to melt your PB that's what a microwave oven is for.

Now that's a manual I need to get my hands on!

Organizing Photos into a Photo Album

I completed my first Photo Album as well as organized my entire photo collection ... from 2011.

Alright, I realize it's mid-2014 here but I made a dent in the 14,000 photos taking up precious space on my hard drive, so I feel like I should be wearing a tiara or that crown from Burger King. Tackling these photos was a monster -- iPhoto is just another basement where I throw stuff I don't want to deal with.

What inspired this project was a Pin on Organizing Photos. You can read her post (which is awesome and in great detail, but she talks about printing photos which I gave up on), or you can read my version (the lazy blogger version). Take your pick.

How to:

iPhoto sorted by Month/Year

1. Sort Photos: All of my photos were in iPhoto already sorted by month/year. If yours aren't, do that first. (Also don't forget to grab your husbands phone and get his photos into your library).

 2. Cull Photos: This is the hard part, and took me a long time. I basically went through each month 3-4 different times at different time periods and deleted photos. For instance: August 2011 started with 275 photos, after 4 different deleting sessions over a few weeks/months, I got it down to 128. Some months I got down to 50, but that's like March when nothing happens.

I kept my progress detailed in my spiral notebook of which months I did, where I left off, etc so I could pick up at any time.

If you have time ... you can also crop and fix all your photos. I meant to do this but time just escaped. I agree that any photo I did crop looked better. Oh well. I'm not Ansel Adams.

How long did this take? I started deleting photos in December 2013 and finished March 2014.

3. Start Photo Book: There's a few to choose from. I made mine through Shutterfly choosing the softcover, Year in Review model. Now if I thought deleting photos took a long time, making the book took even longer. It's online and ended up being 94 pages so it crashed a lot on me and was also slow to load. Then creating the pages themselves just took a lot of time, effort, and brain power -- which I was working mostly after 9PM and my brain officially shuts down at 5PM.



This I also kept detailed in the spiral notebook, listing which months were made vs which months were now finalized.

I started the book in March and finished June 1st. The book arrived today: June 11th.

Notice the 1st page where I left the stock wording ...


4. Back-up photos: Once the book was sent off to the publisher, I resized all the photos (some were like 3MB) and then put them all both on a DVD and on my external back-up drive. And they came off my computer.

Some notes on making a Photo Book:

1. Online the photos look smaller: Seeing the pages now, I wish I hadn't done some of the 2-photo pages or the larger photos. The small sized photos looked like postage stamps online but they ended up being perfect size to capture a series of photos from a vacation, or holiday.

Like did I really need this ginormous photo of my cat?


2. I like the pre-done pages: This party page was a pre-set idea page you can choose and I like how that turned out. It's hard to have the time to stylize 94 individual pages.


Here's another one -- vacation.


3. It's expensive: Look for coupons and deals. If you don't need it right away, sit on your finsihed book until a deal comes. Mine was ready around Father's Day so there was free shipping and discounts. Even then, the 94 pages came to over $60. But I figures, printing each photo and buying books would be around the same thing.

4. I wish the spine wasn't blank: This will end up on my bookshelf so I wish the spine had the title from the front.

Final Verdict: I like the book a lot but I like trying other things so for 2012, I'm trying MyPublisher. So far it's not as "cutesy" as the Year in Review pages and doesn't have pre-done pages with their "bling" but I'm okay with that. I can compare them when I get this done ... next year.

The Money Pit strikes again

This winter we celebrated 9 years of living in The Money Pit. My husband and I can't believe we've lasted this long: this house is one big headache. But something called "excellent schools" and "terrible resale value" is making us stay put and the house is very happy eating away at our savings account one check at a time.

This week I wrote out a check for a new, professionally installed window well cover.

This window well used to hide under a splintering, decrepit wood porch that we finally took down 2 years ago to make way for a patio and now it's exposed for our kids to jump on. So we put a cover on it. Done.

before

Two years and many rain storms, heat waves, and -20 degree days later, we finally had a nice day with the kids playing in the backyard. Nice, until Caligula my daughter took one look at it and decided to pretend it was a bounce house ... and fell right through --- 3-1/2 feet down into the well!

With Cerberus, her Trio of Bears on guard

Luckily the bottom was soft-- or at least that's what my husband said from inside. He saw the whole thing happen and dove in to rescue her -- right after throwing his glass of beer up in the air.  We were so lucky the cracked piece didn't cut her ... I'm still in shock over the whole thing.

Anyway, after kindly refusing my dad's offer of covering it with a sheet of plywood which he would gladly bring over from his collection of "bits & fragments of the last 50 years" stashed in his garage, we were on the phone with a window well company and had it promptly installed.  Voila.

After

 The warranty says "lifetime" and the weight max is 250lb.  We'll see.

Kids for Hire

What I've learned from watching Disney's Cinderella is that washing your floors on your hand & knees is the best method. Singing while washing, however, does not make it more enjoyable -- nor does it summon birds and mice to my aid.

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Today I was on my hands and knees wiping the bathroom floor because, according to the Cleaning Schedule of my role as Household Sanitation Director (AKA the unpaid maid), this should have happened on Tuesday.

My son walks in, "Can I help?" (Queue the theme song from Chariots of Fire)

Never one to turn down cleaning help and a firm believer that misery deserves company, I hand him a rag, point to the bathroom sink full of soapy water, and put him to work.

I expected -- well what I expected was for him to act like how I did as a kid which was to pretend I didn't see my mom cleaning and walk the other way. But no, he helped me clean the whole floor (which is quite small but nonetheless) and then asked if he could clean the cabinets too ("of course!"). From there we moved to the bedroom floor because I had a captive audience and I was not against exploiting the moment. Plus, they were really dusty.

Capturing this once in a lifetime moment.

 My daughter stayed away for the most part. When she did pop her head in, my son told her, "I have so much work to do!" Believing this to be a party she wasn't invited to, and being a known party crasher even at her tender age of 23 months, she grabbed the nearest thing (a bath towel) and got down on her knees and started to clean too.

Looking at my two pride & joys, I felt just a wee twinge of guilt -- and a lot like Cinderellas Evil step-mother -- but what the hell, my floors are clean and I didn't have to pay bribe anyone to do it.

Why I can't go on Houzz anymore

I really like my house. No, I'm not head over heels in love with it; it's not on an ocean or in the mountains, it's not a mid-century modern work of art or an 1890s painted lady, it doesn't have nooks and crannies, a butlers pantry or a winding staircase. It's just a suburban, 1970s split level with 3 bedrooms, 2 baths that is an 8-minute walk to the train station that was in our price range -- therefore, making it perfect.

Over the last 9 years this house has sucked our bank account dry. It's the Money Pit minus the fountain of the boy taking a pee. When the kids head off to college, saddled with loans because we cared more about replacing drafty 40 year old windows than a 529, we'll burn rubber down the street with the For Sale sign out front. Where we'll go is anyone's guess but it won't be a place where -20 windchill is in the nightly forecast, that's for sure.

In the meanwhile, I try to find more ways to liquidate our bank account by getting design ideas from Houzz, pouring through incredible home designs and vistas that seem almost unreal. It's eye candy, escapism for the interior-ally challenged. It's just picture after picture of gorgeousness - people who definitely have more cash flow and talent than the average person (or at least me).

Sigh. So I have to quit dreaming and finding change in the couch to pay for my next home improvement project and love the "Home" I have created with my husband & 2 kids because ...

We will never have a bedroom with an amazing view, unless you count my neighbors shed and kids swimming in a paddling pool a VIEW.

We will never have a shed cleaner than my house, and without bugs, mice & dirt. It is a shed after all.

Our kids don't make hipster cool art. And it isn't going on our backsplash.

Our office space is not this inspiring, feng shui'd, or jaw-dropping. In fact, we don't even have one.

I will never have a laundry chute

Wait! Does this count?

Nor will I have that carefree effortless design cool - "What? That QA? Oh I just found it lying in a garbage on my way home from Pilates. I have a knack for finding cool treasures like this." GAG!

And last but not least, we will never have an outdoor shower (or at least my neighbors hope we won't)

So Houzz, unless you show me a house with dirty socks on the floor, kids toys scattered in every crevice, and a couch with a pillow barricade so the cats don't scratch it at night, I must bid adieu. Farewell fond friend.

I have to clean my house now.

I just terminated the contract with the cleaning service.

Before you start calling me a bragplainer -- those people who like to complain about something but only for the reason of letting everyone know how damn lucky you are -- let me explain.

When my daughter was born, my son was 23 months and all I did for hours on end was nurse her and read him stories (or chase him around the house, or wrestle to change his diaper, or turn on the TV and pass out on the couch from sleep deprivation.) So when my husband uttered the sweetest words in history "Hire a cleaning crew, it'll be temporary" I did just that.  I just didn't actually hear the "temporary" bit because here we are 19 months later still shelling out dough for a house cleaning that will last um... about 20 minutes if I'm lucky. The last time the house was cleaned, my son managed to spill his entire lunch on the floor before the crew even left the house. 

Enter the Cleaning Schedule

Oh what would I do without Pinterest to tell me that all good little housewives like myself have cleaning schedules to stay on top of the piles of crap that form overnight.  Oh ... Are we not saying the term "housewives" anymore? Because the term I'd really like to use in this instance is "unpaid maid."  So I took some time out of my busy schedule of disciplining kids, changing my daughters fourth poop of the day, and trying to make a meal out of 3 ingredients (one of which are maraschino cherries) to create the bad-ass Cleaning Schedule that is on my fridge and of which I ignore on a daily basis.

Lord knows that's why I love "catch up day" that ironically falls on a Saturday when my husband is home.