Product Alert

I actually think the world might be a better place if I start handing these out:

FU Remover

This is seriously The.Best.Product.Ever for cleaning cat hair off of furniture and bedding. if you have a cat, you need to get one for yourself. i would like to give them as gifts to all my fellow cat-owning friends, but it's a long way to christmas and perhaps you already have one anyway. but if not, i highly recommend it. when i got the first one, heidi and i used it on my sofa and my living room carpet and we were marveling at it like ladies on a bad infomercial, like 'ooh, it really lifts the cat hair,' and 'wow, the squeegee edge is awesome'. also in line with the infomercial theme, i used to use lint rollers, which pick up the hair, but they make extra paper waste and it takes so many to clean a little spot. and who wants to drag out the vacuum every time there's a spot of pet hair? plus, it's easily cleanable - just rinse it off, and made of long-lasting natural rubber. the major downfall is that i've only been able to find it at wal-mart, so if you are a target shopper, you're S.O.L. Hee! And if you're wondering why I wrote "when I got the first one," it's because I loaned it to Bri and Rob for Mr. Simba's fur and they didn't tell me that it didn't work, so I assume that it did work and so now it is a gift from me to them and this photo is of the new one I got last night.


PSA Alert: The Ohio Department of scaring-the-bejeebus-out-of-you is running PSAs warning that we are long overdue for a pandemic flu episode and cautioning us to stock up on survival supplies. I'll be posting about my survival "shelter" before too long, but for now, you should start planning for a shelter of your own.

more-ganizing

i have got a LOT of keys. it's true. i have extra doors with locks because of the 2-family. i have spare keys to other people's houses b/c i end up house-sitting pretty frequently. and, i have a pretty large set of keys that go to locks i'm not sure of. so, i got this idea for a key organizer from a martha stewart book and i decided to slap it together right quick. this goes completely against my nature to agonize, deliberate, plan, measure, and finally postpone any project i undertake. but, i realized recently that these are hallmarks of perfectionism, which is a trait i thought i had outgrown long ago. so now, i am practicing the art of doing things badly. as my dad said recently, even if it's wrong, just DO SOMETHING. ah, that Joe D. he is so wise. that reminds me that Tommy has taken to calling us Erin and Joe, as in "Erin and Joe took me to that picnic," and "Erin and Joe, look
what i can do'. this simultaneously delights and terrifies me. i NEVER call him Joe - to his face.

let's call this one 'progress'

the lovely and talented heidi came over tonight and helped me get my craft stuff in order. it was really a mess, so much so that i really haven't wanted to let anyone in the house for a while now. lucky for me, heidi just comes over anyway. so, now, we have a lot of this stuff grouped by task and neatly arranged. i just need to get it all into drawers and cabinets so it's easier on the eyes. also, we cleaned 4 drawers from a set of 10 that my dad found for me at a yard sale. i need to build a cabinet to house them for long-term purposes, but for now, i'm oin to fill the drawers and stack them in the Craft Closet of Doom.

in other news, i have what i believe to be ANOTHER sinus infection. why, oh why?? life is hard.

my drawers

awhile ago, cathy and i started the process of going through pat's workshop to organize and decide what to do with his things. this is as difficult and sad as you might think. it is also, at times, amusing. for example, i found a bunch of vhs tapes in a drawer of his craftsman tool chest, and was all excited to find my long-lost guns n roses live tape, only to have cathy say, uh, erin, that's NOT gnr on that tape, that's where he kept his 'adult' collection. um, ahh-k-waard...and not something you want to know about your brother. anyway, this pic is of one of 2 of these little drawers that were also in the shop. i don't know what pat's plan for them was. cathy opened one and found a useless clump of fiberglass and yarn, which didn't help to clarify his plan, but did give us another giggle. anyway, i decided to give these a good home, so i've cleaned them up and i'm going to put crafty
things in them. i have no idea what they were before, so if you know, please tell me.

Open Letter

Dear Bleached-Blonde Lady with the Acrylic Nails in the Jaguar this Morning,

 

Please do not give me an indignant scowl as if I have trespassed against you by not letting you edge into my lane during your attempt to change lanes – across 3 lanes – from a dead stop. Although I am sure that you are that important to yourself, you are not actually the center of my world, too. If I had noticed you in time, I probably would have been happy to oblige. However, I did not notice you in time, because I was looking at the cars in front of me as my cue to start moving again. Perhaps you should consider that, when you make a mistake while driving, it is not everyone else’s duty to stop what they are doing while you figure out what you meant to do. Your sour face over my not letting you swerve in front of me at the last minute was unwelcome (at best) and may have actually ruined my morning. I wanted to have a nice drive to work, and you did not allow that. I do believe you owe me an apology.

 

Your friend,

-Erin

 

Rough road

I'm tired. I've had an emotionally exhausting week. Father's Day is always a sad time for me, because I know that no matter what I do for my dad, I cannot take away the hurt of not having his son here and Father's Day is a painful reminder of that. Also, my heart breaks for little Tommy and for Cathy. We had a cookout at Dad's place and then they were going out to the cemetary to drop off a poem/footprint thing that Tommy had made at daycare. Of course, this made me cry. Also, Cathy had some hearings related to the workers' comp claim, and this forced both of us (but mainly her) to re-live the entire awful experience of losing Pat, as well as her having to hear really awful details in the testimony from the person who found Pat. So, that's been sucky. Also, this sounds silly, but my ARMY boyz are actually all gone now and that makes me a little bit lonely. I know; I'm always complaining about them and wishing they'd be more quiet, and then as soon as they're gone, I'm all sad. I'm crazy that way.

And lastly, fellas, you should probably just skip this next part: [Monday, I spent 3 hours at Jewish Hospital having a mammogram and ultrasound. Everything is fine, but they decided to use this as my baseline since I'm so close to 35 (how the hell did that happen?!?). However, they had found this little cluster of calcifications and they wanted to see if they were at the skin level or deeper, so I had to have about 12 images taken, which was a little unnerving and also required a LOT more contortion than I was expecting. The calcifications are each the size of a grain of sand, so I have no idea how they even noticed them, but I'm glad they did. I have to go back in 6 months to be sure they aren't changing, but I fully expect them to be fine. Still, there was a lot of mashing and manipulating that made for a very awkward experience.]

Notes on Ferrets and Weasels

I wasn’t sure of the answer to Rachel’s question, so I looked it up.

Ferrets are a kind of domesticated weasel considered to be a subspecies of the European polecat. I believe it would be most accurate to say that the weasel:ferret relationship is analogous to wolf:dog. In both cases, the domesticated animal can interbreed with the feral animal, and they are considered by scientists to be the same species.

There is an animal called the Black-footed ferret which lives in California and has a separate species name, so my assumption would be that it is not the same as the weasel, but is a member of a larger genus (Mustela), which “includes the polecats, ferrets, weasels and many other species of small, fur-bearing carnivores found around the world.”

Here is a description of the biological family: “The domestic ferret, together with the polecats, is classified in the biological family Mustelidae, the group that also includes nine carnivore species that are native to California, including the ermine, mink, badger, and otters.”

Both quotes were pulled from the California Department of Fish and Game’s website.

 

 

 

whenever i talk about shoving the huge scissors into my eyeballs

these are the scissors i mean.

after a few talls of hoegaarden at yet-another farewell party for a departing coworker, i came home to scope out the situation with the upstairs apartment. i was a little freaked out because the door was open but no one was home. also, there is a real-dead deer trophy mounted on the wall. i think it was a young buck, because it has a small rack (hee!), probably 4 or 5 points. maybe 6. i wasn't sure, tho, because there are beer cans on the antlers. which seems about right to me. they have a lot of flags on the walls, including an upside-down Michigan flag (yes!) but no hate stuff and no nudie pics, tho there were some sappy signs their girlfriends had made for them. barf. i did not see any large snakes, narcotics, or limberger cheese. it does smell a little like feet, or what i like to call "eau du college boy," but there's no rancid odor of death.oh, and it's a total pigsty. so, this
kid either loves michigan, hates beer deer, or is a real neat freak.oy.

Hmm...

One of my ARMY boyz is gone for the summer, and he had 2 different guys staying in his place. That’s fine by me, as we all know, my main rules are “pay the rent, don’t tear up the place, and don’t get the cops over here”. And so far, that seems to have been fine for pretty much the entire time the ABz have been around.

 

A couple of weeks ago, one of the boyz mentioned to me that things were really “interesting” since those 2 guys moved in. I don’t know what that means, but I came away from that with the impression that they were probably a bunch of slobs, like college kids tend to be, and maybe they had filled the apartment with a bunch of crap they had drug in from all over the place, like construction cones and crappy sofas and stuff. No major worries.

 

So tonight, the kid calls me and leaves me a message saying that he wants to know if he can get out of his lease; he just doesn’t want to live there anymore. “Just go up there and take a look around and you’ll see,” he says. So what the Eff? I mean, now I have to wait and wonder until I can go up there sometime tomorrow just what the merph (to borrow an expression from J-W) is going on up there.

 

Heidi thinks it really is just because the other boyz are slobs. But I’m not so sure. I mean, this kid has a ferret, for pete’s sake. It doesn’t get much nastier than that, in my opinion. I mean, he has a WEASEL that he is voluntarily letting live in his room. How could anything those boyz have done be worse than that? Also, 2 of the boyz just had their girlfriends in from Michigan over the weekend, so how dirty could the place actually be? I know they were cleaning a LOT  before the girls were coming. They were actually cleaning so much the weekend before that I thought to myself “those boyz must be having girls over soon”. Hee!

 

So, even though I think (and hope!) Heidi is right, I am a ruminator, and so I’ve spent the past 2 hours considering what all could be going on up there that would make this kid want to move out. Feel free to add to my list.

 

1)       They have filled the apartment with limburger cheese and anchovies. (Actually, I think I would have noticed that myself by now!)

2)       They are growing some, eh, illicit substances. I don’t think this is the case, because I was looking at the electricity meters and theirs didn’t seem to be out of control…oh, and because they are in the ARMY, and also because, whenever I tease them about that kind of thing, they look shocked and horrified – but NOT guilty or scared.

3)       They have plastered the walls with obscene images of women. While I don’t think this is the case, I have heard of guys doing this and I think it’s pretty nasty. But still, they just had their girlfriends here and those girls just didn’t seem like the type to put up with that silliness.

4)       They have plastered the walls with some kind of hate messages. Again, I don’t think this is true, but maybe – something related to the war, or something like that?

5)       They have a pet of some sort (“That’s no a dog, that’s a LADY!!”). But still, the FERRET guy being mad about a pet? Oh, what if they got a really big snake, like a python or something? That would explain why he doesn’t want to stay any more. Ferret vs python. Lord, I hope that’s not it. Let’s all take a minute to pray that this isn’t it.

6)       They have done some sort of incredible damage to the place, like tearing out an entire wall or painting the whole place black. I do think I would have seen signs of this around the house, like a TON of random lathe and plaster, or empty cans of black paint, or something like that. But anything is possible, I suppose. Note that I might actually find this preferable to #5. I say might.

 

That’s really all the ideas I have for now. I do hope it’s just that they are slobs and I can tell them to clean up a little and tell him to man up a little. Anything on my list is going to obviously be more of a problem. I mean, some of those things, I can’t even do anything about. Specifically, numbers 1, 3, and 4. Thoughts? Stories? Condolences? It is starting to make me want to stay home tomorrow morning and go up there then, except it will almost certainly be stinkier in the morning than any other time of day. Boys smell really bad in the morning. And what is THAT all about, anyway?

 

i convinced my boss that i need this big whiteboard grid to track all my projects, but i haven't had a chance to set it up yet. i forgot that CNkelly was in here playing around with it and now it looks like i have a big crush on her.

the joy of small things

this is the padlock i had since my sophomore year of high school. it has been on my art class locker, just about every gym locker i've ever used, and the locks on several of my apartment storage units. it was the last apartment (the 'homeless homeowner' one) where i left it behind. i actually went back to the bldg when i realised about a month after the move it was gone to see if the lock was still there. no dice. i still think about the lock from time to time, because the combination is burned into my memory, and whenever i need to lock something i wish i had my lock again.

i have really been 'nesting' lately, doing a lot of cleaning and organizing. (you would not be able to tell this by looking around, but, hey, progress takes time.) while i was moving stuff around in the basement tonight, i found the padlock! it had fallen to the bottom of my little basket of laundry stuff like dryel and downy balls. it is a little scary, even to me, how happy this makes me. i am sooo OCD.

The One With All the Vacuums

awhile ago, my old and faithful bissell vacuum pretty much bit the dust. it had been flagging in recent years, no doubt crushed by the strain of picking up all the hair - mine and stella's. i couldn't find bags for it, then the belt broke, and no one stocks those, either. but i actually found one belt in a secret compartment behind the bag cover panel, so i put that on, but then it kept slipping off. maybe it was a trick by satan; i don't know why else there would be a wrong belt hiding out inside the vacuum, but whatever. at any rate, the final straw was the last time i took it apart and slipped the belt back on and started the thing up - it smelled like burning. burning what, i don't know. but it was nasty. so i just stopped vacuuming and started the search for a replacement. but then my grandma told me this little beauty - the Dirt Devil Power Stick -

wasn't working for her and offered it to me, so i took it. turns out it's not a full replacement for my floor vac, but it has great attachments and it covered my basic vacuuming in the interim.

Now, after all the mudding and painting a few weeks ago, i took cathy's SUV and she had The Bounty Hunter. when i went back to urbana on memorial day, i decided to stop at the car wash and vacuum her car because there were some paint chips and dirt from the stuff i hauled. and then i went balls-out and cleaned the whole car, inside, outside, floormats, stow-away 3rd seat, all of it & that was fun because, really, the only thing nicer than a clean car is a clean car that you didn't clean yourself. so i thought that would be a nice treat. you may be thinking 'erin has really gone tangential on this one,' and it's true. but i'm bringing it back around. when tommy, dad and i went out to my car to go to the cookout, i was all happy thinking about cathy's surprise that she would find later and when i opened the back door of my car to help tommy, there was this little vac, and tommy was all 'we got you this!' to thank for helping, so yay! for surprises and awesome little vacs. it rocks! Cathy had it and her friend Jenny and I kept talking about how great it was a and that is why she gave each of us one. It's the Black & Decker Dust Buster 14.4V and it is seriously the best little hand vac I have ever used - I highly recommend it.

(also, having it makes me feel a little bit like Monica - "Now if they just made a tiny one to vacuum the big one!") (And also, also, Heidi came over one day and watched as I used it to suck up some broken glass behind the house, and then commented that I was actually vacuuming my driveway. Doh!)

So, after lots of deliberating and research and ruminating about what I was going to do about my lack of a full-fledged floor vacuum, I was walking thru Lowes one day looking to see if the rack cover was in stock (for the third time, because, annoyingly, they had it on display for about a month but none in stock, because something else was in that spot and so I finally took that thing and shoved it somewhere way behind all the other canvas things so the ordering person might see that the spot was empty and it before you laugh and tell me that the computers do all that now, keep in mind that it seems to have worked), and I came across the most beautiful vacuum i had ever seen, the Electrolux Intensity. Now, I had told myself at the beginning of the search that, just like house and car buying, I wasn't going to let myself fall in love with based on looks, but who am I kidding? We all know I'm a sucker for a pretty face. Plus, this one had the automatic height adjustment I so desperately wanted. And really, how could I turn it down? So. I was just loading it into the cart when Heidi called and I told her how excited I was to find the vacuum and I said "I know it's a vacuum cleaner, but it's kind of sexy". And I think she had no idea. But then she came over and saw for herself, and we decided to name it Justin, because he's bringing sexy back. And the suction is awesome. The downside is that there are no attachments, which also caused me some serious angst and almost made me pack it up to take it back, but then I remembered grandma's vac with all the great attachments and knew that my life was pretty close to perfect. And in a stroke of marketing genius, the brochure really put a spin on the lack of attachments with this gem: "The Intensity may not be your only vacuum, but it will probably be your favorite." Hee!

Here is Justin's close-up, from his good side, of course:

Ah, he's so cute!

baby steps bob.

if you've ever seen anyplace i've lived or worked, you may be aware that i'm not so hot at the organization-ing. actually, thinking back on some places i've lived, i've done better at times than you might expect. both madison apartments were pretty orderly. but i digress. i got this snazzy canvas cover for my chrome shelf rack and i love it. now i can put my amish crates full of clothes on my rack and cover the whole thing if i don't want to see it. also, the rack holds the telly, which is nice. if you are wondering right now why i don't just have a dresser like the rest of america, it is because i don't like the smell of my clothes when they've been in a drawer. yep, i am that nuts. one down, a million to go.

people were asking about that last pic of the street. that is the town square in urbana. i took the day after memorial day as a vacation day so i wouldn't have to be in all the holiday traffic. so, my papa and i went to the town square for breakfast al fresco. aaahhh. i love dining outside.