To New Beginnings...

Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.--Bertolt Brecht

On a serious note, I think that the reason I try to make everything so perfect and "Martha Stewarty" in my life is because I like to be in control.  But, we can only control our own reactions to situations and not the situations themselves.  I don't deal well with change, and the good Lord likes to shake things up in my life to let me know who is ultimately in control.  No matter how orderly I try to keep my life, the unexpected is going to happen.  Change is a part of life.

The next week will be full of changes.  First of all, Brady goes off to college one week from Monday--which means Randy and I will be on our own again for the first time in 24 years.  What a bittersweet moment!  I will miss my kiddos so much, but it will be fun to be with Randy and go where we want to go when we want to go there, eat what we want when we want to, and do all the things we always said we would do when our kids were grown. 

Not only is my last child leaving, but two of my closest friends are moving away.  I'm happy for both of them and the wonderful new opportunities that they have in their lives, but I'll miss seeing them any old time I want to.

On top of all that, as I mentioned the other day, my best good dog friend is getting to be quite old and decrepit.  I know that eventually I will have to say good-bye to her.  She's been a good dog and a faithful friend to me--and I will miss her!

So, you may ask yourself, what is the point of this rambling?  I think maybe it is time to close my eyes and jump off the high dive.  I need to take some chances, have some adventures, meet some new people, and learn some new things.  This isn't the end of my life, for Pete's sake!  It's a wonderful new beginning.  Rather than being morose and sad, I need to look to the future with anticipation.  God has not led me wrong so far--I don't know why he would start to now.

The Overachievers of the World

I am not the only overachiever in my family.  I am married to someone who is much more of a perfectionist than I am, and who makes everything he does turn out to be the most amazing project you have ever seen.  In addition, my husband is the kind of person who can just read about how to do something or watch a video on it and will know how to do it perfectly afterwards. 

Well, today held all sorts of new adventures for the two of us.  Randy and I have been planning for quite a while now to put some tile in our garage to keep the dirt down in the house.  Today was the day that we decided to undertake this task.  At first, we were just going to tile the step going out to the garage.  Then, we decided we should do some beyond the step.  Next, we decided we should at least go underneath where the freezer is.  Lastly, just as we were getting ready to start, Brady came out to the garage and said how cool it would look if we did a pattern with large and small tiles.  So now, I think that I can safely say that we have the fanciest tiled garage for miles around! 

Now that we are finished with our tiling extravaganza, I am going to take some advice from William Morris, "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."  My goal is to purge my house of all the extraneous crap that we have held onto for no particular reason at all and to do it before I go back to work!  I will report to you and let you know how it goes.  Time to get my organizing book back out and start working on it a bit at a time.  Wish me luck!

Hippie Project?

As many of you already know, I crochet and knit in my spare time and to relieve stress.  While exploring the Internet the other day and looking at upcycling ideas on Pinterest, I found "tee-shirt" yarn.  A lovely Hawaiian lady gave explicit instructions on how to create this yarn and it looked pretty easy to me.  I decided to give it a try.

Well, it wasn't quite as easy as she made it look.  After several tries of cutting up tee-shirts and getting a bunch of little strips instead of one long string of yarn, I decided to examine her tutorial once more.  I found out what I was doing wrong(cutting straight across instead of in a diagonal) and proceeded to make several balls of tee-shirt yarn. 

Now the question was, where to get tee-shirts to cut up? I knew that Randy and the kids would not appreciate me stealing their tee-shirts to make my yarn, and I had already gone through my tee-shirts to make the first few balls.  Luckily for me, I love to go shopping at our consignment store here in town, and they often have free stuff outside of the store(can you say "crap that no one would even buy for a low, low price but Andrea will snatch up because it's free?")  One day as I drove by, there was a giant garbage bag of tee-shirts out in the free stuff!  I brought them home, washed them up, and proceeded to make yarn to my heart's content. 

So far, I have been crocheting baskets out of this yarn.  It will work well for bags too I think, because it is nice and heavy.  My family has been teasing me something terrible about my new yarn.  I have been reminded that ladies in the 1800's made rugs out of old clothes, and that recycling tee-shirts is probably something that makes me a hippie.  The hippie comment got me thinking.  There are tons of hippies in Laramie, why not sell them my tee-shirt baskets and bags?  So, this is my future plan.  I have only completed one basket so far and am working on a second.  When I get it done, I will put a picture of it on here for you to see.

By the way, after an hour of work with the shop-vac, I got all of the baking soda out of the carpet!  Victory is mine!

Pet Puzzler

I have dreams of being like Martha Stewart.  Every summer, I make great plans to organize my house and to keep it immaculate throughout the school year.  This summer, I downloaded a book on organizing your house in 28 days, I have worked on coming up with a cleaning system and I have planned out family meals a month in advance.  I took a healthy eating class and learned about the benefits of planning out meals and shopping once a week for foods.  All of these things sound great, don't they?  Let me tell you the rest of the story...

I get carried away with trying to do too many things at once.  I have all of these projects going around the house, and I never complete any of them.  For example, I organized the kitchen but I never made it to any of the other rooms.  I print off a cleaning schedule for myself and hang it on the fridge where I can refer to it.  Then, I never do the things on the list!  Lastly, I hate going to the grocery on Sunday because it is so crowded.  So, if I don't make a concerted effort to go on another day and do my shopping, we don't have the supplies to cook the amazing meals I have planned out.  As a result, we end up going out to eat.

Yesterday is a fine example of me getting overzealous with one of my projects.  I found a recipe online to clean up pet stains from my carpet.  As Baby, my min pin, is 13 years old, she is getting pretty senile and just goes where ever she gets the urge to go.  If I am not paying attention, I have a heck of a mess!  The recipe is as follows:  first, mix a bottle of half vinegar, half warm water.  Spray it on the stain to neutralize the smell.  After you have gotten the carpet fairly wet, scrub it with a brush to get the mixture all over the stained spot.  Next, when the area is dry or almost dry, sprinkle a handful of baking soda around on the spot.  After you have sprinkled the baking soda, mix 1/2 c. hydrogen peroxide with 2 tsp. dish soap.  Put this on top of the baking soda, and use your brush to scrub this into the carpet.  Once it is completely dry, vacuum up the baking soda with either a shop vac or your vacuum cleaner.  A professional carpet cleaner online told me in his video that this was the best technique to use.

I tried to carefully follow the directions, and it went pretty well.  The carpet smells amazing, and it is not stained any more.  So far so good-- EXCEPT, I went a little overboard with the baking soda and now I am having a struggle getting it all out!  My advice to you would be, if you try this technique, don't totally plaster your carpet with baking soda or you will have to spend the rest of your life vacuuming it up!

Introduction

Welcome to my Blog!  I am a forty something woman, who  wears all sorts of hats in my life.  First of all, I have been married to the same man for 24 years, and I am the mother of three college-aged children.  I've taught high school English for the past 18 years.  I also love to travel around the country watching my two boys play college football.  I crochet and knit, read, and cross country ski.  As a result of being so busy, I am constantly looking for ways to make life easier and less stressful.  I want to share the tips I find with you, my readers!  I will also share about the crochet and knitting that I do, the books that I read, and anything else that I think might be of interest.