You all know that I keep up with FlyLady and that I’ve talked about her before on this blog. I have even changed my opinion on some of her philosophies of housekeeping. I am not a “FlyBaby” as her supporters call themselves. I think that is a bit cultish, and, although Marla the FlyLady seems like a lovely human being, I don’t do personality cults. I think that’s probably because I’m jealous of the cultee.

The other reason I can’t be called a “FlyBaby” is that keeping house, like any other day-in-day-out activity (think of exercise, eating right, being a good person, keeping up with your finances) doesn’t have any magic secrets. Faire le ménage, c’est apprendre à mourir, to paraphrase Montaigne. You can get tips from somebody, but ultimately it’s up to you to figure out how you tick.

I do think she’s on to something with her “routines,” though. She says that a person who struggles to keep up their house needs a routine to keep them on track. A routine is something that you should do every day, or on a regular basis. The sine qua non of FlyLady is to clean your kitchen sink every day. This is a point of order in an otherwise chaotic household. It allows you to always do your dishes at any moment. Although I don’t necessarily do this rule, I think the point is well taken.

Anyway, anyway.

I would like to share with you my daily routine I’ve figured out. These help me avoid doom. I have actually found that I don’t have to do each one every day, however, checking my list at least keeps me thinking about it and not putting it off too long.

1. Make beds. I actually slack on this a lot. However, in theory, I like to make the beds because, like a shiny sink, these are a point of order in the bedroom part of the house. Otherwise, the whole area can look like the garbage tip. This also kind of assumes picking up in the bedrooms: get stuff (e.g. laundry) off the floors, take any dishes to the kitchen, etc. I put it under the rubric of making beds in my mind to simplify my list.

2. Pick up in the living room. I try to pick up in the living room each day. Especially dishes, but we still have lots of toys, paper, etc., because we are not terribly strict on what we let the daughter have in there.

3. Pick up in the family room. I’d rather have a house with one big room than two separate rooms to keep tidy, but I try to do this every day too. Actually, since my daughter doesn’t always come down into the family room, it’s easier to keep up with.

4. Clean out cat box. I have two enormous cats. I used to have one tiny cat who was hardly any trouble but these guys eat a lot and make a lot of stink. Therefore, every day.

5. Kitchen. My kitchen routine is do the dishes and sweep the floor. Having the kitchen clean is a big deal because that lets you make meals, handle kids’ food requests and so forth. It’s a pain but there is a return on the investment.

6. Bathrooms tidy. Flylady refers to this as “swish and swipe.” Just pick up and put away the toothpaste, brushes, makeup, etc. and wipe things down with some window cleaner.

7. Laundry. The fly says “a load a day keeps chaos away.” I think that’s pretty much right, but let me say that for a family of three I average slightly over that, but we’re not skimpy with towel washing. I think that if your family was bigger than mine, you’d definitely be averaging 1.5-2 loads of laundry a day. I try to think about laundry every day but usually I have laundry sprints where I’ll wait a day or two and do three loads or so. I kind of put it on an assembly line where at the end of the day I fold the laundry and put it away. That part is very important too.

8. Quicken. This is not housekeeping per se, but I definitely need to think about the finances each day. Otherwise there are too many transactions to remember. I’ve found that prioritizing the finances on a daily basis is a definite doom-avoidance measure.

That’s it for the daily list. I’ve found these lists are highly personal, and suited to your family and the particular house you live in. But the daily housekeeping list helps me a lot.

I also have processes that I run on MWF, Weekly and Fortnightly. I’ll cover these in different posts.

So, I have this incredibly crappy lawn mower I got off of craigslist. I thought it had decent specs, and I did ask the guy to start it for me, which he did.

However, I used the lawn mower about 4 times before it started giving me grief. It wouldn’t start until the 100th pull (long after I’d had to use the asthma inhaler.) It would quit every row I’d mow. The self-propelled throttle thingy was upside down so holding it in place killed your back.

In January, I had it repaired to the tune of $200+ dollars. (Do not ask me why this happened, I am not happy about the circumstances surrounding that. Actually, okay. They did a ton of work without giving me a figure. Then they’re like, “here you go, it’s $200.”) Still, I thought, “great, this’ll be a really good lawnmower now.” They again started it up in the parking lot and everything. Worked like a charm.

I started lawn mowing season and it was back to its old tricks–only worse. Finally, last month, I could not get it to start. At all.  So now, I have to get a new lawn mower AND dispose of the old one. Turns out I can have it recycled by a place that does ferrous metals. So, that part is fine. But I have to drain the oil and gas first. I for one have very little small engine experience (if I’d had some, I wouldn’t have been in this situation to begin with). However, I did some research and here is what I figured out.

For oil.

If you turn the lawn mower upside-down, you should see a little cap screwed into a hole near the blade base, like this:

Then, you screw it off, like this:

Then you can, if you have some, use some cinder blocks to lift the lawn mower up so the oil can drain out. I just balanced it on the bucket, like this:

That’s it for the oil part. For the gasoline, many online sources say to “run the lawn mower until the gasoline is dry.” Which would make perfect sense, except for the fact that I’m readying it for the dump because it won’t run! Anyway, I did the logical thing and held it on its side while draining the gasoline into another pail.

So for the disposal, where I live anyway, you have to take the oil and gas down to the hazardous waste recycling place. Then you take the lawn mower to the ferrous metals place. Fortunately, when folded up, the stupid thing fits in my trunk.

Well, I’ve been quite spotty as of late, but I’m still hanging in there, keeping house and trying to get a business off the ground. I intend to get back on the blogging wagon ASAP. I’ve put the blog on my routine calendar and everything. So you should be hearing from me more often. In the meantime, I realized my blog is now over a year old! I just wanted to share with you what was going on last February as a prelude to the awesomeness to come. Here goes:

Some Basics

• Dishwasher notes
• Dishwasher hacks

Sine Qua Non of Dad is in the House

• Stylish baskets!
• Rags
• To sweep or to vacuum?

Anyway, enjoy. These are some really important points to my philosophy in keeping matters up to date around the house. I know it’s February already, but here’s to a great and productive 2011!

Well, it’s getting a little late to be posting this, but it is a tip you can still use.

You see, I have a bare old hairbrush of a Christmas tree, purchased when my wife and I were newlyweds living in Maryland. I cut off the bottom stump with a hacksaw so that I could put it on the end table and it’d be high enough that kids and cats would leave it alone. All that to say, you wouldn’t think it’d be very pretty. But it is, thanks to my pimpage.

How do I do this you ask? I assemble the tree. You can see it looks crummy, just like this:

In fact, you can see some of my daughter’s toys right through the sucker. You can also plainly see the color-coded bands that tell you how to put it together. Very bare indeed.

Did I tell you the reason I don’t get a real tree? I got tired of stuffing it into my Corolla. So back to the plastic one for reasons of economy and laziness. But I digress.

Next step is to put on the lights. Now, Martha Stewart tells you to wrap each branch in lights. I found that that might be good if your tree is 16 feet tall, but if your tree is smaller, it looks like a fireball that is descending from space to land in a doctor’s office in Virginia. You are forewarned. But if you must, you might want to try out those LED lights because you can string up like 150,000 lights on them without blowing up your living room. The LED lights look strange and otherworldly, also, which adds to the meteorite effect.

But I digress again. Seriously, putting the lights on right after you set up the plastic tree sets the stage for true pimpage, which involves: real evergreen branches. I cut some off of a cedar tree near my back yard.

Cedar is perhaps not the best choice. I usually wait for a storm to blow down fir branches and stick them in. But this year we didn’t have any land in our yard. So I chose cedar for the fact that its branches are low down to the ground where I can snip some easily. It’s doesn’t match all that well, but the effect works well. The rest is easy, just stick them right into the tree:

I’ll take a picture of the whole tree once I get my living room cleaned up. By the way, thanks to James, aka Seattle Dad, who kicked my butt to post again.

You may have heard of this one, but if you have a bad stain on porcelain, use a pumice stone. For reals. It works, no joke. Even on rust. Oh, just one thing: I probably wouldn’t use it on your feet afterwards.

In addition to wishing all of my friends and family here at DIITH a Happy Thanksgiving (even if you are not in the United States, because, hey, you should have a happy day too,) I would like to put in a plug for cooking by using the recipe on the package.

I got to thinking about this because I typically use the recipe on the Ocean Spray bag when I make cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving dinner. (I don’t have to cook the meal this year but I am bringing cranberry sauce and an apple crumble.) There are lots of things I make just by using the recipe on the package.

Now, I am no foodie, but I can cook. Why then do I choose to do something so ordinary as using the package instructions? Well:

• Being lazy, I always have the package to look at. I have a computer in my kitchen so all my recipes are at my fingertips, but I still prefer to grab the thing at hand. In a similar way, I have organized all my measuring spoons, but usually just use a normal teaspoon.
• I can assume that the people who produce the product have, or have had a tradition of using their product. I can assume they have test kitchens or can at least pay a consultant. I don’t have all these things you see, so I give them the benefit of the doubt.
• Most recipes are 99% the same. You can go to great trouble to do the fancy recipe you find in Good Housekeeping, but on examination, you find that it’s the same as the recipe on the box. For reals! Kind of deflating…
• I have found that they are a good basis for experimenting on. For example, the cranberry sauce. I’m going to put apples, nuts and orange zest in there. This is not on the package, but I have used the package to get the basic information. That leaves me free to pursue my Ina Garten-like ambitions.

Another recipe I’ve found to be the best is the peanut butter cookie recipe off the Jif Peanut Butter jar. Because choosy Dads choose Jif.

Lots of people who know me know that I subscribe to the Oprah school of dieting, also known as the Luther Vandross school of dieting (may he rest in peace.) That means that I have to stock pants in sizes 32-38 to accommodate my fluctuating mass. Well, life has happened as they say and I’m on the top end of my range. When I get to that point, I say to myself, self, you are uncomfortable all the time and you look like h**l. So I pull an Oprah and drop 40 pounds. It’s not the best, but I figure it’s better than never doing it and having the weight go in one direction only.

I’m a big fan of building up slowly to things. That way the pain is minimal and you get little bursts of enthusiasm for having accomplished *something* regardless of how small.

I have done the couch to 5k program before, and I’ve done it long enough to know it works. I don’t think I actually have gotten up to a 5k but I think I will this time.

The other thing I’m adding is this 100 pushups program. I hate pushups with a hot hot hate, but that is mainly because I couldn’t do one without collapsing in a fetal position. That has all CHANGED now. I can do 8 pushups before collapsing in a fetal position.

There you have it. No gyms, no illusions of grandeur. Just me and two reasonable goals (5K and 100 pushups). I hope to check in with good news in the future.

Okay, so I’m finally done with this thing, and, dutifully, I stayed up too late Thursday doing it. (Daughter had to wear her costume to school, so that was my deadline. Bonus is Halloween stuff is this weekend and I’m done with that at least.)

After making the tail, the job was to sew up the side seams and sleeves. Since you work with the thing inside-out, it can be a bit confusing at times. Especially with the reptilian tail. I did find that sewing up one leg, then taking the tail and stuffing it down the finished leg make it a little easier to not get caught sewing something I shouldn’t.

Then, I had to make the headpiece, or hat, or whatever you want to call it. I lied when I said yesterday that the tail was the hardest part. This head thing was a job and a half. It was made up of about 8 pieces. I had to do darts, which are folds that make up certain curves in a piece of clothing. As I am attention-deficient, this was hard to do precisely. Then, I had to make a muzzle, stuff it with fiberfill, and gather and ease-stitch it to the main helmet head. Then I had to put more spikeys down the back seam. Then I had to do eyes! Take that Dr. 98210! I can make eyes! And not some crazy zombie eyes either, but cute eyes!

I now adjourn this series to go take a nap. Here are some pictures:

So today, the costume starts to become a real beast because the tail is evolving out of primordial sludge.

The hardest part of this whole costume is the tail. So let’s get stuck in.

First off, you cut out the pieces. There are spiny pieces and the fleece that goes inside the pieces. For the longest bit of spine, you take the fleece and fuse it to the backside of the contrast fabric you are using.Then, you lay it out with the right sides together and you sew just the spiny part, leaving the whole flat part open so that you can turn it outside-in. Here they are:

Same procedure for both other pieces, but the headdress we’ll do later.

For the actual tail itself, not the ancillary spiky accoutrements, it’s the same fleece, then right sides together protocol. Except that when you go to sew it together, you have to put the spikes in, upside down, so that when you turn it right side out the spikes are pointing out. Like this:

Sow you sew all that down (it’s best to baste it which means to sew it crappily prior to sewing it for real).

Then, you turn the tail inside out and stuff it with fiberfill (this is the big bags of stuffing they sell at the fabric store or Walmart).

Last step is to sew the tail into the back seam of the jumpsuit. According to me, this is the hardest part of the whole costume–wrestling a reptilian tail through the tiny spaces of a sewing machine. It’s hard to do perfectly, I just go for strength.

Anon I’ll do putting on sleeves and finishing up the jumpsuit part.

Now we’re getting somewhere. This is the front, and I’ll do the back (and tail) in a separate post.

First step is to fuse some interfacing to the belly. You buy interfacing (this is iron-on lining that stiffens your fabric–”that’s what she said,”) then you cut it and iron it on. The pattern actually called for double-sided interfacing but I just used normal and glued it down really well.

Then, you take the belly and sew it on using an “edge stitch” which is the technical term for sew the friggin edge down. I actually did this differently too since I’m using flannel (which is woven and will therefore unravel whereas the pattern calls for fleece whichis non-woven and therefore won’t unravel). So I did a zigzaggy overlock stitch just to hold everything down.

Here is the belly and the front of the costume:

Here is a close-up of the edge stitching I did:

Once you’ve got the belly sewed on you can worry about the zipper. The zipper is kind of cool, but scary at first. What you do is sew the seam up, using machine basting (machine basting is just where you set the machine to take really long stitches). Then, you take your iron and press that seam open. You lay the zipper flat on top of that seam, with the works of the zipper facing out. Then, you sew it down on each half of the zipper.

Then, all that’s left to do is to take your seam ripper and cut out the machine basted threads that held it together. Voila! You have a zipper.