The thing I think I will dislike the most about moving back to the old hood will be the job hunt. The crazy things employers expect you to remember for and employment screening are just super taxing on my memory. I end up spending days trying to fill out an application so I can dig up all my previous addresses, all my previous employers and supervisors names (some are closed and I can’t remember what ‘Steve’s’ last name was – or if I even ever knew.

I suppose I should put a positive spin on this – it will be very nostalgic.

If anybody sees this idea and wants to move forward with actualizing the concept, please contact me so I can get a cut of the cash. Some furniture designer out in the world would make himself (and me, remember me) a whole lot of cash by designing a couch or sofa with arms that were designed to be sat upon. How’s that for contemporary sofas. The idea would take the world by storm. Everybody likes to sit on sofa arms. Someone should redesign them to handle the load. Genius.

Too bad I’m not a furniture designer.

I am not looking forward to moving. You know it’s not just the horror of packing and getting the stuff in the van and getting the stuff out of the van and unpacking. It’s also the cleaning. I don’t want to tell you about how the toilet looks right now and I am personally refusing to think about the black spots growing around my faucets. Somehow it has worked out that up until I knew we would be moving, I had the cleanliness thing under control and then as soon as I found out, everything seemed to go to heck. Some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy I suppose.

We’ve gone and put a bid in on a house. There’s no telling if it will be accepted or not. There’s no telling if it is too high or too low since the price people put on the house when it’s a short sale might be really far away from what the bank is willing to accept and I’m REALLY fuzzy on how that works. In any case, it takes months and months (apparently) for something like this to go through but we’ve definitely got our hopes up (and signed about 50 pieces of paper) just to say hi to the bank.

Oh Joy.

Without a quality set of blinds a well-furnished room can look just normal and plain. Blinds can add a dramatic style to any room or any area of the house as well as ensuring your privacy behind the windows. We all want windows in our homes. No one wants to live in a box, but once you have windows, you need blinds to cover them up. Get good ones that match your personal style and taste.

Even in this economy you can’t cut out all of your expenses. Home insurance is a very important part of your life and going without it could cost you a lot in the long run. Make sure that you don’t cancel your home insurance even if things start to get bad. Instead, make sure that you get the absolute best deal that you can with home insurance quotes for all of the things in your home that you need to protect.

We have some outdoor chairs with cushions that recently have started to fall apart. Thinking that they were designed as outdoor cushions, that I could leave them in the sun. Evidently the Arizona sun was not a part of the testing process. Thankfully, I’ve found an online outdoor cushion store to find exactly what I’m looking for in a cushion that will last a lot longer than the cheap cushion that came with the chairs. I’m looking at a woodland stripe.

Even though the economy is only just now starting to come back into a slightly more hopeful zone, it may be the perfect time to find a new faucet for your bath, sink, or kitchen. Or your faucet may just finally be too old to fix this time, and it’s high time to replace it. In any case here is a picture of one of my favorite faucets that I can hopefully get installed soon.

I recently tried to find out if ants can eat through tile grout like it appeared ours had but I had no luck. It just seems so unlikely and yet I really don’t know how else they could have ended coming up through there. I don’t think they just happened upon and really well rounded hole that was really close to the kitchen. I suspect it was by design but it’s really creepy to think that not even the hard tile is a barrier against these wretched invaders.

With winter coming and my husband’s love of the cold I know I’m going to end up with windows open and buried under 80 blankets every night.  My sister was the same way when we shared a room in our childhood but she offered to leave the window half closed.  Now I don’t know if you’ve ever compared sleeping through the winter with the windows half closed and the windows open completely, but I can testify that there’s no real difference.  Either way you ‘ll find yourself begging for an electric blanket.  At least with my husband I can suck him dry for body warmth  – something that would have been might awkward with my sister.

I found my husband vacuuming the a/c air filters the other day. It’s not like these things are super expensive but for some reason, he decided to vacuum it instead of change it out. I will grant you that shopping for them can be a little hard since you have to know the measurements before you go out. I’m notorious for forgetting that kind of detail and then bringing home a completely different size. Which then goes into the trash. I suppose instead of calling him cheap (or me forgetful) I should think of him as helping the environment (which means I’m not – I suppose our carbon footprints will cancel out).

If you have a pond as a water feature you know that perfectly murky pond water doesn’t come by just letting it sit there. You have to care for your pond especially if you intend it to include fish. Just like when you have them in a tank at home, the water has to be aerated. You might do this with a fountain or you could get your hands on a couple pond aerators specifically designed for the job. These things don’t have to be unsightly – some even just float on the water.

My nemesis has returned. That dreaded creature that has turned many a blissful night into a nightmare of stinging pain. The ANT!!

We’ve been invaded. We threw a 409 volley (the all purpose cleaner) across their bow to dissuade their presence but they kept coming.

We startegically littered our counters and floors with land mines of ant bait, but they seem to have access to our mine maps. Every time we redeploy, their tactics change. It’s as if they’re reading our minds (or this blog post).

We planted and dusted the exterior of this domicile with a variety of chemical weapons to no avail.

Just a few days ago we feigned surrender by putting a cup of jelly laced juice outside to attract them and have them give away their supply line. It worked and we traced them back to HQ where we used weapons of mass destruction (a shovel and more poison) to annihilate them. For two glorious days we believed victory was ours.

And then, today, our hopes were dashed. Like a swarm of locusts (except no flying thankfully) they have regrouped and returned. Our kitchen sink seems to be their main objective. I’m seriously considering giving it over to them. Maybe we can hold the line at the kitchen but I don’t know if it’s realistic to try to defend the whole house talking.

I know it’s un-American to think in such a way but when you’ve been in the trenches like I have you start to think a little differently. You start to feel sorry for them. You start to scratch at any little thing. And you long for things to go back to the way they used to be when the kitchen didn’t crawl and an itch was just an itch.

While driving around town, I happen, every once in a while, past a house whose negative edge pool is visible from the street.  Mainly because the house is elevated.  And every time I do, the slogan “The Bold Look of Kohler” goes through my head and I want to remodel.

Now I have no reason to think that this pool has anything to do with Kohler but I think they have a negative edge bathtub or something and the Kohler faucets are really quite pretty most of the time.  Recently the faucet in my sink developed a hole and was replaced with a new Kohler one.  To my dismay, this is clearly the low end of their stuff – not because it doesn’t work but because it is ever so plain.

I think if I ever tried to flip a house I would be one of those people who goes dramatically over budget because they have to have granite everywhere and want to add a second floor and want high end fixtures on every sink.  Yup, sounds about right.

The Reid site had retooled its website for industrial equipment supplies.  They’ve made it easier to find things and gotten more pictures of their products as well.  They say they’ve also made checkout easier but I haven’t tried it myself so I don’t know for sure how it’s working.

On the main page, everything falls into categories.  You select a category and it takes you into a list with subsets of that category and each of these subsets has a picture to help you visualize what’s to be had.  It also tells you how many different items are in the subcategory before you go there.

Once you know what item you want, you just click the ‘ADD’ button to get the product in your cart.

It all seems pretty straight forward and intuitive, especially if you have bought things online before.

In the rental in which I currently live, the decorators did something kind of interesting. They used porcelain tile to cover the counters throughout the house.

As a matter of fact they used the exact same tile for the floors, shower stall and counters. This makes a bit of sense because then you don’t need to keep extra tiles of 3 different varieties on hand for when a tile gets cracked and needs to be replaced. And since this is a rental aesthetics aren’t that big a deal to either the owner or myself.

However, if this were my house to decorate, I’d definitely change it up at least for the shower stall.

With the staggeringly difficult economy forcing people out of work and into a place where they’re looking anywhere and everywhere for a job, many of us find that we have to move far to get a position. The west and California especially seem to be hit by these rough times.

If you are in California, you will most likely be going East to find work so you will have to find moving companies Los Angeles style which is really no different that anywhere else. You decide if you’re going to do it yourself or get professionals and then you call around asking for quotes. If you want to go the extra mile, you take the lowest quote and go back through seeing if someone will beat it.

As a life long do it yourself mover, I look forward to the day when I not only have people to drive the truck for me (and thus don’t have to pay for broken awnings that I’ve driven into) but also the day when I can afford to have people who will pack the stuff for me too.

Ah, to dream.

Off I go into the wild blue yonder to help a sister move. I was supposed to help another one last weekend but I couldn’t make it. Alas. But I think this will be interesting because I’ll be going to another state and a city I’ve never even had a layover in. My kids were wondering if I would be leaving tomorrow and getting there tomorrow. It was fun explaining that planes go a bit faster than cars do so my trip to another state will actually take less time in the air than our trip to the airport.

What fun!!