Miranda's Profile

OCD isn't an adjective, people, it's an illness. You can't "be OCD." Also, characterizing any awareness of bacterial and viral illnesses as "OCD" really does a disservice to public health.

That said, the toothbrush thing is silly: those germs are dead within a few days anyway, and I'd imagine it's really only a concern if the toothbrush is stored with someone else's. Soak it in a few inches of alcohol for a while if you're worried; it should be fine. (Alcohol is more effective at killing germs than hydrogen peroxide is.)

I really can't see what makes the "before" picture "unfortunate," and I don't care for the "afters" at all (way too countrified) -- but both are a matter of personal taste.

Hey, let's not belittle RomaineNYC. There might have been a bit of TMI in there, but a point was being made. There was no snarking at others for making the same point more briefly, soooooo....

Going into movies is a whole other topic (see the long thread about it on Shelterrific, for example).

I like a lot of the houses mentioned (the Summers' house on Buffy, Lorelai's house on Gilmore Girls, Monica's apartment on Friends, etc), but I'm really commenting to mention that I actually lived in (east coast) Central Florida when The Golden Girls was in its first TV run.

The style of the house was intrinsically "South Florida," but a lot of beachside property in Central and North Florida also had that vibe at the time. So, nothing about the house stood out to me! My own place didn't look like that -- my parents were recent transplants from the northeast, so the only time we had "tropical" stuff was in a furnished rental. But over the next few years... this was an incredibly common style to find in the houses of school friends, church acquaintances, and so on.

There are a lot of engineers and software designers and so on in the area I lived in, though, because of the proximity to NASA and a few of the companies that work closely with it, so a sort of classy modern style was also pretty common among friends... lots of Danish-style furniture.

Any time Dr. Bronner's comes up in a set of comments, the fans come out of the woodwork, and I feel like the odd man out: that stuff is horrible and harsh on dry skin. I think it might be the most overrated product to constantly come up on sites I read.

The lavender version is OK for fine washables, but for much less money you can get Seventh Generation lavender
dish soap.

(Yeah, yeah, everyone should use what they like. :)

A note about the name: NYLON is already doing the New York / London split thing in the name, so that's the first thing that occurred to me... not that the name was bad so much as that it was derivative of that of an existing magazine.

The cover is terrible, too, but I'd still consider purchasing it on the newsstand. "Living Etc" isn't enough!

Cats? Any and everywhere. We've given over the floor of the linen closet to their beds, and they also like to crawl onto the lowest shelf, but there are dozens of possible spaces in this place.

My dog, a Sheltie named Arwen, has a strong denning instinct and likes to sandwich herself between two smooth surfaces. She usually winds up between the layers of coffee tables (sleeping on a lower shelf under the upper surface), or on the lowest shelf of a bookshelf if it's left open to her. In the case of the coffee and side tables, she will wriggle into spaces that seem impossibly small in relation to her body.

UO is indeed overpriced, apart from their political issues (which, let's be fair, are at the top, not at all reflecting opinions held by most of its work force). Sometimes items I'm aware of from other stores are sold there, and the mark-up is insane... like blind-boxed Re-Ment miniatures that usually sell for around $3 or so that they sold for $10, or tiny Japanese condiment dishes sold in my neighborhood for $2 and at UO for $6.

The Free People clothing brand used to be sold at UO a lot but seems to have mostly moved over to Anthropologie. They have a nice blog, pretty and inspiring and worth a look. They do talk about their clothing, which isn't relevant to this site, but they also discuss a lot of artists.

http://blog.freepeople.com/

(No, I don't work for them or anything like that.)

Still, any kind of art materials that you can buy at UO? I'd look for them at Blick Art first, then at smaller stores. The markup at UO is just insane.

Not everyone has a microwave, and not every stove has a built-in timer, but my kitchen has both, so a separate timer is kind of a waste. It is useful to have a few available for different tasks.

When I moved into this apartment six years ago, I found that the two most essential items were a pizza wheel and a can opener, with a whisk not being far behind. We love to have an electric kettle; we use a lot of hot water and love the convenience. We've had Chantal kettles ($100), forgotten to set the whistle, and fused the enamel to the burner (not ME, but it's happened in the household), so a quick-heating kettle with automatic shut-off is worth its weight in gold.

"Shelving unit with cubby holes" is a 5x5 Expedit, and while the bins might add to the value a bit, a new one doesn't cost that much more than $150.