talkingcrow's Profile

You can always buy a chip book if you feel better about it. The last one I bought at Benjamin Moore was $18.

I've seen some great paint lately around Seattle - I love dark grey with white window trim and a bright color highlight and maybe a door. Also a dark dark blue or purple. There's a purple house in Wedgwood I've come to love. It has white and I think yellow trim. It sounds garish but it's sweet.

We did a similar thing with our bookshelf. We painted a sheet of finish plywood with chalkboard paint and it was the perfect size to set in front of the large Ikea Expedit bookshelf. It kept junior out of our good books and was a nice drawing area. Now that he's old enough to leave things alone we put it in the kitchen and use it all the time to draw and "paint" (with water) and play games on and learn words.

I only have one kid, but also have a cat on meds that need to be tracked. Awesome about the other baby apps, but there is also Time Flies which just tracks the last time you did something, like wash the car, or your hair, or clean the fridge. You could set it up for meds too, but it doesn't have alarms. I'd combine that with the basic phone alarms for a pretty solid system.

I use Dr Bronners too. If you want more scent you can always put in a couple of drops of essential oil. I re-use my Method containers, but they do eventually get a bit gummed up and require a soak/wash.

Ratio: 4 or 5 parts water to one part soap works fine - just eyeball it.

As a side note, with a toddler I've been working on getting as many chemicals out of things as possible, so we're also trying out a mix of Dr B's and water with some avocado oil thrown in for shampoo. So far it's genius.
(half and half water and soap with about a teaspoon of oil per 1/4 cup of soap).

I have to say, this just didn't strike me as a good justification over all. I'll leave it at that with respect to the "why" part.

One of the blog columns that I really like is Small Measures on DesignSponge. What I like is that it really is about the ways we can improve in a very non-righteous kind of way. I'd rather see a specific list of ways to avoid paper towels. The bacon can be solved (why not dedicate a couple of tea towel rags to bacon)? Or whatever. The last remaining issue for me that keeps them around is pets. The other few that get used go into the compost.

I suspect you understand all the backlash if you make such an effort to use your own bags, can, eat local, etc.

baking soda and vinegar are the magic cleaning tools for everything.

i have a coffee thermos on my coffee maker and it got to the point of no return, black black even though we wash it out. I can't get my hand in there and I've tried a variety of antics in the past.

i finally got it clean: vinegar soak, added baking soda, soak, did what I could with a scrubby pushed around with a wooden spoon, and finally, what really helped finish it?

2-3 denture cleaning tablets. awesome.

1 on vinyl being nasty and bad for you.

I have a Hotel Shower Curtain from Restoration Hardware. It's plain white, but fabric and mostly keeps the water in, can be washed, etc. As they age (this is the 2nd or 3rd I've had) they do tend to lose some of the waterproofness. But they do look nice.

I have to say my favorite thing in our tiny tiny bathroom is the curved shower curtain rod. I highly recommend them. It holds the curtain out just enough to make a shower very roomy.

Coffee pot. (it goes without saying)
Chef's Knife.
Paring Knife.
Cutie Cutup board (tiny cutting board, many uses).
10" Cast Iron Deep Sided pan
Rice pot.
Favorite wooden spoon.
Medium sized water boiling/steaming pot.
Jellyroll sheet pan.
Chopsticks (use constantly for everything - more than tongs).

waffles are so good that it's hard to NOT own a waffle iron. i'm absolutely going to try this. it never occured to me (even remotely) to only make a few cookies at a time until a chef friend was able to pull out frozen cookie dough and make us a few lovely molasses goodies to have with tea. i'm a cookie eater, so 4 at a time - better for dosage control!