akay's Profile

Sometimes I like quiet -- usually when it's nice out and I can throw the windows open to hear kids on the nearby playground and birds chirping.

But more often, I prefer some music or a TV show. If I'm walking around the house cleaning or cooking, it's great to put on a show I've seen a hundred times already because I don't have to pay attention. I can hear the setup to a joke, and walk out of the room remembering what comes next and laughing to myself about it.

It passes the time more pleasantly, or sometimes, it's nice to cover the sounds of my neighbors loudly watching a baseball game or having a conversation on their deck.

And okay okay, I'll admit it: sometimes it's because it's dark out and I'm creeped out when I can hear every creak in my old building.

I am looking for an old wooded ladder

A ladder covered with forests? ;)

I'm curious about the windows that will cover the gap in the interior bedroom. My understanding is that these kind of spaces are required to have some form of ventilation in case of fire (though I could be completely mistaken). If that's the case, wouldn't sealing it over with glass also be against code?

I'm in a third floor walk-up, and our laundry room is in the basement of the building next door. Hauling stuff down there and back was always a huge pain, but now that I've developed some health problems, it's well outside of the range of things I'm capable of doing. This may get better over time, but if not, not being able to carry a heavy, unwieldy basket up and down three flights could well be the dealbreaker that makes me move. :(

The best thing you can do is preempt the problems. When I'd get a new roommate, I would plan a (dis)orientation night -- we'd make fun drinks and snacks and talk about roomie stuff: bill payment, rent checks, usual bedtimes, when we prefer to shower, cleaning, what shows we want to DVR...

The biggest discussion was always about kitchen (and bathroom) items and maintenance, since those are the most intimately shared spaces of the home. Talk about your past living situations -- what worked and didn't, what you liked and what irked you. Do you like to cook together? Or do you prefer to keep your food separate? Who buys paper towels and dish detergent?

A lot of these kind of roommate problems just stem from lack of communication. It's so much easier to talk about hypothetical future problems -- and how you'd like to handle them -- than to broach the subject with someone once you're already having a problem with them.

Yeah, I keep mine mostly by color (I keep series together), but they're also divided up by fiction, design books, and cookbooks. I've never had an issue finding one. Not sure why people get so up in arms about arranging by color unless they really have a lot of books.

When I had less space for them, they used to be crammed in by size like tetris blocks, which I think is the only option a lot of us have. It's not like color groupings are the Dewey Decimal system, but it's a step up from that.

Add silica powders or liners to the pots. It's a natural compound that retains water (it's in those packets that come in shoes and bags to absorb moisture), so it helps keep the soil in containers from drying out. You have to really over-add it to rot the roots. My deck faces south and gets very little shade throughout the hot Chicago summers, and without silica, every plant would wither out there.

I have the levered kind of citrus press (like this guy), and I've found that I get a ton more juice if I use it normally, and then invert the already-juiced half (pop it so that the rind is on the inside) and then re-squeeze.

Thanks for the response! Any future plans to make wheels for other regions of the country?

Was there some color correction done to the image? Looking at it side by side with the same image on their site, this one is a bit more desaturated. Just trying to gauge what the actual colors are like since I'm considering ordering one

I'm always skeptical when I see that phrase -- "made from whole grain" -- instead of just "whole grain"

It's like that cooking "creme" that isn't spelled "cream" because cream it ain't