Wednesday, March 20, 2013

A household hint



Ok, so it is kind of weird the stuff I think about sharing, but here are my thoughts anyway.

I learned this trick from my daughter-in-law (wonderful lady, by the way).  We both detest cleaning the trash can.  Her trick - put TWO trash bags in the can, one over the other.  If there is no leak when you change the bag, you can just remove the full one, put another one on top and you are ready to go.  If it does leak, chances are good that the second one will catch the leak.  Just take both bags out, put in two new ones and you are done.  If they both leak, you still have to clean the can, but that doesn't happen often.  This has saved me a lot of unnecessary work.


Monday, February 11, 2013

Vermont Teddy Bear commercial


I’m not sure if it is just me, but I find the Vermont Teddy Bear Valentine’s Day commercial to be terrible. Every time I see that commercial, I just get more and more disgusted with their portrayal of women.  I am NOT a big feminist, but that commercial just gets to me.

Their assertion that something that lasts (Teddy Bear) is better than something that doesn’t (flowers and chocolate) is not the problem.  They say if you get them chocolate, they’ll eat it and then ask if they look fat.  Then they say “you don’t want to go there”.  You don’t want to go where?  They make it sound like every woman whines all the time or that it is a burden to listen to her.

But the part of the commercial that gets to me the most is the main point.  Valentine’s Day is supposed to be a day to make your loved one feel extra special by doing something for him/her.  (Whether this is a “holiday” made up by marketing companies is a subject for another article.)  This commercial makes it very clear that guys should buy their Teddy Bear, not simply because she will love it, but so they can get “rewarded”.  By the speaker’s tone, it is pretty obvious what “reward” he is expecting.  

Monday, January 14, 2013

Beginning


Before I begin, be warned – the following is me rambling and may not be grammatically correct.  I’m trying to start a habit of blogging and I know that if I write, wait, proofread, wait, proofread again and then publish, it will never get to the publishing stage.  Once I get in the habit, the writing will improve (I hope)!

I’m 45 years old and I’m STILL trying to figure out my life.  About a year and a half ago, after working for many years, I left the work force to stay home.  For the first 5 months I spent almost every day working on our house remodel.  Then the holidays came.  We got to a “good enough for now” stopping point and prepared to celebrate with friends and family.  After the holidays, we were still so exhausted and tired of all the manual labor and mess that we didn’t start again for about 3-4 months.  During our hiatus, I don’t even really know what I did, but I did not seem to accomplish much.   Some of the time was spent working at my parents’ convenience store, but mostly not much got done.  Once I started working on the remodel again, I continued for 3-4 months.  Then we were pretty much done with what we could do.  We didn’t do our bathroom (we still have a plywood floor) and we have one bedroom (currently the “tool room”) that hasn’t even been touched; it’s too full of tools and “stuff”.  Until we can build another storage unit to put the stuff, we can’t do any more work.  So, I guess we are done with the remodel.

Now, I have to do something else.  I have realized that I am extremely disorganized.  Oh, I knew I was “kind of” disorganized, but now I see that it is really a problem.  I start on one thing, then see something else, then something else, etc, etc, etc.  I work on a lot of things, but none of them seem to get done.

After discussing with my husband, I have determined that I really need to create a schedule/to do list.  I have come to realize that I don’t like change, including changing from one task to another.  This creates a problem for me – if I know I have to work at the store at 4pm, for example, I can’t seem to start anything significant before then.  I end up wasting the entire day.  Logically I know that I could still get several things done, but just having that 4pm deadline hanging over my head keeps me from starting.

Now that my eyes have been opened to this shortcoming, I hope that I can fix it.  Of course it doesn’t hurt that I am no longer working at the store.  As I am writing this, it occurs to me that I also know this about myself – I ALWAYS get stuff done when there is a hard deadline (not just one I created as a “hope to be done by this time”).  Maybe writing all this down will help me see myself more clearly and realistically.  I hope it will also help me figure out why I never had trouble getting stuff done at work.  Maybe because it was someone else’s deadline?  Any thoughts would be appreciated.

FYI – working on this blog IS on my to-do list!  But, since it is not the only thing on the list, I guess I’ll move on to the next item.

Until next time,

Ronda