Creative Homemaker

My 19 year old son just told me about this cool electronic gadget you can buy that you attach or aim at nonworking light bulbs on a strand of Christmas lights. It analyzes and finds the burned out bulb. I looked at one at QVC. You have to aim the tool at each light, and it lets you know which is not working. The tool costs $15.92 plus 3.97 shipping and handling. And not only that, but then I'd have to actually use it!! Yeah right! I think I'll go buy me another set of $2.99 lights from Wal-Mart.

Ok, I’m sure that you all are tired of looking at perfect houses and wondering why you can’t have gorgeous things like all of these other toured homes. I was thinking you could take a look at mine and then you’ll know that it can be Christmas even in the midst of chaos. First of all, I’m the one that does the decorating, so I have no excuses. I do have some beautiful eclectic things, but I’m cheap, move a lot and hate it when things get broken. So what I have is mostly kid-friendly pieces. Last year, I cleaned out some stuff and decided that others could enjoy them before they were ruined at my house. Here are a few of my favorite decorations. First of all, my children’s nativity scene, my dear sister, Nin, made this and gave it to me years ago. It has been through all of my children and still looks pretty good. It’s in the bathroom, because I can’t put any priceless items in there, the kids would play at the sink and break it. I looked in this morning, and someone thought that the...

Being a military family, each night I make the troops start at the front door and do a “walk-through”—police call. The object of this "order" is to get anything that is yours and pick it up, put it away or I get it and it disappears. Thinking I could just command and not inspect, I sent them on their errand. Miss Busy came back a few minutes later and said, “Yeah, Mom, nice house, but I sure don’t like all the junk on the floor.”

This evening after dinner, I was standing in the kitchen tidying up when the doorbell rang. My kids have been trained NOT to go to the door--they escape, and they get in arguments with neighbor kids etc, so I went to answer it. I opened it to find no one there. Aargh, I hate it when those rotten neighbor kids “ring and run.” I was going to find them this time. Even though I was only in slippers I headed out to the sidewalk to see if I could find the perp and give them a good tongue-lashing. I glanced one way and then headed toward the mailbox, I heard something near the side of our house and called out. “Ok, you may think it’s funny to ring the doorbell, but I don’t!” I saw movement, HA, I had them now, someone moved to hide behind my Suburban, probably thinking they could scoot around the back of my truck and then they would be home free. But I had parked it so you couldn’t get in between the garage and the garbage cans. I stood at the end of the driveway, I wasn’t going back i...

It has been weird-real-life video for me to stand here and rinse and wash someone's entire life. I have seen one couple marry and raise children, take trips on ferries, attend graduations, and have parties. I’ve watched them open Christmas presents, and babysit grandkids, I’ve seen new puppies, sons playing baseball, and kids riding carousel ponies. It is so heart breaking to me to see these photos in this condition. Oh, I know that no one plans to have a 20-foot wall of water entire your living space. (And it was a beautiful home; I've seen the pictures to prove it.) But it sure makes me more passionate about the Creative Memories Mission On my morning walk back from the school bus, I stopped with a friend at the home of a neighbor to let her know that her garage door had been left open. She mentioned that if someone had broken into her garage they could have all the junk in the garage except for her girls' Baby Books. I nearly yelled at her to get them in the house an...

I was sitting here reading through some of my favorite blogging posts, (I'll post my favorite blogs soon, I promise) and I just came to the conclusion that this blogging thing could really take a large portion of my life. I can actually DO the laundry instead of blogging about how much there is. I can actually fix dinner instead blogging about what I would have prepared if I hadn't been sitting at the computer all day. I can actually sew my kids Christmas presents instead of pining away at the fabric my sister sent me. What a concept! Work! Good, fulfilling work! I was reading in the book of James today, (you know, in The Bible) I'm doing Read thru the Bible in a Year . It says in verses 22-25 of Chapter 1 22 But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. 23 For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; 24 for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he wa...

Today's batch was fairly easy to clean up. I had them in the fridge over night so mold would not grow. The first two garbage bags went much faster, but then they were mostly pictures in frames, with their own set of problems. These pictures were stacked closely together, so there were lots of pictures in a smaller space. A few things I learned that I thought would be of interest to you and good info to pass on to our customers. Please take your photos out of the developer's bags/envelopes. They almost always have dye in the paper used to make the envelope. When they get wet, the dye will run and stain the top picture. Fortunately, for Mrs. "C", most of these were double prints, so the duplicate was somewhere in the stack. In the stack I did today, I only found one CD, and while it did work and the pictures loaded ok on my computer, there was only one CD. I was hoping I would find more CDs when I started today, making my task go a bit more quickly. There ar...

Today I started in on a small garbage bag on photos. I say small because it was small in size, but the number of photos was nearly overwhelming. The photos were stored in a canvas bag, through the mud, I read "garden Tote" on the side. It had pockets on the inside and out. It was full of nearly a dozen sets of "picture developer" envelopes, 2 slip-in style pocket albums, and stacks (about 8 inches thick) of photos. I'm estimating 500 photos in this bag. They may be the worst out of the bunch. It looked to me like the bag had been full of water and the muddy sediment settled and landed right on the photos. (I just can't even imagine the heartbreak these people went through--to see all of their things FULL of mud.) I would grab a small section of photos and peel and swish in the sink to remove the chunks of mud. (You know, all those pdf things on CMC-Network don't even begin to come close to what I was actually doing.) They say "gently agitate...

I was prepared for the worst. I had water and gloves and tools to scrape the mud, garbage bags in which to put the broken picture frames, tables to lay out the photos. But I wasn't prepared for what I saw when I opened the first bag. I'm ahead of myself-- I was moved to volunteer with the cleanup, and came in contact with Kathryn at Daring Young Mom she referred me to a cleanup volunteer who had the photos. She came with 4 bags and 2 boxes, the bags were mostly pictures in frames, old 70's high school pictures, a black and white or two, and lots of snapshots. I was amazed to see that under an inch of gooey mud, they weren't in too bad of shape. Water really isn't an enemy to a picture, they are developed in liquids, and as long as they don't dry out in this condition, they can be cleaned and made right again. I started in on the first pile. I had glimpsed a black and white in the bag and thought I ought to start on the oldest ones first. They seemed to be the m...

This morning, Sweet Boy came up to me and crawled into my lap after I had finished reading my Bible, everyone else was still asleep. He put his arms around me and whispered in my ear, "Mommy, you are a nice mommy." Ahh, that makes it all worthwhile. Filled my tank for the day.

http://www.daringyoungmom.com/2007/12/08/flood-washington-with-relief/ I read this post through a link on a blog I regularly read. Please read her post and then decide if you can help. I'm sending food storage items and blankets and clothing. These poor people have lost everything, destroyed by 14 feet of dirty, river water. So sad. Please help if you can.

Here's an update on my sister's "live off you food storage" experiment. Enjoy, how are you all doing? We have been very blessed, although I do not shop for groceries out of my budget, we are on WIC for milk, eggs, cheese and some cereal, plus I go to our foodbank once a week. I got 4 bushels of apples last week, I just finished putting them all up. I got 13 more quarts of applesauce and about 15 or so pints of apple butter, and then froze 3 qts of it, because I ran out of jars. We'll eat those up first. I'm trying not to have too much in my freezer in case the power goes out again for a week. Here's Sis's update: Hi All, Maybe this is Provident Living Practice. Here’s my confessions. A couple of people asked if I were going to buy gas, or Christmas. I thought I’d better define my parameters for this experiment. All I’m really trying to do is not go grocery or household shopping. We have a couple of roasts, about 20 lbs of hamburger, 5 pounds of saus...

After I saw that the sugary lava flow was not moving any further, I trudged up the stairs to where Hubby was studying. I slunk over to the bed and, with head hanging down, I told him I had destroyed the kitchen. He hugged and assured me that it would be all right, we went down stairs to survey the damage. I was met again with the terrible sight. Hubs said not to despair, and went to get the spackle knife-paint scraper thing from the garage. He started chipping away at the objects on the counter and I set the pot to soak in the sink. I lifted the spoon and thought it looked like sticky tar. (It would probably be useful for protecting the roof if we ever needed a little patching.) I was able to get the drips off the floor without any damage except for a small bubble in the linoleum which you can only feel if you are scrubbing the floor down on your hands and knees; as if I ever have time to do that, I’ll never feel it! I was pretty impressed at that, I thought for sure the sugar-lava wou...

A couple of weeks ago, I posted that I had finished all of my canning. Well, the bug hit me again as I strolled through the grocery store. APPLES!! I hadn’t done any apples! No applesauce, apple butter, apple pie filling, apple rings, spiced apples, NOTHING! I scooted Sweet Boy over in the cart and loaded in a full bushel box of apples. (Now he had a seat instead of the “ouchie-wire” cart.) Back at home I scoured through all my files for the delicious caramelized-sugar apple butter recipe that Gram and I made back when I lived in the mid-west. I couldn’t find it anywhere, looked all over the Internet too; I only found recipes that had real caramels added. I couldn’t can that, caramels have milk in them, so although the flavor may have been right, the recipe certainly wasn’t. I gave up my search and called Mom. She remembered it, but although didn’t have the recipe; she said that I should just be able to “caramelize” the sugar in a regular recipe and add it to create the caramel flavor....

My sister "Silver" and her family have decided to try an experiment—living on their food storage only, from now until Christmas. She has been very industrious to “put up” and can lots of things this summer and fall. She made this decision when she was looking at all her neat rows of canned goods. (I must admit that I sit in the garage on our swing which we brought in for the winter and admire my shelves too.) I think this is a fantastic idea! Of course that is one of the reasons why we store for the future, to use in the event of an emergency. So if we have not planned ahead and purchased everything that we need in that event, how do we know if we have been wise in our preparation? King Solomon said, in Proverbs 6:6 “Go to the ant, you sluggard! Consider her ways and be wise, which, having no captain, overseer or ruler, provides her supplies in the summer, and gathers her food in the harvest. How long will you slumber, O sluggard? When will you rise from your sleep? A little...

I was reading Proverbs chapter 31 the other day and was thinking, oh yeah, if I had servant girls, I could get all that done in one day too. Because the proverbs 31 woman had maidservants and I didn’t, I named my appliances so that I could feel like I had “servant girls” working for me too. I have Drucilla the dryer, Christine the crock-pot, Minnie, the microwave, Denise the dishwasher, (sorry my Dear Friend!) Olivia Oven, Brenda blender, and poor old Wanda the washing machine. My original Wanda, (17 years old) died last year, and was replaced amazingly enough by a lady of the same name. She is not new working for me, but had a one-year warranty, as she has had some operations in the past to fix this or that. She worked fine for me up until about 3 months ago when during her spin cycle there came a terrible screeching noise. I ran and shut her off and waited. I had a full load of laundry in the tub, sopping wet. How was I to get it all spun out if I didn’t just run it? S...

Babies are funny! I love the way their little minds work. BooBoo (18 months) does the cutest things and you can almost see the wheels churning inside his little head. Lately he has been stuffing things down the front of his shirt, like he was trying to save them for later. He walks around looking like he has elephantitis, clanking and rattling as he moves. Every once in a while, something will fall clear through his jammies or his sweats and he’ll act all surprised. It cracks me up, like he didn’t know it was there? The school kids just walked in the door, gotta go do the “Mom” thing now.

I am of the opinion that birthdays stink. Oh, don’t get me wrong, birthday’s when you are 5 or 6 are terrific; balloons, streamers, presents and friends to share in the momentous occasion. But when you turn 40, the balloons have lost their helium, the streamers have gotten dusty in the attic somewhere, the presents are fewer, and the friends are busy with their own families. My birthday this year has been at best, a downer. The phone has been turned off, my cell phone is dead, my day has been busy with cleaning up kids that can’t make it to the potty, and laundry of the above-mentioned stinky clothes. I can’t even post this to my blog because the internet has been disconnected. I was told by Hubby last night, (not in these same words, but the same message), that I was halfway to dead. That is why forty is such a big milestone for some people, because most people live to be 80 or so, so when the milestone, (or headstone rather) is reached, you are “halfway there,” “reached the top ...

Today I finished the last of the canning for 2007, maybe. I said that Saturday too, and then I did some more. My friend Mrs T. gave me a recipe for tomato soup which was her mother's out of an old Kerr Canning book. I've made if for a few years now, the first year I scorched it, (oops) and had a rather barbequed taste to it. LOL, we finally finished eating it, (yuck). So last year I made a few more jars, but didn't eat all of it. I still have about 4 quart jars left from last year, but when Mrs T. made it this year it looked so much easier than I did before. I thought if I put it in pint jars, I could eat it for a healthy lunch. The kids don't care for it much, but I love it. Last winter, I was at the local thrift store and found, to my delight, a Victorio Strainer with a few missing parts. The tag on the box said $2.99, a steal at that price, but it was half off that! So for $1.49, I got a great strainer--much sturdier thatn the red plastic version I had been using. I ...

Well, I'm done canning for today, I finished 25 quarts of peaches, or rather, AZ-Girl and I finished them. She's my sweet neighbor from across the street. She has helped me do jams and jellies too. Very helpful!! Then we started in on the 6 boxes of pears. We did two boxes tonight before dinner. I got 18 quarts of pears. I did 4 jars with green food coloring and two with red for Christmas dinners. Hubby and Fordman, AZ-Girl's sweetheart are putting up my light fixture/pot rack tonight, yay!! We've only had it for about 6 months. Finally, I'll have light again over my sink.

I was supposed to have a yard sale today with my neighbor across the street. We spend most of the day yesterday cleaning and sorting her garage for the sale. I had been sorting stuff for quite some time and had a pile ready in the garage. But unfortunately, it has been so hot in my garage that the pears and peaches are ripening too fast. I thought I had a week or more to get them done. So instead of selling, I'll be canning today. It actually will be a good day to be in the kitchen, it is a bit cloudy, imagine that, here, in Washington, cloudy! Go figure. I cleaned the kitchen and have all my jars sorted, I'm doing pear halves, maybe, (I cut them up anyway for the kids, so I'm thinking why not cut them up now.) I'll post tallys later.

We have company here for the night. They are traveling to the coast for a vacation before school starts. DearFriend commented that BooBoo sure looks like me so I pulled out some photos of me when I was his age. Oh my goodness!! It is amazing the resemblance. I'll scan one of me and then post one of BooBoo for you all to see. Hubby wants to get BooBoo's hair cut, but I'm afraid his little curls will all go away if we do that. Miss Busy lost hers when we trimmed, and now she is completely straight. I say the curls stay for a while. BooBoo is such a sweet baby. He has learned how to give kisses but prefers not to shower them on just anyone. I gave him a bite of peach tonight and he "said" thank you by blowing a kiss to me. On a totally different note, I've lost access to my second computer with Memory Manager on it. The machine won't load, Hubby thinks it has a bad hard drive, we had 2hard drives linked together to give me more space for my pictures. I'm ...

Today after scrapbooking with the ladies at Faith, I came home and washed the jars and labeled them. I usually use a sharpy, but since I had so many to do, I decided to use my computer. I had some Avery labels and downloaded a template for printing them. How easy!! I love my computer! I had to trim them a bit, but made quick work of that with my Creative Memories Personal Trimmer. (You can get your own CM supplies by visiting my website and shopping online.) I labeled them on the lids only so when they are used I can just throw them away and not have to scrape labels off the jars. I did that once, what a pain. I had a successful scrapbooking Crop this morning, sold over $400, nearly half of that was from inventory. So that is money in my pocket, the other is for one new customer who is excited about the new Vintage Power Pallet. It is so cool, all the papers and stickers are coordinated, and very stylish. It makes for an easy album project. I'd like to be able to keep a ru...

Tomatoes, onions, garlic, herbs and spices. 9 am on Monday to after 2 am on Tuesday. hot stove, sticky floors, 4 loads in the dishwasher, soup and bread for the kids and Hubby, burning hands from the acidic tomaotes. Couldn't have done it without DC and her son. Absolutely exhausted. I'm not blogging very coherantly, nor am I spelling correctly, I don't suppose. I have sat here for the last hour and a half trying to figure out my blog again, it has been nearly a year. Couldn't figure out how to post again. Finally, blogger just kind of figured it out on it's own. Good, cause I have no brains right now. DC and her son came to help me to day and oh, my, what a blessing they were to me. I never couldn't have gotten it done without them. Last week, I made about 50-60 pints and half pints of jams and jellies. My cupboard is full out in the garage. Saturday, we got 5 boxes of Tomatoes, 6 boxes of pears and 3 of peaches. I thought I was going to be doing peaches, and p...

That was so difficult, clear the cashe, (whatever,) resign in, blah blah blah. Why does it have to be so hard!!