Archive for the 'Home' Category

Testament to sad times

Kasia April 7th, 2009

There are a lot of vacant or auction homes right now, and a lot of people without homes or jobs. I’m not sure why this particular auction home makes me so sad, except maybe that I’ve loved this house for years and wished I could buy it.

I don’t think that’s the only reason, though. It’s definitely one reason – here my dream house is going up for auction starting at $10,000 and I can’t buy it. That’s grounds to be a little bummed.

For those who are wondering why not: terms of sale are cash, for one thing; and I already have a mortgage on the little condo Canuck and I are calling home, for another. Unloading a property in Michigan in this economy is the stuff prayers are made of (which is why that house is up for auction right now). Besides, on my salary we’re in no position to maintain a house like that. Even if we got the house for $40 or $50 K, and could finance it, what happens when you need a new roof, or the septic field – which I guarantee that house has – goes kaputt? Old houses need ready cash. (Just ask my poor dad, who has owned several, including a notorious money pit about fifty years older than the house we’re talking about, and a barn of a house from the 1920s that was, I gather, a nightmare to heat.)

Anyway. I can see that that’s part of what’s making me sad.

But I think more of it is that I’m looking at this 100+ year old house – maintained very well if the exterior is any indicator – that someone else has loved and lost.

People other than me loved this house enough to maintain it to last the past 108 years: through wars and the Depression and lots of lean times. And maybe it’s my imagination, but I think it looks like a house that’s held a lot of love. How do you fill four bedrooms, but with family and friends?

But the last someone who had this house…who knows? Maybe they couldn’t afford it when they bought it. Or maybe they bought a different house expecting to be able to sell this one (because it’s been on the market for some time), only to find that the bubble had burst, and they made two payments for as long as they could, until… Or maybe they lost a job – or two, or more - and simply ran out of savings.

I don’t personally know anyone who I know to have fallen in the first category, but I know plenty of people who fall in the other two. And I suppose a lot of what’s making me so sad about this house is that it reminds me of those people. It reminds me of friends and acquaintances who, through bad decisions or bad luck (and in some cases, both) have lost their financial footing and are trying to get it back in other, less economically ravaged areas. It reminds me of others I know who are on the edge, or near it, and who are living every day with the knowledge that that could happen to their house next.

Yeah.

I think that’s why I’m so sad to see it up for auction.

It’s Michigan in a nutshell.

Goal for tonight:

Kasia September 22nd, 2008

Put away all the clean clothes.

If anything remains on the dresser once the laundry is put away, put that away too.

Should be manageable, right?

How long should a vacuum cleaner last?

Kasia July 22nd, 2008

I’ve lived on my own for…let’s see…about six years now. In that time, I have owned two vacuum cleaners. The first, a bagless Bissell or some such, was bought for me as a Christmas gift for the Christmas following my move. It died about two years ago, so at about age three.

Then I went and read Consumer Reports, and bought a Eureka bagged vacuum. Let me tell you, either Consumer Reports seriously misjudged that one or I have the worst luck in the world. It’s given me problem after problem after problem. AND, because I was tired of paying ridiculous prices for the bags, I snatched up a great deal I found on bags on Amazon. I’ve got a stack of bags for this stupid thing, and the suction seems to be gone.

My beloved is going to try to check it for blockages this weekend, and if that doesn’t work I may appeal to my father to try to fix it (if he can’t fix something, it’s probably not worth being fixed). But my question to you all is: how long should a vacuum cleaner last? Am I being unreasonable to think a vacuum, even a cheap one, should last more than two or three years? And understanding that I can’t afford one of those thousand-dollar vacuums that people like my mother use, and that I do abuse my vacuums a fair bit, what sort of vacuum do you recommend? (By abuse I mean cat litter and cat fur are the biggest offenders, but I also use it to suck up spiders and insects that I’m afraid to kill any other way. I’m a coward…)

Suggestions would be welcome. I do have mostly hard floors right now, but I also have rugs that quite frankly cannot do without being vacuumed. Not with my cats. And I have furniture that needs vacuuming, and curtains…

In which the Clam discusses her (hopefully diminishing) domestic ineptitude

Kasia July 20th, 2008

You may or may not know this, but I don’t really know how to cook.

I mean, I sort of do. I know how the stove and the oven work (though the microwave is a more commonly used appliance at Chez Kasia). I understand the rudiments of cooking. But if cooking is an art, then I am a philistine.

It’s not entirely my fault. My mother was an ardent feminist who thought cooking, cleaning and housework were drudgery. So teaching her daughters how to keep house was not high on her priority list. And sure – shared housework is a good thing, and most couples I know do share housework to some degree or another. But one still needs to know how to DO it!

My dad did most of the cooking and quite a lot of the cleaning, but he was also supporting us, and was consequently way too busy to teach me much about what he was doing. And I was too busy having tantrums and refusing to clean my room to care. ;-) (I was a difficult child. I really hope any children Canuck and I have take after him.)
My only memory of doing anything in the kitchen before age 10 or so, apart from loading or unloading the dishwasher, was fluting the edges of pierogi with a fork as my grandmother made them. I don’t doubt that she would have taught me more about cooking as I got older, but unfortunately, she died when I was 8.

When I was 10, my parents divorced. My poor dad was running himself ragged trying to support us and keep us halfway sane. TBS was helping him. But the house was a madhouse and we were all hanging on by the skin of our teeth. At that point, my level of expertise graduated to making my own lunch: a sandwich, a drink box/Capri Sun sort of thing, and some sort of Hostess dessert. (The Hostess was a HUGE deal – my mother NEVER let us have junk food. Come to think of it, the Capri Sun was a big deal too…)

I started doing my own laundry in sixth or seventh grade, because my dad’s rule was that it all had to be downstairs, turned, pockets checked, zipped and snapped, on Saturday morning so he could do all our laundry. A very reasonable rule. But I could never get it together enough to have it done at a reasonable time Saturday morning, so finally I asked someone to teach me to use the washer and dryer.

Around that time, I learned to make pancakes. And at some point in high school, my stepmother taught me to make “monkey bread” (YUM). Along the way, she taught me by way of correction, a fair bit more about housework than I had known before.

But really, I still hadn’t learned to cook. And when I was 23, I flew off to England for a semester. No dormitory cafeteria – a common kitchen. I was going to live off my own cooking for six months.

TBS, being possessed of great foresight, anticipated the problem and started teaching me to cook some basic things: hard-boiled eggs, rice, banana bread, Greek chicken. After my arrival in Britain, a couple of Czech housemates of mine taught me some additional lessons. Like Czech pancakes (which are basically crepes), and that outside of the U.S. and Canada, throwing away food is simply not done. (Quite a culture shock!)

I made it through that experience with a little bit of TBS-taught cookery, a little bit of Czech help, and probably more prepared foods than I ought to have eaten (I was especially fond of a garlic-butter baguette that Tesco sold). Oh – and with some care packages from home, including my dearly-beloved grape jelly (which I couldn’t find anywhere over there) and some boxes of Velveeta shells and cheese. You should’ve seen the one Czech girl’s face when she saw me making it…but I convinced her to try it and she marveled at how good it was… ;-)

All this to say: my domestic skills were, and to a great extent still are sorely lacking. (I scrubbed my first floor, with the help and instruction of TBS, at age 25.) I’ve improved, it must be said, thanks to FlyLady, Saving Dinner, TBS, the Canuck, my parents (even my mother, who for my 30th birthday gave me a copy of Cooking Basics for Dummies with the phrase “Girls Whose Mothers Neglected Them” P-Touched over the word “dummies”), and countless friends. But I’ve got a looong way to go before I’m up to my age standard.

So you can see why I’m excited that I had a little domestic breakthrough today.

Inspired by Jennie C., I decided that I was not going to make my this-week’s grocery run be another hot-dog-and-frozen-dinner-fest. No – I picked out three recipes and made a list based on them. The first recipe was from Saving Dinner. The second recipe was from a cookbook TBS gave me as an early wedding gift, called Quick, Thrifty Cooking. The third recipe was Jennie’s sausage & pepper sandwich recipe. And I figured out a few other things I needed, like milk and bread.

Well. I went to Kroger. And do you know, not only did I follow my list (though I did pick up a couple of things that weren’t on it because they were on sale and I wanted to stock up), and watch sales, but I mentally shifted gears several times, initially scratching off one recipe because I thought it wasn’t going to be affordable, but then going back, recalculating, and deciding to do it after all.

It was possibly the most enjoyable grocery shopping trip I’ve ever done. And not a hot dog or frozen dinner in the cart. (Not even a frozen lasagna!)
THEN, after I got home and unloaded everything, I debated whether I ought to heat up my last remaining frozen dinner – after all, it was 80 degrees out, my air conditioning doesn’t work, and I live on the second floor – or whether I should suck it up and COOK.

I cooked.

I used the stove. I used the oven. I used three pans and a casserole dish, baby! AND IT TASTED GOOOOOOOOD!!!

(I even washed a load of dishes after. I had to take a shower when all was said and done because it was so stinkin’ hot, BUT I DID IT!!!)

And now, the challenge becomes doing it again tomorrow. Or the next day, if my leftovers carry me through… :-)

Just FYI

Kasia February 20th, 2008

Blogging’s been a bit light over the past few months, as you may have noticed, and it’s probably going to get lighter before it gets heavier. Between working both jobs, wedding plans, maintaining my home, marriage prep classes, maintaining my relationship with my fiancé, trying to keep in touch with friends, and family obligations…well, I’m a tired little monkey, and the last thing I’m apt to think when I get home to eat dinner at 9 or 10 o’clock is “Gee, I should blog!”

Don’t get me wrong; I love blogging, and I love my readers. But now I’m developing some minor health issues; really nuisance things in the grand scheme, but on top of everything else they’re the proverbial straw and I’m the camel’s back.

Sooo…I expect to be back to near-normal by Easter, and hope to blog periodically between now and then, but in the meantime, don’t be surprised if my posts are fewer and shorter than usual.

Love you guys!

Compact fluorescent light bulbs

Kasia February 18th, 2008

A few months ago, The Big Seester sent me an article that reported that incandescent light bulbs are going to be phased out, until they are no longer available for purchase in 2012 or so. Maybe it was 2014. I responded with an only slightly facetious crack that I was going to start stocking up now.

She thought that was hilarious. But honestly, I hate CFLs. They look stupid, yes, but that’s not so much why I hate them (I would only hate them for that in my decorative fixtures). I hate them because I find their light depressing.

So she challenged me to try them in, say, my office for a while, and see if I still hated them. The result is a mixed bag. When I first turn them on, they’re sickly and weak and I inwardly curse whoever invented them. By the time they’ve been on 10 minutes or so, their light seems to become more robust (or perhaps I adjust to the pathetic light) , and my only real complaint is that they have a sort of an odd color to the light and the bulbs, which is probably the spectrum of the light.

My question to my readers is this: I keep hearing about full-spectrum CFLs, and CFLs that are supposed to be closer to incandescent lighting in their spectrum. However, if they do in fact exist and are not just an urban myth designed to keep those of us who like our light bright and strong from rebelling in defense of incandescents, then apparently they are not sold at any of the stores I patronize. The Canuck and I went looking for them specifically at a few different stores (local hardware store and K-Mart, at least), and no dice. Anyone have any luck finding these? (And while we’re at it, maybe we could find some that don’t look stupid for my decorative fixtures?)

I did the little DTE Home Analyzer energy assessment, and it congratulated me on using less energy than comparable homes in my area. I’m guessing it’s because my air conditioning is broken and I don’t have a dishwasher. That said, I’d still like to shave down my energy bills; and while I’m at it I might as well start to get used to these confounded CFLs. I’d just like them to be a little less of a penance.

OOH! THAT should’ve been my Lenten penance this year: change all of my light bulbs to CFLs!!! Maybe next year…

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