I Love Vinegar

I would like to introduce you all to my new favorite thing: Vinegar. Well, actually, I hate vinegar, in terms of taste and smell, but recently, I've discovered its versatility, particularly as a natural household cleaner.

My friend Kaitlyn got me a book for my birthday called Vinegar: 1001 Practical Household Uses. And that's what really got me hooked. It's broken into different sections (laundry, cleaning, DIY, outdoor/gardening, cookery, health and beauty, and pet care) and outlines all of the different uses for vinegar in that category. And what different uses there are.

The first thing I tried from the book were oven and microwave cleaning. For the oven, you mix vinegar with borax or powdered laundry detergent and make a paste. Heat the oven to 180 degrees for 5 minutes, spread the paste at the bottom and leave it for an hour. Then I used a rubber spatula to pick up the paste and scrubbed with a scouring pad. Our oven is beautiful! For the microwave, I just mixed water and vinegar, put it in the microwave, and "cooked" it for five minutes. The steam loosened spills (gross) and made it easy to scrub up. Magic!

I think I'm now addicted.

Winter Baking

As some of you may know, I'm not the most successful cook most of the time. Something always goes wrong, even if whatever it is turns out fine in the end. Except banana bread. I am quite good at making banana bread, if I do say so myself.

I've come across lots of different variations for banana bread. Some have chocolate chips or peanut butter glazes. But I prefer using the recipe we've always used, which was my great-grandma's. It's the one my mom always made, and my grandma always made, though she added nuts and I omit those from my recipe.

Yesterday, we got hit with a pretty big snowfall, and what else do you do when you the snow is falling and blowing across the yard? You bake (or shovel, which I probably should have done before it built up so much). I happened to have four bananas that were too brown for me to eat, so I peeled them, mashed them up, and added them to Sunny, my stand mixer. When we registered, I thought about the default Kitchen Aid. But then I saw the Sunbeam mixer at Penney's and fell in love with its vintage style. We got it as a wedding present from a dear friend, who had the sweetest intentions of giving it to us. And I love it.

I didn't have regular crisco, just butter-flavored, but I think it gave it an extra bit of deliciousness. Shelby was glad I was baking because she got to lick the floor after I sprayed the pan with cooking spray. And the whole house stayed warm and smelled delicious on a late winter day.

I personally like the banana bread to be a little underdone, so in 50 minutes, it was ready to come out of the oven. And that was perfect: It had just a little batter strip at the top and was warm and yummy otherwise. A perfect treat--and a success story.

Managing Paperwork

I realized this morning as I was putting stuff away that I wanted to write a post about our home binders, something I teased a while ago. These are still a work in progress, as I don't think any organizing system can be truly judged (and adjusted, in my case) until it's been tried out. So far, this is a pretty good solution for us, so here's what we did.

When we built my new desk, we moved my old desk upstairs. It has really found its calling as a grown-up bedroom desk, as I knew it would. I keep all of my cards, paper and envelopes, stamps, address labels, in the drawers, and on the shelf nearby, we have our binders. We have one for house stuff, one for other bills, and one for personal stuff and Shelby stuff.

In our house binder, we keep manuals, utility bills, receipts and proof of any upgrades we've done, and paint samples. Essentially, this will be the book that will have any relevant information when/if we ever move. I also plan on doing some before and after pictures, just because that could be kind of fun for us to see how we changed the house.

Our second binder has insurance information and other bills and account information we might need that doesn't necessarily relate to the house. The third has everything else, including Shelby's vet records and camp bow wow application.

We keep plastic sleeves in each binder, so we don't have to hole punch anything and everything stays together. Then it's just a matter of choosing the right binder and pulling out what we need.

I also plan on doing a binder for recipes and meal plans, so that hopefully putting in a bit of time now will save me some time later. This way, I can rotate in recipes we like and make it easy to find what I need that night or when I'm making a grocery list.

So there you have it, a simple-ish way of getting organized when combining two lives.

Life Lessons

After scorching my first batch of homemade spaghetti sauce (it still turned out, thank you very much), my mom decided I needed a lesson. So, she decided that my dad and I would make a small birthday dinner for some family this weekend. I love our secret family recipe for spaghetti sauce, not only because it tastes great, but also because I love hearing my dad tell stories about his parents, who I did not get the pleasure of knowing. He paints pictures of their cafe and what it was like growing up there, and that's truly the best part of the making

He started off by teaching me the correct way to hold a knife and peel and smash garlic, how to follow the recipe but also follow my tastebuds, and the best order to follow the recipe in. And in the end, we ended up with some delicious sauce.

While we were cooking together, I started thinking about all of the things he's taught me over the years, even though when he asked me what I was thinking about, I told him I was thinking about when we needed to stir next. And here's what I came up with.

For starters, there's work ethic and determination, the value of hard work, strength and patience, protecting your family and standing up for what you believe in. He taught me how to make friends, telling me to just go up to people and say, "Hi, my name's Whitney, what's yours?" and this was especially useful for someone so shy.

After I'd memorized my prayers, he taught me Hail Mary, leftover from his Catholic teachings, and I find it is my favorite prayer, one that I repeat over and over to myself on nights I can't find sleep; perhaps because I'm not Catholic, I find it beautiful and comforting all at the same time, and it is always the cure for my insomnia (which he also gave me).

Of course, there's car maintenance: I can check the air in my tires and fill them when they get low, and I like to think I could change the brake pads on my car if only I could get the car jack thing (isn't that the name?) to work. He helped teach me to drive, even though I was less than successful on the "big roads." I feel like I know how to pack a car efficiently, though he's the best, and to always be prepared, especially during cold Nebraska winters.

There's also a love for the ocean and the Nebraska plains, the basics of skiing and sledding and swimming and snorkeling; riding a bike, cheering for the Huskers, caring for family pets, looking words up in the dictionary, even if you don't know how to spell them. The best way to find open houses, how to buy a house, inspect a house, fix a house, and how to see potential in everything. How to put everything in piles while cleaning, which I still do, even if I don't pick up the piles.

He instilled in me a passion for adventure, and taught me that life is adventure, family is an adventure, love is an adventure, and to try and live each day as an adventure, which is perhaps the best lesson of all. 

Finding Fancies

On Saturday, my mom and I hit up the shops in Downtown Littleton. I couldn't believe how much has changed in the small downtown Main Street. When I was in second grade, we took a field trip, stopping at Two Potters (I believe this was the name . . . )  and Chocolates by Mary Carol, which are now gone and replaced with Lola's Sweet Shop, where we stopped for half-price Valentine's Day-colored sour gummy bears and Twin Bings for my dad for his birthday, and a paint-your-own pottery shop. This is where my brother and I went to paint together before I left for college. He painted a fish for me that moved to Lincoln with me and has lived on my desk in each of the sorority rooms I moved into, my first apartment, and then my first real grown-up job. When we had the big move to the other building, the fish stayed on my desk, despite the suggestion it move to a drawer, and I would say it is one of my prized possessions; it now has a safe spot on my desk at home.

What has not changed is the number of antique stores, and we spent the morning exploring several. It has only been recently that I have acquired a vintage taste, though I don't think it's surprising, considering, well, my mom. She  took us to antique stores when we were younger, telling us to keep our hands in our pockets and DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING. I am still to this day a very tactile (thanks for the word, Mom) shopper and not letting me touch anything may have been smart on her part (especially considering how clumsy I was) but was torture to a younger Whitney. But now that I'm older, I'm glad to go with her, because she knows what's new and old and what's a good price for the things I want. And I found many things that I wanted in Littleton Antiques and Such and the Pink Attic Cat, among other stores. I love vintage ribbon and lace, half-completed sewing projects, aprons, books, paper and postcards and photos. There were vintage glass door knobs, depression glass, champagne flutes, and other kitchen knick knacks that caught my eye. In the end, we walked out with four dessert/champagne glasses (mom) and a printer's press block in the shape of an L (me), plus a present for my friend Kaitlyn's wedding. But more than that, I walked out with a few ideas and lots of inspiration.

Road Trip Reflections

I decided to take a solo road trip home this weekend, leaving Nathan and Shelby to fend for themselves. One of the reasons I thought the part-time job was a good fit was that it would give me more time to take quick trips home to see my family. This week's work schedule, the weather, and the fact that it's my dad's birthday weekend gave me the perfect opportunity to hit the road.

It used to be that every time I left Colorado I would be hit with a pang of sadness telling my parents good-bye and pulling out of the driveway. Today, I was surprised that I felt the same way leaving Nathan and Shelby, which means that I finally consider Lincoln home (even though I'm sure that I'll still feel the same way when I leave Colorado Monday. I'm lucky enough to have two homes.)

My favorite companion on a road trip is a book on tape (or CD, as my case may be), at least when I'm driving alone. Some of my favorite past "reads" are Kitchen Privileges, Dear John, Certain Girls, and Marly and Me (though I only got about three-quarters of the way through because I could see where it was going). I'm listening to The Glass Castle now, and so far, I really like it. I find that a book on tape has to be just right. The best ones are funny, romantic, or biographical, in my opinion. And the reader has to be just right. We tried listening to a Laura Ingalls Wilder book on CD and it just did not work, especially with the fiddle playing and singing.

I was able to have company, however, on the last part of my journey. I picked up my  Grandma and we were able to catch up and talk about books and many other things. I'll get to take her back on Monday, too, and I'll be able to finish my book on CD on the last part of my journey.

Once I arrived home, I got dinner cooked by my mom and homemade hot fudge and now I'm enjoying cable TV. And I'm excited to sleep in my old room tonight.

DIY: My New Desk

So, I've already teased you with this link showing you the plan for my new desk. Well, not the exact plan, but that's the point of this post. I'll show you how we adjusted the initial plan to better suit my needs and show off some pictures of the work in progress and the finished product. Here we go!

I started looking for a new desk when I got my new job. I was going to be working at home, and I felt I needed something more functional than what I had if I'd be spending so much time working at it. I had a desk in my room with my computer and piles of stuff to be filed, stuff to be put away, stuff to be shredded, stuff to be tossed . . . you get the idea. In the basement, I had a craft table set up, with stuff I'd bought for my etsy store, stuff leftover for the wedding, works in progress, and supplies. Basically, I had two desks full of stuff and no space to work. So I started searching for something that had lots of storage and a huge area for me to work. I found a plan that used a door as the top and then found a door on craigslist. Alas, the man wouldn't let me get the doors the next day—he wanted them gone ASAP and couldn't guarantee me a door. So, I finally convince Nathan we/he could build my craft table.

The only problem was that my room is not quite big enough for what the plan originally called for. It's a small, cozy room, with a daybed and a rocking chair, and I didn't want to sacrifice either of those. So we cut the depth down, and to keep the space, we also made it longer. It was also too high for me, so we made it shorter. And because of these measurments and the fact that I wanted to store my sewing machine on a shelf, we decided to only have one shelf on the sides. Let's just say we spent almost the same amount of time figuring out the math for the new plan as we did building it. But we got it (almost) perfect in the end.

We checked with Nathan's dad to see if he had any scrap wood he could cut for us, but while he was waiting for said scrap wood to dry out enough, Nathan's mom found a sale on plywood at a local hardware store. They were able to pick that up for us and cut it according to our measurements, which was very helpful. And then, on my birthday, the wood was delivered and ready for us to put together.

The first thing we (I mean, Nathan. Let's face it—I helped but he did the hard work!) did was build the big side box. We had to hold everything up so that we could visualize where it went, and then Nathan put everything together. We only had a few missteps along the way, mostly in shelf placement, but it only took about an hour and a half.

We thought the second one would be even easier because we'd already done it once. WRONG. We started with the wrong boards three times before we figured it out. Turns out we need to visualize and then build, even if it's just repeating a process we've just done; we don't learn from experience. Once both sides were done, we carried them upstairs and put the top on in the actual room. We'd discovered earlier on that the only mistake we made measurement-wise was that the front side pieces were taller than the top, meaning that we needed to add a quarter-inch board to the back to level it. Luckily, I remembered that we had one in the shed that the previous owners had left behind, and Nathan used the snowblower to get back there so we could finish the desk. 

And there you have it! Now for a tour of the desk. Shelby does like to sit on the rug while I'm in there working (or Facebooking, as the case may be). On the left shelves, I have all of my etsy stuff: paper, fabric, ribbon, notebooks, and everything I have in my inventory. The front shelves in the left hold my craft supplies: glue, glue gun, tape, markers. The right side has all of my personal projects and supplies: paper for my scrapbook, work stuff, a plastic bin of things I need to scrapbook. And the front shelves hold office supplies (staper), my books (dictionary and style guides), journals, and supplies for the printer. It's really nice to have everything organized in a way that makes sense with my mind, even though it doesn't look especially neat (which is why you don't get pictures of the finished space!). But what's important is that it's functional. And don't worry: we plan on painting the whole thing white when it gets warmer out, though I can see a benefit of leaving it as is: If I get paint or glue or whatever on it, it doesn't really matter.