April 22, 2012

Blomus

Filed under: Family,Friends,General Living,Shopping — Copa @ 10:31 pm
Tea stick

Tea stick

This evening I was looking at the blomus website because I was trying to find a housewarming gift for our new neighbors that would be unique. So I was browsing through the blomus kitchen section and saw a couple of really unique items that piqued my curiosity.

One of the blomus stainless steel items that I saw and was interested in was a thing that they called a “tea stick.” I clicked on the picture, hoping to get some more information about the item. I’ve included a photograph of the item for you to see. I’d like more information about how to use the item, but there is no information on the Internet about it. Have you used one of them before?

The new K-cup

My sister-in-law called today and asked my wife if we already had one of those new Keurig coffee machines or not. She replied that we did not have one yet, but were interested in finding a good deal on one because her parents are staying with us for a couple of weeks and her father really likes the machine that they have at home. Much to my surprise, she told my wife that she was going to go ahead and order one for us to be picked up at Wal-Mart through their site-to-store service. She’ll pay the tab, all we have to do is go pick it up! That’s really exciting news because it is not very often that anyone in either of our families do anything that nice for us. I’m looking forward to trying it out! I wonder how fast we can go pick it up!

April 21, 2012

Sprucing up the back yard

Filed under: Family,Garden,General Living,Home Improvement,Shopping — Copa @ 6:14 pm

My wife has been talking about buying one of those fake rocks that are hollow inside to put it over the top of the well pipe. When we first moved into the house she was thinking that she would like to buy an ornamental Dutch Windmill to put over the well, but she has searched for years in vain to find the one she would like to have. I suggested that we buy one of the ornamental wishing well houses to put over it, but she really wanted to do something a little bit different than that – many of our neighbors have that cute little wishing well disguising their wells.

Meanwhile we’ve been trying to decide which kind of fence we want to install between our house and our “bad” neighbor. Unfortunately from what we understand the wooden privacy fences have to be installed with the good looking side facing the neighbor, so we are now looking at using bamboo poles to line the inside part of the fence so that even the inside part of the fence will be nice looking. Maybe we can find a bamboo fence that looks nice from both sides. Although thinking about it, maybe we should just plant some bamboo along the property line and just let it fill in naturally. What do you think?

April 19, 2012

Solar panels

Lately I’ve noticed that my wife has been buying a lot of small items that work with built in solar panels. For the past several years we’ve been buying and installing solar powered landscape lighting. Since money is tight we’ve only been able to do a little bit at a time, but slowly we’ve been able to light the way from the driveway’s parking areas along the walking path to the various doors that are used in the house.

More recently she has bought some lights that are mounted on the side of the house that are solar charged and motion detected, and she has had me install them beside all of the entrance doors. At first I was quite annoyed with her for spending the money on something that I thought was unnecessary, but since then there have been a number of times that I’ve gotten home after dark and found myself really glad that when I got close to the door the lights came on so I could see the door knob clearly enough to be able to find my house keys, unlock the door, and let myself in. When she offered one of those lights to me to install on the wall of the new shop building I told her that I wouldn’t need it, but now that I’ve seen what a great job it does I think I’ll take her up on the offer.

April 17, 2012

Kitchen Spring Cleaning

Filed under: Family,Food,Hobbies,Technology and Gadgets — Copa @ 7:30 pm

It just amazes me how many spices we seem to be in need of these days for the variety of recipes that are being made for today’s families. Our kitchen spice racks are overflowing with so many spices that we have now decided to go through them all and throw away the old and unneeded ones that are just taking up valuable space in current spice rack that just wasn’t made to hold all that many bottles of spices.

We would buy a new, bigger wall spice rack but this one was made by my late-brother in his shop class back in the 80′s and it means so much to the both of us that we wouldn’t dare consider replacing it, ever. So this year’s spring cleaning will include a lot of the kitchen stuff and area, not something that gets done often around here.