Well, that was Exciting!

I am the absolute last person who should be messing with electricity.  Seriously.

Luckily, we found this great electrician (kind of sketchy on how official that title is) who knows what he is doing and does so fairly cheaply (that is the part that makes me feel suspicious about the title.)  So, for the most part, I let him do all of the stuff with the electric.  (Do you like how I said that just like your grandma might?  That's to emphasize how little business I have messing with it.) 

If you read here even occassionally, you know that I am OCD about weird things. For instance, the fact that the outlets in the old house were all almond colored really annoyed the shit out of me. So, I wanted to switch the outlets to new white ones. Well, Mr. Electrician man, switched about a third of them and then just broke down and taught me how to do it and some special tricks to do it correctly with fucking aluminum wiring, which if you don't have it, say a prayer of thanks, and if you do have it, I have the number for a great electrician.

So cut to the new house.

The run down dream house. 

Guess what color all the outlets are?  Yep, fucking almond.  And somehow all are filthy.  Like, how the fuck do you get goopy dirt all up in an outlet without killing yourself?? 
Anyways, this house has copper wiring. THANK GOD!  It's only about a million times easier to work with.  Even I could do this!

Well, yes.  I successfully replaced the outlets in my son's room and in the upstairs hallway as I painted. 

Here is a before




















Here is an after

See?  Such an ass I am!  The wretched brass and shiny wall plates had to go.  I considered just spray painting them all, but this being my dream house and all, I decided to spring for new oil rubbed bronze covers.  They look awesome, yes?


Well, let me tell you a little known secret.  Metal, specifically, oil rubbed bronze conducts electricity like a champ.  Like a champ, I say!  Did you know that a loose METAL outlet cover and a plug that's half in creates a very interesting situation? Trying to screw on the metal cover while having a plug half in with a live outlet may be a dipshit idea?  (An instance where one's laziness may even kill you?)  Did you know that electrical current can even cut metal?

Now you do and so do I.  Fuuuuuuck.

 

Yeah, yeah

I am actually doing something worthwhile this week...  Painting my sons room.  But I thought you may like to see how filthy the shower was when we moved in...

My Laverne "L" is thanks to the magic eraser.  Ew.
More about this shower later.

Halloween Scare the Shit outta Me

So the new kids bathroom had a smallish mirror that was hung too high for little guy to see himself in.  Bad fend shui, and not safe because that little monkey was climbing up onto the counter twice a day so he could see himself brushing his teeth.

In a moment of sheer genius, I decided I would take the bathroom mirror and use it above the fireplace and use the one from the old house in the bathroom.  (It was just a tiny bit too large for on the mantle.) 
It's nice when things work out, isn't it?
Oh yeah.   (You better have fucking said that like the Kool Aid guy...)

The morning of Halloween at 4 am the mirror in the kids bathroom decided to commit suicide and jumped.

Nothing like loud crashing accompanied by shattering glass to wake a person up.  I even had earplugs in and it scared the shit out of me.  Then the kids had a hard time getting back to sleep. (Well, duh.  A huge adrenaline rush will do that to a person.)


Btw, did I tell you why it fell?

We had it hanging in the old house with those picture hanging strips and although I was surprised that it didn't fall off the wall, I decided that if it worked there, why wouldn't it work here?!

See those picture hanging strips still stuck to the wall?   yeah....

Maybe the fact that the paper backing was totally shredded after taking the mirror off the wall in the old house should have told me, "beware!"   I just kept saying fuck it.

This was a serious pain in the ass to clean up.  Every little fleck here is a piece of glass.  This is where my kids are most likely to walk barefoot.

There must have been a magical fountain of glass that shot up and out into the hallway.  I'm sure it was pretty, but what a pain in the ass to clean up.  Even being very cautious, I still had bloody hands when I was done. 

 

Oh - and my solution to the clearly unsafe condition of the hall bath so the kids would not go into it?

 

Gah! I am still annoyed with myself for breaking that mirror with my laziness. 

And just like anytime you cut corners, I spent at least three times as long cleaning up that fucking mirror than I would have if I had just removed the damn paper and stuck those strips right on the mirror and frame.  (See, my laziness STILL will not be tamped down!)

Why? Why so Fucking Difficult?

So - in an effort to make the laundry room even more functional, I've been organizing the cabinets and hanging hooks.
Yeah, totally boring.
But let me tell you about the fucking ironing board hook. 
So, the funny thing here is that I iron mayber once every 4 or 5 years.  Really.  I can't stand that shit.  What a goddamn waste of time, because....no iron shirts exist, people.  Why in the hell would I ever iron ever again?  Really.
So I have an iron and a board and of course I would like to keep them in the laundry room...  Makes sense right?

Well, I had them stashed behind the door, but every time I shut the door I worried that the board would tip and make a buttload of noise and wake the children.  And god knows, once the kids are asleep there is nothing I hate more than having to do the whole bedtime shit again.

So I decided to get a simple hook to hang it on the wall behind the door.  (No, most definitely not on the fucking door.  Do you want to hear that shit clanging around every time you open or close the door or brush against it.  FUCK NO!)

So, it's a fairly simple installation.  The directions sucked my ass, but big fucking deal - I can read engrish with the best of them.

First I decided the height to hang the hook and marked the holes.  Then I drilled for the anchors that were included with the hook. 

The directions said to use a drill bit that was the appropriate size.  This was my first inkling of trouble.  Seriously?  Most directions will have the drill bit size, as part of the idea of a wall anchor is a tight fit. 

So I went from small drill bit and trying to tap in the anchor.  When I looked at the anchors as well, I thought something was fishy.  They had these fins that stick out, but nothing that looked like it would grip the wall.  Plus, said fins make a hole in the wall as you tap them in.  Really.

So I finally got the holes drilled and the anchors tapped into place.  I hung the hook and started to attach it to the wall and into the anchors.  The first one went off without a hitch.  The second was a little trickier.
The third, the screw was all the way in and not gripping anything.  Spinning free.  What the fuck?  So I did what any normal person would do and said Fuck It! and moved on to the next.  Three out of four isn't bad, right?!

Guess what, motherfuckers?  The fourth and final anchor betrayed me and THAT screw was spinning into nothing as well.  SIGH.
And because I'm such a fucking genius, I just thought, well,  I'll just use longer screws.  Yeah, the first one just pushed the "anchor" into the wall cavity and the next one didn't work either.

And you already know what a good workman I am.  I was toast.  I had the power drill above my head for at least one minute total, and my arms weren't having it.  The top two anchors were solid - so what the fuck was I supposed to do, take them out and have to patch the goddamn wall to start all fucking over?  HELL NO.
Two out of four ain't bad.  I'm batting .500!  The ironing board is hanging and the iron is neatly on the hook.  If this motherfucker falls, it sure as shit isn't my fucking fault.  Seriously, the person who cheaped out on these one tenth of a cent anchors should have something heavy attached to the wall above their bed with said crap anchors!  They could have at least not included any anchors at all, so then I wouldn't have been lulled into a false sense of security with the crappiest anchors ever, designed by a person who clearly didn't know what the hell the fucking purpose of anchors are in the first place.  ASSHOLES!

And, if any of you readers see that there was something obvious that I should have known to get those anchors in correctly, just keep it to yourself, because if I ever see an anchor like that it's going straight in the trash and I'll use the ones I fucking understand that also tell me what size drill bit to use. 

Just this...

I know this is silly but...
Just this....

 

What the hell did I sign up for?  Every. single. one. looks. just. like. this....  or worse.

Carpet Cleaning.... My Ass!

Get ready for a fucking rant over here.  Seriously.
The carpets in this house are filthy.  Disgusting.  Full of dog and cat hair.  Totally barf worthy.  Sooo, instead of hiring a carpet cleaning service to come in on the day the house was vacant, I decided that we would just get bids when we moved in.   Then I decided, nah, fuck that, $150 is too much to spend on a carpet cleaner, so I decided to rent a carpet cleaner and do it myself for $50.  Oh, inner Martha Stewart, GFY.

So as I was researching which machine to rent, I came across this gem on you tube.
Click here for a Cleaning Orgasm....
Woah!  Sign me up for the Bissell, post haste!

Yeah, let me show you my reward for spending 50 bucks to rent a 75 pound machine that I had to haul up and down stairs and go over each precious square of greasy carpet at least 4 times.   And pushing and pulling this monster is a total pain in the ass - it's heavy as shit and doesn't turn for shit, so when you complete one row, then you basically wrestle it like a greased pig to get it set up for the next row.   (I'm sure there is an easier way, but come on!)
Now get ready for the before and after...

  This is the before...

This is the after..

 

Yeah.  After all that it doesn't look like I did a god damned thing.  My fucking arms are sore, my legs are sore, I had to move a bunch of fucking furniture, the skin on my hands is peeling off ( which may be unrelated, but I am on a streak here!)I had to haul this fucker from lowes and power lift it like a Russian Olympiad up into the van, COME ON!   I am seriously pissed and now wondering if a service would do a better job.

Here is my booby prize though.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Buckets and buckets of filth.  So it may not look cleaner, but at least I know it is.   Also, it may not look better, but it totally smells better.

So after all this, would I ever rent a carpet cleaner again?  Hell no!   Shhh, don't tell my husband, but he was totally right.  I told him my cheapskate plan, and he said that those machines never work very well.  Sigh.  Fucking you tube...

Big Shit over Here

I know I haven't blogged in a fuck of a long time.  Sorry.  We moved.  (Yay!).  To the dirtiest house EVER. (Boo!)
In real life, when I talk about this I go through all the possible easons why this house was filthy.  On this blog, I never present my best self, more like my worst, so with that in mind,  the family that lived here lived like filthy pigs.
Speaking of pigs - I am a sexist pig because the person I blame that the house is dirty is the mom.
Why is it that I blame the mom?   Seriously, so fucking sexist of me, and totally unfair, but I do feel like it's the mom of the house who decides how clean or dirty a house is.  Maybe it's because I assume all boys would live like frat boys if left on their own, which is also fucking sexist.  Seriously, what is wrong with me?

Anyways, I've been running around feeling superior as I clean up the filth.   I do feel a bit like I'm in a Mr.Clean commercial, although it is getting fucking old.

I'm gonna keep you in the loop for all our projects around here.  And how shit really goes down.  Hopefully I'll be able to log more than once every fucking six months.  No promises, but I'll try.

Seriously, WTF?

Alright.  Here is what I'm talking about. I was reading a story to my youngest and he choose a Scooby sight words book.  These books are so ridiculously bad...  But I digress.  I almost barfed when I saw the cover...

All I could think is that whoever the cover artist for this little book had a wicked and sick sense of humor.  But then again, maybe I am the only one warped enough to see it.  Maybe I am scarred from when we adopted our cat and she was de-wormed and the vet warned me that I may find a long white worm in her litter and not to panic about it.  (Yes, because if I found a foot long tapeworm while sifting litter, of course I would stay calm.  Right.) (BTW, thank god she didn't pass any worms.  There would have been barf in the litter as well.)

So the bottom line is that when I look at this cover all I see is Fred thinking about how gross that tapeworm is and Scooby wanting to eat it, because you know Scooby, he'll eat anything. 

Fucking Home Made Play Dough. God Damn It.

Let me begin this post with a link to Amazon.

LINK
 

Just so you know, 36 cans of play doh are $24 bucks.  Just sayin.

So I decided yesterday that I would make some play doh with the little guy today. I thought that it would be a good way to keep us busy and not baking cookies.

So the recipe I had called for flour, salt, cream of tartar, oil and water.  This was not surprising. It did say that I would be cooking the stuff, so I thought that was weird.   I mixed the ingredients up and was pissed to find this slop.

Seriously?  Fucking runny ass shit. 

At this point I'm thinking that I will be standing at the stove stirring this crap ass home made doh for fucking ever. 
Luckily that wasn't the case, but this shit was annoying.
First this happened...

 

Which was kind of promising...  And then this started to happen...

And I feared my son would be playing with glorified cottage cheese. 

 

 

Just as an aside, red food coloring is just disturbing.  It looks so much like blood.

Zombie play doh.  It looks so disturbing, like I bled into it or like there is a dead bloody finger in there.  Gross.

Ok.  Back to it...  So miracle of miracles, it finally came together and was really nice and soft. 

I separated it to get it ready for food coloring. 

No, I don't have OCD issues, why do you ask?!?!  Okay, Okay, I have a problem sometimes about being anal rententive about stupid shit.  If you came to my house you would be like, OCD?!  How can her floor be that filthy then?  Well, listen up, my floor may have crumbs and be gross but there is some part of my house on any given day that has been organized according to my OCD fixation of the day.  It may be taking apart the oven door to get to the glass with the streak of brown on it - it may be something else, but I can assure you that there will be something weirdly organized and/or clean.  Today it was the fucking playdoh.  I indulged myself.

And Goddamn it felt good.  My perfect playdoh.  Okay, except for the purple.  God forbid that the food coloring people actually give you a real primary red.  The red that a person needs to be able to mix colors is actually more like fuschia than blood red.  (SEE!  All those years of thinking you were counting drops wrong to get your lavender Easter Eggs and they turned out brown.  It's not you - it's the fucking dyes.)Anyways, I was pretty happy with my colors.  And no, I didn't forget why I was doing this...

And he didn't want to make perfect colors anyway.  Here are his colors.  And his hands.  Holy shit, look at how gross his hands are...

 

 

 

Okay, so this seems like a pretty big win.  And it is, in a way.  Except for this part...

Normally, I really don't give a shit if the playdoh gets all smooshed together and sent out through the extruder together to get all mixed in weird ways.  I really don't.  I kind of like the weird psychedelic designs it can make.  But part of me today cried a little when he took those pretty and perfect little dough balls out of the bags and made one big rainbow pancake.  And then I felt like a big jackass. Sigh.

All my pretty colors ended up being one big lump of greenish blorp.  Did I mention that he said "I'm gonna make BIG fake boobs!" with the afforementioned green blorp?

(I keep trying to wrap it up with something witty here, but I don't think there is any quip I can come up with that is better than that.)

 

Well, GFY Jillee

Well.  I am going to show you more dirty little secrets about myself.  I noticed how filthy my dishwasher was.  Seriously fucking gross.  I don't know how shit gets so gross and then all of the sudden, it's like Holy Shit, it's like I'm in an episode of hoarders or the British How Clean is your House? 
Okay, clearly I watch possibly THE worst tv ever. 

 Yeah, so the photos don't show how truly gross it is.  There is this weird greasy orangy brown film over the entire inside of the dishwasher.  When I rubbed it with my finger it balled up, like greasy greasy filth.

  So I did what any good American housewife of the beginning of the 21st century does.  I turned to Pinterest.  When I searched for dishwasher cleaner, I got this post by Jillee.  Her blog is One Good Thing by Jillee.  Here is a link to her post...
http://www.onegoodthingbyjillee.com/2012/02/how-to-clean-your-dishwasher.html

Please note - she has no disgusting before pictures.  Here is her one picture of a before.

Um, Jillee, you really think the state of that dishwasher necessitates an exclamation point?  Come on!  It's gleaming white.  She ends up pulling an old melted plastic cup out of the bottom and then cleans it the dishwasher by running it with a cup of vinegar and then again with some baking soda.

I tried this hoping that it would magically make the inside of my dishwasher be approximately white again. 
BTW, let me have a bit of a rant about the time involved in this.  My dishwasher is always either full or well on it's way to being full and sometimes it's full and running with another load waiting in the sink.  I needed to run it empty not once, but two times.  Seriously!   This was trying. 

So here is the results...Please pay close attention to the left hand wall in this pic.  STILL FUCKING GROSS!

BTW, let me make a confession to being OCD at times.  You can see that the lower half of the left wall is pretty darn clean.  Let me share why!  I got caught up in a fit of making my dishwasher totally, perfectly clean and busted out the comet.  I came to my senses about 10 minutes later and thought, GFY Jillee and other pinners.  I need strong drinks if I'm fucking cometing the inside of my dishwasher, which by the way, let me show you the outside....

Yes.  The handle is completely broken off.  When the outside looks like this, I don't know why I give a shit about the inside either.

Run for your Lives!! I'm Sewing Again!

Oh my god.  I haven't sewn since my youngest gave up having 2 naps a day - and this was a few years ago.  He's in school enough that I decided to get going on making some things from my fabric stash.

If you remember a while ago I was making ill advised and completely crooked changing kits that no one wanted?  I enjoyed making them, but they left me with some odd fabric left over - like baby mink and cowboys and all kinds of oddness.
So, I went through the fabric stash with my daughter - she has been asking me to teach her how to sew.  I know, I know, I'm spreading my poor skills.  I will take sewing lessons with her though.  I swear.  I will learn while she does and stop the cycle of horrible crafting...

Anyways - the fabric that she choose was, of course, the most impossible fabric to sew.  It's that baby mink stuff that is super soft, but not only is thick and furry, but also has a knit backing that is silky.  That my friends means we were the trifecta of fucked.

It was her first time sewing anything with a machine besides sewing paper together, so I gave her the long straight seams to do.
Did I pin them for her?  No.  Did we press anything?  No, haven't we talked about my sewing habits before?  Did we even make sure that the seams would match up - yeah, not so much.  Did she add to the damage by insisting that the furry side was worn against her body?  Yes.  Did she also up the ante by insisting that the seams also not touch her body?  Yes - so essentially she wanted to wear them inside out...  and well, my seams aren't known for their straight perfection...

Without further ado, here are our results.

Aw, she looks so happy doesn't she?  Poor thing.  (BTW, her shirt is the same idea she has for the pants, but clearly the sweatshop workers who made the top had no problem with getting everything right...)

 You can tell here that I actually used pinking shears to cut out the fabric!  Wow!  My skills have really improved!  On the down side, you can also see what a sloppy cutter I am.  Shaggy edges, be damned!  I have no fucking patience to recut!!!  I also sewed through the elastic waistband, which makes the runching of the waistband even for most of the way around and then there's a weird flat section...

This photo shows all the loose and crappy edges.  I mean really - my poor kid.  I promise I won't continue to teach her to sew.  I swear.  I also promise to share what I learn while taking lessons with her, because I'm sure it will be pretty funny.  Lastly, I can't help the fact that she wanted to wear these fucking pants.  Seriously.  I tried multiple times to talk her out of ever wearing them, even to bed...  No luck.  I will draw the line if she tries to wear these over to anybody's house or out in public.

Lastly, please check out the seam on the right pant leg.  Wow. 
The good news is that she likes the pants.  The bad news is she likes the pants.

Hey, aren't you glad that I'm sewing again?