A homey Saturday

Today was a homemaking kind of Saturday.  First thing this morning I went to Market On The Move which is the food co-op where for $10 you can have up to about 60 pounds of produce that would have been taken from the inspection station at the US-Mexican border to the dump because it was not picked up on time. 

I got:

tomatoes
English cucumbers
yellow summer squash
little sweet bell peppers

Doesn't sound like much, but from the tomatoes I got:

30 jars of diced tomatoes.  They were all pints except the last one which was a half-pint.  I was out of tomato pints (still have a few quarts) and was having to use store-bought ones. (!!!)

David stopped by around lunch time, then he and Bill went to a gun show.  It was David's first and he was quite intrigued, Bill said.

A little later Alicia dropped in and we chatted while I finished up the canning.  She suddenly had a hankering to pet and hold a chicken, so I sent her out with a container of scraps to entice them.  They're very friendly.

You can see the towels drying in the sun behind her.  I got a couple of loads of laundry done too.

 

In the evening, a cook-out with David and Alicia and all of us.

 

It was a good day.

A shameful picture

Yes, this is my laundry room.

 The size seems all right, doesn't it? It's 9.5' x 5'. Still sounds good.  Oh, there is a 3' x 4.5' platform just to the right in this picture and the water heater and the furnace are sitting up on it.  THAT takes a chunk out of the square footage!

I hope one day we'll get a heat pump for the A/C and heat and perhaps get a tankless water heater.  That would allow enough room to dance a little jig.  Even a counter for folding!

BUT, that is years away.  Unless the A/C+furnace unit mysteriously quits working . . . .

Good bye to an old laundry friend ;-)

Last week I bought a new laundry basket to replace this old one.  Sounds simple and straightforward, doesn't it?  An identical basket is still available, so my baskets will still stack and nest together.

I felt kind of sad to put the old basket into the recycling bin.  The second house Bill and I owned was a brand new house in a suburb of Boise, Idaho.  It was twice the size of our tiny first house and about 75 years newer and 75 times nicer.  We didn't have near enough furniture to fill it, and in fact, didn't even have adequate living room furniture for about a year.

Bill and I had only the his-n-hers children at that time, no little twins+1.  Weekend laundry was chaotic with all the clothes that traveled between the various parents' houses. 

One day I went to the store and bought night lights for the long hall, 5 wastebaskets so each bathroom and the girls' and boys' rooms would have one, and 3 laundry baskets.  So everyone would know where each basket belonged, I took a Sharpie and wrote "GIRLS," "BOYS," or "MOM AND DAD" twice on the rim of each one.

You can still see the labels and it was the boys' basket that finally gave out.

What did you find in your washing machine today?

I'll bet it was different from what I found in mine.

Laundry can be pretty

Don't you agree?

My new favorite clothes drying products

I read about both of these products on a blog a few months ago, but since both are from Ikea and we don't have one in our town, I had to wait until we went to the really big city to shop there.

I was using a low-quality wooden drying rack. I liked that the parallel rods were of a decent diameter which didn't leave much of a fold line on my clothes, but it was small and wobbly. I got this one and I love it!



The only drawback is that since the lines are metal, they are thin and often leave fold lines on the clothes, I can put at least two loads at a time on it, and I can easily pick it up and move it around when it's open. It folds flat and cost $20.

The other item is a clip dryer that looks like an octopus and in fact has octopus eyes on it, which took me several weeks to notice. It's insane how much I like this item.



I have the white one. It has 16 strong clips on it, that while they are very secure, aren't hard to squeeze open at all. I use it to hang mostly underwear and socks. It can be windy here in the spring and I've never had anything come loose from the clip dryer, unlike the wire dryer. The arms fold up for storage and it cost $5.

I didn't receive any samples or get paid to promote these items, but wanted to post about these portable drying devices I found and really like.