Challenge 14... hello, woodland creatures...

The men and women of our house have distinctly different views on the wildlife that wanders through the yard. I see it as pretty and cute and furry. Jimmy suggests we put a tree stand in one of the trees. At least we know we represent well the gender stereotypes.

This buck grazed through the front yard this morning. He was alert but never flashed the white tail until he bounded across the cul-de-sac to our neighbor's yard where the grass is decidedly greener. Of course, our grass is more tender, so I can only assume that his appetizer was our side of the road and he was headed for the entree.

They have many luscious {expensive} plants peppered throughout their natural area... downright gourmet eatin' over there. Our yard is a bit more like shredded iceberg lettuce with shredded carrots. The grass is lettuce; the numerous storm-harvested sticks are carrots.

The buck has three fawns with him. Two poked around the buffer between our yard and our neighbors, and the third ventured directly into the next-door neighbor's yard. It's greener too.

There's also a picture of a doe peeking through the pool fence. The wooded area behind her is where they have their... nest? burrow? den?... I don't know what deer-homes are called. She came to visit early in June and just stood there, watching me read my book.

The deer population must be getting out of control. Virtually everyone I know who doesn't have a fence around their garden has become part of Salad Bar Tour '14. Hunting season is going to be interesting.

Challenge 13... cauliflower pizza crust...

Let me just go on the record in saying that I think the whole gluten-free thing is a little overhyped. I have some sweet friends with celiac disease, and I 100% know their reaction to gluten is legit, but gluten, in my humble opinion, isn't causing the decline of Western culture.

That said, around the middle of September last year, I saw a picture of myself and thought... I look old and fat and tired. Ew. I sent a text message to a friend and about a week later I started a journey towards a much healthier life.

I've lost over 70 lbs and am transitioning to a maintenance phase, so that means that I'm looking for great recipes that will give me the most bang for my caloric buck. I found this great recipe for cauliflower pizza crust on Pinterest.

I decided to do a little experiment and just make "homemade" pizza (as far as the kids knew) and have the family try it without telling them the crust was made from cauliflower.  It was a HUGE hit. The Zackster said that it was way better than Pizza Hut, and Zane said it was different, but he really liked it.
Jimmy asked me to put it in the regular rotation of meals.

So yay! New, healthy pizza!!! Click here for the recipe.

Challenge 10... pantry cleaning...

Cleaning out the cabinets and pantry.

When he saw the fully decluttered and cleaned pantry, Zack announced that we have NO FOOD in the house. All I did was throw out the expired food. That should tell you it's been a long time since I've cleaned out the pantry. I thought I cleaned out the pantry about a year ago, but surely I wouldn't have left cans in there that expired in 2012 2010 2007. Surely.

In the cabinets above the toaster oven, I found a stash of Chick-fil-a sauce and ketchup that would amaze the Hoarders team. The sauce, ketchup, extra plastic ware, and the wooden clementine crate they were sitting in all landed in one of the four extra large trash bags we tossed.

The sad part is that I cleaned out only one small pantry and only three cabinets' worth of food storage. I still have the other half of food cabinets to go. Then cups. Then plates and bowls. Then storage containers. Then cooking/baking equipment. Then serving pieces. Then candles. (WHO ON EARTH HAS AN ENTIRE CABINET FOR CANDLES?!) Then vases and sundry glass containers for decorative purposes. It's going to be a long haul.

Clutter gives me the illusion of having plenty, but in all honesty, it's largely junk. I'm looking forward to getting rid of the unnecessary stuff in our house over the course of summer break. Just 30 minutes to an hour a day... that's all.

Onward and upward to the spice cabinet... and Kitchen Declutter Phase 1 is complete.

It's not easy living such a glamorous life.

When your pool water is old...

Remember when our pool started acting up?  You can refresh your memory here. In spite of the regimen of algaecide, citric acid, and flocculant, this spring we had the worst battle with stains and algae we've ever had.

It was so bad, we abandoned googling answers and went straight to asking the neighbor who owns a pool company for help. What we discovered was this: our water is old. Seriously. The same water has been in the pool for, well, every since we moved here in 2007,  and who knows how long before that.

Did you know that chlorine is a gas and to put it into pool water, chlorine tablets contain cyanuric acid as a stabilizer for the chlorine? It keeps it from breaking down under the ultraviolet rays of the sun. When the concentration of cyanuric acid grows to high levels over the years, it prevents chlorine from breaking down altogether. Since the chlorine can't release, it doesn't kill algae. So you add algaecide, which raises the copper level in the water. If your water is already prone to high levels of copper (and this happens especially if you have a pool heater), the copper in the water clings to the pool liner and creates large brownish gold stains.

Now, if this happens several years in a row, other chemicals start to break down. The cyanuric acid breaks down and somehow (magic is my theory) you get a lovely coating of purple sediment all over the flat surfaces of your pool liner.

The water can be perfectly clear, but there are brown stains and purple sand all over the place. The scientific name for this is ick. When you step out of the pool, it looks like the picture below:

Ew

So, you call your neighbor the pool company owner who explains your water is old. You drain about half the water out, refill it with fresh water, and turn over the keys to the gate to the pool guys who will tweak it until it's perfect.

And that's how you deal with old water in the pool. Next March, I will be posting about how you deal with putting in a new pool liner.

Beverage stations...

The second thing that made SBS-hostessing a breeze was setting up regular beverage stations.

For the high school SBS, we narrowed beverage choices to two: water and lemonade. What freed up the yellow tub in the first place was the fact that instead of putting ice in individual cups, we filled two beverage dispensers halfway each with ice. Then we filled them the rest of the way with the beverage. In a creative moment, I took some adhesive-backed foam letters and stuck them to dispensers. I wasn't sure if the letters would come off when we washed them (we hand-wash them), but after six weeks, they're still stuck tight.

Ladies' SBS means COFFEE!!! I love me some good coffee-drinking women! We had the same water and lemonade pitchers, although a couple of times I did put out mango peach tea in the third dispenser. But the highlight of social time at a ladies' SBS is drinking coffee with friends.

Coffee featured labels. Caff was more popular, so it stayed in the pot, since most nights I ended up making more. Decaff went in a carafe

We went to disposable cups after washing 12 coffee cups the first night. :) Four kinds of sweetener. Five kinds of creamer that rotated.

There's nothing in this picture that isn't in the others. Coffee corners just make me happy.

Bible study in a tub...

Twenty years ago that would have meant I was sitting in my bathtub with a board stretched from edge to edge, reading and writing. I have three kids now. I can't remember the last time I actually sat down in a tub.

This Bible study in a tub is about a really cool hostessing discovery I stumbled on this summer.

My sweet, amazing, supportive family agreed to re-arrange life as we know it (read: not trash the house on a routine basis) for a couple of months this summer so that we could host two Bible studies in our home. The high school summer Bible study meets on Monday evenings, and the ladies' SBS meets on Wednesday nights. I thought it would be a little chaotic, but in all honesty it is a ton of fun AND the house has stayed relatively clean all week (because the degree to which we trash it Thursday - Sunday directly correlates with the amount of work we do in the big Monday cleaning).

One thing that made set-up a breeze was the Bible study tub. Before the first meeting I was shopping at Walmart and picked up a bright yellow ice tub. I was going to use it for ice, but the plan changed. It was packed with paper products and coffee supplies, and I didn't have time to find a place for everything, so I just let them there. You have to admit that some of our better ideas are "accidental" discoveries.

At 6 p.m. before the guests arrived, I'd grab the tub and put out the supplies. The tub stayed on the corner of the counter so that if anyone needed additional cups/napkins/spoons/plates/Truvia, it was right there. When everyone left, I'd repack the tub, and it'd stay in storage until 6 p.m. on the next SBS night.

Here's a quick run-down of the Bible study in a tub:

The Tub - fully loaded with...


sweeteners (because so many people like so many different things),


forks, spoons, plates, cups, napkins,


name tags,


and beverage labels.

The other thing that made set-up a breeze was the beverage stations. More on those tomorrow...

A little warm outside...

You would not believe your eyes, if 10 million fireflies...

Lanterns are pretty. My porch is lit up with lanterns and candles in the summertime; it's one of the summer things that make me love the season.

Now my courtyard is lit up with lanterns too.

The recent Ikea pilgrimage netted five new silver lanterns.  I put them in the courtyard peach tree. At night it looks like fireflies are dancing around.

The Ikea stool...

Remember the bag-o-Ikea goodies? Well, to the left of that bag was a box--the only piece of Ikea furniture I brought home this trip.

That box was a step stool for my kitchen. I am short -- very, very short compared to the height of my cabinets. I can reach things on the first shelf and the front of the second shelf.  Higher up or further in and I'm in trouble.

Online they showed the stool in two finishes --natural birch and brown-black stain. When we got to Ikea, there were no brown-black stained step stools. So sad. My friend Suzanne and I decide that the natural birch one looked pretty unfinished, so I bought it.

I took ebony stain I had left over from a failed attempt to convert a white-washed frame into an ebony-stained frame, and I stained...

... myself AND the stool.

I'm sure this will take my cooking to new heights. Bahahahahaha! *smh* I did not just say that...

The land of the in-laws...

Jimmy's grandmother was born in Sweden. Her maiden name was Andersen. Therefore, we feel a kindred spirit with Ikea, which could go a long way in explaining my over-the-top affection for the retailer.

Yesterday we made our first summer of 2011 visit to Ikea. I went with a printed list from the Ikea website. Dave Ramsey haunts me wherever I go, so I have to have a list to avoid budget-busting purchases. Dave would be proud because I spent 30% less than I had budgeted. It was because of the rug. The rug I loved on the website was boo-ugly in real life.

I'll get around to posting what I'm doing with everything, but here's a shot of most of what came home with us. Little stuff, but hopefully it will have a lovely impact on the home place.

While I was there, I found my dream kitchen. I'm processing how it will translate here...Do I take ideas from it and apply them to what I've got? Do I postpone all immediate plans to tweak the kitchen and budget to buy the Ikea version because we've got to do something with cabinet doors that are cracking and falling off their hinges? Do I apply some ideas now, while budgeting for future changes? Oh, the quandry.

In the meantime, here are pictures of dreamland...

And here is proof that I can out-plan, out-shop and out-last my kids at Ikea:

Pool Chemistry 101...

At my high school there were two chemistry teachers --the one everyone loved, who taught for 6,000 years and was legend for making his students want to become doctors and pharmacists, and the crazy one who was working on her PhD but couldn't explain the chemical structure of carbon dioxide vs. carbon monoxide to students, yet she was allegedly brilliant in a research environment. Allegedly.

I had the crazy one.

So when pool chemistry goes awry, as it is wont to do the latter part of June every single year, I am clueless. And impatient.

In the middle of June, our pool looked like this:

And today it looks like this:

Wait... it's hard to see just how bad it is from a distance. Let's try that again. Here it is two-ish weeks ago:

And here it is today:

Hmmm... notice a change? Yes, it is a different color. Copper-colored, to be exact.

As I understand it, what had happened was this: the chlorine and pH levels dropped. A lot. We added a ton of chlorine (and repaired the automatic chlorinator, leaving it set on MAX-10).

Then we filled the pool with about 8" of water because between the lack of rain and the prevalence of diving championships, the water level had fallen significantly. The unbalanced chlorine and pH helped leach copper out of the pipes in the pool heater. Mind you, if the heater were a little newer, it would have been plumbed so that when it's off the water flows around the copper pipes and not through the copper pipes. But no, it's old, so water flows through the copper pipes of the pool heater whether it's on or not. Over the course of a week, the pool went from pristine blue to pond-muck green-brown. Lovely.

Only here's the thing... now the water chemistry is near-perfect. It's the pool liner that's stained. I feel like I need to call Bill Murray and invite him for a swim.

Other pool-or-pond, pond-would-be-good-for-you visitors we have include insects...

(OK, you have to be a little impressed at the sparkles under the cricket's feet. Downright Disney, don't ya think?)

...and amphibians...

We are waiting on someone who majored in science and understands chemistry (i.e. won't kill every living thing in the neighborhood) to get off work one evening while it is still light and finish the de-staining treatment.

In the meantime, I'm headed poolside to chat with the enchanted creatures who have taken residence in our backyard pond pool. 

What I did on Saturday (and Sunday)...

Bright and early Saturday noon, I decided to tackle the deck furniture and get it spiffed up for Summer 2011. Saturday was primer day. And Sunday was top coat day.

Thankfully, I was able to resurrect the dining set for yet another year, which is good because replacing the decking boards is on our pro-jik list for July (and probably August and maybe even September, if things go the way they usually go when I tackle DIY pro-jiks).

Last year I left the cushions out all the time. They faded, mildewed and even grew some lovely algae which very rudely wouldn't come off completely in the washing machine. I believe that's the outdoor fabric triumvirate of ick. I ended up scraping and scrubbing them by hand before they went into the attic. When I took them out of storage this year, they were faded AND stained. Ew.

So I did what every cost-conscious DIYer would do. I flipped them over. :)

I blame last year's cushion debacle on my own laziness. It seemed like too much trouble to untie each cushion and take it inside when we weren't using the table.  This year, instead of tying the cushions to the chairs, I made bows out of the ties and laid them in the chairs.

And it looked so very lovely. Seventeen minutes later, the loud thunder clap signaled the beginning of "Operation Save the Cushions."

Less than a minute after that, all six cushions were safely tucked into the stairwell of the bonus room, conveniently located next to the back door that leads to the deck. I'm guessing it's fewer than ten steps from dinette to stairwell. I think it'll work, because let's face it, if it takes a lot of effort, it's probably not happening in the summer. Except for the decking thing. I hope.