Tag Archives: household

Home for the Headaches

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Eek, four weeks since I’ve posted something.  Unfortunately, the blog has been taking the back seat to life lately…

The client I’m at didn’t renew our contract through the end of the month, so I’m heading back in the office after April 24th.  I may already have another client booked but that hasn’t been finalized yet.  To be a consultant on the bench isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I’m not bringing in money and it isn’t cheap to sit around doing nothing.  I’m not too worried as I’m continually adding to my skills to be more of a selling point to potential clients.  Enough about work.

School has been crazy, as usual.  I’m looking forward to finishing at the end of this month because Tazz and I are heading to New Mexico for five days and then to San Antonio for four days.  We’re going to see Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico along with the VLA (Very Large Array) near Socorro which was featured in the film Contact.  San Antonio will be four days of unplanned activities, mostly sitting around relaxing with my Aunt and Grandfather.  Tazz has never been to SA so he’s looking forward to it!

The household work has been a blast this spring, already.  Finally got the garage door replaced and entry door removed.  The chimney was falling apart and just dropped $2200 on a new liner and repair.  Next up, our driveway is getting ripped out and replaced because of water issues we were having in the basement.  It’s the year of repairs and I’m doing my part to stimulate the local economy.  (read: sarcasm)

Starting this fall, maybe even this summer, I will be starting initial work on my iPhone application for a migraine diary.  If you have interest in being part of my focus group and potentially a beta tester, let me know via a comment or send me an e-mail through my blog.

Eliminating Distractions

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At work and at home, I frequently get distracted by noises.  At work, it’s the cackling hens I’ve talked about and at home it would be the TV from another room for example.  I dropped $100 on a pair of noise-cancelling headphones from audio-technica and I’m in love with them.  They reduce probably half of the ambient noise around you and add a little music on top of that and you can hardly hear those distractions.  When I need to really concentrate, these guys have been my saving grace.  I’ve considered using them when I get a bad migraine too since you don’t have to be connected to a music source – you can just wear them.

The ‘tween Time

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School is finally over for the spring semester and I have some “between time” until summer session starts next week.  Since this past weekend and I Tazz have:

  • Got the garage resided (well, we watched)
  • Refreshed the flower beds out front & planted pretty things (they haven’t been used for three years easily)
  • Fixed the garage spot light (me on a ladder & electrical wire)
  • Removed the 30 year old non-functioning fluorescent lights from the garage
  • Put a new, efficient fluorescent fixture in the garage
  • Mowed the lawn
  • Pulled the weeds/creeping charlie
  • Emptied and removed the scary barrel (more later on this)

Whew that’s a lot.  And there is still more to do.  I’ve noticed over the past few years that we’ve let things slide around the outside of the house and a number of things inside too.  I keep a to-do list of household repairs, etc on tadalist.com and it hasn’t changed in a long time.  School is the primary reason but I think, in general, I just gravitate towards lazy.  I’m hoping this motivation sticks with me through the summer!

The scary barrel mentioned above is actually a 50-ish gallon barrel that has been hidden behind our garage since we bought the house in 2001.  The previous owners said they had no idea what was in it so they left it.  Tazz and I were actually afraid to know what was in there until in approximately 2004, I opened it.  It took a lot of effort since it was sealed pretty heavily.  What I found was a bunch of stale water, a wrench, an oil filter, and about 8 quarts of used, degrading motor oil.  The smell was that of a sewer.  I didn’t know what to do with this and neither of our cars at the time would let me safely transport it to a hazardous waste site.  So it’s sat back there, like a nagging blemish.  Sometimes I swear it was calling to me in the night.

I finally came up with an idea on how to get rid of it.  I ended up buying two 5-gallon buckets from the hardware store and carefully emptied the stinky, migraine-inducing contents into the two buckets.  Come to find out the idiot put holes in the barrel up the side and it’s been leaking oil on the ground for years.  Anyway, I got the oil/water/wrench mixture out and have let the barrel dry out.  There is a little bit of oil left but now it can be thrown out.  Now we have two pretty buckets full of gunk.  I wonder how many years they’ll sit in the garage? 🙂