Our New Couch

This is our new couch! We bought it at Costco.

We love it!

It is so comfy and it looks great in our family room!

It really helps to open up the room.

It feels so much more inviting!

No Soliciting!

In our neighborhood, we have A LOT of solicitors! It really gets annoying after a while.  

No, I don't want to remodel my kitchen that is 4 years old!

No, I don't want a $5000 fence in my backyard!

No, I don't want them to inspect my roof!

No, I definitely DO NOT want a new Kirby vacuum!

If I do want any of these things, I will call them!

So, I had a great idea one day.  I made a No Soliciting sign to put in my window next to my front door.

I love it!!

It is so simple.

I really do want to support Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and 

I have A LOT fewer unnecessary doorbell rings!

I have had a smelly bathroom for a long time.  I didn't know what to do about it.  I would clean the entire bathroom and it would still smell bad. Then I realized the smell was probably coming from the shower drain.  I would clean the cover to the drain with a toothbrush (an old one for cleaning!) and clean out as much hair and gunk as I could, but it just wasn't enough!
Last night I decided to google "how to deodorize a shower drain."  Man, I just love the internet!!
Who knew there were that many stinky shower drains?

These are the links that I found:

www.sheknows.com/living/articles/808474/clean-out-your-shower-drain-without-chemicals

www.ehow.com/how_5616661_deodorize-smelly-shower-drain.html

I used the process from the first website and the amounts of baking soda and vinegar from the second website.

It has really made a huge difference already!!

I still had to clean the inside of the pipe with the old toothbrush to get the rest of the crud down the drain, but after using the baking soda, vinegar and boiling water, it came right off.

Now maybe when I clean my bathroom, it will actually smell clean! I will make myself a note to do this at least every 6 months. (Clean the drain...I plan on cleaning the bathroom a lot more often than that!)

Happy cleaning!!

Here is a picture of my clean shower drain.  I had to crop the picture, though, because now I need to google how to get stains off of your shower floor.  I scrub and scrub and scrub and it still shows grime.  Oh, well, another day, at least it smells better!

Hunger Games/Christmas Tree

Ryan, Nathan and I went to the midnight showing for Hunger Games when it first came out.  We had a lot of fun! Nathan and I have read all of the books. We thought they did a good job on the movie.

We didn't start on our way home until about 3am.

I had just gone to my dad's house in Keokuk to visit them while they were there for Spring Break.  My dad asked me if I wanted a little Christmas tree. 

 I told him no...again.  He had asked me the last time I visited too. Then I thought about Goodwill.  I told him that if he really wanted to get rid of it, we could take it to Goodwill.  He said that would be great.

So we did! At 3am! Ryan propped it up against the front doors.  We thought it was so funny! Well, it was, at 3am!