Strategies for Living in a Messy House

 1) Be sure to have a sacred place for the things you really can't lose.

1.1) Things you need often, like car keys, wallet, should be in a visible bag that zips shut and stays always in one place when you're at home.

1.2) Things like birth certificates, passports, should have a designated drawer that you know is there for the important stuff.

1.3) The top surface of anything is not a safe place for something not encased in a larger, preferably sealed, container. Things get knocked off surfaces to land behind things, under things, or just get lost in piles of junk.

2) Tape a long colorful ribbon to the TV and other remotes.

3) Attach USB drives to a lanyard or colorful ribbon or cord.

4) Have a bulletin board for the stuff you mustn't lose, like bills.

5) Try to have all your bills sent via email.

6) Set up Autopay for utilities and other bills whose amounts don't vary by much.

7) Lay out all of your clothes, including socks and underwear, the night before, along with deodorant and anything else you don't want to be hunting around for in the morning.

8) You need a calendar that everyone in the house can see, that everyone in the house updates with meetings, appointments, parties, or anything that takes up time, and that everyone in the house looks at a lot. This should be close enough to the phone and have a pen attached so you can write down the appointments when they're made over the phone, and for when the automated reminder phone calls come in.

If your family is all able to use a shared Google Calendar for this purpose, congratulations.

frugal cleaning of messy houses

1) When you need to wipe gunk from the kitchen sink drain, look around for a discarded paper napkin on the floor. Then it can have a second use in picking up disgusting crud before you throw it away.

2) If your vacuum cleaners all got clogged with hair and broke, you can get the carpet somewhat clean by running your sneakered foot along it. This will roll up clumps of hair with dust trapped inside. You can pick up a clump, throw it away, then decide if you want to do more. You can get different parts of carpet clean at different spare moments. It's a nice exercise.

3) Entire house a mess? Clean the bathroom first. You know why.

4) Why do socks need to match? If the texture is the same, then it doesn't matter if the colors don't match. You've got a pair. They'll feel fine. Different colored socks is a fashion statement. You can go for it with no guilt.

5) Hang clothes, placemats, or whatever needs rinsing on the clothesline before it rains.

6) If you ever try to organize things in bins, make sure to label the bin with what category of things should go in there.

Some years back, I organized the contents of bathroom cabinet into different plastic shoeboxes but made the fatal mistake of not labelling the categories.

Overs the years, the contents entropically shuffled.

Whenever I'm rooting through the boxes trying to find something, I think I really ought to get around to organizing them again, this time with labels. It hasn't happened yet.

7) Try cleaning the kitchen floor. It's non-controversial; usually doesn't involve much personal junk to argue over; and you can clean around anything you can't move.

I did my kitchen floor in stages. Swept and mopped the part that wasn't covered in junk. Then another week or so later, cleaned up some of the junk, reclaimed part of the floor. Finally, I could look down the entire kitchen floor to the back wall. It was clean. It was wonderful.

8) Once you get a part of your place clean, such as the kitchen floor, practice more frequent maintenance cleaning. Maintenance cleaning is much quicker than long-delayed cleaning. You can sweep the kitchen floor in 30 seconds if you already swept it yesterday (or after the last disaster ten minutes ago). 

9) Every part of your dwelling that looks normal is a boost of sanity to all of its inhabitants. Look with tunnel vision, if need be, at these small victories when you want to feel normal. Keep these places, if no place else, clean. Hold them tight against the evils of chaos. You will survive. You will even expand the territory of saneness.

10) Total victory is a mirage. Slightly more livable is your goal.

Together we didn't quite all go yet

Together We Will Go by J. Michael Straczynski
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Preliminary Review:

I won this book, so feel obligated to review it ASAP.
I was surprised when a real hardcover book actually showed up in the mailbox. I'd received emails saying I won and I was like, yeah, how?

I don't know if there was a blurb to read before I entered to win this book. If there was, I probably wouldn't have read it in order to avoid spoilers. All I had to see was "J. Michael Straczynski" and thought wow, I love Babylon 5, so I want to read his book.

Now there's no reason to expect a writer to write the same kind of thing over and over. In fact, the work usually gets dull when they do that. The problem here is that had I read the blurb, I would not have wanted to read it: A book about people on a road trip to suicide? No. That's cutting too close to home. Our family was devastated by one young cousin's suicide some years back.

Anyhow, when I got the book, I did read it non-stop to page 92. I thought, "This is very readable!" Then I remembered that the last book I'd been reading was a Barnes&Noble translation of Herodotus, so sure, this book is easier than Herodotus (though not as much like fantasy--Herodotus is weirder than Hobbit Town.)

The one-word-review I kept wanting to give this is "Competent"--which from me is high praise. The book is well-written. I've read, put up with, or given up on a lot of books that were not competent. With this book, you are in good hands, if you want to read it.

The problem is that after that first weekend when the book arrived, things have gotten kind of depressed--nothing to do with the book, just a coincidence. I've read up to p.182 so far, and it's sufficiently interesting and diverting, but I felt I was like reading it for homework. No reason for self-discipline while wallowing in depression. So I lay back in bed and flicked on a Rivers of London audiobook for a re-listen, which is the kind of thing I do when I'm depressed, only in the past it was Discworld novels, and before that, well, that kind of thing.

I will get to the end of this. I am curious about the characters. Admittedly not desperately curious.


View all my reviews

4-foot-square garden - Current Status

• Flopped over chives (two types!)
• Untamed oregano. Pollinators love its flowers.
• Hopeless tomatoes - Will they grow before frost?
• Hopeful lavender - The tallest one has a flower.
• Some sugar snap peas still hanging on. 

Cuisinart CBK-110 Breadmaker Review

I love this bread maker. I've had a lot of fun and eaten a lot of bread.

Easy-bake

It's a cool way to bake--you just put everything into one container, and then you don't have to worry about forgetting it, or timing the baking, etc.

I've baked way more bread than anything else since it arrived. The machine makes baking bread easier than baking brownies or cookies or whatever it was I used to bake.

It first arrived the Friday before Labor Day weekend 2020. I made so many loaves my kids were complaining that they were tired of the smell of fresh-baked bread.

You do need to experiment a bit to get good results.

Don't follow the recipes that come with the machine

The worst thing about this breadmaker is the recipe booklet. If you purchased this machine and only tried to follow the recipes in the booklet, you would think it was a terrible machine.

I don't know why the booklet only calls for all-purpose flour. The two recipes I tried following the booklet resulted in "cratering", that is did not come out well.

The King Arthur Flour website has a recipe that does work with all-purpose flour:

• English Muffin Bread for the Bread Machine

And see my previous blog entry for more recipe advice.

I tried the booklet's French bread recipe again, but this time with bread flour:

• The 1.5 lb recipe came out small, so I tried the 2 lb recipe the next day.
• The 2 lb recipe also did not rise to the top of the pan, but it was better.
• I didn't have kosher salt, so used a smaller amount of regular salt.
• It worked reasonably well with the delay-timer.
• My family complained that the crust is too tough, but the bread ready by 8am disappeared by late afternoon nonetheless. It isn't perfect, but it is decent and convenient.

Crust Color Setting is Only for White Bread Program

The booklet talks about setting the crust color for French bread, but crust color is not an option when using the French Bread setting. Could my machine be defective in that way?

I can't set it for the Whole Wheat program either. It really doesn't matter. 

2-poud loaf?

It's best to make the 1.5 pound version of a recipe to see how high it rises in the machine before you try its 2-pound version. Some 2-pound versions work in the machine. Other ones rise in the baking so much that they lift the lid and look like a monster dough scene from a movie.

If you'll be around in the kitchen, you can experiment with a 2-pound recipe: just be ready to pull the loaf out to bake in the oven. If the bread is very high at the "take out the paddle" stage, you may want to pull out half the dough to bake in the oven. You can make them into rolls or something fun.

Never use the delay timer for a 2-pound loaf recipe you haven't tested first.

Cleaning

In the many experiments, sometimes the bread rose and cooked against the window of the bread machine. The easiest way to clean the machine is to put some water in the bottom of the bread pan and leave it inside the machine. The water will evaporate onto the window, which makes any crust that stuck there easy to wipe off. The bread pan is also easier to clean after that soaking.

I use a small brush (possibly a test-tube cleaner?) to clean the hole in the paddle.

Paddle is Metal. Metal retains heat.

When not using the delay timer, it is very useful to be able to hear the beep and take the paddle out. You still have the hole from the paddle pivot pole in the bottom of the loaf, but not the paddle shape or the paddle.

Sometimes the paddle remains in the machine when you dump out the bread. This happened more often after I used the machine for several months.

When the paddle is still in the bread: 

1) Cut very carefully around so as not to wreck your bread knife or score a line on the paddle.

2) Remember that the metal paddle stays hot longer than the bread around it has cooled. Don't touch the paddle even if you've already been safely grabbing pieces of the warm bread around it. 

Wire to pull out handle

The machine came with a weird wire loopy thingy to pull the bread pan handle up when it is hot. I found this hard to keep track of until I started hanging it on the knob of a cabinet near the machine. You can use a fork anyway for the same purpose.

It would be good if they built in a holder for this, if they're going to provide such a thing.

Fresh bread pan is hot

I was very glad for my silicone pot-holder mitts for pulling out the bread-pan and holding it sideways to dump out the bread onto the cutting board. Highly recommended. The fresh baked bread, pan, and paddle are very hot.

Loaf shape

The bread is the bread-machine upright non-standard shaped loaf. But the machine's countertop footprint is compact, and the machine is less expensive than the horizontal bakers.

I think the optimum way to cut it is to start at the flat end until the length of the loaf is about the height of a standard slice of bread. Then rotate the bread and slice from the puffy top to the sliced-off bottom. Others disagree.

Whatever the shape, fresh-baked bread tastes wonderful.

Recommended Recipes and Ingredients for Bread Machine Bread

 My brother-in-law gave me his old bread machine, along with a recipe book by Beth Hensperger. This worked great until we broke the bread machine. I still used the recipes in the Hensperger book, figuring that if they worked jumbled in a machine, they'd also work mixed up in a bowl and baked in the oven.

Years later, I finally bought a new bread machine. I used the Hensperger book again.

I still use it, but my two standby bread machine recipes are on the King Arthur Flour Website:

• 100% Whole Wheat Bread for the Bread Machine
• English Muffin Bread for the Bread Machine

The whole wheat recipe calls for optional flax seed or similar, so it's worth buying some flax seed. 

I've used acorn flour instead of the flax seed and it tasted really good.*

I've recently added a tablespoon of flax seed to two of the white bread recipes in Hensperger; it did no harm, and gave the bread a friendly speckle.

The English Muffin bread uses all-purpose flour, so it might be a good first recipe for you, if you haven't gotten around to buying bread flour. It's called English Muffin bread, but you can just call it bread. You can add raisins to this one if you'd like. It also works well with the cinnamon swirl feature shown in the Cuisinart Bread Machine video:

Take out the dough at the "Remove the Paddle" beep, stretch it out, sprinkle on sugar and cinnamon (and raisins) then roll it back up and put it into the machine to bake.

Suggested purchases:

• Bread Flour
  
• Bread Machine (Instant) Yeast:  because the King Arthur bread machine recipes calls for it. If you can only find the regular Active Dry Yeast, that will be fine, don't worry. The non-instant yeast is probably better for the long Artisan bread cycle, but that's just my guess.
  
• Nonfat Dry Milk powder: Sometimes the bread recipe calls for this. Sometimes the bread recipe calls for milk, but either you don't want to use up your milk, or you want to use the delay timer. You can use the delay timer when a recipe calls for milk if you leave the milk powder on top of the flour in the machine. It doesn't become milk until the machine turns on and begins mixing.
  
• Buttermilk Powder: Hensperger sometimes calls for buttermilk powder, sometimes actual buttermilk. Either way, you can use the powder (and the delay timer). The Saco Buttermilk powder also has a great pancake recipe on the back, so you should buy it even if you don't have a bread machine.
  
• Flax Seed
• Gluten, sometimes called Gluten Flour 

Gluten and flax seed can be tricky to find at first. Try carefully scanning the large display of something-Mills** specialty grains in the middle of the baking aisle. Other groceries stock them with the "natural" foods baking ingredients.

If you only have All-Purpose Flour but want to bake a recipe that calls for Bread Flour, just add a tablespoon or two of Gluten. Not a perfect substitute, but it works OK.

More advice:

Never put the salt in with the liquid at the bottom of the bread machine, especially with the delay timer. It kills the yeast too fast and the bread doesn't rise well.

With recipes calling for oil and honey or molasses, measure out the oil in the tablespoon first, then measure the honey or molasses with the oily tablespoon. The honey or molasses drips off the oiled tablespoon much better than off of a dry one. Remember that 1/4 cup is 4 tablespoons, so you don't have to get your quarter-cup measuring cup sticky.

Intergenerational Parenting

Today I found myself saying to my daughter:

"If his mother taught him to hold the door open for women, then you need to let him do it. It's just something you remember about people, like their preferred pronoun." 

 

University of Chicago sends too much recruitment mail to high schooler students

Today my high-school kid received another postcard from the University of Chicago. She has received more recruiting snail-mail from them than from any other institution.

The University of Chicago is far away, and scary, and there are plenty of good schools in New England to choose from. Schools that won't need airfare.

She is not going to apply to University of Chicago. She would not be admitted. If she went there, she would flunk out. (Though, hey, maybe by grad school, things will be different!)

If I were a University of Chicago alumna or paying tuition to University of Chicago, I would be annoyed at the money wasted on these futile mailings.

There should be an easy way to opt out of receiving any more.

Of-course-you-remember-me Spam

 In my Inbox this morning: