Domestic Tuesday ~ July 24, 2018

I've just entitled my post "Domestic Tuesday" in the hopes that it will spur me to actually be domestic today!  So far I've resisted going out on the patio with my mug of cold brew so there is hope :)



I went to bed late again last night and then I couldn't fall asleep because I was stressing about that house behind us and who might move in.  Arrgh. I wish I could turn off my mind like a tap, but when I'm anxious I tend to dwell on the subject of the anxiety. Even Forensic Files couldn't really make me forget. I fell asleep but woke up a short while later, still thinking about the same thing!  I think I restarted the same episode of FF 3 times!



I only woke up ONCE to go to the bathroom, yippee, but I tossed and turned all night again because my shoulders hurt once more. What is going on?  This morning I surmised that it might have been because of all the water jugs that I carried and moved yesterday.



I got up at 6:45 a.m., cooked Greg's breakfast (oh, all the dirty dishes didn't disappear magically overnight?!) and packed his lunch, said hi to YS who was feeding the cats, reminded him to check his email before he left the college today, in case another meeting with the advisor had been scheduled, and went back to bed.



Only once again I couldn't fall back asleep because my shoulders hurt, even though I felt tired. So I got on my phone and checked emails, news, and various apps.  Then Greg got up and I don't know what was up with him this morning but he kept going up and down the stairs once his boots were on and that makes a lot of noise, despite having 2 fans going in my room to provide white noise.



As soon as I heard him drive off, I got up because I knew I wouldn't be able to go back to sleep. I got dressed and went downstairs.



I need to try to do a bunch of chores today so they don't nag me all week: dishes, cleaning and inventoring the fridge, sweeping, vacuuming, folding the laundry, cleaning the downstairs bathroom... ugh.



I poured a mug of DD cold brew. I should be able to finish that today and then I'll just drink room temperature decaf. I felt hot at times last night but I don't think it was hot flashes so maybe I'm making progress on that front!  All the pillows in the bed are probably what's keeping me hot, but I need them to support my knees when I sleep on my side.



For breakfast, I fixed a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios Medley Crunch, and since I didn't have any fresh berries to add to it, I emptied out the rest of a jar of dried apples in it.  This reminded me that I also need to dehydrate several apples that are starting to go bad, so I set out the dehydrator to remind myself to do that later on. It's going to heat up the kitchen, sadly, and I can't set it outside since we have 95% humidity out there and it's going to rain again this afternoon.



I earned the daily Rewards and entered a sweepstake.



I drew the missing letters on my keyboard with Sharpie, waited a while for the ink to dry, and then dabbed them with the cheap nail polish from Dollar Tree.  As I suspected, the nail polish made the ink bleed a bit, so it looks terrible, but after letting them dry for a while, it seems that it might work. We'll see how long it takes for the nail polish to wear off.  I updated my post on how to fix your keyboard with my results. I guess I should have waited to see if the "fix" worked before I posted, but I was so excited that I had found a way to fix my keyboard for cheap, lol.

I replied to a blog comment and commented on another blog.



Thunder started booming at 9:30 a.m. and it got darker!  Good thing I didn't plan on sitting outside this morning :)



Then I did some chores:

• Cut up 3 apples that were going bad and put them in the dehydrator
• Emptied out the countertop composting bin into the large one outside
• Realized I'd forgotten to take out the trash so I collected it from throughout the house, as well as the Recycling (which will be collected tomorrow) and took the trashbin down to the curb
• Noticed with satisfaction that Greg followed my instructions and reused the dirt from the self-watering bins that he collapsed to fill a gap in the soil near the bottom of our driveway. Hopefully the weeds will overtake that soon and hold it in place, otherwise it'll just erode down on the street (which is what's been happening with the soil that was there before).

• Swept the front porch. It started raining and I was happy about it until I realized that I had come out from the side door, not the front door (which was locked) so I had to run in the rain to get back into the house, lol!
• Rearranged the Recycling bins so the top one doesn't overflow. Why am I the only one who ever takes the time to do this?  Men will just keep piling things on top. Of course, I'm happy that they're actually recycling!
• Made a To Do List.  Damn it, it's 2 pages long and I only listed the stuff off the top of my head!

YS came home. He hadn't heard from the advisor.  We've been dealing with this since before June 21st!

Thinking about YS, I forgot to note that yesterday I gave him $60 for the high school parking pass that will start going on sale tomorrow. They didn't note the price but it was $50 this past school year.  I told him to make sure he mentioned he was dual enrolled, in case there is a different parking pass for that.

I went to get the last mug of DD Cold Brew and while I was at it, I decided to do some more chores:

• Inventoried the fridge. Realized that I had a lot of produce food waste :( All my fault, I've been terrible about using up what I bought.
• 1/4 papaya
• 1.5 zucchini
• 1/2 cucumber
• 1.5 lbs of tomatoes
• 1 avocado
• Took all of that to the composting bin outside
• Mixed a batch of "Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes A Day" boule bread dough.  I'll bake some bread tomorrow instead of buying some French bread at Publix :)

Dinner tonight, according to the old menu I'm trying to follow is "salmon, pasta and stir-fried zucchini".  I have a box of teriyaki salmon patties that I'll cook, I'll make some kind of pasta for YS and myself (or maybe frozen ravioli, I think I have some in the freezer) and I'll stir-fry the 3/4 zucchini that I was able to salvage, along with some spinach that's going south and mushrooms. I'll dump the rest of the green beans from last night in there too.

I got up to do something, spotted the  felt pads that I had left on the mantelpiece months ago to remind myself to put some under the feet of the window bench in the living room (something that I'd been meaning to do for years but kept on forgetting!) and finally put them on.  Good grief, finally.  That won't help my sore shoulder problem because that bench has books in it so it was super heavy to lift it (because I'm dumb and lazy and didn't think to remove the books first, lol).  

I helped YS search the state college website to see the confirmation that he had been registered for his Fall classes and save the screenshot as a pdf, and then I told him to email it to the advisor as a follow-up to the voicemail I left last night, asking her to call him urgently to settle this.  Her voicemail had indicated that it was faster to get a hold of her via email and that she was being slammed right now. Well, yeah, if everyone is having the same damn problems, I'm not surprised.

I'm going to put on an episode of Antiques Roadshow and fold the laundry.

I'm King of the Laundry Mountain!

2 p.m.  I've been super busy and I can't even remember what all I've done!

• Folded the laundry and took the baskets upstairs
• Put away the folded items that remain downstairs
• Asked YS to help me put the futon cover back on the futon
• Vacuumed the living room, Cat Room, downstairs bathroom and hallway.
• I changed one of the cat's scratching pads and sprinkled catnip on it.
• Texted Greg to ask about some boxes he'd thrown in a corner a few months ago. He didn't want to keep them but one of them is the box for the Xbox One X so I put it aside to take to the attic in case we want to resell the Xbox some day.  The other box was for his gaming headphones and the interior box is a very sturdy red box that I decided to keep and reuse for gift giving. I recycled or threw away the rest of the boxes.

Keeping the box and also saved the silica gel packet.  The Christmas labels were some that he never put away so I'll put them back in our stash.

• Cleaned the downstairs bathroom:
• mirror
• sink
• shelves
• (I cleaned the toilet earlier this morning, I can't remember if I mentioned that!)
• sprayed bleach in shower stall
• put some blankets and the shower liner in the wash
• Hung up a clean shower liner in the shower stall
• made a new tray with the bottom of a cat litter jug to replace the metallic (prettier) one that I was using to hold the fluoride rinse and YS's toothpaste because somehow the rinse always leaks and makes a reaction with the metal of the container and it becomes gross. Now it's ugly but it won't be as messy and much easier to clean. I set the metallic container outside. I'll clean it later and reuse it for something else but not in the bathroom!

• Got a notification that my TV and the icemaker had been delivered, got them inside right away.
• Took the TV upstairs and set it up. 
• While I was setting it up, my Daughter called to share some drama around her Calculus exam.  She doesn't have a grade yet, didn't think it was as hard as what other students were saying but then again there were apparently a lot of bad mistakes made on the test by the T.A. who designed it so they're all in limbo to see what happens.  She will be coming home Friday night. Yay!
• Tried setting up the spare DVD player, found that the tray wouldn't open. Set it aside.
• Remembered that I still had the "leaf" antenna that we used to use downstairs before we got new windows, hooked it up to my new TV.  Used masking tape to tape it to one of the windows which faces East, thankfully the best direction to get TV signals AND that allowed me to run the cord around the moulding of the closet so I don't have a cord running across the floor.

• Got the TV to detect many over the air (OTA) TV channels, hooray. Can't get NBC, though, that's always a problem with those antennae, but I never watch live TV anyway (and when I do it's something like Antenna TV or CoziTV and I do get those just fine).
• Used more masking tape to tape the curtain to the window frame where the cord of the antenna comes out, so I won't get bright sunny light in the room in the mornings.
• Back downstairs, texted Greg to ask whether he wanted to open his own present (the icemaker) or if I should set it up for him. He wants ice when he gets home so asked me to set it up.
• I was going to make room on the counter next to the fridge for it, but it needs a grounded outlet and I don't have one available there (our kitchen stinks in that regard) so I set it up on a spare chair next to the chest freezer.  I glanced at the manual but just enough to get the first batch of ice underway. It's not too loud, hooray!  A commenter on Amazon said that if you have very hard water, you should use filtered water so I used one of the gallons that I bought for our water mishap last week. Moving forward, I'll filter water in the Brita pitcher though.

• I stopped the dehydrator and put the apples away in a mason jar, in the fridge.

• I hung the shower liner outside because the sun is out again, and put the blankets in the dryer. I should have put them outside to dry, but oh well.

My feet hurt and I haven't even done the freaking dishes yet!

I harvested a sprig of mint from the garden.

Then I fixed my lunch: a salad made with a large tomato, about 1/2 a cucumber, and an avocado, a corndog, and some pineapple with mint.

My mom sent me a quick email. She said it's very hot over there and she's so thankful for the AC unit we bought them last summer. I'm so glad they're able to use it, it takes a load off my mind. I wish my great aunt had one too, I need to see if my mom can reach out to her cousins to share how much she likes hers so they buy one and install it for her.

I set out to try to figure out the problem with my DVD player. The tray wasn't opening. I googled the brand name and "tray won't open" and the first result was a fix-it website that suggested removing the casing and the top of the DVD tray, with helpful pictures. I did that. 

There wasn't a DVD stuck in there.  I replugged the DVD player in and tried opening the tray again and this time it opened. I repositioned the top of the tray on it and it wouldn't open with it on, even though it was positioned properly. However, there is a floating disk in the middle of it that grips either the DVD or the part of the player that comes through the hole in the DVD, I'm not sure but it was obvious that it had gotten misaligned.  

I took everything back upstairs with me, connected the DVD player to the TV and made sure the DVD was playing and the tray would open. It did when the top of the DVD tray wasn't on, but would get stuck when the top of the tray was back on. 

I  I couldn't find any instructions for that so I got the DVD to play without the top of the tray, and then dropped the top of the DVD tray back in place and somehow the grooves aligned themselves and it worked fine! I screwed everything back on, tested everything again and now I'm good to go!  It took maybe 15 minutes tops to do all of that and a screwdriver. I also dusted off the inside with a can of compressed air that I had gotten at Habitat for Humanity ReStore for just $0.49 (and there's still plenty of air in the can).  Woohoo!

My next task was to try to set up the bluetooth adapter that I bought to get the TV to play on my bluetooth speaker, since the TV itself isn't bluetooth but I wanted to be able to play it just loud enough so that I could hear it at night without bothering Greg. However, I first need to charge it for a couple of hours.  That's fine, I need to read the instructions and make sure I understand how to use it first :)

It's now 4:30 p.m. and I just finished doing the dishes. My back is killing me!

While I did the dishes, the ice maker merrily kept on making ice cubes (more like bullets, actually, to Greg's great delight as I was texting him pictures of the progress.  It took 2 hours to fill the ice maker's basket. At that point it stopped making ice and the "basket full" light came on.  They say the ice cubes will stay frozen for about 18 hours in there, but I removed them right away and put them in one of the larger freezer containers that I had bought at Aldi last year and nestled it in the basket of my chest freezer.  It only used maybe 1/4 of the water I'd poured in there and I'd poured about 2/3 of a gallon.  I think we have plenty of ice for tonight so I unplugged the ice maker. I'll make more ice tomorrow if we need it.

Greg was very excited :)

I brought the shower liner inside before doing the dishes because it was about to rain again (it rained while I was doing the dishes) but the washing machine didn't get all the mildew off it so I'll scrub it with vinegar and blue Dawn tomorrow or Thursday.

Months ago I had washed the chair cover from the chair we keep in the Cat Room, Mean Kitty loves to lounge on it and Greg sits there to conduct his Sunday family calls.  It's very comfortable but hopelessly stained. I'd bought it from a thriftstore many years ago. Anyhoo, I'd never put the cover back on, so I did that today. It's one of those that you have to shape around the chair and then have to constantly adjust so I don't like it but the chair is so stained, the annoying cover is better than no cover at all!

I never ate my pineapple for lunch so I'll have it now as a snack. I've been so busy that I'm still drinking my 1st mug of decaf of the day.  I'm usually on my 3rd or 4th mug by now!

My last key sticker just fell off so I wrote "C" in Sharpie, unplugged the white keyboard from the laptop so it can dry while I type this with the wonky laptop keyboard (so many keys have stopped working now, my number lock isn't disengaging but it would be worse if it was stuck in the "OFF" position!) and then I'll dabble nail polish on it.

I watched a video on the bluetooth transmitter that the manufacturer had posted on the Amazon description page and took notes on my phone, so I'll be able to connect it to my TV and bluetooth speaker when I go upstairs later on.

I feel so productive today, I might not be that productive again for many days, LOL. I've crossed off about half the items on the To Do List that I wrote out this morning.  I'm going to try and sweep the kitchen and Cat Room later on today as dinner cooks.

I went upstairs to try to connect the bluetooth transmitter and pair it with the bluetooth speaker and had a very hard time.  I started composing an email to the manufacturer of the transmitter because I saw that they had given their email address to a commenter on Amazon, and after I typed a whole bunch of details, realized that I'd been trying to plug it into the Audio IN jacks instead of Audio OUT.  Ah ha! So I ran back upstairs... well, there's no Audio OUT jack, just an Optical Audio out, but the transmitter doesn't have an optical IN.  Arrgh.  

I continued reading comments and someone suggested buying a digital/optical to analog audio converter (sigh, another $20 to spend!) but without specifying which one. I researched them on Amazon but it's too much for my little brain, so I retyped my email to the transmitter manufacturer, explained that my TV didn't have the needed audio jack to use their transmitter, and sent them the link to the converter I'm thinking of buying to ask if they think it'll work with their transmitter. Arrrgh.

So in the end, I completely screwed up in buying that TV because not only does it not have bluetooth capability, the needed audio out jack, but it also doesn't have a headphone jack!  And other comments led me to discover that despite it being a Smart TV, you cannot update the apps or even add new ones, you're stuck with what they have. I mean that's fine with me because I don't plan on using it as a Smart TV, this is why I bought the extra Roku 2, but sheesh, what kind of smart TV is that dumb?! That was my first LG purchase and I don't think I'll buy that brand again.

Anyhoo, for now it seems that I'll have to watch the TV "normally" and hope that the sound doesn't bother Greg.

For dinner, I cooked the rest of a bag of frozen fries in the air dryer instead of looking for frozen ravioli because I was too tired!  I also made a stir-fry for Greg with the leftover zucchini, green beans and the end of a bag of spinach past its prime.  Lastly, I cooked the teriyaki salmon burgers, those are easy. I'll have mine on a whole wheat bun. Not sure what YS will do, Greg doesn't like those buns. How can he not like those buns?! They're delicious!

While dinner was cooking I went to check the mail. It started raining again!  I also brought the trash bin and the 2 yard waste bins back to the house. I pisses me off that someone left a bag of trash in my trash can. Who does that?!  I know it's not ours because it had bottles of Coors Light that I can see through the bag and Greg doesn't drink Coors Light.

I rinsed the dinner dishes but left them in the sink and counter. I'm too tired, I'll do them tomorrow.

Netflix sent me an email with show suggestions so I added a few of them to my Watch List.



We all need dash cams, ya'll. Look at this. Witnesses said the red car hit the blue car, had major damage, and fled the scene (and then the driver of the blue car died). The police has been looking for the red car for several days and they'd posted a witness description of the car's license plate and some stickers on it. Without the dash cam footage, that driver would be sitting in jail, accused of vehicular manslaughter & hit and run!  Smart of him to have retained a lawyer first, too.  I need to get us all dash cams.

Frugal

• I packed leftovers for Greg to take to work
• I continued drinking the free Dunkin' Donuts Cold Brew (and finished it)
• Reused water left in one of Greg's bottles to water my Christmas cactus
• It rained = free irrigation for the garden
• Greg reused soil that we might have thrown away to pad the ground near the driveway, after pulling the weeds from it.
• Dehydrated 2.5 apples that were going bad
• Made a batch of bread dough to bake at home instead of buying French bread at Publix
• Inventoried my fridge so I don't buy excess stuff that I won't use!
• Cut off the bad parts from a cucumber and zucchini so I can still use the good parts.
• Made a plan to use those up, along with spinach and mushrooms that are going south, into today's meals.
• Fixed my keyboard keys, again, myself, with a Sharpie and cheap clear nail polish.
• Earned some rewards in various programs, thus getting closer to being able to obtain free gift cards.
• Changed the AC back to 74F. It's cooler this week so I'm going to see if we can stand the upstairs with it being 74F because it feels too cold downstairs during the day.
• Remembered that I still had our old leaf TV antenna and connected it to my new TV to be able to watch OTA TV in my bedroom if I want to.
• Harvested mint from the garden
• Made a salad with the cucumber that I had to save this morning (half of it had been slimy and gross)
• Made a tray out of the bottom of a cat litter jug for my bathroom instead of buying a new, more decorative, tray.
• Washed blankets and shower liner in cold/cold
• Hung shower liner outside to dry
• Use homemade window cleaner to clean mirror in bathroom
• Saved a box for gift giving
• I rewashed 2 cereal bags and 3 zipper bags and hung them up to dry so I can reuse them.
• We ate all of our meals at home!

Not So Frugal

• Ugh, food waste!
• I'm going to have to buy yet another gadget to make my new gadget play nice with one another because I didn't pay attention to the technical details and they don't fit. Arrrgh.