Kelly Update and a Great Podcast

December 9, 2016

...s this blog focuses on do not get counted by economists. All that cooking, cleaning, gardening, child and elder care count not one bit towards the sorts of calculations economists obsess over such as gross domestic product and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. This is particularly unfair to women who tend to be more responsible for what happens in the home. And let’s not even get into the ethical difficulties of placing a dollar value on human bei...

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Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up

Mrs. Homegrown

February 26, 2016

Domesticus, Tidying up

2 Comments

...he illustrations are Japanese-cute line drawings. It doesn’t look like any cleaning or organization book I’ve ever seen, and that is what makes it special. Kondo understands that tidying is a spiritual activity, not an organizational activity. The same week we got this book, we also had a library book out about home organization. Erik had grabbed it off the new book shelf at the library without looking at it until we got home. It shall remain name...

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Preparing For El Niño Storms

Mr. Homegrown

January 5, 2016

Preparedness

16 Comments

We begin this post with a gutter cleaning selfie showing the precipitous drop from the front of our house as well as a view of the “flipper fence” handrail I built for the in-laws. The much promised El Niño rainstorms are on our doorstep this week. For those of you in the rest of the world who might be unfamiliar with the phenomenon, every decade or so weather conditions in the Northern Pacific conspire to heat up the ocean which, in turn, causes...

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How to Remove Bees from a Wall

Mr. Homegrown

October 5, 2015

Animals, Bees

4 Comments

...p made with a 50/50 mix of water and white sugar. This keeps the bees busy cleaning themselves so that you can gently brush them into a dust pan and transfer them into their new bee box. Some people use specially adapted vacuums to suck the bees off the comb and out of cavities. You have to be careful if you do this as it’s easy to injure the bees. Once the comb and as many stray worker bees as you can coax out of the wall cavity were in the box,...

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Kitchen KonMari Session, Illustrated

Mr. Homegrown

March 9, 2017

Domesticus, Tidying up

20 Comments

...frequently used items on more accessible shelves. Ironically, the kitchen cleaning session overlapped with the lunch hour preventing meal preparation. We decamped to a local Mexican restaurant for a meeting with a friend and Kelly finished this KonMari session on her own later. I’d call it a victory but we’ve still got to tackle the pantry. [An editorial note from Mrs. Homegrown: First, I cannot believe he has shared this cat hair business with t...

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