Spring cleaning time!

Photo via Flickr

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of work and school, and my semester is finally over.  I handed in my thesis proposal last week, and my partner and I are currently enjoying a much needed staycation to relax and get organized.

Naturally, I overplanned our holiday with three pages of to-dos and spring cleaning plans.   But honestly, I am just so excited to have the time and mental space to get the apartment organized!  My partner and I have been mostly staying away from our computers, enjoying the quiet, and getting to bed early.  Then in the mornings, we’ve been leaping out of bed ready to clean!  (Well, I leap into cleaning while he leaps into making a delicious green smoothie!)

We’ve been making excellent progress, but haven’t yet hit the tipping point.  The more we clean and declutter, the crazier the apartment is looking, because we have boxes and piles of “actionable stuff” – the things to take places – returns, special recycling (electronics and batteries), stuff to donate, a garage sale box, etc. all spread out on the living room floor.  But we’re chipping away at it a little every day, and I know that by the end of our holiday we’ll be living in a clean, serene and organized space.  In the meantime of course, I’m oscilating between feelings of resolve and overwhelm, but trying to make sure to have some downtime and do actual fun stuff on our holiday too.  Later this week we’re going to an outdoor nordic spa for the morning for my partner’s birthday.  Winding down in a bubbling hot tub in the forest will be absolute bliss, and looking forward to that is keeping me motivated to keep chugging along with the spring cleaning!  Ahhhh…can’t wait.

Paying off debt: the other side of the coin

Whenever I read about personal finance, specifically stuff about how to pay off debts, the mantra is generally “decrease spending and increase income,” but the emphasis always seems to be on decreasing spending.  I don’t doubt that that’s the better of the two strategies, since if you’re in the hole it’s best to stop digging.  But at the same time, as I try to curtail my unnecessary spending (which I’m having mixed success with, *cough..shoes..cough*), I thought, why not balance this with trying to bring in some extra income?  So I sat down and made a little plan:

1. Apply for a $500 scholarship that my school has for part-time grad students.  It’s probably a long shot, but since my grades are good enough I thought I should give it a try.  I dropped off the application on Monday, so now I just have to cross my fingers and wait.

2. Do some freelancing.  I signed up for oDesk and so far it’s working out well (and I like it better than elance).  I stick to my standards, don’t apply for anything that looks sketchy or lame, and look for positive feedback from providers before bidding on a job.  Right now I’m still wrapping up my semester but I’m hoping to do more freelancing in the summer.

3. Promote my favourite blender.  I am a total Vita-Mix devotee, so I’m happy to promote them.  People who buy one using my link save $35 on shipping, and I get a little commission to throw at my debt, so everyone’s happy.

4. Sell unneeded “stuff”.  I did that when we last moved and ended up making $1000 by downsizing – that’s almost a year’s part-time tuition for me so I was thrilled.  There’s still too much “stuff” though…I need to declutter in a big way!  I haven’t ever used eBay as a seller and I’m hesitant about the shipping aspect, but I’m thinking about trying it this summer to get rid of various things that are cluttering up my life.

5. Blog?  I write a shoe blog for fun, and I may see if any shoe companies want to advertise with me, but that’s a tricky subject since I don’t want to gum up the whole place with ads.  I did write a sponsored post last year, which was interesting.  Might look into that a bit more.

6. Mystery shopping.  This one’s a bit “out there”, but I signed up with a few local companies to try it out.  I have no idea if it’ll work out or not, but I thought, why not give it a try.

Anyway, these are my ideas so far.  But the main thing is, I really do have to cut back on my spending.  Maybe if I can make some good progress on the freelancing, I can designate that as my “fun money” in my (non-existant) budget and be really disciplined with my 9-5 paycheque.

Email Obfuscator: hide from spambots

Just found this nifty site that will convert your email address to a spambot-proof code that still shows up as a normal looking email address on your website.  Great blogging tool for sure…don’t want your “contact me” button to net you a tsunami of penis-enlargement ads.

From the site:

ob·fus·cate: To make so confused or opaque as to be difficult to perceive or understand.

Out there on the World Wide Web, there are nasty little programs known as “spambots”. All these little spider programs do is crawl around the web, searching for email addresses embedded in web pages. When they find them, they collect them and they are sold or otherwise circulated to unscrupulous people who want to send “spam”, or unsolicited commercial email, some of which is pretty offensive.

Rich kid paints a 60 foot penis on his parents’ mansion

Saw this on the news today and nearly keeled over laughing.  From BBC News:

An 18-year-old has secretly painted a 60ft drawing of a phallus on the roof of his parents’ £1million mansion in Berkshire. It was there for a year before his parents found out. They say he’ll have to scrub it off when he gets back from travelling.

You know you’re rich and spoiled when you can paint a giant penis on your parents’ mansion and they don’t kill you when they find out…”oh yes, the giant phallus, we’ll have him fix it when he returns from his travels…”

The Wake n’ Bacon – an alarm clock that wakes you with freshly cooked bacon

Now this is innovation – an alarm clock that wakes you up with the “smell and sizzle” of cooking bacon!  Not my cup of tea, personally, but I have to give this invention props for creativity (maybe it would work with vegetarian bacon? eesh).  Plus, I am partial to any alarm clock that doesn’t involve a horrendous noise that makes me want to smash at it.

How it works: you place a frozen strip of bacon in the Wake n’ Bacon at night.  The clock is set to go off 10 minutes before the desired waking time.  The inventors hacked the alarm clock so that instead of the clock signaling the speaker to generate the alarm sound, the signal is instead re-routed by a microchip that responds by sending a signal to a relay that throws the switch to power two halogen lamps that slow-cook the bacon in about 10 minutes.  Phew – complicated!

I have to wonder though…it wouldn’t take too long for a single strip of frozen bacon to thaw.  Is it safe for a piece of raw bacon to sit out all night?  What if creepy little bugs get in there and crawl on it?  The food safety stuff just freaks me out a little too much.

Via /mathlete/

Antique store find: Royal Copley Deer Vase

I am so in love with second hand stores, flea markets, antique stores, garage sales, consignment shops – anything where I can find interesting and unusual stuff.  I’m lucky that there are quite a few neat little places like this in my neighbourhood.

Recently I wandered into one of them and this cute kitschy little snuggling deer heads thing caught my eye.  I had no idea what it was though – a hollow deer head?  What on earth?

On a return visit, I asked the antique store owner what the heck it was.  He explained that it was a vase made by Royal Copley, which is apparently “very collectible.”  To be honest, I know nothing about antiques and couldn’t care less what they’re “worth” – I just need to know that I like it.  Heck, I would have thouht that this is the kind of weird trinket that I would pick up at a garage sale (like the big ceramic statue of E.T. that I found at an obscure junk shop for $1 – love!).  I don’t know what I was thinking paying $50 for snuggling deer – probably a protective reaction ingrained when I watched Bambi as a child so many years ago.   I mean, who could say no to those big liquidy eyes?  I just wanted to give them a new home.  Awwwww.

Womanizer Parody

I know, another video, but I couldn’t help myself!  This is a really well-done parody of Britney’s “womanizer” vid.  Maybe I’m just biased, hitched as I am to a headset-wearing, WoW playing, chewbacca action figure owning, Star Trek and Star Wars reference spouting, super awesome nerdy man

Know Your Mushrooms

I’m going to see this documentary tomorrow night. It looks pretty interesting – check out this hilarious excerpt. The only thing more entertaining than the space-travel story is that it’s told by a middle-aged guy that looks like a mild-mannered duck conservationist.

This film is on a double-bill with another documentary, “Grass,” about the history of the US government’s war on marijuana. So it should be an interesting and educational night (this all counts as thesis research, right?…)

The Wikipedia goose-chase

This comic from xkcd gave me a giggle.  It is so true.  I love Wikipedia for this…following one branch of interesting info to another, ad nauseum.  As a connoisseur of useless facts and a generally curious person, I love being able to plug in any tidbit and follow a whole trail on it.  *cue “The More You Know” music*

I’m finding Wikipedia to be a total lifesaver in grad school too.  So often in readings and classes people toss out theories and authors that I’m not familiar with.  I’d be lost (or should I say, more lost) if I couldn’t Wiki them to get the gist of it.

Well, time to get back to my thesis proposal…maybe I’ll Wiki the philosophy of agency…oh hey cool, Hegel is referenced in this article…hmm, historical materialism….superstructure…..feedback loops……cybernetics………

Vita-Mix Love!

After months of longing and self-restraint, I’ve finally cracked and sprung for a Vita-Mix!

My partner and I try to make a big green smoothie for breakfast every day, and our regular blenders definitely had a hard time with the crazy amounts of stuff that we try to pack into them.

The Vita-Mix is a tank (with a 7 year warranty no less).  A huge, powerful beast of a blender.  The pitcher is 2 litres, enough to make 2 nalgenes full of smoothie.  And the large square bottom really sucks all the ingredients down into the blades so it’s quick and there’s no stopping to stir or stuff wayward strawberries into the mix.

My dad – who’s had a Vita-Mix for the past year now – gave us his secret to making a super smooth smoothie with it.  You blend everything up on medium speed until it’s almost done, then blast it on high until it’s finished.  We had tried just putting it on high, but it’s so much smoother if you do it medium then high.

Our first green smoothie in the Vita-Mix - black kale, frozen strawberries and blueberries, fresh papaya, water with a splash of cranberry juice, Vega powder, hemp protein, greens+, and ground salba seed. Yummy!

Now the best part about this blender, and the reason that I ultimately caved and ordered it, is because it’s so incredibly quick and easy to clean.  This is because the pitcher is all one piece; nothing comes apart.  You just put in a drop of dish soap with some hot water, turn it on for about a minute, and then rinse it out.  Seriously, done.

Contrast this with our old blenders that had to come apart for cleaning and were such a pain to wash!  We had two blenders – when one was dirty, we’d use the other.  It was so time-consuming (and counter-top consuming).  I knew that if we had a Vita-Mix, we’d only ever need one blender, and it would always be clean and ready to go.  After using it for a week, I can confirm that this is total bliss.

The price tag is steep for sure, but I am so happy with this purchase.  And at least I was able to save $35 on the shipping by using a coupon code.  Here’s the deal, if anyone out there wants it:

Order directly from Vita-Mix and get free standard shipping when you quote the code 06-003915.  Call 1 (800) 848-2649 Ext. 2303 or order online.

Pass it on!