Navigating life as a military wife.
When I wrote about some of my spray painting endeavors over the summer, a lot of you asked me for some spray painting tips. 
Well Censational Girl (if you don’t follow her, start now!) published a list of Spray Paint FAQs yesterday that is the most thorough explanation of spray painting I’ve ever read. So if you have an itch to spray paint, or if you think you might ever get the itch to spray paint, bookmark her post now!
My friend Mamaku posted a haiku yesterday about her chickens (and their cannibalistic habits, yikes!), so I’ve had eggs on the brain. With all these eggy thoughts, I decided I HAD to tell you a tip my friend Autumn shared with me last week about eggs: how do you tell if an egg is fresh or not (without looking at the expiration date on the carton)?
Submerge your questionable egg in water. If it is fresh, it will lay on the bottom; if it’s a week or so it will lay on the bottom but bob a bit; if it’s a few weeks old, it will balance on it’s end. But if it’s a BAD EGG, it will float!
Why does this work? Well, there is a small air pocket in the large end of an egg. As an egg ages, it looses moisture and carbon dioxide shrinking the eggy insides and increasing the size of the air space. Of course, the more air there is, the more it floats! Pretty neat, eh?
So just remember: never eat a floating egg!
Remember when I had this great secret for storing spices with you last week, but then I needed to take a break to put my head in a vice? Well, it’s your LUCKY day, because I’m going to share that secret with you now that my head is no longer going to explode!
So I had a problem…in the spice cabinet next to the stove, I keep a lot of our sauces: Soy Sauce, Pam, Olive Oil, etc. The problem was that these sauces and spices only fit on the highest shelf, and I had to take some of them out in order to get to the sauces in the rear. I needed a lazy susan, but all the ones I found were $15.00 and up! Yikes! Sooooo I raided my kitchen cabinets and found the bottom of a springform pan. And….TA DA:
It has been great! It works just like the lazy susan would and it was F-R-E-E! Yippee!
Do you have any organization or decoration tips? I’d love to feature them! Send me your tip and if possible at picture at ThisAmericanWife {at} Yahoo {Dot} Com!
I told you a few days ago about the baby shower I went to last weekend. But I DIDN’T tell you about the little top secret device I learned about…
Many of you know that I’m a bit of a cleaning freak, but apparently I have never been let in on the the amazing powers of…the steam mop. Have any of you known about this and not told me?!? How DARE you!!! This thing is AWESOME–it’s like a swiffer on steroids!
Luckily, my friend Tess, who hosted the baby shower had one…and she was kind enough to tell me about it, and then even broke it out for me. She’s a regular steam mop saleswoman (seriously…I think she could make millions selling them door to door.)
After you do an initial sweep or dry swiffer, you fill the mop with water and plug it in to let it heat up:
Then you put a pad on the bottom (these are washable), and when it’s warm you just run it across the floor:
It’s that easy! And it works sooooo well! There was sticky punch all over Tess’s floor and it was cleaned up just like that (picture me snapping here). No chemicals. No fuss. Just steam! (Wouldn’t that be an AWESOME tagline?!? Tess, feel free to use that in your sales pitch.)
It gets Tess’s seal of approval:
Here are a few of the top steam mops on the market: the Haan FS-20, the Bissell 1867-7, and the Shark Steam Mop 53101. Happy cleaning!
And if any steam mop companies out there would like to hire Tess to model YOUR steam mop, you just let me know and I’ll pass the message along to her.
That’s right blog readers, it’s time for another edition of Twenty Dollar Tuesdays! I’ve often written about the importance of constantly evaluating what’s in your home. It’s easy for us to become accustomed to all the little things in our house that we don’t like or are outdated. So today, take the time to [...]
With Thanksgiving just a week away, I’m starting to plan our menu. We’re spending Christmas with the fam, so it’s Thanksgiving with friends this year. With Thanksgiving I’m always torn between traditional and something totally original. My husband is taking care of the turkey (cooked in a bag, upside down, stuffed AND covered in bacon–yum). [...]