Home and Lifestyle

Expanding our ER

January 27, 2008 by Tricia

I think I’ve mentioned before that the hospital where I work (well sort of work as I’ve been off sick for over two years!) has been undergoing a major renovation.

The remodeling or what they are calling a succession plan has been taking place all over the hospital, but it’s most evident in the ER where I work.

I think our ER is going to take up half the first floor when it’s done! It’s going to be huge!

It’s the second busiest ER in Canada so I guess it makes sense to expand. I just hope that they hire enough staff to cover all the areas!

The old way of drying your clothes

January 26, 2008 by Tricia

Grab the Photo Hunt code.
Photo Theme. Visit participants.

This weeks theme is Old Fashioned

We do have a dryer, it came with the house when we bought it (it’s 30 years old and probably qualifies for this photo hunt theme too!), but we sometimes dry our clothes the old fashioned way on a clothes line in the backyard.

I don’t think that there as many people using clothes lines these days as there used to be. I grew up with my parents using a clothes line or later one of those odd large metal umbrella looking things in our backyard and when we moved into this neighborhood we noticed that most of our neighbors (all the closest are in their 80’s) used clothes lines.

Our house had a clothes line but it wasn’t in good shape. The actual line was sagging and the wheel was rusted. We got a new set up and one of our neighbors showed us how to tighten up the line properly.

We rarely dry anything on the line in the winter. Well not unless I want a stiff frozen piece of laundry! I think I have used it in the winter once or twice though when it’s been unseasonably warm. Mostly the clothes line is just a great place for the birds to hang out in the winter.

In the summer we use the clothes line quite a bit. Unlike some of our neighbors we don’t dry our under garments on the line. No one needs to see those! We tend not to dry towels or sheets on the line either as they aren’t as soft when dried on the line as they are when they’re dried in a dryer. We do dry all of our cotton clothes on the line though and that makes up the bulk of most of our laundry during the summer.

The clothes smell so fresh and clean when they are dried outside! Oh and did you know that the sun is a great way to keep white clothes bright and clean? It naturally bleaches the clothes.

Since our dryer is ancient and I’m sure its an energy hog we also save a lot of money by drying a good portion of our clothing on the line during the warmer months. In the winter I often hang clothes in the basement to dry instead of using the dryer for everything.

Aches and pains

January 26, 2008 by Tricia

OMG. I can’t wait for spring to come.

I’m so tired of this extreme cold weather we’ve been having! It’s literally making my bones ache. Remember I’ve got Crohn’s and it can affect your joints so I think that’s why my knees have been hurting so much lately. It’s a bad combination of auto immune disease, probably some old injuries from my running days and frigid weather.

It makes me wonder how bad my knees will feel when I’m older! Actually it makes me feel like applying for medicare insurance now! LOL

Sometimes I get achy knees just before we’re going to have a storm or just before it gets really humid here too.

Do you get aches and pains in the cool winter months or when the weather changes?

How to keep the dog from damaging our couch?

January 26, 2008 by Tricia

Lately I’ve been wondering how much longer our leather couches will look good. We’ve been letting our puppy get up on the couch so that she can sit with us, but occasionally she’ll try to bit the couch or tries to dig in the seats. I wonder what the couches will look like 6 months from now?

I’d love it if our basement was finished already. I’d move our couch, loveseat and lazyboy chair downstairs and use it like leather home theater seating set since we plan to set up a home theater in the basement if we go the rec room route.

I really don’t mind having the dog on the couch … well as long as our furniture can stand up to it.

Do you let your dog or cat on the couch? How do you keep them from ruining your furniture? Just keep telling them no when they are doing something that might damage the couch?

Clean house and cleaner air too

January 25, 2008 by Tricia

Even though I’ve been feeling terrible the last few days Chris and I did manage to get some housework done on Monday. He was off work, as he often is on Mondays, and late in the afternoon we decided it was time to vacuum. It was the first time we vacuumed around our puppy.

Now don’t get the wrong idea and think we live in a pig sty. We don’t have any carpeting in our house so dusting, sweeping and mopping regularly is usually sufficient. However, every once in a while it’s good to pull out the vacuum and do a thorough job of cleaning.

We had no idea how our puppy would react to our very loud vacuum.

I had a feeling she’d be ok with it as she doesn’t seem to mind when I use my blow dryer and the groomer said she was interested in their big blow dryer when she was being dried off at the groomers last Monday. Still … you just never know how an animal might react to something new so we wanted to try out the vacuum when Chris and I were both home. That way one of us could comfort her or totally remove her from the room if she started to freak out.

Turns out that she loved the vacuum. Chris started the vacuum and she went right up to it and acted as if it was a new toy to play with. She didn’t seem to mind the noise at all and was happy to watch as Chris vacuumed all of the dining room chairs, the inside of the air registers and so on.

It’s good to know that we can pull out our vacuum whenever we need to now and know that the dog won’t be upset by the noise. We just have to make sure she doesn’t bite the cord or the vacuum hose when we aren’t looking!

I’ve always found this house to be a little dustier than I think it should be … well compared to newer houses anyway.

I think it’s because we have an older furnace system – an oil furnace actually, and also because our 1927 triple brick house is made of lathe and plaster. Well the interior walls are made of lathe and plaster I mean! I’m also sure it doesn’t help that our living room dining room ceiling has had a bit of work done on it and is currently waiting for us to put up that tin ceiling I’ve been talking about for ages.

Sometime in the future we’ll think about changing over to gas heating. At that time we’ll also need to get a new furnace. I’m sure a new furnace with better filters or an air cleaning system on the furnace will make a huge difference in the amount of dust in the house!

Oh, on Saturday we splurged and got two air purifiers. Chris and I both smoke. Yes I know – we’re bad. We plan on quitting soon. We figured that the air purifiers will help with the air quality in our home too as they clean the air of dust, pollen, smoke, mold and bacteria particles. They are Honeywell Hepa air purifiers with permanent filters.

We were going to get one big air purifier, however since the air purifier should be located in the area that we sit in and smoke in most often to be most effective we figured a big one, one large enough to clean the air in a large open living room dining room would be too noisy to sit be side we opted to get two of the next size down. So we got two medium sized air purifiers. One is near where we sit in the living room and the other is at the other end of the room in the dining room.

So now our house is really clean and the air should be a lot cleaner too!

Do you use air purifiers in your home or do you have a funny story about your pet and vacuums or other cleaning equipment?

Expanding our ER

The old way of drying your clothes

Aches and pains

How to keep the dog from damaging our couch?

Clean house and cleaner air too

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