How to Do Home Improvement Projects While You Have Young Children At Home

Don't.

Plumbing Adventures

Last Tuesday I went out to move the laundry and noticed a small puddle around the water heater stand. Curious, I peeked around the side and . . .

IT HAD CRACKED! The stand had cracked and the water heater was tipping, dripping, and gradually ripping off the wall. If any of you have plastic water heater stands, please replace them TOMORROW. We were lucky. If the stand had cracked all the way and the water heater had fallen it might have broken the gas line and spewed flammable vapors into my garage. Maybe if it had happened while we were camping last weekend our garage would have blown up when we came home and clicked the garage door opener.

Cool.

Love My Ceramic Cook-Top

Our old stove started to give out a few months ago. Two of the burners stopped working. So, after putting up with it for a while, we caved in and bought a new stove. This time I decided I wanted one of those flat cook tops, the type without ring pans. They looked so easy to clean.

Little did I know.

Ceramic cook tops are not really easy to clean. They are possible to clean. Ring pans are absolutely impossible to keep clean for long. Something falls down there while you're cooking, scorches on, and then never completely comes off. On the other hand, when something drips onto the ceramic cook top, it does scrub off again, if you scrub it right away and you use the nifty ceramic cook top cleaning cream.

The nifty ceramic cook top cleaning cream is a little like car wax. You wipe it on, then polish it in before you even start cooking. It cleans and protects the cook top, and makes it easy to clean up scorched drips. There have been a couple of drips that resisted even the nifty cook top cleaning cream, so I gently scraped them off with the edge of a metal spatula.

So far my ceramic cook top has withstood encounters with my giant boiling water canner and my cast iron griddles. As soon as the cook top cooled I polished off all the black marks, dripped syrup, and hard-water deposits, and it looks as good as new. I love my new ceramic cook top.

Fall is Here (Almost)

Fall is here! I don't care that it is still 105 degrees Fahrenheit outside. They had pumpkins at Wal-mart. I bought one and left it on the table for a couple of days just to get us in the mood. Then this morning I sliced it in half. I pulled out the seeds and spread them on a pan, sprinkled them with salt, and roasted them for thirty minutes at 350 degrees. I don't ever rinse the seeds - they're tastier roasted with pumpkin juice on them. Next I put each half of the pumpkin on a big baking sheet and gave them the same treatment - except without the salt, and I roasted them for about two hours. The skin peeled off easily once the roasted pumpkin had cooled. I pureed the flesh in the blender a little at a time, and now I have several pounds of pumpkin puree to use in pies and breads and cookies. There is a pumpkin pie in the oven right now, and I am doing a happy dance in the kitchen because fall is here (almost).

Mice and Corn

The monsoon is here! It is time for those of you who live in Southern Nevada to PLANT YOUR CORN! Yes, you may have thought it was too late to put in a garden this year, but the trick with corn is to wait until the humidity goes up and then plant. With the soil as warm as it is, the corn just pops right out of the ground and shoots up - all you have to do is water it. By the time it starts to tassel the weather will be cooling off and the tassels will not shrivel up and die in the sun, like they would have if you planted corn in March or April.

In other news, we have mice again. There is a place in the garage where they can jump up into the walls, and a hole in the wall at the bottom of the stairs where they can easily get into the house. I patched the hole in the wall and set out the trap.

The very best bait for mouse traps is toasted peanut butter. Spread a little peanut butter on the trigger, then brown it with a match for less than a second. We had a very stubborn mouse that would not touch the trap no matter what we put in it, until I tried the toasted peanut butter. At least he died happy.

Seeing Spots

I got a grease spot on my brand-new birthday present blouse from my grandmother. It didn't come out when I ran it through the washing machine. Fortunately I knew what to do.

Back at Thanksgiving time, the turkey I bought turned out to be the fattiest, greasiest turkey I had ever seen. There was a layer of blubber under the skin, and the drippings were more oil than juice. After dinner, my tablecloth was a disaster of grease stains. I put it through the wash twice with no improvement. Then I got out my Yankee Home Hints book. It said to use distilled water to wash out stubborn grease stains. So I poured a gallon of distilled water in a bucket, added dish soap, and dropped in the table cloth. I squished the table cloth around a little, then dumped the bucket in the washing machine and ran a cycle. The table cloth came out perfectly clean!

Fast forward to the present. I used the same trick on my blouse, and now it is just like new. I found that it is better to mix the dish soap with the distilled water and then add the item to be washed rather than putting the dish soap on the grease stain and then putting the item in the distilled water.

Emerging from the Swamp

Now that the weather has warmed up we would love to have all of you over to swim . . .
. . . except . . .

This past winter my two-year-old threw an entire giant bucket of sidewalk chalk into the pool. One day the chalk lay scattered around the back patio, and the next I found it dissolving in little colored lumps all over the bottom of the pool.

I did not think much of it until six weeks ago when the weather warmed and the algae started to bloom. In the past a couple of chlorine tablets in the floater would clear things up. Not this year! The pool got greener and greener in spite of my efforts. Then, to top it off, my husband vacuumed the pool and found the filter full of wiggly little red worms! Our tropical fish loved eating them, but no one wanted to go swimming with them.

Chlorine tests revealed NO CHLORINE in the pool at all, in spite of multiple shocks and keeping tablets in the floater at all times. My one-time-chemistry-major husband theorizes that the chalk ate the all acid in the pool, including the chlorine stabilizer. Even when we finally managed to raise the chlorine in the pool to detectable levels, the worms and the algae still thrived on.

In desperation, we drained half the water from the pool last night. We rented a pump from the pool store, then waited until after dark so that the heat and the sun would not crack the exposed pool liner. Today the pool looks much better, but it is not quite ready for company yet. My husband is out trying to find some place that sells stabilizer in small enough quantities so that we don't have to store dangerous acid in the garage.

Let this serve as a warning to all! No sidewalk chalk in the pool!