24 hours of bliss

Oh the sun!

It came out and it inspired me. I rolled down the windows and I felt invigorated. Involuntarily, I found myself bursting out with "There is sunSHINE in my soul today!" in my finest opera voice. What? You didn't hear me? You must not have been anywhere near Dixieland and Walnut. I'll be happy to regale you at your earliest convenience.

It's like I forgot what it was to feel the sun on my skin. All I could think about was going out to the backyard and planting something....there was sun to be had, after all. Why waste it? (Because the evil frost will kill them next week...that's why...evil, evil frost!)

The happiest thing of all is that just like clockwork, when we arrived home after the school pick-up, there were equally sun-deprived neighbors already waiting for us on our lawn. Bikes, soccer, baseball....anything! Let's just play outside!



Come again, sun. It was nice having you.

A range of emotions.

Hilarious.




Thanks, Lara.

Pretend it didn't happen

Question:

Whilst changing a diaper, have you ever gotten poop under a fingernail?

The feeling of horror it produces is indescribable. And let's face it, the gut reaction method of cleaning under a finger nail is to use one of your other, undefiled fingernails to dig under there. With horror you look down at those hands and realized that you have just doubled your problem.

Even with loads of lather and the power of anti-bacterial scrub...I may never again feel truly comfortable using these hands to eat.

Never, ever again.

Sowing a seed

Apparently I have an eight year old with:

a. a sense of humor

b. patience

c. access to beans

My spinach feels violated, but I'm secretly proud.

A rock and a hard place

I REALLY need to clean my house. REALLY.

It's threatening to swallow my children whole. And I can't find my ipod in all this mess. But I really feel I must have this ipod to get in the cleaning mood. I'm at a loss.

No ipod.

No cleaning.

ugh.

Maybe I should call my visiting teachers or the Bishop to come over for a visit.

That'd light a fire under my britches.

Can rotation plans

Okay...this may not make sense, so good luck to you. 20 dollars for real plans may be sounding pretty reasonable by the time you wade through this.

Off the bat, don't forget that these do not need to be perfect or precise. As long as there is a slope to the shelves, they will roll. As long as the space where the can falls to the next level is wider than the diameter of the can, it won't get stuck and you're golden. Presto!

I made my units to be 17 inches deep because that's how deep my shelves are, but you could adjust these to fit your shelves.

These instructions are for a soup can size:

Cut these pieces:

sides: (2): 17" x 11"
back: 4 3/8" x 10" (can be shorter, if you don't have the wood. Just needs to stop the cans from rolling out the back from the top shelf)
label: 4 3/8" x 3"
lip: 4 3/8" x 1 1/2"
top shelf: 4 3/8" x 13"
bottom shelf: 4 3/8" x 16"

All of these pieces have a width of 4 3/8 inches because that's just slightly wider that the height of a soup can. So if you were to do a veggie can or a tomato past can, just change this measurement accordingly. Everything else can stay the same except for the top shelf you might shorten to 12 1/2" for a large can like pineapple. Get it? If you don't, you will once you do one. Then I promise you'll realize how easy it is to customize these.

It's important that all the pieces have clean flat edges, so if you used a table saw, you should be good to go, but since I used my scroll saw and mine inevitably came out a little wavy here and there, I used my sander t0 flatten the edges of each set, just to make sure they would glue together nicely. Unfortunate that I'm allergic to sawdust, huh?

On with the plans!

Take one of the side pieces and you are going to draw guidelines so you know exactly where to glue the shelves and back.

Here's a basic diagram:



A. Draw a vertical line 3 1/2" in from the left side.

* This measurement is based off the diameter of the can plus a "bit" for the can to drop easily through, plus an extra 1/4" for the back to be glued in. So a soup can is a little over 2 3/4" wide, add a little to get 3 1/4" and then another quarter inch for gluing in the back and you have it.

B. Measure 2" up from the bottom left corner and mark a small tick mark (1)

C. Use a straight edge to draw a line from tick mark 1 to the bottom right corner.

D. Now measure up 3 1/4" from where your slop line and you vertical line intersect (I marked it with a star). Put a tick mark there (2)

E. Now measure the distance from tick mark 2 to the bottom of the board (should be around 5 inches-ish)

F. Add two inches to that (around 7 inches-ish heh heh) and mark that measurement on the right side of your board (from the bottom). Make a tick mark (3)

G. Use your straight edge to connect tick marks 2 and 3. This will be your guideline for glueing your top shelf.

You got it!

Now you are going to glue your shelves and back in place. Start with your back, then glue the bottom shelf along the lower sloped line and your top self along the top sloped line. I was super high tech and used soup cans to hold the shelves up and ensure they were at a right angle while they dried. I would use a can on both sides of each piece you are gluing.


And as you can see, I didn't always have a large enough piece for the back so just made do with a couple smaller pieces. It doesn't really matter as long you position the piece to stop the cans at the back of the top shelf. It works fine and isn't visible from the front.

Once the glue is dry, just put glue on the exposed edges of the shelves and back and place the other side on top of it. It helps to have it up against some thing strait (like a wall or a previously made unit) to make sure the sides are lining up right. I skipped this step in my first one and you saw where that got me. Then you can sit something heavy on it or use clamps to make sure everything is drying securely.

Once that is dry, just apply a little glue to the sides of the label and lip pieces and pop those in! Mine usually needed to be clamped a bit as well.

You did it!

Please leave chocolate on my doorstep.

Plans shmans

I've been wanting to organize my canned food storage for a very long time. I'm sick of writing the date on every can with a sharpie and reaching behind a precariously stacked row of cream of chicken soup in order to keep the oldest cans in the front. And if we're being honest, I actually stack the flats on the garage floor and trip over them for two months before I get around to that step.

I was aware that there were plans online that you could purchase, telling you how to build your own can rotation system, but even then you pay only for the plans for say, the soup size or the veggie size. At twenty bucks a pop, that can get expensive and that's without buying the actual supplies. And due to frugality's tight grip on my psyche, I just couldn't do it. It goes without saying that I wasn't about to shell out the cash to buy them already made...that's fer city folk!

So I ran across some plans to make some out of cardboard. Here. I couldn't resist the free-ness of it and gave it a try. Not bad! Mine was a little wonky, due to it being my first try and all, and despite what you might think, I really don't have that much high quality cardboard kicking around. Although I did sneak across the street under the cloak of darkness and steal some out of the neighbor's recycling container. When I saw her put it out earlier that day, I thought, "Ooooh! Look at all that cardboard." You can see why Mark fell in love with me, right?

Once I get working on something, I have a limited window of time in which I'm feeling fired up about it...if it doesn't happen in the window, it's not happenin. So waiting for life to send me a package and making one at a time isn't going to work and the idea of shelling out cash for cardboard didn't appeal to me. The great thing about making one of these puppies out of cardboard is that the process taught me that this is not rocket science. All you need are two sides, a back, shelves with a 2" slope and something to stop the cans from rolling out onto the floor.

The wheels started turning (in mah noggin) and I came up with the plans for all the sizes I needed. I bought 12 sheets of pressed fiber board and used our electricity-rich snow days to work on these:


I'm in love with them.

Good bye sharpie! Good-bye reaching behind the shelves where there may or may not be large poisonous spiders to retrieve cans that have fallen back there! Hello, sending kids to get me anything I ask for!

Okay, so I won't bore you with instructions, but I will say that if you want to do this, I'd be more than happy to share the knowledge and of course, help in anyway I can. I promise not to charge you (except for any item you would like to give me that may or may not contain pecans).

You will need some type of saw. I used my scroll saw because that's all I have, but a table saw would make it substantially easier. You will also need wood glue, the more clamps the better (I have two, so it was a process), and a large square...you can borrow mine.

You can make them in any size:



And you can also do them in cardboard, of course...and it works fine. There's mine on the bottom right of the picture:

It's surprisingly sturdy, and if you have a bunch of cardboard, you can't beat the price. The ones I made out of fiberboard came out to cost about 3 dollars per unit. Oh, and can you tell that the one to the left of the cardboard one was my first fiberboard experiment? It's a bit on the crooked side and the bottom lip is too short, so if you aren't gentle, when you pull out a can of soup, the next one will come at you with a vengeance. Live and learn. I plan on writing, "BEWARE!" on that one, so my kids will escape a can to the head. Or maybe I'll fill it with cream of celery....that's only a can to the head twice a year.