Spring Clean

Oh yes, it’s that time of year again. Time to clean and I mean CLEAN. Months of dust and grime have accumulated in the Marcoccia home and with a fresh change in season comes a fresh home. Granted our snow is still here and apparently isn’t leaving anytime soon, but we are doing what we can to encourage things to come back to life. A few other motivators for this cleaning festival that I should mention as well are that we listed our Timberlakes home for sale this week with a realtor. I will write more about this when I have a better emotional grip on it, but for now we are scrambling to get this place “show ready”. Another motivator is to SIMPLIFY yes! I love to simplify and I was inspired to do so last night by this blog I discovered here good stuff.

So here are some highlights from our Saturday cleaning festival. First we discovered that our bathroom light fixtures are kind of cute they are frosted on the tips. Huh we had assumed the whole glass thingy was frosted the entire two years we’ve been here! This is bad I’m totally revealing what a bad housekeeper I am and how lazy I am. That light fixture has been screaming to be cleaned and polished from the very first time I saw it. Procrastination is a terrible thing.

Gary volunteered to watch Ellie as I attacked the bathroom. It was a little quiet after a while so I stepped out to see how they were doing and this is the scene I found…

Daddy’s little helper. She was content in the backpack for over an hour! I think we have discovered a new way to clean the house without interruption. Not sure who was more proud Daddy or Ellie.

Human Thing

Here is an inspirational song/video from The Be Good Tanyas that I found on one of my favorite blogs. I really like the animation, the quilts on the line, and the couple dancing with the mountain scene in the background. Those are my favorite highlights…oh and the song isn’t so bad, either. 🙂 Don’t be afraid to check out “The Littlest Birds” as well.

Enjoy.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd1Ie370rHk[/youtube]

Keeping Gary on his Toes

So, last night after I put Ellie down for bed I began my nightly routine of scurrying about the house in an effort to straighten things up. Gary usually insists that I take a break and sit down, but it’s my chance to get the house in order and complete a task and if I don’t do it who will 😉 besides when I do sit down at the end of the day for that break I like to do it in an orderly space.

Anyway, I was washing the dishes and telling Gary how easy it is to put the slip cover back on the chair when a coffee mug slipped from my hands. I reacted and tried to grab it and in the process cut my hand, blood immediately filled the bottom of the sink and I said “Oh, Gary I cut my finger” then I saw that it was kind of deep and said “um, its bad”. Gary came rushing over and wrapped a towel around my hand, made me hold my arm up over my head, and walked me over to the sofa. It was obvious I needed stitches so we started talking about if we should wake up Ellie or what to do. I began to feel my head tingle and the room was getting dim and I said to Gary I might pass out… Well I did and when I came to Gary was on the phone with the 911 operator and Chip was across the room in the corner looking at me with huge eyes.

I don’t know, apparently I was hyperventilating and passing out at the same time. Didn’t know that was possible but he said my eyes rolled back and I started breathing funny. It scared Gary and he made a mad dash for the phone. Needless to say we woke up the neighborhood. Timberlakes volunteer EMTs were dispatched as well as an ambulance from Heber. TL has a wonderful group of fine citizens who volunteer as first responders which is so critical to the community because it takes 20 minutes at the least to get an ambulance up here from Heber and a lot can happen in 20 minutes. We were able to turn the ambulance away although they got as far as the gate.

Once things calmed down we got Ellie up and took the trip down to the hospital. When all was said and done I got 4 whole stitches on my right ring finger. Poor Ellie went from sleeping peacefully to a house full of strangers and then whisked away to a harshly lite room at the hospital to watch her Mom get worked on by more strangers. Poor Gary thought that his weirdo wife was having a seizure. I didn’t think I was a fainter although it runs in the family. Leslie and I now have matching stories I know she has scared Mark and Bailey a couple of times. My Mom fainted once when she was young. The story goes that my Grandma’s first reaction was to say to my Aunt Meriam “You did it! You killed her!” or something like that. So, I haven’t escaped the female dramatics from my side of the family.

Gary wanted me to show off my battle wounds with the dishes. I thought I’d spare those of you who would rather not be exposed to a nasty photo of stitches. So if your interested you can check it out here.

Spring Equinox

From Wikipedia: “An equinox in astronomy is that moment in time (not a whole day) when the centre of the Sun can be observed to be directly above the Earth’s equator, occurring around March 20 and September 23 each year…”

This is what Spring looks like on the outside today…

and this is what spring looks like on the inside…

HAPPY SPRING!

Here is a little ditty for your listening pleasure… Might as Well be Spring

**UPDATE**

I posted too soon, turns out its a beautiful, surprisingly warm, blue sky, sunny day…

A little more Green

Last week while I was visiting my parents Gary called me with the news that our washing machine had stopped spinning and was making an awful noise. Yep, it was inevitable our washing machine had pooped out. So, we took a deep breath and went shopping. With hardly any arm twisting I managed to talk Gary into a front loading washer. Actually, all that had to be said was “it will reduce our water use by more than half”. That’s right, front loading washers use about 18 gallons of water compared to the old school top loader that uses up to 45 gallons of water and they reduce the amount of time clothes spend in the dryer because they spin the clothes at higher rpms. Plus it reduces the wear and tear on clothes from a conventional dryer therefore helping your clothes last longer. It took my first batch of laundry 40 minutes to dry. The oldy moldy dryer took about hour. I’ve never been so excited to do the laundry before! We sat in the hall this morning as a family and watched the first load of laundry get clean.

This made me think what are we doing to reduce our “footprint” and what could we be doing better? I often feel that for every one thing we do right there are 5 things we could be doing better.

So here’s a few things the Marcoccia’s are doing right.

• We recycle. This is a big chore for us as we don’t have any curbside garbage or recycle removal. We haul our garbage two miles down to the community dumpsters and we take our recycling 30 miles to Park City. This has made us very aware of our trash and how much we throw away. Heber has a recycling center but they don’t take glass, we have to go to PC for that so we just do it all in one trip. Recycling has not been an easy task for us as we have a small space to work with and the plastics and paper get out of control very fast, but we try to be diligent and call each other out when we spy something recyclable in the garbage. By the way PC has an awesome recycling center.
• We don’t buy garbage bags. We use the bags from the grocery store for our trash and recycle the rest of course.
• We try to use cloth napkins at meals. I’m working on phasing out the paper towel habit. We have some friends who gave us napkin rings with our initials engraved in them so we can use the same napkin for a couple of meals rather than washing them after every meal.
• We pay our bills online. In an effort to reduce the paper trail.
• We use natural or biodegradable cleaning and grooming products. We have septic so my theory is the more natural things that go in there the better. Not a fan of chemicals seeping into the ground water and such.
• Compact fluorescent light bulbs are in the lights we use the most throughout the house and we are in the process of changing every light bulb to a more efficient one as they die out. We bought these light bulbs for family members for Christmas gifts one year not very exciting for the recipients but it meant a lot to us to encourage some green living.

And, here are a few things we could be doing better…

1. Start taking my own bags to the grocery store. I’ve been thinking about this one a lot lately but not acting on it because I keep forgetting to take the darn bags with me. So from now on I’m going to have a stash of bags in the truck that stay in the truck.
2. Use less water. IE, wash the dishes more efficiently and take shorter showers.
3. Use the gDiapers I bought for Ellie. I’m so guilty. While I was pregnant we talked about using cloth diapers. We found gDiapers which have flushable inserts. Its been so much more convenient to use Pampers and Huggies. I hate myself for not being more diligent on this matter, but man poop sucks!
4. Buy local when possible and join a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) this summer I want to get to know my food.
5. Turn the heat down and put on another layer.
6. Be more efficient on our trips into town to cut back on driving.
7. Bake my own bread. Not sure if this is really “green living” but I’m looking for a way to reduce the amount of high fructose corn syrup in our diet. Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately due to a chapter in the book An Omnivore’s Dilemma and I have been inspired by these blogs here and here. It will be one less plastic bag to recycle.
8. Make smarter choices when shopping.
9. Use the compost much more!
10. Be more creative by finding new uses for old things.