Do Your Children Push The Boundaries? It May Be A Sign Of Future Leadership Abilities

Your last nerve.

Kids plucking your last nerve?

Considering the "I have to run down to the 7-11 for cigarettes" ploy, never to return, even though you don't smoke?

Well check out this article published today in ScienceDaily - your little envelope pusher may be the future leader of the free world!

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Make A Batch Of Bugs!

I'll show you how to make a cool batch of lady bugs and butterflies – and I’ll tell you the secret that the pastry chef fascists don’t want you to know!  (what…too much?)

Cocktails With eM

eM isn’t a big cocktail drinker so when she asked me to make her something the pressure was on. 

Get On-Line Crime Reports For Your Neighborhood

This free site takes information from participating police departments and plots crimes against a Google Map interface...

Make Jewel Encrusted Rings For Your 3-Year-Old!

Dude, you have to be secure in your masculinity and leave all the macho bull s#it behind when it comes to doing stuff for your little girl.  Case in point

I recently made these cool rings for J.  I also made one for eM so that they could have a matching set...

Darth Vader (LMAO!) - so worth the 46 seconds

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Prevent Housework Arguments!

You don’t need a PhD in marital counseling to know that perceptions about who is, and isn't, pulling their weight around the house can fuel some pretty heated “discussions” (although it helps if a PhD has written a related article).

eM and I both like the house tidy but I’m way more detail oriented than she is (believe me, it's a curse).  I used to occasionally get ticked off because I didn’t perceive that eM was doing her fair share of the housework.  What I finally realized was that she wasn't slacking, in fact eM works her ass off, she just wasn’t noticing the same things I was noticing so they weren’t a priority for her like they were for me.

And eM was doing lots of other things for the team, like managing our household cash flow and all of the grocery shopping, things I wasn't thinking about while I was focused on the cleanliness of a particular room.

There were also occasions when eM thought I was taking care of a task and I thought she had it covered. As you can imagine, hilarity ensued.

So, once again, eM and I saw eye to eye on the need for a plan.  Here’s how we went about taking all the ambiguity out of our household division of labor...

You Have A Smoke Detector – Why Not A Flood Detector? A product you need and never knew existed!

We’ve had a couple of water intrusions in our house.  The first came when I wisely put a fine mesh screen over a storm drain in the bottom of the stairwell outside our basement door.  The first big rain sent leaves down the stairs which promptly piled up on the mesh creating an watertight seal, sending the water that was meant to go down the drain directly under the basement door.

The second was when eM 1) neglected to change the lint screen on the outlet hose from the washing machine and 2) didn’t check to make sure the drain was clear in the outlet tub.

I realized I needed to find something to give us the heads up when water starts flowing where it’s not supposed to...

Save over $800 In The Next 12 Months On Your Energy Bill – Without Replacing The Windows!

In December of 2008 we got a shock when we opened our power bills (get it?  shock - power...).  Our combined power bills were up 22% versus the previous December!

I did some further digging and discovered that our cost per unit of energy had gone up 32% during that same period - greedy utility company bastards!

I immediately started working on a plan to turn things around.  Since January we’ve saved over $493 (and 31 cents!) on our combined energy bill versus the same seven months last year.

I’ve often heard that the greatest savings comes from replacing old windows.  Our home was built in 1960 and the original, horrible, single pane windows are still in place.  We’d love to replace them but that’s just not in the budget, even with available stimulus plan money.  I needed a plan that didn’t involve a massive cash outlay...