You Clean

Happy Year of the Tiger!

It’s traditional to use this time during the Chinese New Year to clean, gut, disinfect, and generally purge your home. It’s a good time to do it, too, especially in my neck of the woods where it’s been constantly snowing and there’s little else to do.

While it’s traditional to do all of the cleaning before the New Year (which, this year, was on Sunday), cleaning on New Year’s Day is forbidden because it could sweep out the luck from the New Year. Now that the first day is over, however, you can still work on your goal throughout the month of February and get your home in tip-top shape well before the Jones family does in the spring! Here’s how. Read more

No, it’s not a catchphrase of the latest movement or a nationwide command secretly issued in the State of the Union Address. Get Organized Now! is a website run by Marcia Gracia, an organizational guru who maintains thousands of organizational tips, products, and packs to help you stay on top of organizing your life. Read more

Bed BugThe Stranger’s Brendan Kiley recently wrote a disturbing piece about everybody’s second favorite bug (the cockroach of course being the first) the bedbug. In fact, the piece so disgusted me that I immediately became OCD for the first time in my life and not only had to scratch my arm 24 times, but scrub it ferociously as well in solidarity with people who have suffered an infestation.

The cute little bugs apparently reproduce violently and in a way that can kill the female or shorten her life, forcing me to contemplate whether or not the “she was asking for it” defense would have any merit in a bedbug court of law. Once the female bedbugs have reproduced, the bedbugs hide out in mattresses and pillows and are incredibly hard to get rid of.
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olive oilOlive oil has long been used in cooking and creates a great addition to the flavor of many dishes, particularly Italian style dishes and the health benefits of olive oil have been the subject of numerous studies and have become rather well known; however, olive oil also has a number of great uses for easy cleaning and household chores. Here are a few tips and tricks for great ways that you can use olive oil around the house: Read more

If you’re having guests over for Christmas this Friday, you have just enough time to get your house clean—that is, if you’ve already got your shopping done, your groceries bought, and the rest of your list checked off. If not, you may be out of luck! Really, if you zip through the major areas indicated below, you may even still have enough time to get those cookies baked for the office party. (Those pictures with Santa, now, may be a higher order to fill…) Read more

Between shot records to x-ray copies, prescription information to hospital stays and surgery records, the average person is sure to have a file of medical information an inch thick—if not more. When you have additional family members to keep track of, the job becomes that much more complicated.

Keeping medical records straight may not seem like such a big deal; after all, what’s done is done. But when you’re keeping track of your own medical history, linking events and risks with possible current health issues, and checking insurance payouts and medical bills for accuracy, they can come in pretty handy. You can also use them during tax season. And what about medical emergencies? Doctors always want a medical history when you bring someone in, but in times of emergency, it’s not like he or she (or you!) will remember everything. Read more

Recently an Alternet article about the inequalities of housework between family members—mainly, between wives and their husbands—sparked a lot of controversy on the web. None of the data there surprised me; I had read an article a while back about how, after she gets married, the average woman acquires an entire extra two weeks of work every year—unpaid work, that is, and an entire two weeks, not two “work weeks”—just from cleaning up after her husband. This doesn’t include any children that they may have. Read more

The Magical Household: Empower Your Home with Love, Protection, Health and Happiness is possibly my favorite pagan book in my entire collection. In it, Scott Cunningham and David Harrington share a plethora of folklore, recipes, spells, and simple actions to make your home more magical and meaningful. There is really something that anyone on any budget can do in this book.

The Magical Household explains that you don’t need money to live in a magical home. You don’t even need to live in a cottage in the woods with herbs, pentagrams and witchy-looking stuff everywhere (though you have to admit that would be fun). Simply using your fingertip to draw sacred symbols for protection on your windows and doors, for example, can help safeguard your home and give it a more magical vibe without spending anything. Read more

Admit it: your home has smelled like a soiled diaper (or two), the wrong end of a dog, or the poop deck of the Black Pearl at some point or another in your life. When this happens—especially if company is coming—we all want to immediately reach for a can of Febreeze and douse the house in a cloud of smelly-good residue.

But the fact remains that, like most aerosol sprays, that really isn’t that good for us to be inhaling. It’s not like it really gets rid of the smell’s source or anything; it just covers it up. It’s like throwing your toddler’s blankie over dog poop instead of cleaning it up—or doing what Adam Sandler did in Big Daddy: using newspaper to lay over vomit and pee, and simply let it sit there. Read more