A Step in Solving the Pet Hair Problem

Tuesday Revews-Day

Disclaimer: This post contains product supplied for review.

Bringing a dog home has been one of the most fun and frustrating adventures in recent memory. He’s awfully cute, and he’s pretty snuggly at times, too (the other night I went to sleep with his head on the crook of my arm, how sweet is that?!), but he destroys things and barks for reasons real and imaginary (more so the latter). He also sheds. A lot.

Now, this is where having a single-color pup would be vastly superior: if you have a black dog, wear black clothes and upholster your furniture in dark tones. Blonde or white, likewise. Grey? You have plenty of options to choose from. But Duncan is a tri-color and he sheds his black and white with impunity, and I just can’t see myself living in houndstooth check 24/7/365.

Fanatics might resort to daily sweeping and a lint brush in every room. We are far from fanatics. We accept the presence of dog fur in our lives as out lot. It’s life, we deal.

But there are times when we just need it gone, whether it’s expected company or a random Tuesday when I’ve had enough, and it was one of those random days when I received an email introducing the Bump It Off, billed as sometime to solve a plethora of household woes, including pet hair! That alone was enough for me to send my address for a sample.

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Here’s how we’ve fared with the Bump It Off over the last couple of months for the top three uses:

  • Pet hair: the silicone picks up the hair and rinse off fairly easily. While there could be, I suppose, a concern about pet hair clogging drains, for occasional touch-ups of clothes or upholstery, it probably wouldn’t be a problem. You can also use the soft bristle side to groom you pooch. Duncan seemed to like the feel of it but, like most things, he was more interested in chewing on it.
  • Dishes: The Bump It Off features one side of blunt nubs and one side of soft bristles, both of which work nicely for getting food off dishes without damaging any finishes. Because the bristles and bumps are soft, though, you may need to exert a bit of elbow grease, but it’s still better than scratching or chipping enamel or other non-stick surfaces.
  • Laundry: Those bristles come in handy for working spot treatments into stains or brushing away surface debris.

The design of the Bump It Off is pretty clever, with the four fingers holes on one end and an open space opposite that allows the user to hold it whichever way they find it most comfortable and useful depending on the application at hand.

While it won’t completely eradicate sponges and scrubbies from our home, I can definitely see keeping one on hand in the kitchen, laundry, and living rooms plus one in the car for wardrobe touch-ups for nights out or meetings. They are top-rack dishwasher safe and come in bright colors, in singles or two or four in a pack.

And I apologize, especially for those non-fans, if you also now have “Shake it Off” stuck in your head–it certainly makes for a memorable product name!

Tuesday Reviews-Day: Teanzo Advent Calendar

Sips

So, if you follow me on Instagram (@scrapsoflife, if you don’t), you might have noticed that I was posting an awful lot of tea pictures this month…

That's a lot of tea cups (mugs, etc.)

That’s a lot of tea cups (mugs, etc.)–No repeats for 24 days!

After seeing a picture in my insta-feed about another tea advent calendar, I hopped onto Amazon and impulsively bought the first tea advent calendar I could find that was reasonably priced and available with Prime shipping (what can I say, Prime has me spoiled). It arrived and promptly taunted me for almost a week before I could taste my first tea. (That would be the downside of Prime shipping and advent calendars…)

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Prior to this I had not heard of Teanzo 1856, a company out of California, but I’m quite happy to know about them now!

The 24 teas included in this box were:

  1. Winter Earl Grey
  2. Jasmine
  3. Apple Cinnamon
  4. Irish Breakfast
  5. Peppermint Rose
  6. Acai Berry Green
  7. Dream Spa Blend
  8. Black Cherry Tea
  9. Ti Kwan Yin
  10. Chocolate Mint Tea
  11. Bergamot Earl Grey
  12. Detox Mint
  13. Cranberry Tea
  14. Breakfast Tea
  15. Tranquil Spa Blend
  16. Tropical Iced Tea
  17. Moroccan Mint
  18. Vanilla Rooibos
  19. Darjeeling
  20. Orange Creme Dessert Tea
  21. Fennel Chai
  22. Earl Grey Green
  23. Chocolate Coconut Tea
  24. Christmas Chai

Picking a favorite is nigh on impossible, so many of them were amazing in their own unique ways. Both chocolate-including teas were certainly fun, but the Chocoate Coconut Tea was my favorite of the two–even Todd liked that one, and he’s not a tea guy. He also liked the Black Cherry Tea from earlier in the month. I’m always happy with chai blends but not always fine with fennel–the Fennel Chai surprised me with how good it was, though the Christmas Chai was still my preferred of the two.

There was only one tea I was unhappy with, and that was the Apple Cinnamon–it sounded great, but I think something was off. It had an odor to it that was a little too earthy, maybe even a bit musty? I brewed it up anyway and, yeah, the weirdness lingered. It was too bad, too, as I liek apple-cinnamon items in general. I’m hoping I just got a bad batch.

I think both the Dream Spa Blend, Tranquil Spa Blend, and the aptly named Tropical Iced Tea would both be fabulous over ice in the summer. (Bonus for the Tranquil blend being my first experience with green rooibos.) The cranberry tea could have made a lovely sachet or potpourri (if I hadn’t wanted to drink it, too). The Orange Creme Dessert Tea was also aptly name, like a warm creamsicle, but in a good way.

Even though each packet of tea did not seem to hold a tremendous amount, I had no problem brewing a second cup of any of them, when desired, with no loss of flavor. I did sweeten just about all of them, and to many I added a bit of milk. Many of them I used my refillable Keurig pod to brew them and while I know purists would not necessarily agree with the method, I had no problems with it.

Of course, the majority of these teas have caffeine, and I generally avoid that. I made an exception for the advent calendar and didn’t notice too many side effects from the uptake in intake, but I would probably stick with their herbal and rooibos teas in the future (with special exceptions for their chocolate teas).

For my first advent calendar experience (yes, really, this is the first one I’ve done in my 40 years of life as far as I can remember) this was a smashing success. A tea a night, when it’s chilly outside and schedules are hectic, was a nice little wind-down for each day. I’d definitely do it again, and I’ll almost certainly be ordering from Teanzo in the future.

Full disclosure: This is not a sponsored review. I purchased the tea advent calendar myself and was not contacted by the company prior to the start of the sampler. I can’t say they don’t know who I am since they did like a lot of my instagram posts, but not beyond that.

Five More Minutes

Everyday Adventures

I just finished listening to My Mother Was Nuts, a memoir by actress and director Penny Marshall, read by the author.

(Yes, there are affiliate links in this post.)

At first, I wasn’t too sure about her reading her own work–because that’s what it sounded like, someone reading, not performing. But as the book went on, the occasional misplaced paused or lack of inflection stopped mattering, and the deadpan delivery of some of the lines increased the comedy tremendously.

She began and ended the book talking about her desire as a kid to have five more minutes of play time. And describes a lot of her life as ways to play a little bit more. But she wasn’t just about play and having fun, she learned from her brother that it was important to give back–through jobs or even just little ways to make people’s lives better, happier, even for a moment.

The stories about her dance-teacher mom’s relentless hunt for the next place to perform was toned down from mania by Marjorie’s belief that everyone should know how it feels to entertain. While she didn’t set out to be an entertainer herself, a series of opportunities and her brother’s Hollywood connections led to her most famous role as Laverne on Laverne and Shirley. She talks about her SNL memories, and the incredibly funny people she and her second husband, Rob Reiner, hung out with in California. About the joint birthday parties she and Carrie Fisher threw for decades, her travels with Art Garfunkel, and the movies she directed–some of them among my all-time favorites, like A League of Their Own.

I read celebrity biographies not because they are celebrities–I dislike the blind hero worship that celebrities inspire–but because these books show their humanity. Plus, I really like the behind the scenes details about the shows and movies I enjoy, it makes the experiences much more rich. After hearing how Lavern and Shirley got started and what episode she really found her comedic legs on (Angels of Mercy) I went and looked up some of those notable episodes (a lot are available on Hulu). I’m a product of the pop-up video generation, I like the inside scoop, and I prefer to hear it from the horse’s mouth, not some sensationalized tabloid version edited to be more salacious than it really was.

While I wasn’t as crazy about the stories of the various drugs they did during the 80s, I appreciated her frank description of her experiences. When she spoke about 9/11 and what it meant to her to be a New Yorker at that time, and how she went to every event, every opportunity, to show that the city was safe and that the terrorists weren’t going to stop them from living their lives, the choke in her voice wasn’t an act, it was touching. I choked up, and I’m a cynical bitch when it comes to things like that.

Not only did I enjoy this book, I put it up there with the Ellen Burstyn memoir, Lessons in Becoming Myself, as a favorite biography and one I’d recommend unconditionally.

One last thing, the quote that stands out to me is one where she accepts an invitation to spend Christmas in Switzerland. She says,

I was amazed at what was possible when I said yes.

Many (many) years ago I made a rule for myself that I would not say no to any reasonable opportunities. It was a challenge to myself, to my habit of wanting to do something but talking myself out of it at the last minute because it was a new experience and I couldn’t predict the outcome. I was tired of sitting at home wondering what I was missing, knowing it was fear that was keeping me from experiencing life.

I didn’t make 100% fabulous choices, and some were downright dangerous but for some serious overtime put in by my guardian angel, but for the most part I’ve had good things come out of say yes, sure, why not?

This stood out to me, and made me love the book and her story even more, because I could definitely relate. Just like the element of each story in the movies she chose to direct or produce, it’s that common element of life that creates a bond, and make us feel invested and involved.

Penny Marshall had a major health hiccup in 2010 but was able to beat it. Here’s to her “five more minutes,” may they be long ones.

Tuesday Reviews-Day: A Trio of Holiday Reviews

Tuesday Revews-Day

No Wine Left Behind

It’s been a little while since we’ve done a good, old-fashioned product review around here, but today I have not one, not two, but three things that could be useful to you this season.

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First off, this is the CapaBunga Wine Storage & Service Kit and I think it’d make a fabulous hostess gift. Now, I reviewed the original Capabunga wine caps a few years back and we’ve been using them pretty much constantly over the last couple of years. I even tried to use on a champagne bottle with mixed results.

While it was a bit of a stretch to get the CapaBunga over the mouth of the champagne bottle, the pressure that built up inside was often too much for it and we’d hear a soft “pop” from the fridge when it’d just get too much. So when I heard they’d come out with the CapaBubbles cap I was over the moon! Obviously we were not the only ones who didn’t always finish the bottle of champers in one go.

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The CapaBubbles top is a 2-piece cap with a plastic collar that fits just under the mount of the bottle and the cap which screws onto the threads of the aforementioned collar. Instant screw-top champagne! We opened a bottle of the Barefoot champagne you see above on Thanksgiving morning for mimosas and I am happy to report that the remaining bubbly is still bubbly a week and a half later. Cheers!

In addition to two of the original CapaBunga wine savers and the CapaBubbles champagne stopper, the service set also comes with a set six GlassWhere glass markers–silicone collars meant to rest on the base of your stemware to designate whose is whose. They have party-appropriate sayings on them, like “Most likely to break a glass” for the resident klutz (which would be me… though it’s been a while since I’ve actually committed such a party foul).

The CapaBunga gift set is $29.95

On-Trend Stocking Stuffer

Everyone’s pretty much on board with the grown-up coloring book trend, right? I mean, sure, I’ve been touting the benefits of busting out the crayons and coloring books as foil to creative blocks for ages; it’s nice that the rest of the world is catching on!

What I’ve noticed, though, about the more modern coloring books is that the designs are incredibly involved, a fact that is not calming to me, at all. The tiny illustrations and pattern fills are lovely to look at, don’t get me wrong! I love some good line art and repeating patterns (more power to the folks that made Zentangles a marketable thing in the mid-00s but I was doodling that stuff in my notebook margins back in the late 80s), but it wasn’t for coloring.

Still, when our friends at Oriental Trading asked if I wanted to take a look at the coloring books from their sister company, MindWare, I thought it was at least worth giving them a shot.

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I received 3 Mindware coloring books: Fantastical Styles Flowers, Celtic Flowers, and Fantastical Styles Ocean. They do include busily-patterned images, but like the conch shell, above, many have a single, large “container” for the patterns. That was a little easier to wrap my head around.

One thing I definitely like about the current coloring book trend is that these books are printed on nice, bright white paper that has a little heft to it. And most are printed on one side so you can use markers and not worry as much about bleed-through. I decided to use my watercolor pencils and water brush to work on the conch shell and once I gave myself permission to leave some of the spaces white (negative space is your friend, folks) I had a pretty good time!

Another nice thing about these particular books is that many of the designs repeat within the same book. So if your perfectionist side comes out a bit, you’ve likely got another chance at the design. Or you could share, you know, whatever floats your boat.

Each of the Mindware adult coloring books is 6.95

Catering to Your Gluten-Free Guests

Finally I had the chance to try these Free for All gluten-free crackers. You want to be a good hostess and make sure you’ve got everyone covered as far as snacks go, but finding good gluten-free crackers can sometimes be difficult. And what if it’s not just wheat you have to watch for, but corn, rice, and soy, too?!

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Free for All crackers are made from a blend of cassava flour and five ancient grains (amaranth, quinoa, millet, sorghum, and teff). They come in three flavors: Olive Oil and Sea Salt, Roasted Garlic and Rosemary, and Olive Oil and Herb. We put these out for our Halloween party as well as with the appetizers at Thanksgiving.

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Now, at first glance, I admit: the crackers look like chipboard. But they are surprisingly light and not the heavy or dense as some gluten-free products can be. So don’t let the looks dissuade you!

I don’t know about you, but I heavily dislike dry food, so I’m not going to just eat plain crackers, I’m going to have something with them! The Olive Oil and Sea Salt cracker, above, is spread with blueberry-vanilla goat cheese and was a very tasty part of breakfast one morning. I also think these crackers would be great crumbled and used as cracker-meal in a topping for a casserole or the crust of a savory pie.

Free for All Crackers are produced by Partners and can be found at many grocery stores as well as by the case on Amazon (I see they have brownie thins, now, too! Wouldn’t those be awesome in s’mores?!)

Thank you to CapaBunga, Oriental Trading Company, and Partners for sending me these products to try out and share with all of you!

Consuming Mass Quantities of Books!

Just for Fun

Because when so many are audiobooks these days, “reading” doesn’t seem like quite the right word, you know?

August book covers | snagged from Goodreads

August book covers | snagged from Goodreads

Even I’m a bit impressed: that’s an average of a book every 2 days. Of course, that’s not how I generally read, but some, like Storm Clouds Rolling In, were an all-day read, so that certainly helps. But mostly it was me being spoiled by the audiobook options and even taking to listening to them while I cook dinner some nights, that helped quite a bit.

The Series-es (or however you pluralize that)

  • The Source*
  • The Void*

The first book in the Witching Savannah series, The Line, I read a while back, probably free via Kindle First or Kindle Select, and either the next book wasn’t available yet or I wasn’t compelled enough to buy it, but when I saw the rest of the trilogy when I was looking for new car “reads”, I remembered the first one fondly enough to give them a whirl.

It’s tough to talk about a series like this because it’s almost impossible to talk about events in books 2 or 3 that would ultimately be spoilers for the previous works. I will say that it deals with a family of supernatural witches in Savannah (my second favorite story locale) and the theory that said magic has it’s source or tether in something called the Line. Ley lines and key lines are common enough concepts, and this one starts off along the same vein (hah!) before turning it on its ear a bit. Book 1, from a year ago or more, was good–typical southern dysfunctional family with the added kapow of magic–and Book 2 (Source) was my favorite of the trilogy. Book 3? Well, again, without giving too much away, the author does something I disagree with quite a bit in tying up the main characters’ loose ends. Then he undoes it, sorta, in a semi-clever but nonetheless clunky manner.

  • Timebound*
  • Time’s Echo
  • Time’s Edge*
  • Time’s Mirror

I really hate when I start a series that hooks me in and then isn’t finished yet. Noooooooo! Seriously, I was horrified to find that the 3rd (Edge and Mirror are supplemetnal novellas, but still worth reading) book in the series won’t be out until mid-October. But that aside…

This is, as you might have guessed, a time-travel series with the protagonist as a 16 year old girl. Again, being that it’s a series it’s tough to talk about specifics, but I found the story captivating and the main character just snarky enough to be believable as a teenager, just obtuse enough to be human, and just stubborn enough to be relatable. If books that deal with multimple timelines or realities make your head hurt (like Crichton’s Timeline or the Matrix movies), this might not be the series for you, but otherwise I recommend it heartily.

And while very much dependent on future technology, a lot of it takes place in the recognizable past. Had I read something like this in middle school, for instance, it would have spurred so many independent study sessions I can’t even tell you. And history is totally not my thing.

Oh, and if you’re a fan of AHS and looking forward to the upcoming Hotel season, Timebound has some verrrry interesting plot points (based in fact) that I was reminded of as the Hotel trailers have started to air.

  • Storm Clouds Rolling In

A series with just one book read, what mischief is this?! Well, next to the rest of the series not being available, I dislike the bait and switch of the first book being available on Kindle Unlimited but the rest of the series (of which there are 7, so far, I think) I’d have to buy. And I’m still debating but, yeah, I’ll be picking them up, too. Once some of my backlog is read through.

At any rate! If you liked Gone With the Wind but, like me, really wanted more of the pre-war part, the Bregdan Chronicles might be worth looking into. Instead of the Deep South where many an antebellum story is set, this book revolves around Virginia, both on a remote tobacco plantation as well as in Richmond. The daughter of the family is certainly no Scarlett, though she does have a certain willful streak and is not interested in becoming the sort of lady her mother has in mind. No, our heroine actually turns out to be a budding abolitionist (not giving away much, the story leads you there from pretty early on), but it’s not as simple as freeing the plantations slaves and moving north, not when her father becomes important to the governor and is trying to reason peace over war.

Apparently this book is based on actual events and people in the area, though is still firmly planted (hah!) in fiction.

Speaking of History 

  • Yellow Crocus*
  • Daughters of the Witching Hill*
  • Melissa Explains it All
  • Paris Time Capsule*

Upon a reader’s recommendation I picked up Yellow Crocus, which starts off in the first person by stating it is a true story before switching to third person not-exactly-omniscient for the main narration. This was a bit disconcerting at first, but we rolled with it, only to have it handle the epilogue back in first person and, of course, it’s not true at all but a complete work of fiction. That’s a sort of mechanical review of the book, I realize, but I didn’t like the misdirection.

The story itself, though, was quite good, despite the early confusion, and also deals with a daughter of a plantation, her relationship and dependence on her nurse, and how the two women’s lives paralleled each other as time went on. I pretty much saw where the story was going to end up, and the main character took an awfully long time to come into her own, but I don’t think that’s actually wrong for the era the story is set in, just a character annoyance I’ve mentioned before.

On the other hand, Daughters of the Witching Hill is, we find, based closely on actual trial reports from the pre-Inquisition Witch Trials of Pendel Forest, though you’d swear from the story itself that everything was made up from whole cloth. It wasn’t a highly active story, but it spread over 3 generations and included the sort of little touches that really made these women very real to the reader. That it was read by someone (audiobook, again) with a very good handle of the vernacular made it all the more pleasant to listen to.

In more recent history, and far lighter, I switched to Melissa Joan Hart’s autobiography and, while a lot of reviews I saw were negative, I really enjoyed reading about her early years in television and thought the anecdotes about her Sabrina years were more than adequate: I didn’t need some sleazy tell-all. Some criticize her insistence that she’s normal as can be considering to be a false front and took offense at her name dropping, but what else can you do when you work with other stars?! I found it refreshing, honest, and down to earth.

And then–do you remember several years ago (2010ish) when the apartment was discovered in Paris that hadn’t been touched since WWII??? I vaguely did, so when I stumbled upon Paris Time Capsule I was curious how the writer would spin the story. According to the notes, the book is based upon that same discovery, the owner was, in fact, a French courtesan of the era, and the painting that was found in the real apartment and in the book was painted by Bouldini, a painter of the era known for painting the fringes of society.

Seeing as this was a bit of a romance, it has a predictable ending in that respect, though it does take quite a while for the main character, Kat, to find her ever-lovin’ spine! Sheesh! As to the bigger question of the story–why was Kat left the Paris apartment and not the family that was, apparently, the woman’s descendant? That one I figured out pretty early on, though not all the details, of course. It didn’t take away from the reading since it was more a passing thought towards the beginning and not something more in-your-face. Hearing about the French countryside and the path a refugee from Paris, escaping on the eve of the Nazi invasion, was quite interesting was very entertaining as they uncovered each piece of the puzzle.

And the Rest…

  • The Mermaid’s Sister*
  • Dead Secret
  • We Were Liars
  • The Rose Girls*

These last four books were just sort of all over the place, thematically.

The Mermaid’s Sister is set in turn-of-the-century America with it’s peddlers and traveling medicine shows, and a woman on a hill who adopts two girls–one left for her in a sea shell, the other brought by the stork. The shell child starts to transform into a mermaid at age 16 and a plan is formed to bring her to the sea before she wastes away to nothing. While first her sister and then their family friend are, in turn, committed to breaking this “curse” the continue on and I began to wonder how we were only halfway through the book when we were so close to the obvious ending?

And then something happens to completely change the story and then I knew how we were only halfway through. I was also suddenly more interested in the story at this point, as the first half was sweet, but not exactly gripping. The second half was far more entertaining and satisfactory as far as character growth went. The ending was exactly as I suspected, but there were some nice twists in there that made it that much better.

Fast forward a few centuries to modern-day England and you’ve got the setting of a typical whodunnit that was a bit sluggish throughout, really. I set it down several times in favor of other books throughout the first half of the month.

We Were Liars was the book club pick. Not too far in there’s a starling passage that turns out to be nothing more than a teenage melodramatic metaphor, something that is a bit of a hallmark of the book. With a definite poor-little-rich-girl vibe (I mean, really, broken home notwithstanding, her family owns a private island near Martha’s Vineyard where they all summer, the whole clan, and the kids run rampant and unsupervised), the teenage narrator dines out on metaphors like they’re candy. Seriously, it was a bit much. Despite all of this I was actually enjoying the book after it got going and as the main character struggles to regain her memory after an accident 2 years prior, and then…

I swear I’ve seen a someecard or similar that says something to the effect of you can kill any character you want, just don’t kill the dog? I can’t find it, but I wanted to use that as a virtual bookmark for We Were Liars. Yeah. Forewarned and all that.

Still, the ending was not exactly what I expected it to be, but I got to the correct conclusion several pages before the “protagonist” and at least she then has the decency to cut out all the melodrama in the face of true tragedy.

Ending the month was something decidedly lighter, with The Rose Girls telling the story of three girls recovering after the death of their mother, secrets revealed, lives set right, and a big old manor house (complete with moat!) saved from ruin. I was just a sweet story, overall, with some laugh-out-loud moments here and there and an ultimately satisfying ending. It was exactly what I needed as I packed kits and dealt with website stuff at the end of the month.

At the beginning of the year I set my reading goal at 75 books, figuring that if I was mainly reading at night before bed, two books a week (for 100 books/year) might be pushing it. Obviously that was before several things changed and before I joined Kindle Unlimited. Now I’m at 66 books for the year, so will likely reach my goal in September. Maybe I’ll make 100 my stretch goal or, maybe, I’ll switch things up and not read as much? Yeah, okay, I don’t see that really happening, but even I have to admit my book consumption tops even my summer reading mania during my school years.

Read anything good lately? I’m obviously open to suggestions!

(*denotes an audiobook)