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Insect Repellant Smart Options

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Bugs. No matter what purpose they serve, they can be a giant nuisance. Flies and mosquitoes can ruin a nice outdoor picnic, and certain insects, like bees, can be dangerous to those who may have an allergy.

 

Most people want to kill bugs found around their homes. They want to keep mosquitoes and flies away from their outdoor patio, and they want to keep other bugs, like ants and spiders, out of their homes.


For years, many people have been turning to pesticides or insecticides and other insect removal sprays in order to kill bugs and keep them away from certain areas, but most pesticides or insecticides contain poisons and can be very dangerous to your health.

Instead of putting your health and the health of your family at risk in order to keep pesky bugs at bay, consider using the following smart options.

Outdoor Insect Killer

Mostly known as “bug zappers”, these outdoor insect killers are a great way to keep bugs away from your home and patio without the need for poisonous sprays. Instead, these zappers use a fluorescent light to attract bugs, and when the bug is close enough, the light kills them. There are many different outdoor insect killers on the market, each varying in size and design, so make sure to choose the one that’s the best fit for your yard.

Citronella Candles

Citronella candles come in many different shapes and sizes and are a great way to keep bugs away from your patio. They look like regular candles, so they can fulfill their duty while still providing a nice ambiance. Citronella candles generate a scent that repels bugs, and while you can smell it, the scent is not overpowering.

Mosquito Dunks

Nobody like mosquitoes, and they can turn a nice outdoor experience into an itchy nightmare. Mosquitoes like water, and if you have a pond, bird bath or other standing water near your home, you’re going to have mosquitoes. You can fight them by placing mosquito dunks into these water sources. These rings are about two inches in diameter and can kill mosquito larvae up to 100 feet away.

Off! Clip On

A few years ago, Off! created a clip on bug repellent. This device has a repellent inside and uses a fan to propel the repellent out around your area. It works the same way as bug spray, but without the nasty pesticides and insecticides and definitely without the nasty bug spray smell.

Exterminators

If you have a major bug infestation near your home, hiring an exterminator to alleviate the problem can also be a smart option. Exterminators are knowledgeable about bugs, and along with taking care of your infestation, they’ll also find the root of the problem to better alleviate it. Plus, exterminators have different methods that can help you remove your bug problem in a safe way.

Don’t let a bug infestation kill your outdoor or indoor activities. Instead, use one of these smart options to help you safely remove bugs from your home.

Prepared by Mariana Smith from Franklin Pest solutions. Learn more about their work and consider incorporating some of their tips for daily bug-free living.





Tools to Organize Your Recipes Online

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After exploring this topic I found out how incredibly helpful all the available websites are for making recipes useful. Given that technology plays such a major role in our lives, what better way to employ its attributes than organizing recipes? Many even offer meal planning and grocery shopping venues. On the other hand, for some of us nostalgics, there’s still nothing better than curling up on the couch with familiar cookbooks and locating well-loved yellowed, stained pages describing how to prepare the very best comfort food in the world. But maybe the next generation would appreciate it if I actually took time to put them in one of those amazing helpful organizational tools.

  • Grocery Shopping on the Fly

I picture a mom with one night for grocery shopping. That’s the evening without ballet, gymnastics, sports, horseback riding, or piano lessons. Since her time is so scarce, and valuable, organization is a must.  An additional look at her favorite websites and she not only has favorite recipes, and meal plans, but a grocery list whose items appear as they do categorically from one side of the store to the other. Now if only all that efficiency would just translate into someone shopping for her without charging for the service.

  • Online Recipe Shower

In recent history, brides have actually asked if there was a way for them to have a “Recipe Shower” online. Not a formal party, but a way to send tried and true “food friends” to the betrothed. This might be a good way for truly busy or out of town guests to “get together” before the wedding. I wonder how it would work; could someone let me know.

  • Helpful Websites

After researching several websites, it appears the best places to go for organizing those wayward recipes includes places where recipes are readily available to your computer, have menu suggestions, nutrition notes, and make grocery lists from needed items. Mentioned below are various helpful sites. The first ones, to my knowledge are free: Springpad; Evernote (free in most frequently used platforms) and its add-on, Say Mmm;  Dropbox; Food on the Table; Our Groceries (free Android app); Pepper Plate Recipe, Menu, and Cooking Planner; and Google Docs. As you know, Google Docs is not exclusively for recipe organization, but does provide useful tools. Other less cost effective websites include: Paprika; Meal Board Meal and Grocery Planner app; Plan to Eat (not free after first month); AllRecipes; Spark People (meal plans and nutrition) and last but not least is Pinterest. Therefore, besides organizing recipes, this myriad of websites, and many more I’m sure, can do everything except actually cook the meals. Sometimes you might even find a chef preparing a meal, or entrée, you find interesting…those are especially enjoyable and helpful for those cooks-in-training.

  • Vintage Cooks

With online networking and helpful recipe exchange sites equipped with comments on the palatability of various dishes, cooks can drool while they plan. As much as it pains this seasoned chef to admit it, more cookbooks may slowly be finding their way into the antique shops. But I do find it quite gratifying to be able to use both cookbooks and websites; makes for such a well-rounded cook.

Gareth Shaw is a professional chef and writer who loves to blog about everything from the best ways to keep your recipes to tips on serving quick, healthy meals.

My favorite birthday meal

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Yum. There’s nothing like a delicious birthday meal. It was my birthday on Thursday and while my husband and I didn’t do anything major to celebrate it we didn’t have a very nice steak dinner that night. A lovely barbecued mesquite steak, with steamed asparagus and sweet potato fries.

Then, last night, my mother-in-law, came in to town. We were all supposed to go away this weekend but in the end I decided to stay home. However, since my mother-in-law was staying over last night before she and my husband took a long drive to the Ottawa area she offered to buy me a birthday dinner. She suggested Chinese food.

I’m a little leery of Asian food because I’m allergic to Shrimp and Shellfish but there is a very nice Thai restaurant near us that we’ve had take out from a few times since I discovered my Shrimp allergy and they totally start fresh for my order. They clean their pots and make sure that there’s no seafood or shellfish based sauces in any of the foods items we order and of course no shrimp either. So I feel very safe eating food from their restaurant.

So we ordered quite a bit of food from the Red Chilli Thai Restaurant on the Danforth in Toronto. I think it was forth or fifth time we’ve order food from that restaurant and as usual the food was delicious. I particularly love their Mango Chicken dish. It’s delicious.

There were three of us eating on Friday night and we ordered several tasty dishes. Let’s see, we ordered the Vegetarian Appetizer Plate, steamed rice, Green Curry Beef, Cashew Nut Chicken, mango chicken, and Satay Chicken, and chicken Phad Thai with three spring rolls. Now, because our order was over $50 we got the Pad Thai and spring rolls free. We also got a 10% discount for picking it up and paying cash. Pretty cool.

Needless to say we didn’t come close to finishing the food that we ordered since there were so many dishes. My husband and mother in law left early this morning on their trip and I’m here with a fridge literally full of tasty leftovers! Yum. Yep. That’s what I had for dinner tonight. Thai food. I love it. I could eat this birthday dinner every day.

What’s your favorite birthday dinner?

Red Chilli Thai Restaurant on Urbanspoon

My hand is slowly getting better

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I haven’t been writing on any of my blogs in the last two or so months as much as I used to because of the hand injury that I incurred in early June.

My hand is still recovering as the injury was quite bad, but it’s much better than it was when it first occurred! It was bad enough for most of the last two months that I could barely type.

I tried using dictation software to type my posts for a while and that was working as long as the room was fairly quite or at the very least had a steady background sound level, but for most of late July and August there’s been someone home with me all the time so there’s been lots of noise in the house. Plus, when you have to “speak” your thoughts, your blog posts, your email replies, your Facebook responses, your Twitter posts .. well, there’s a certain lack of privacy if someone else is around to hear every single thing that you utter.

Don’t get me wrong, for the most part I don’t have any big secrets that I’m trying to keep from my husband or temporary renter in our house or anyone for that matter, but I’m not accustomed to every single thing that I write (and would have had to say, sometimes repeatedly to the dictation software to get it right) heard by everyone in my household. It’s pretty strange to get used to!

I still plan on using the dictation software. My hand is still healing after all. But I need the house to either be empty or at least the room I’m in to be empty and fairly quite for me to use the software – for multiple reasons.

In other news – since I haven’t posted for a while … yes we have a temporary renter in the house. I’ll probably write more about that at another time. He’s kind of driving me nuts at the moment and he’ll be out of the house very soon .. like hopefully today or tomorrow. Yeah! Fingers Crossed!

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I smooshed my hand

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You’ll have to excuse me for not writing much lately. Earlier this month I had an accident that resulted in me damaging my left hand – badly. Oh and unfortunately my left hand is my writing hand so that makes typing on the computer or doing pretty much anything a whole lot more difficult!

We’ve been doing some renovations on our home and my husband “stupidly” left an extension ladder – you know one of those huge metal ladders – out in our living room. It was lying on it’s side up against a table that we have our turtle tank on but that table happens to be right in the hallway that leads from the dining room to the kitchen. Well … Early in the morning of June 7th I was wandering into the kitchen to get a drink of water and as I came back through that hallway in the semi-dark my foot caught on the ladder – or something – I really don’t know what happened and the next thing I knew I was falling literally on top of the ladder and almost under the side table.

Skip forward to a very swollen left hand, a huge bruise on my lower left thigh a trip to the local emergency room that took 6 hours – with xrays of my hand and a follow up visit with a plastic surgeon that specializes in hands and I’m in a special hand splint because it looks like I have a torn ligament in my left thumb, and possibly a torn ligament in my outer left wrist or maybe a break in the bones there. Next week I have a follow up visit with the surgeon to see how my hand is doing. It’s still swollen and bruised but less than it was to begin with so that’s good. Then if it’s not healing well enough or if she thinks it might be a complete tear of a ligament I guess she’s going to send me for an MRI and then depending on the results I might have to have surgery.

torn thumb ligament and torn outer wrist ligament

So … thanks for leaving the ladder out Chris! Whatever happens it looks like I’m going to be in this splint for at least another four weeks so there goes half the summer. Do you know how hard it is to type on fingered and how hard it is to do just about everything else with your non-dominant hand? I take a lot of medicines and I can’t even open my pill bottles properly! I have to leave most of them open with the caps sitting on top and I’m really messed up if I close one! Oh and I can’t even use the plastic twist thing on a loaf of bread to open or close the bag. It’s hard to do with your non dominant hand and since my left hand is all splinted up so that I can’t use my thumb it’s almost impossible and very painful to do with my left hand. So my bread is put in a Ziploc bag for now.

Wrist and Thumb Spica Splint

 

The huge lump in my thigh is slowly going down. It’s been 11 days since the accident. What was once one huge lump is now several smaller ones. I don’t know if that’s good or bad? Smaller is good I suppose but it was HUGE to begin with. I was told not to be too active.

Bruised thigh after fall ON ladder

I know I’ll figure more things out as time goes by, but I’m not a happy camper.

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