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I have a feeling that we’re going to need a new car soon

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the other day, as Chris pulled out of the driveway to go to a store for me I noticed that our car was making spluttering sounds as he drove away. I gave him a call on the cellphone and asked him if he heard the car making funny noises but he didn’t think that it did … still … our car is getting kind of old. It’s a 1996 Ford Contour. So it’s 13 or 14 years old.

I’m actually amazed at how good it looks. It has a few tiny rust spots but other than that you’d never know the car was as old as it is.

I have a feeling, given it’s age and the spluttering sounds I heard the other day (no matter that my husband didn’t) that we’ll be looking for another car in a year or so. Hopefully not sooner! I mean it’s bound to start having some kind of serious problem – right?

Hmm maybe I’ll check online to find out which cars have the best safety ratings, best mileage etc. That’s what I did last time when we were getting our current car. I also spent some time looking for insurance online where I could compare or get quotes for car insurance prices for the cars we were interested in.

I’d love to get a Hybrid, maybe a Smart car … but I think they are too pricey for us right now unless we get a “mildly” used one. As it stands, unless Chris or I start making a ton of money our next car will probably be a used one, no matter what kind we get.

Are you driving an older car? Have you been thinking about getting a new or used car soon to replace your current one?





Why does my dog keep chewing on her dog bed?

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There’s only one problem with having a dog that loves to chew … when she’s bored she starts to chew on her pet beds! What a pain … I’m trying to give my dog a comfortable place to rest and she repays me by chewing holes in her dog bed!

It’s not as bad now as it was when she was a little puppy. She chewed on everything she could back then. I swear it was worse than watching a toddler. Luckily she only chewed a few things (other than her bed) that she shouldn’t have – including the bottom of our upstairs staircase, the coffee table leg and the hood of my coat!

she has one smallish pet bed in her crate – she’s a Lab and she just fits in it if she curls up. Recently she’s started to chew on the pillow again. We also have a HUGE pet bed that sits on the living room floor and it’s made with a very thick canvas material. She’s chewed the center pillow in that a few times – I have a feeling that some of the chewing on that one was accidental when she was chewing one of her bones or her rawhide … but still, the holes look horrible!

I’ve hand sewn and patched her small pet bed a few times and that’s helped but it doesn’t
t make the pet bed look much better.

Midnight is about 19 months old now. She’s calmed down a lot in the last few months, but other Lab owners keep telling us that they don’t really start to calm down until they are about three. Some have also said the destructive chewing slows down around that time too, although others have older dogs that still chew a lot.

I guess we just have to keep her as active as possible so that she’s not bored and too tired to chew her bed.

Do any other dog owners have this problem?

BTW if anyone knows what to do about a possible mouse or other wild animal that seems to be in one of our walls please comment on the post I made on Tricia’s Musings. I’m getting freaked out by the weird sounds in the wall!

Poked and prodded

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Today turned out to be busy!

My husband usually has Mondays off and works the rest of the week, but he did someone a favor and traded shifts so he worked on Monday and had today off instead. Good timing on the switch as I had a doctors appointment in the afternoon and if I had taken the subway as I’d planned to do it would have taken me well over an hour to get there. Instead it only took about 15 minutes by car!

I’ve been seeing my family doctor and other doctors fairly regularly because my Crohn’s just won’t settle down … plus I had to go in today to get another shot of Depro Provera. No I’m not using it as birth control – even though that is how it’s working on my system … we’re trying it out to see if takes care of my endometriosis. I’ve been on it for almost a year now and since I don’t get my period while I’m on it I’ll have to say it helped because now I don’t have those horrible horrible period pains that were almost making me pass out in pain prior to my starting Depro Provera.

The only bad side-effect is that it’s caused me to gain at least 10 additional pounds … since I have Crohns that’s not too bad (Crohn’s tends to make you lose weight!), but still … I don’t like the extra weight – not at all. Hmmm maybe I should try some Solo Slim ?

I’ve also been having a lot of trouble with my back lately. I’d say it’s been hurting more and more for over a year – especially if I walk a few blocks or do house cleaning like sweeping or vacuuming. I think it’s because I tend to lean forward a little bit when I do those things. Anyway, my back goes into spasms that get worse and worse until i lie down and let my back muscles rest.

At the beginning of February – when my husband was in the hospital with a heart problem – I did a lot of walking back and forth to the hospital. I was carrying things back and forth as well. I think that did my back in … because sometime during those first few days of the month my left thigh went numb and now my whole left leg is pretty numb. I have Vitamin D deficiency too so that might be affecting the bones in my back.

So in addition to seeing the doctor today we also made a trip to the hospitals x-ray department and had my lower back x-rayed.

Then it was off to a drug store to pick up some digestive enzymes. Since my bowels are inflamed due to the Crohn’s disease it’s causing me not to digest some of the foods I eat very well. I also don’t digest some of the pills I have to take each day either … so I’m going to try taking digestive enzymes for a while and see if helps at all.

Finally after being out for about four hours we arrived back home. I didn’t get to rest my sore back though … my husband wanted me to edit one of his posts and he always seems to have trouble resizing photos and then adding them to his blog. I’ve even written out directions but he seems to always need my help. Arghhhh! It’s not that hard – right?

I think I”m just going to relax for the rest of the evening. God knows I need to recover from being poked and prodded all day! LOL But first – dinner! I made a roast yesterday so we’re going to have leftovers … easy!

Our bedroom is freezing!

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I’m so glad that winter is almost over! Yesterday it reached 18 Celsius (64 F) in the afternoon … but in a few days we’ll be back to the usual cold March weather. Hopefully this March won’t be as bad as last year! I remember a few snow storms and one of the worst of the year happened in March of last year.

Other than going outside in the cold I dislike the cold winter months because our main bedroom, upstairs, is the coldest room in the house. I wrote a post about it recently on my main blog – talking about how I hate getting ready for bed in the room because it’s so chilly that I end up covered in goosebumps! Some of my readers on the other blog suggested a variety of things but the main suggestion was to use a heated blanket. While that’s a great suggestion for once we get into bed, it does nothing to help with the too cool room.

When we first moved into our house in June of 2001 we noticed that the main bedroom – at the end of a long hallway far away from the stairs, didn’t have any cold air return. So we had some duct work done and had a cold air return added to the room. I’m sure that helped, but we still had drafts in the room once winter came.

A couple of years after we moved in we decided to tear down two of the bedroom walls … well the plaster anyway, to find the source of the drafts. We plugged up a few cracks that we found in the triple brick in the top of the wall near the ceiling and some near the base of the wall and then used drywall to close up the wall again. That fix made the room quite a bit warmer than it had been, but it’s still cooler than the rest of the house.

Since the room is cool in the winter we’ve always used some kind of electric heater to warm the room for an hour or so once we got to bed. We turn it on for a while prior to going to bed and since it has a timer on it we set it to run for about an hour after we’ve gone to bed. That helps quite a bit, but unfortunately our heater stopped working so we now need a new one. Believe me … that heated blanket is becoming more and more appealing!

We obviously still have some air leaks in the room because the room is too warm in the summer as well. Maybe we’ll have to tear down all the walls to find any other cracks that we missed.

Do any of you have the same problem? Is your bedroom a lot cooler than the rest of your house?

Our messy basement

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We haven’t set an exact date yet, but sometime in April we’re going to have our oil tank replaced. Prior to that we have to clean out our basement so that the work can be done.

I’m not looking forward to the clean up!

We’ve lived in our house since 2001 but because we started doing renovations from the first day we owned the house we still have a lot of stuff stored in the basement that hasn’t even been unpacked from our move! Plus there’s tons of renovation materials – extra wood, paints, sanding stuff – way more than a normal household would need, but enough for one that’s undergoing renovations.

When my Mom died in 2004 we divided up furniture and other things from my parents house between my three brothers, my sister and I. Since I’m the youngest and being a fairly new home owner I got more furniture than my siblings. Of course, as I said above, we’re still trying to renovate our house, so most of the items I got from my parents house are stored in the basement as well.

All of this has resulted in a very jam packed basement! I really should take some pictures just to show you the furniture and boxes piled up on top of one another. It’s so bad I really hate going into the basement to do laundry, get food from the freezer or use the washroom down there.

We have a lot of cleaning to do over the next month! I think that once we start going through all the stuff down there we’ll end up throwing out or giving away at least half of it. Hmmm … if the weather stays nice maybe we could have a yard sale.

What I’d like, once the basement is cleaned out and hopefully half the stuff has been disposed of, and once the new oil tank is in, is to have a useable area in the basement. We don’t have money to renovate it just yet, but eventually I’d like to set it up like a den with nice home theater furniture and home theater system down there. Now that would be nice.

It’s a shame … our house is fairly small, and we have all this space in the basement but we can’t really use it for anything because we’ve been using it as a storage area for things that we’ll probably never use.

Do you have a place in your home that’s like that too .. maybe the garage, the basement or a specific room? Or maybe it’s your attic that’s jam packed with things that you put away years ago thinking you’d use them again sometime in the future?

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