Extreme Makeover Home Edition – with hottie Ty Pennington – is filming in Maricar’s neighborhood.

Maricar is the writer of Keeping the Castle here at b5media.

It will be a rare opportunity to get another perspective of what goes on behind the scenes of miracle makeover television, so stop by her first three posts and then subscribe so you don’t miss it.
Extreme Makeover Home Edition in Mid-Michigan
Extreme Makeover Home Edition: The House
Extreme Makeover Home Edition: Saturday’s Progress.

In other parts of the World Y from Joy Unexpected found no joy when Trading Spaces came to her neighborhood, she found it …read more

Have you seen the generic, knock-off Magic Erasures on the shelves right next to the Mr. Clean ones?
We’ve been moving so I’ve used about 16 Magic Erasures to clean 4 years of grime off the old house and other people’s grime off the new one.
The Mr. Clean Magic Erasure is a housewife’s wet dream. Really. They cost around $2.80 for two. A little too much for me to throw away the nasty ones until they’ve crumbled into a fine dust (they disintegrate as you use them.)
 The generic knock offs – and I’ve seen several brands in several different stores – cost …read more

I adore Mr. Clean’s Magic Eraser. A friend of mine used it to get Sharpie marks off her boss’s wall after bringing her kids to work for an afternoon.
So I bought it and I LOVE it. It’s a little white sponge. It’s weightless, it has no smell at all, it doesn’t engorge with water when it’s wet so it remains weightless and without smell for the duration of use. I’ve looked on the box and it has no ingredients. The only clue is that it says, “Do not mix with chlorine bleach,” so I assume there is amonia in it. …read more

Are you an e-mail chatter box? Do you keep your inbox full rather than empty? Do you suffer from e-mail addiction? Do you know how to give the “e-mail brush-off”?
Did you know that how you manage your inbox says a lot about you? For example, “…if you keep your inbox full rather than empty, it may mean you keep your life cluttered in other ways,” says psychologist Dave Greenfield, who founded the Center for Internet Behavior in West Hartford, Conn.
Often, I would walk by someone’s desk and notice that he or she seemed to have thousands of unanswered e-mails. I …read more