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 was boring and inconvenient.

Image Source: Maricar at Keeping the Castle.

Post from: Blisstree

Keeping The Castle & Extreme Makeover

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 about $1.05. So you save about 50 cents per erasure.

 But do they work?

Well, I just wiped crayon off a kitchen chair, black Sharpie off plastic drawers and coffee stains off the computer.

Cheaper Magic gets a Blog Fabulous happy boogie dance!

Post from: Blisstree

Generic Magic

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. But, I can’t prove it because, as I said, no smell at all.

It works so well that I believe the secret ingredient is, in fact, a little pinch of magic dust.

It easily scrubs grime from the bathtub, sinks, door jams or anywhere at all there is grime. It gets crayon, pencil, pen scribbles and off walls of any surface – and as my 5-year-old daughter can attest, even a child had enough elbow grease to use it. It cleans soot from fire or smoke damage easily. It wipes up all the goop on refridgerator shelves. I have yet to try it on anything that it doesn’t work on.

Seriously, this is the only cleaning product I buy anymore. I buy it in bulk so I don’t run out. I hate when I’m on a cleaning binge and I run out of my Magic Eraser. Be prepared for the one drawback, it disolves as you use it. I suspect they could make it so that it lasts forever, but then we wouldn’t run out and buy anymore. But it’s cheap enough, you can buy a four pack for under $4.

When you first use one be prepared to have a spring cleaning frenzy overtake you. You’ll try it on a particularly nasty job and you’ll be amazed. Then you’ll think, hey I wonder if it would get the grime off the patio chairs outside. Then you’ll hit the door jamb on the front door that perhaps isn’t so white anymore from everyone touching it day in and day out. Then you’ll be looking around your house and see all sorts of grime, grease, fingerprints, marks and smudges that you long ago stopped seeing because you tried to scrub it off and failed, so you learned to stop looking at it to save your peace of mind. But, once you suspect the Magic Eraser will work on it, you’ll all of the sudden see it and tackle it and will rejoice with a long-forgotten glee that dirt is to be conquered.

In the back of my mind I worry that maybe someday they’ll discover that whatever is in it causes cancer or some such hideous thing. But, then I think of Elaine from Seinfeld and how she ran to all the pharmacies for miles around to buy up all the sponges when they discontinued them as a birth control method.

I will be like that. I’ll order it on the Internet and buy cases of it from discount stores and I’d even buy it on the black market.

Post from: Blisstree

Buy it on the Black Market

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 can remember feeling inadequate; as in–I’m not important or popular enough to be getting all of that mail.

But then I realized that those with the over-stuffed inbox could be “e-procrastinators”…making the decision to deal with old e-mail tomorrow or the next day…similar to those who leave bills unopened for months and months.

I answer every e-mail — that may have to do with my need to be liked. I also have a very neat in-box…because I can’t bear chaos and clutter. (why then is my sweater drawer in such disarray?)

Regardless of what type of e-mail profile under which we fall, the bottom line is that an organized inbox can only help our productivity.

Here are some logical tips from organizational experts: Marilyn Paul, author of It’s Hard To Make A Difference When You Can’t Find Your Keys, a book for the chronically disorganized, says –

• Pare down an inbox by moving e-mail into folders by need or follow-up
• Once a week, set aside time for inbox housekeeping
• Use the inbox alphabetizing feature, which organizes all e-mail by sender (I’m trying that one immediately)

Christina Cavanaugh, author of Managing Your Email: Thinking Outside The Box (heh, I get it…) says:

• Simply delete the oldest 9,000 notes (9,000! who has that many?)

When you think about it, if you compare your in-box to your kitchen, would you want all of that garbage lying around?

Good luck and sometimes, just say no…and don’t answer your mail.

Material compiled from Wall Street Journal article.

Post from: Blisstree

E-mail Housekeeping.