BWO


My dedication is to my family and my faith.
This blog is updated when inspiration strikes and time is available.

Thursday, September 24, 2015

A Story of Dog Hair (and How It Disappeared)

Do you ever look back at some of your past purchases and feel very satisfied with your decision to buy? Maybe I'm the only one with that feeling, or maybe you're on the same page as me. Whichever it is, I decided I should share some of my favorite purchases over the past year or so that helped me out in a huge way. No one asked me to write about their products but the links are part of my amazon associates account.


My little family moved in to our first real house a little over a year ago. That would be one husband, one big fat pregnant lady, one baby still baking in that lady's belly, one cat, and one very hairy black lab. The last on that list is where the trouble came in. We don't have a huge amount of carpet in our house, but what we do have is a nice light creamy color, a perfect backdrop for the piles of black hair to lay upon. We moved in with a second hand old hoover vacuum and a standard dog brush.

 I shortly discovered that those tools would not allow us to survive with a giant black house dog. Even though our dog Vader loves to go outside in his beautiful fenced backyard, the house was sure to be filled to the brim with hair within a limited time span. Since I felt this problem had to be solved before our baby was born so the baby could have a clean house to live in, and since moving Vader outside was not an acceptable option for my husband, I did some internet searching for my solution. We were on a budget that did not allow me to buy a new vacuum cleaner, especially not one that would suck up that much hair and not die. Then on Amazon I found my answer:

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a $10 rubber broom. That piece of rubber on a stick saved our sanity and budget for about a year. It is a lot more work than just vacuuming, but it gets the job done. 
I will have to say that when we first got it I tried to use the bristle part and was unimpressed. The product pictures on Amazon seem to indicate the bristles should be used. But when we turned it over and used the squeegee side, scrapping it across the carpet, we got clean carpet and a pile of hair to pick up, as shown in the above photo. That photo I actually took a few months after we got the broom, after we cut down the amount of hair with a FURminator. 
Before the FURminator we had about twice the amount of hair on the carpet, and if we didn't brush the carpet twice it still looked pretty black. So back to the internet I went for more solutions and I finally caved and got the much advertised FURminator. This brush is much more expensive than the rubber broom, and more than I thought was worth paying for any brush. But desperate times call for buying gadgets that are cheaper than a new vacuum.

What do you know, the fabulous FURminator works! It is worth that ugly price tag with the huge shedding problem that we had/have. Also, Vader loves it. He lays very flat and still when getting brushed because he thinks if he moves we will stop brushing him.


About the same time as the FURminator my mother was kind enough to gift us a Swiffer Sweep and Trap Floor Cleaner Starter Kit for the hardwood floor. So I found a solution to fit our budget and keep floors clean for the little baby girl who was soon to be crawling upon them. Armed with this solution I began to save money for a nice fancy vacuum that could do the same job and use much less effort. Just recently I finally got my prize, and it was love at first use. This vacuum has been everything it was advertised to be, and more since I didn't see all the bonus features it has on the product page.

I love that I can use this vacuum on the hardwood floors as well, and it works a lot better in that respect than the sweep and trap did.  We still have to vacuum every day because Vader has incredible powers of shedding hair. But now it can be cleaned in much less time and effort. So I have learned there is great value in both the rubber broom and the fancy vacuum. One costs little money and much effort, while the other costs more money and less effort. 

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Four doodles

I don't think my art is anything special, or even really passable as an adult's handiwork. But I'm OK with that. When I get the time and inspiration, I doodle regardless of how grown up it looks when I'm finished. These I drew on an iPad mini using a stylus and the app Penultimate. I think many people don't doodle because they have 'no artistic ability' by their own judgement. It doesn't take artistic ability to make a fun doodle. The doodle doesn't have to be shared with anyone, the benefit is in the relaxation and fun of doodling it. So here are my doodles, and my wish is that you might be encouraged to doodle too.

My posture has been slowly declining, and I have found the reason. I drew a little doodle while thinking about how this happened. In high school I had no lap top and was thus required to sit correctly (for the most part) in a desk chair by a desk. In college I got my laptop and was no longer confined to a desk. Instead I could lounge about on couches and chairs, but still for the most part sitting is the easier way to operate such a device. Now I have a smart phone at long last (have had one for a few years but not until I graduated college) and I am no longer even required to sit in order to operate such a device comfortably, which results in long hours of laying in bed or lounging in whatever poor postured position I desire. Good or bad? A very hard question to answer. I'm comfortable in the moment, and love the advances in technology. 

The customer at work has a team of people who decide on the requirements for the app we are writing for them. They named themselves the Tiger Team, so I drew a word art to fit the title during one of our meetings.

An image and message that popped into my head. The bible asks a similar question but I thought it was fun to put it to a doodle.
My coworker had a 42nd birthday party, themed Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy of course. Drew a doodle of the book cover alien.