Blood stain on your new shirt? no problem…really, no problem at all.

This is just a random post. Do you know how to remove blood from clothing?  It always amazes me when I can successfully remove it.  I learnt my lesson a few years back,  I cut my finger just before going on holiday… I actually tend to do this quite frequently, I think the distraction factor of an imminent holiday makes me careless in the kitchen.  Last February I actually went as far as slamming my thumb into my car door… yes, the car door I use most days and close successfully.  And had to then go to Hawaii with stitches and finger rubbers….  oh yah, it was all very attractive.  And no I did not take pictures… I was too mad at myself.

Anyways, a few years back I cut my finger in the kitchen, got the blood on a pair of grey jeans I needed to take with me to Europe.  And then I didn’t do what I normally do and tried something new and then I ruined the jeans.  I went as far as bleaching them, then I went to the store that sold clothing dye and tried to dye them back to the correct colour.  Ok,  what was I thinking?  I was completely out of my mind.  The end result was that I changed the colour scheme of what I was travelling with and re-packed.  This was all on the DAY WE WERE LEAVING.  Insane.

So I never waiver from this method now.  If you get blood on your clothes,  take them off… then run cold water over onto the stain and let the stain soak in cold water.  It has to be cold.  This even works on blood that has set.  I know cause I just tried it.  I had blood on a shirt that I didn’t realize had blood on it until I took the shirt out of the closet to wear again.  After a few hours, the stain was almost gone.  Then I just squirted some Oxy Clean Baby stain remover on it while it was still wet and the blood was completely gone.  This was on a baby blue shirt.

I use Oxy Clean Baby stain remover because I want to believe that anything with the word Baby on it is gentler on me, we and the environment. I may be out to lunch on this but as we use a lot of stain remover on Don’s shirts for the necks…I feel that maybe its gentler on his neck the next time he wears the shirt.  And we all know that not all the soap residues wash out of our clothes…. or do we?   Soap doesn’t wash completely out of clothes.  That’s why people with soap allergies have issues… there is only so much rinsing a washing machine can do.

And there you have it,  a random blog on getting blood out of clothes.

 

Dry spell…or a spell of dry weather….would definitely prefer the latter.

So I had a dry spell.  I guess this is what my husband calls writers block, fortunately as an author he doesn’t often have it…. but regardless… I had one and I had guilt over it.   I had full intentions of writing more in the New Year.  But January 1st came and went and the only blog post I put up was a picture of Char and I cooking on New Year’s Eve in our chef’s outfits.  Which turned out very great btw.  At 2:30 am when we were still dancing, we realized we should really go to bed or we reckoned the next day was going to be more than tough.

So I apologize to all my avid followers… heehee… all 5 of you?  Here finally is a post and its about nothing.  Recently I cleaned up the pictures on the hard drive of this computer.  It was full and all my various food pictures were struggling to fit.  When Don gave me that great Canon at Christmas 2010… all the pictures got a lot larger.  Seemed a shame it have such a great camera and take pictures the size of a small point and shoot camera.

I discovered I had purchased an external hard drive and forgot about it.  I decided that no time like the present to sort out how to attach it to this computer and then….. what turned out to be the arduous task of moving 10000+ pictures over to it.  To improvise I also had to find a USB hub, which I also had kicking around.  The problem with ‘old’ anything in computer world is that also means ‘slow’  The little box kept popping telling me that if I used a high speed USB, things would be better.  Well I had all the time in the world….

I will explain, 2 weeks ago I got the worst influenza I have ever had. I had nothing but time on my hands as I slowly recovered.  Today, 2 weeks later I FINALLY could go back to Bootcamp and be pathetic and short of breath.  Anyways that’s another story…. I slowly dragged all the picture files over to the external drive.  Then after I got them all over there, I tested my ‘screen saver’ picture rotation.  We discovered a few years ago that you could put pictures onto a screen saver rotation and then you would actually get to see all your holiday pictures that you forgot you took. Once I was assured it would still run through the holiday pics, I deleted them off the hard drive… meanwhile praying that I didn’t inadvertently delete anything I couldn’t live without.

Really, what was a I worried about.  Just because its was external I didn’t believe it was as ‘safe’ as the hard drive on the computer… the hard drive that is accessed every day and bombarded with Temporary Internet files and a variety of other strange things from the internet.  Who was I fooling?  The external hard drive just sits there and occasionally makes a sound as its accessed.  And that’s it.

So after all was said and done, I got a huge amount of space back on my computer hard drive. Now I can proceed to fill it up with useless information that will just further confuse and irritate me in the future when I have to figure out how to get rid of it.  But such is human nature… that’s why Storage businesses are so prevalent and why Storage Wars is such a popular show… human beings just can’t seem to deal with things in the present… they have the ‘need’ to hold on to stuff for that inevitable rainy day.

And on that note, here are some of the pictures that I found I have on my now-external hard drive. Enjoy!

 

Blog update from my phone?! Who knew…

Woke up to a grey, cool day so I decided that today would be a good as day as any to get our planes, trains and automobiles in order for our trip.

Those last details like which bus, train, tube or all of the above to move us from point A to point B. When I get all engrossed in the travel, I start to feel we are already on holidays! Especially if I use Google Streetview, my brain thinks I am standing on the corner I am looking at. Its great.

Maps printed, car rented, tickets in hand…now comes the hard part of packing for the trip. We go through a number of weather zones so its VERY easy to overpack….which is my tendency. Just take laundry soap and all will be well.

Ok…update over. Let’s see if this mobile posting works!
twitter: @conniejcampbell

Sent from my Blackberry

 

Committment phobia? Here is a book for you

So lets just say I read this book because I was so impressed with the last one by Elizabeth Gilbert, well actually I was mostly impressed with Eat Pray Love.  I almost gave up on it… I think it was page 172… or that’s the random page that I have been using when I relate how I felt about that book.

I did almost give up on her…. after page 172, I changed my mind.  She is a bit neurotic… actually very neurotic would be more accurate.   She went on and on and on about her inner turmoil around her marriage and its demise and then her rebound relationship with the young man… but this review isn’t about that book, it’s about the follow-up to that book.  We all know that it is a hard act to follow… I mean how many authors get a movie about their books?  So a REALLY hard act to follow, especially when its only her fourth book.

So when it appeared at the bookstore with a 40% sticker attached… I decided that it was the book for me.  I must say I was swayed because the cover said it was a love story… and I thought that it would be a nice read about how they reconciled their different heritages, lifestyles, monetary levels and lived happily ever after.

I disagree now with the label ‘love story’ but I don’t disagree with much else in this book.  Gilbert, with her usual neurosis and excellent writing style writes about the next stage of her life with Felipe.  All is going well as they spend time jetting between the US and a variety of other countries.  Then the unthinkable happens,  a red flag goes up and Felipe gets refused entry into the US.  They insist with the amount and length of his trips that have been occurring, he isn’t simply doing business in the US, but must be considering the US a more permanent stop and as he hasn’t been given approval for such status, they deem Felipe a threat to the Homeland.

Felipe is forced to leave and head off to Australia but not before the officials ask why they don’t just get married as it would solve all the issues?  Gilbert balks at the idea,  actually they both do.  They had taken, as a couple, a firm stance against the institution and all it stands for.  With her divorce and its monetary leash and Felipe’s own bad experience, they had vowed to never tie the knot.

So they begin the long arduous job of securing just the right to get married.  Gilbert had decided that they should continue to travel around during the process instead of just staying in one spot and waiting it out.  And so the book takes the reader through all types of conditions whilst she researches marriage and its meaning in the areas they visit.

The book is a great read.  The reader finds out where a lot of our western ideas about marriage come from and how much they have changed over the last 1000 years.  From when the Church got involved to when the Government decided to try and control it and its contractual obligations.  I was very surprised at some of her findings.

Gilbert is an excellent story-teller and I found in this book, she curbed her neurosis a bit so as to not overwhelm the reader with too much information about her innermost thoughts.  I would recommend it as a summer read.  It won’t disappoint. ( book review of Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert)