Hot Dog Pinewood Derby Car

This project is not mine but it’s so awesomesauce I must share it with the entire Internet. Yep. That. Cool.

Mr. G is racing in his first Cub Scout Pinewood Derby. With a little parental help, the kid needs to turn a block of wood, a weight, and some wheels into a car for the BIG RACE. 

It sounds fun. I wish Girl Scouts did something like that. Even at a young age, I'd use any excuse to break out the tools, ya know?

When his mom told me Mr. G wanted to go for style instead of speed, I expected Mr. G to make a car looking like the Batmobile (a thumbs up choice because we share the same taste in superheroes) or an ice cream truck to go with his career goal of being an ice cream man.

Princess’s Tequila Snowman

I like to decorate with snowmen because they are happy little guys you can leave out after Christmas as a winter decoration. Well, that is, unless you are our Queen of No Property Manager who argued that the snowman I hung  on my door was a Christmas decoration and should be taken down last February (during a blizzard I might add when the real thing dotted lawns all over the neighborhood.)

Of course, I shot back it wasn’t right she assumed I even celebrate Christmas (although we do) because we live in a multicultural neighborhood (which I love!) and I don’t remember anything about a snowman crossing the dessert to visit the baby Jesus in the stable – who was really born in March, not December.

I left the snowman on my door until the Spring Solstice -which is in March for spite. Heh.

Happy Birthday to Me

Today is my birthday.

I shed my little girl sawdust and paint splattered armor.

I put on a confident and frilly woman’s dress. 

My Garage Door Opener Might Be the Death of Me

My garage door opener is a fickle minx. When I press the wall button or the remote, I’m not sure what I’m going to get. Most of the time the garage door opener opens and closes the door, as it should. But take that for granted (as I did the night of our burglary) and the door will go down and pop back up. My favorite trick is after checking the batteries in the remote, a press of the button makes the light blink and the door stays open. The taunting blinking light always happens during a rainstorm or when I am in a hurry.

I spend a good chunk of time checking the garage door sensors for obstructions (rare), readjusting the garage door opener controls with the change of the seasons, and keeping the remotes fed with fresh batteries.

A slight turn with a screwdriver is all it takes to make the adjustment

Our burglary was the last straw. I didn’t watch the door to make sure it closed completely. The door popped back up and stayed open all night. That’s how the robbers got into the house while we slept.

Husband and I discussed our options:

What Type of Sewing Machine Do You Have? Do You Like It?

At 39 years old, my Kenmore sewing machine has seen and sewn it all. My mom bought it in 1972. Mom put many miles on her. Bessie sewed curtains for my childhood bedrooms, countless Halloween costumes, and Barbie clothes. Mom sewed color guard uniforms, flags, and more high school musical costumes than I can count before, during, and after I graduated high school.

Everyone say hi to Bessie!

Why do I call her Bessie? Because when the machine acted up mom yelled, “Come on Bessie!” as she sewed and the machine snapped back in line. Bessie is a safer thing to say around little kid ears (mine) than saying what you really want to say when you are frustrated with things not going your way during a project.

Mom gave me Bessie after she got a new sewing machine. I put many miles on Bessie too. Under my roof, we sewed blankets and toys for Blitzkrieg, Christmas gifts, curtains, slipcovers, reupholstered furniture, and repurposed more things than I can count. Bessie and I designed costumes and historical clothing too. Bessie is Mommy’s Little Moneymaker when it comes to building costumes.

I Don’t Like Front Yard Vegtable Gardens and Yet I Have One

This is my yard after we moved into our condo.

A group of neighborhood darlings smashed my gazing ball. Boo.

A year or two later my front yard looked like like something out of an apocalyptic sci fi movie. Japanese beetles and grubs killed most of my shrubs and flowers. Slime mold killed the rest.

The reason this blog is called Condo Blues. *sigh*

My Dog Writes a Guest Post

Hi Everyone, Blitzkrieg here. Lisa’s building something in the garage, which makes this the perfect opportunity to use her computer to say hi to all of my fans!

Hi fans!

Actually, I have something real important to ask you.. This one’s important to me because I’ve lived it and it stinks. Not stinks in a good way like muddy pond water but stinks like rifling through somebody's trash and eating charcoal because I was stray kind of stinks.

I Got Down and Dirty with Frank Fontana

NO!

Not like THAT!


I’ll write a more detailed post on everything we did and all of the new toys tools I saw at the Craftsman DIY Blogger Summit in The Craftsman Experience later. However, if I don’t post something about the event as soon as I get home my dad and father in law might explode with curiosity! 

You don't want exploding Dads so close to Father's Day, BTW.

Compost WIN and FAIL

Last summer I made two compost bins fromRubbermaid tubs and violated the warranties on the tubs to do it 'cuz I'm Danger Girl.

I threw in a shovelful of dirt in to prime the bins and diligently added a layer of shredded paper from our paper shredder to the bin for every layer of vegetable scraps that hit the bin.

Every once and awhile I locked the handles on the compost bin and turned it end over end to mix the contents. Since I use paper for my ‘browns’ everything stuck together and required breaking it up by poking at it with a shovel before I flipped the contents to mix it.

It’s a year later. Let’s see how my Compost Experiment is doing.

I Built a Birdhouse. It's Kinda Insane.

I’ve been sitting on this news for so long, I’m surprised I haven’t burst by now! Craftsman tools asked me to teach a group of mom and dad bloggers how to use power tools at the Craftsman Blogger Summit this week!

Little ol’ ME!?

*Faints*

It’s part of my lifelong campaign to get women to stop making Honey Do lists and start making Do It Yourself Honey! lists.

Blitzkrieg thinks this is a silly goal and I should put my efforts into something nobler like world domination. *sigh* I really wish he would use his powers for good and not evil. I’m trying to teach him but it’s hard…

Enough about our family drama. You want to see my birdhouse, right?

Columbus Craftacular!

Last weekend I went to the Etsy Team Columbus Eco-Chic Craftacular to support my friend Patti and her booth, to shop for birthday gifts, and since I was in the company of a bunch of creative, green types (my peeps!) break in my new reusable Glass Dharma straw.

 Hoo boy! I look like a shaggy dog.*cringe* I need to get a hair cut!

5 Recycled and Repurposed Laundry Room Organizers

After successfully organizing the linen closet with chalkboard labels, I set my sites on spring cleaning and decluttering the laundry room.

Um, no I didn’t redecorate my laundry room. It’s always been The Evil Dead Laundry Room**  and superhero action figure hangout. They are NOT dolls. Even though they look like dolls. Every guy I know says they are NOT DOLLS.

I still say they look like dolls.!

I think laundry, and ironing especially, is an evil chore. This room sums my feelings up nicely even though it looks a cubical in an IT firm. Some of these things may or may not have lived in former cubicals or the computer room of our old apartment, ahem. Does that mean our plastic toys fall into the green creative reuse category? Yeah, I didn’t think so. It’s an insane fun room though. At least to us.

On an more decorative note, I hope I can redeem myself in your eyes with my distressed wall treatment  and the sisal rope I used as crown molding. I was going for country rustic until the room turned into psycho toy land.

Extreme Green Couponing?

On Lazy Budget Chef (You didn’t know I have a food blog?!) I wrote about the show Extreme Couponing  and how I once was a couponer but stopped. Between careful shopping and cooking more from scratch the quality of food we eat went up, the price went down, our heath improved, and our lifestyle turned a deep dark shade of green.

I don’t generally take those “How Green Are You?” quizzes because they are very subjective based on the entity that creates them. Nevertheless, through One Million Acts of Green and helping out Practically Green, I took their quizzes and scored extremely green. I am Superbly Green (the highest rank) on Practically Green and been in their top 10 for almost a year.

Oopsie.

Pretty good for a gal who doesn’t have solar panels, a Pruis, or eats solely certified organic food, eh?

The Green Bag Lady

I don’t support laws that ban plastic shopping bags because it ends up hurting people that cannot afford to buy reusable shopping bags. I’d rather a store or city offer incentives for using your own bag because I think you get more flies with honey than vinegar. That’s why I had to interview Teresa VanHatten-Granath when I heard about her Green Bag Lady Project.

In an attempt to make her corner of the world greener, Teresa makes and gives away free cloth shopping bags! The project started in her own college classroom. She now has people using her free cloth shopping bags around the world!

Green Bag Lady Bag Number 111170.

How long have you sewn? How did you get started making shopping tote bags?

How Low Does Your Furnace Go?

My friends and family consider me the Energy Saving Maven because I reduced my home’s natural gas and electric use by 32% using cheap home improvements and new habits. So it wasn’t a surprise when a friend of mine asked me to come to his house and help him lower his sky high heating bill last winter.

I trudged through the new fallen snow on his sidewalk and rang the doorbell. He answered it wearing shorts and a t-shirt.

It was easy to find the answer to his high energy use and heating bill.

I don’t expect you to lower your daytime temperatures to my frigid 58 degrees (F), but if you accept Crunchy Chicken's Freeze Your Buns Challenge and lower your heating temperature by only a few degrees it will do a world of good. In the case of my friend, he has rescue birds so he came up with lowering his daytime temperature from 75 to 68 degrees (F.)

This year, I’m using the One Million Acts of Green Give the Gift of Green Facebook app to send my friend a reminder to not to jack his furnace this winter.

You can use the One Million Acts of Green Give the Gift of Green Facebook app this November trough December to send a green act as a “gift” that publishes to their News Feed. If the person isn’t on Facebook, you can send your message to them as an e-card.

How low does your temperature go during the winter?

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Disclosure:  Rockfish Interactive, in partnership with  Cisco are compensating me for my considerable time on this project. However, my ideas, words, and opinions are my own and are not influenced by this compensation. See what the other ambassadors have to say about One Million Acts of Green: Crunchy Domestic Goddess, Green Your Décor and Green and Clean Mom.

My Little Edie Grey Gardens Costume

 After I saw the Gray Gardens HBO movie, I knew I wanted to be Edith Bouvier Beale or “Little Edie” (she was named after her mother who everyone called “Big Edie”) for Halloween. This year husband and I are going to a Halloween party in the Short North, our arts district. If anyone should know who Little Edie was or about Grey Gardens, it would be this crowd.

Little Edith Bouvier Beale was known for wearing scarves to cover her alopecia. When their fortune ran out and Gray Gardens disintegrated into a filthy mess that violated every health and housing code on the books, she obviously did not have money to update her wardrobe. Instead, she wore what she had in odd combinations. Tablecloths became skirts, wildly patterned hose, sweaters became head coverings to create what she called “bohemian” or “revolutionary" costumes.

I took my cue from this clip of Little Edie describing her “best costume for the day” in the 1975 Grey Gardens documentary.

Drew Barrymore recreates this scene in the HBO Grey Gardens movie.

Make a Woven Ribbon and Washer Bracelet

I open the email and sat there, stunned. Martha Stewart Omnimedia invited me to their Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Bloggers' Night Out! party to meet the Martha Stewart creative team!

Mecca!

Mindful Momma said we should make something to wear to the party.

Dare I?

Inspired by the belt on my new dress, I grabbed some washers left over from the cornhole game boards I built in the garage, a bit of ribbon from my sewing stash, and made a woven washer bracelet using A Steno Pad for My Thoughts woven washer necklace tutorial.

Another project that perfectly illustrates my tool girl side and my girly girl crafty side.

Good Green Fun at the Ohio State Fair

Husband and I spent a day at the Ohio State Fair. When we were not eating local food – which is crazy easy to do at the State Fair, we were checking out the sites and acting silly.

There were things to do for kids of all ages. Even goat kids! I thought of Nanny Goats in Panties and snapped a photo of the goat playground for Margaret.

The goats weren’t feeling playful because it was early

 in the morning when we visited them.

The animal, food, and craft judging were all in full swing. We saw and were allowed to pet many animals. Our favorite was the Highland cows. Husband and I call them McMoos because we are convinced that they moo with a Scottish accent. Mac-moooooo.

6 Thrift and Shopping Scores!

I finished my Saturday errands and found myself less than a block from the Ohio Thrift Store. I had to go in. Ohio Thrift is one of the better thrift stores in the city because in addition to the regular thrift store finds they also accept donations of new closeout items that do not sell from major retailers. I purchased a couple of new tank tops there for a couple of dollars that were originally from a major retailer that goes by the nickname Vickie who is very Secretive about things. Thrift store score!

The Thrifting and Shopping Bargain Fairies were good to me. I think they were being kind after that depressing and horrible bathing suit shopping trip earlier this summer. Everything in every store I went to was either dental floss or granny and all looked awful on me. It still gives me nightmares just thinking about it.

Let’s look at the spoils of war!

I bought this cute sundress for $3.99.

Festive, fun, and flirty.

I didn’t realize it was a reversible sundress until I got it home.

This dress is perfect for traveling!

The Big Game Bargain Huntress kill came with this purse. Like the sundress, the condition was excellent; it was $20, which is high for a thrift purse. Then I saw it was a Kate Spade purse! I love Kate Spade!

It's a little tacky to keep the price tag on

 but wanted to prove I wasn't just dreaming.

Green? Yes. Cheap? Yes. Cute and in style? Yes and yes! Mine? – You betcha!

A week later, I was floored with an invitation to a very nice special event during BlogHer this weekend. I wanted a new dress to wear while I networked my face off at a place I consider Mecca. I thought my best bet would be at a consignment store. I always find something that fits and that I like at Clothes Mentor when stores selling new clothes let me down, which is often.

Consignment store prices are higher than a thrift store but I think it is worth it because Clothes Mentor has dressing rooms (unlike Ohio Thrift), everything they sell is in fashion (no revamps needed other than hemming), is in excellent condition, and they sell designer clothes at the fraction of the price. I feel a lot better cutting off six inches of designer consignment store pants to hem them than new designer pants.

As a green blogger, I know I should not be so concerned with name brands but I guess I am that shallow. I like how certain designers fit and their clothes look better on me than others do. I tend to mix and match thrift, consignment, and sale items in the same outfit because I like to live big and look nice on a little budget. Going to a high school that was straight out of the movie Heathers  makes me think more about my appearance a little more than I should I suppose.

I decided to check out TJ Maxx first because I have to pass TJ's on my way to Clothes Mentor so TJ's is more convenient.  Shopping at a closeout store is less green than shopping at a consignment store depending upon what you buy at the closeout store of course. It also means I'll spend more money. Based on the bathing suit fiasco I didn't expect to find something I liked at TJ's either.  I just wanted to rule them out because Husband went shopping with me. He isn't a big fan of shopping from store to store to store like most women I know like to do.I wanted to make it a little easier on him by trying a store close to home on the off chance I'd find something on the first try.

Boy I am I glad I went! TJ’s had a summer clearance sale and they had clothes that fit me that weren't hoochie short or granny moo-moos. Yay! 

I bought this kicky sundress for $25.00.

I needed new shoes to go with the dress. Famous Footwear was also having a super duper clearance sale. I got the sassy pink vegan cha cha  heels for $20 and the pink silk flats for walking to the event for $15.Since New York is a walking city most ladies wear flats to ride the subway/walk and then change into heels right before they step into a party.

The heels fit nicely in the Kate Spade purse.

Both pairs were regularly $50 – bargain! Not shopping in the children’s department for shoes this summer ? Priceless!

However the Big Game Bargain Huntress Score of the Day came with this top I grabbed on a whim on my way to the dressing room back at TJ Maxx. The blouse had the original store tag on it with a price of $168.00.

How lucky is that? Pinch me! I'm dreaming!

TJ Maxx had it marked down on clearance for $15.00! I said it was a serious shopping score. Husband corrected me and said it was a steal.

Thank you Universe for making these two shopping trips much more fun than buying my bathing suit! 

Do you have any favorite shopping places where you know you’ll get a bargain? What was your best Bargain Shopper Score?

Hey FTC: I paid for everything I purchased at these stores with my own money.

I Greened My SunScreen

I gave up trying to get sun tan years ago because my pale faced Scandinavian skin makes me burn like a vampire in the sun.

Really.

I got a sunburn by sitting too close to a sunny window at work once, OK?

My New Year’s Resolution for 2010 is to green my health and beauty aids so I switched to a zinc-based sunscreen.

I bought Alba Botanica. Alba scores a 2-3 on the Skin Deep Database for safety. There are other sunscreens that score better for safety but they are much more expensive and most are only available on line. I go through so much sunscreen I wanted to find something I can buy locally when I run out. Price is also important because I buy a lot of sunscreen during the summer.

So far, I like the protection Alba offers. My only negative is that it’s thicker than my old chemical based sunscreen and takes a bit more time and effort to rub it in completely so my skin does not look whiter and more ghostlike than it already is.

The big test was when I marched in a parade. I slathered on one coat of Alba sunscreen and let it dry. I hoped it would protect me because I knew I wouldn’t have time to reapply sunscreen throughout the day. Even if I could, the last thing I needed was to make my hands slippery with sunscreen because I was twirling a flag in the parade.

After a full day in the sun, I came home hot and tired. To my delight I didn't find a sunburn on my face, arms, or legs. Yay! I jumped in shower. For some reason my head hurt when I shampooed my hair.

Because…..

I got a sunburn on the part in my hair!

Sunburn on my head.

I never though of putting sunscreen there!

Yes, I got a sunburn on my scalp.

File this one under “these things only happen to me.”

Next time I am wearing a hat.

Do you have a strange sunburn stories or am I the only one?

Reminder: Help me Win my Dream Job!

I've been selected as a finalist for the Salada Green Tea Spokesperson contest. Your vote will help Salada pick the winner. Please vote for me Lisa Nelsen-Woods and help me win my dream job promoting green living and healthy eating on a budget. You may vote once a day, every day from now until the contest ends on August 1st.

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Disclosure: I bought the sunscreen with my own money. Alba did not pay me to say nice things about their product nor are they responsible for my sunburned head because I'm an idiot. This post includes an affliate link. If you choose to purchase an item I will recieve a small commission at no extra cost to you. This will help me with my goal of making Condo Blues a self hosted blog.