Toothpaste for your Furbaby

We do our best to brush Gren’s teeth almost every day.  Granted, it’s a two-person operation: one person has to put the dog in a headlock and the other risks getting covered in paste and dog saliva on “scrubby duty,” but we do it because we love our little fiend.

I finally came to the end of the supply of dog toothpaste (vanilla flavoured, if you must know) that came with the latest doggy toothbrush (which I have since abandoned for a soft people toothbrush).  As I was about to go out and get some more, I chanced to look at the “all-natural” ingredients list.   Sorbitol?  I don’t even know what that is, but it’s the second ingredient.  And why does it need to be sweetened with stevia?  Since when do dogs need sugar?

So I’m going to make my own.  And there’s a ton of recipes on the internet.  Many of them require you to use glycerin, which I guess is the sticky-togethery ingredient that actually makes the paste into a pasty substance.  But that sounds like a pain in the ass, so I’m going to go with a version that uses coconut oil instead (used in small quantities coconut oil is beneficial to your pet’s health), and modify it a wee bit.

Start with a bouillon cube, and dissolve that in 1 tablespoon water.  Or, in my case, use this gel-like one instead.  This is mostly for flavour, so use something your dog will like.  Gren has issues with chicken and beef so I would use pork or vegetable.

Add in 2 tablespoons baking soda (a deodorizing abrasive), and 1 teaspoon cinnamon (a fragrant abrasive).

I also ground up about 1 teaspoon dried parsley (for fresh breath) and added a pinch of ground cloves (an anti-parasitic).

A drop or two of tea tree oil (for fresh breath and as an anti-bacterial agent) won’t go amiss, either.

Looks tasty!  Actually it didn’t smell as awful as I thought it might: just like vegetable soup with too much cinnamon added.  Not bad in the end.

Then you need to work in about 1/2 cup coconut oil.  If you have trouble mixing everything up you can soften the oil or melt it, but you want it to be solid in the end.

You can store this mixture at room temperature in a sealed container for several weeks.  Brush often!

Many sites actually recommend using your finger and a clean washcloth instead of a toothbrush for maximum efficacy, so we might try that at some point.  Fortunately, Gren seems to like the taste of this stuff better than what we were using before, so he struggles a lot less.

Immediately after we brush his teeth Grenadier goes and gets his Tricky Treat Ball, which we fill with the other half of his dinner.  Trundling around with the ball, he will snarf up the kibble that falls out of the hole, and in gulping it down he will produce more saliva to further aid in cleaning his teeth.  When he’s done he usually drinks a whole whack of water too, to wash everything down. And then he goes to sleep.

Quick and Easy Air Freshener

I love fresh air.  I’d rather be cold and have the windows open than be boxed in a stuffy house.  And commercial perfumes tend to aggravate my asthma, so if I can avoid them I will.

Spring is ALMOST at hand in Newfoundland, but the days when I can justify turning off the heat and leaving the windows wide open have yet to come.  And having an active dog and an active man in the house, coupled with the variety of things I cook, means our house could use a bit of fresh air during the winter months.

I saw this post from Smashed Peas and Carrots a while back and I thought it might be worth a try.

Basically all you need is a small jar, some baking soda, and some essential oils.  The original post required a mason-jar style lid, where the lid itself could be replaced with perforated scrapbook paper, a great way to personalize the jar.  I don’t have any scrapbook paper, so I decided to use fabric and elastics instead.

I also didn’t have any spare jars at the moment, but I had some large ramekins that were sitting around so I thought I’d use those instead.

So it’s simple: take about 1/2 cup baking soda and plop it in your jar.  Or bowl.  Or whatever.

Shake about 8-12 drops essential oil of your choice onto the baking soda.

Affix your lid, which could really be anything, provided it has holes for air to flow through.  I have a small patch of fabric here (charming thrifted vintage handkerchiefs) that I fixed in place with an elastic band.  Give the contents a gentle shake to mix them up a bit.

I made four separate bowls, for the main activity rooms in our house: tea tree for the bathroom, lavender for the bedroom, and orange for the living room.

As an experiment, I also tried some rose water in baking soda and put that in my office.  I doubt it will last as long as the ones with the essential oils in it, but it still smells lovely!

Keep the jars or bowls out of the sun in a place that gets good air circulation and I think they’ll probably last you at least a month, maybe two!

This one is on the table by the entrance to the dining room. We walk past this all the time, wafting air to and fro.

Updated Magnets

Our refrigerator here on Elizabeth is like a hundred years old.  It’s rusty, it sweats, leaks weird green stuff when I turn it off, and produces copious amounts of black mould if I’m not around to wipe it up frequently.  It’s not my fridge, though, so I can’t really complain.  Nor am I really going to do anything about it.

But the thing is, the stuff I stick to the fridge is mine, and the rust and moisture on the fridge itself has made some of my steel magnets a little bit dirty and dull.

One afternoon when the Pie was out and I was bored, I decided to jazz up some of those old magnets.

I mean, they’re just magnets, right?

So first I took some CLR to them (actually the organic version of that ever-popular calcium/lime/rust remover).

I scrubbed off what I could, then carefully dried them.

Then I picked up some of my craft paints. I went with red and black to match the red walls, black counter, and red and black floors of my kitchen, and then a sort of white-gold metallic to touch up the rest. They’re nothing too spectacular, but they’ll do for now.

Off to See the Wizard — But Tidy Up Before You Go.

Bakhita in motion.

Good morning!  Today we’re taking Ali Does It west as we travel home to spend the holiday season with our families.  We’ll be in Ottawa for a WHOLE MONTH.  During this time, Gren will have his second birthday (hopefully he’ll be able to celebrate it with his sister, Bakhita, who also lives in Ottawa).  And Cait and I will be starting on a new category of blog posts for you: Mad Science.  Because who doesn’t love science?  I know I do.  Especially when it involves things that fizz or glow.  So stay tuned for a wide variety of madcap experiments in the coming months.

From left to right: unnamed female puppy, Gren, Paddy (Gren’s dad), and Bakhita (Gren’s sister).

And not to fret!  I will continue to blog while I’m home with the family — in fact, I will probably make them help out, so we should have uninterrupted posts all the way into the new year!

Before we go, though, I have a quick cleaning tip for you.  I hate leaving a dirty house.  I just can’t stand coming home to a mess, dirty laundry and expired food and stale whatever.  I’m not in the mood.  So the Pie and I tend to do a whole-house clean before we go, just making sure the surfaces are clean, things are dusted, the laundry and dishes are done, and the fridge is empty of anything that might expire in our absence.  It just makes for a better homecoming, especially when the first thing we do upon our (usually late night) reentry is open our suitcases in the middle of the living room and make a big mess.

Now, there’s a lot of work to do in the days leading up to our travel — usually the Pie is writing exams and I am packing and getting Gren ready for the airplane.  So anything that saves me time and effort is number one in my books.  So here’s a handy tip for quickly and lazily cleaning your microwave — while you do something else.  And this even works on super gross, super crusty microwaves.  Trust me.  I own one of those kind.  I’m a terrible housekeeper.  And I’m freaking LAZY.

Take a small bowl and fill it with about a cup of water, maybe a cup and a half.  Whatever floats your boat.  Then add in a few tablespoons lemon juice (you don’t have to be all elitist and use fresh lemons for this — bottled lemon will do just fine).

Pop that bad boy into the microwave in the middle and nuke it for 3 minutes.  Then leave it in there, without opening the door, for another 5 minutes.  While cool and awesome science is going on behind that door, you can work on cleaning something else.  Or check Facebook.  Or play with your dog.  That is up to you.  What is happening is the steam from the boiling water is loosening baked on goo, and the acid in the lemon is breaking up all the grease.

Then take your handy dandy scrubby sponge and simply wipe away all that grease and grime.  That’s all it takes, is a little wipe.  I kid you not. It’s that simple.

Even gets the stuff on the ceiling of the microwave. Easy peasy.  And even if you forget about the microwave, all that lovely condensation will have done its job, even if you come back an hour later.

And once the lemon water in the bowl has cooled, you can dip your sponge in it and use it to sanitize your counter tops and cutting boards. BLAMO KABLAM.

Beauty and the Beets

I have extremely sensitive skin.  Just looking at something wrong will cause me to break out in hives, rashes, or various forms of acne.  So I’m very careful about the stuff that I put on and in my body.  I also find that soaps, lotions, and all that stuff made with all natural ingredients seem to me to be more luxurious than the anonymous filled plastic bottles you can pick up at any store.  Why not share that luxury as a gift?  There are two high-powered executive type ladies in my family, so I thought I’d make a little “working woman’s survival kit.”  Here, then, are instructions (from various places) for some little home-made beauty products with a touch of luxury.  I’ll start with the hardest project first, and move to the easiest, though I wouldn’t really call any of these projects hard.

Let’s make some lip balm!  It’s frightening how much you can pay for this stuff in the stores.  This recipe here, which I modified from one I saw on TLC, produces about 3/4 cup (6oz) of lip balm (which filled 12 little half-ounce tubs), and cost me about $4 in supplies.  BAM.  If you were wondering, I got the plastic tubs from Patch on Etsy.

Start with 1/4 cup beeswax.  You can get this in tiny, easy-to-melt pearls from some places, but this being Newfoundland I got it in a solid 2oz block, which is pretty much 1/4 cup.  This stuff is local, from Paradise Farms.

I grated it and cut it up into little pieces.  I recommend getting all your ingredients measured and containers ready to go beforehand, because once this is ready to go you will need to act quickly.

Pop the wax into a double boiler (or metal bowl set over a pot of bubbling water) and let it melt completely. It won’t take long.

Add in 1/4 cup almond oil and 2 tablespoons coconut oil.

Don’t freak out if the wax curdles — it’s just adjusting to the cooler temperatures of the oils, and will melt again.  Just keep stirring. I also added a few drops of peppermint essential oil at this point, just for a nice cooling sensation on your lips and a fresh scent.

When everything has been fully liquified again, you can remove the pot from the heat.  Whisk in 2 tablespoons beet juice for colouring (you can leave this out if you wish and your balm will be whitish or ivory, depending on the colour of your wax).  You can add more if you wish, but make sure to whisk it well, as it won’t fully combine with the wax and oil.

Quickly transfer the liquid to a cup with a spout and pour into your containers.

I worked too slowly (because I was taking pictures, which then ended up blurry, damnit) and had to re-melt my lip balm in the microwave to get it all out.  Make sure to wipe out the cup and the melting bowl with a paper towel before you wash them — it can get messy otherwise.  Work whatever is leftover into your hands.  It’s quite nice.

I probably should have smiled for this photo.  But I didn’t realize how grumpy my mouth looks this close up.  :(  But the balm is very nice, very refreshing and smooth.

Let’s make some deodorant!  Store-bought deodorants are full of all kinds of gross things, and there have been studies done on the links between aluminum used in anti-perspirants and Alzheimer’s.  This recipe, which I modified from the one here, has four ingredients, and each one has a specific purpose.  I doubled what I will present to you below, but it produces about half a cup of solid deodorant.

In a medium bowl, whisk together 1/4 cup baking soda and 1/4 cup arrowroot or corn starch.  The baking soda is your key deodorizer, and the starch is your moisture-wicking agent.

Melt 6 tablespoons coconut oil (your moisturizing agent and the stuff that will hold everything together in solid form) and whisk that in as well.  Add in a few drops of tea tree oil (for antibacterial purposes, and to add a light scent).  I also added in a few drops of lavender essential oil, just for the frivolity of it all — I know, that makes FIVE ingredients.  I love the combination of lavender and tea tree.

Pour that into a container with a lid and allow to solidify.  Apply it to your underarms with your fingertips.  Voila.

***EDIT: So I’ve been using this for a little while now and I have to say that, at least for me, this stuff works BETTER than either the super dooper organic and chemical-free version or the regular brand-name stuff you pick up in the drug store.  Sure, it’s a little grainy going on, but it lasts way longer, there’s no residue getting anywhere it shouldn’t, and in terms of actually deodorizing, it’s tops! ***

Let’s make some shower scrubs!  I think that salt/sugar scrubs are the epitome of pampering oneself at home, so I decided to make not one, but two different kinds.

Orange Salt & Sugar Scrub: In a bowl, mix together 1 cup sugar and 1/2 cup sea salt.

Add in 1/2 cup melted coconut oil, 3 tablespoons almond oil, and 2 tablespoons vitamin E oil (you can get that at the drug store).

Add in a few drops of orange essential oil, as well as finely grated orange zest.  Stir well.

Scoop into a container with a tightly-fitting lid, and keep in your bathroom for when you have some extra time in the shower.  Just remember that those oils can make the shower very slippery when you rinse off, so be careful.

Brown Sugar & Coffee Scrub: Did you know that caffeine is a great thing for your skin?  In a bowl, mix together 1 cup dark brown sugar and 1 cup finely ground coffee (not used coffee grounds).

Add in 3 tablespoons honey and 1/2 cup light olive oil and mix to combine.

Scoop that into a container with a tight lid and keep that in the bathroom as well, for when your skin needs a little pick-me-up in the morning!

Let’s make some eye makeup remover!  This is so easy, it’s like not even a thing.  Mix together 4 tablespoons olive oil with 3 tablespoons almond oil.  To remove your waterproof eye makeup, simply moisten a cotton ball with the stuff and there you go!

Tidy up the edges of your containers before you put the lids on.  Decorate your containers with a few personal touches.

Presentation is important, even though it’s what’s IN the containers that counts!

Fast-Tip Friday: Storing Jewelry

(Sorry for the glitch with the photographs there, folks. Seems Flickr is subtly changing the addresses of my photos after I’ve already posted them …)

Next week is jammed packed chock full of fantastically amazing recipes, so I’m going to leave you hanging with a handy tip to tide you over for the weekend.

Get ready for a shock: this is my jewelry box.

I know it looks totally chaotic, but I swear it’s organized.

The thing is, I own a huge amount of jewelry.  Most of it is just costume stuff, but some of it is inherited.  I’m also horribly allergic to metal, so I can’t wear most of it.  At least, not until my body chemistry changes in the future.  So I keep it all stored very carefully.

I save tiny and odd-sized plastic bags, with the Ziploc-like seals, whenever I find them.

Then I keep my rings together.

And my necklaces separate, which keeps their chains from tangling together and also protects them from exposure to air that will cause them to tarnish.

And the finer chains I also take the clasp part and seal it on the other side of the closure.  I find this ensures that the fine links won’t tangle with themselves or with the heavier clasp.

Whenever I go home I usually spend an hour or so with my mother’s jewelry collection, doing the same thing.  For stuff that you don’t wear all that often, it really works.

This is why the trees on my street grow on a slant.

If a post about origami dishes or cheesecake doesn’t come up at 7AM NST on Wednesday it’s because of this.

Meet the storm known as Leslie. Because of this I am intermittently without power. And I didn’t have anything already scheduled in WordPress.

But regularly scheduled posts will return asap.

Comfort, Company, and Compromise

Okay for real it’s autumn.  The time has come for me to finally start cracking down on my thesis.  My outline has been approved by my committee and I’m ready to go.  The problem is, until Saturday, my “office” (read: the tiny rolling desk I moved into) was stuck in a dark corner of our bedroom for the whole summer.  I love our bedroom, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not a place conducive to dissertation-writing.  I wanted my office back.

But my office looked like this (Corgi sometimes included).  That giant queen-sized bed pretty much takes up the whole room, which is only about 9 feet squared.

What’s left goes to the freezer.

We didn’t want to get rid of the bed if we could keep it — it’s very handy to have a spare place to sleep if you have unexpected guests or your spouse is sick or what have you (normally when this happens one of us [ME] sleeps on our tiny loveseat in the living room).  But holy crap a bed takes up a lot of room!  Of course it would be a simple matter to get some form of hide-a-bed or convert this sucker to a murphy bed or something like that.  But we don’t have any money and this isn’t our house, and we’re only going to be here another year anyway.  We just need a band-aid solution to get us through the year — a year that includes me writing the equivalent of a textbook.

So we had to do some shifting around.  And of course when you’re doing this you don’t want to spend an hour or two shoving furniture needlessly across your floors.  No.  You want to go in with a plan.

What do you do?  Well you map it out.  My husband studies cartography, so this was right up his alley.

First, you need to measure everything — the furniture, as well as the dimensions of your room.  Make sure when you’re measuring the room that you include the floor space of the room (that is, from baseboard to baseboard) and not from wall to wall.  Baseboards usually account for an inch or two in depth and that could mean a whole lot when it comes to fitting stuff in.  Also make sure that you can account for the full swing of a door, be it a closet or the main entrance.  You may think you can deal with a door that doesn’t open all the way, but trust me, that will get irritating pretty quickly.

Conveniently, there are tons of programs out there on the internet that can help you to map out your future room.  The one we used here wasn’t the greatest, but it suited our purposes.

The big issues for us in planning out our room were that the room itself only has two electrical outlets, and that the longest wall is taken up halfway through with an electric baseboard heater.  Oh, that and the huge honking bed we need to fit in there. So this is the room as it stands right now. The desk and chair to the left are what needs to fit in the room.

We tried out all sorts of permutations, and eventually we had almost agreed on getting rid of the bed altogether and just sucking it up for the next year.  It was the freezer that was causing us grief.  It would fit in our bedroom, now that we’d moved the desk, but did we really want our freezer in our bedroom?  Probably not. But it had to go somewhere. As far as my office move-around went, however, we ended up putting everything back (virtually) pretty much where it was originally, and just swapping out the freezer for the desk. Presto-change-o.

In the end, we decided to shove the freezer into our dining room.  I may eventually switch it up with that table in the corner (but as you can see the aesthetics of the place are pretty much ruined with all the craft stuff I’ve got on the go at the moment).  It doesn’t do anything for our dining room, and it makes it a little annoying to manoeuvre around the table now, but we don’t really have the time or money to have big fancy dinner parties anymore, and we really only use the dining room for a workspace and to have breakfast on the weekends.  So it will do.  For now (meaning I’ll probably re-evaluate my priorities and move everything around sometime in the next month or so — the way things are is already bugging the OCD in me).

And my office?  Well, it’s not perfect by any means. All the pictures are now hung up wrong. When I sit at my desk I get a bird’s eye view of what’s in our recycling bags. But it’ll do.  For now. It’s a compromise.

The Wee Flea Problem

One of my friends from work asked me if I knew how to get rid of fleas.  I didn’t, but I said I could find out (because that’s how I roll).  So after exhaustive research of the internets (seriously, I read like TWENTY different sites), I came up with what seemed like a sensible solution, and I put so much work into it that I thought I would share it with you.

First, a little note on having fleas: they tend to like damp, dark places, so if you live in, oh, say, Newfoundland, chances are you’re going to encounter them at some point.  You don’t even have to have a pet to get fleas in your house — they can come in on your legs, your clothing, even stuff you bring in from the garage or whatever.  It doesn’t mean that you’re a dirty person.  Fleas just sometimes happen.  Living in crowded or damp spaces will do it.  Getting rid of them takes a bit of work, but it’s a relatively simple process.  So here we go.

Step one:

Take everything your pet lies on and wash it in hot, very soapy water.  Dry it in the dryer or hang it out in the sun.  Fleas apparently don’t like the light.  Or soap.  Wash your bed linens, pillows, cushions, dish towels … anything a flea can hide in and that fits in your washing machine, you should chuck that in.  Anything else, you can scrub it with soapy water and hope for the best.

Step two:

Wash your pet in flea-killing shampoo.  Either that or use a flea comb to brush him or her and have a bowl of hot soapy water nearby so that when you comb out a flea you can douse it in the water to kill it.  Either way you will need to use a flea comb to get eggs and the like out of your pet.  Always, when brushing or washing, wash/comb the neck first so the fleas can’t jump onto the head while you’re washing the rest.  Don’t let your pet near any other animal that could be carrying fleas.  Use a flea preventative specifically designed for your pet (we use Advantage on Gren, it’s not too expensive).  We use a flea comb on Gren just for the brushing of him, so he’s used to the pull of the fine teeth and his hair is very straight.  If you have a curly or wire-haired dog, this is going to be a little bit more difficult.  You might want to book a special appointment with a groomer for this step if you’re unsure about how to proceed.

Step three:

Vacuum the crap out of your place.  Go over your carpet with some heavy brush attachment to loosen clinging larvae.  Get into all nooks and crannies, carpets, furniture, and any spots that are dark and/or damp.  Cracks in the floors, behind doors, in grates – anywhere dust collects could be a storage spot for flea eggs.  Immediately throw out your vacuum bag to avoid escaping fleas (my mother-in-law, Mrs. Nice, tells me that if you put moth balls in your vacuum bag it will kill any bug you suck down, though it smells a bit weird when you first turn on the machine).  If you have a canister vacuum like we do, empty the thing into a bag outside and then hose ‘er down.

Step four:

Use some form of insecticide (most of the internet says you have to go the chemical route, sorry).  Get one with a compound in it known as IGR (insect growth inhibitor) and follow the instructions.  Don’t let children or pets near it.  You could also scrub every surface of your house with soap (rugs included), but you have to be thorough.  The insecticide treatment, while gross and chemical-y, probably will work better than any vinegar-soap-lemon juice thing you can come up with, so it’s something to think about, even if, like me, you’re not into using those kinds of things.

Step five:

Hose down your garden with soapy water (or a chemical insecticide) and trim back all the foliage to expose all the damp dark places to sunlight.  Mow the lawn often.  Keep dark and damp spots to a minimum.

Step six:

In two weeks, repeat steps one through five, vacuuming every other day.  Fleas have a two-week life cycle and fleas in egg form will not be affected by any form of insecticide, so you gotta do it twice.  If you don’t do it twice then it’s not going to work.

Prevention, the natural way (after you’ve taken the previous steps):

Sprinkle nutritional or brewer’s yeast on your pet’s food or rub it into his or her fur. Our first dog, many decades ago, got fleas one summer and we fed her the yeast.  It seems the fleas don’t like the taste of the dog’s skin once the yeast has gotten into it and they take off.

Herbal flea dip: boil 2 cups fresh rosemary leaves in 2 pints (~1L) of water for 30 minutes.  Strain the leaves out and add the mixture to a gallon (~4L) of warm water.  Saturate your pet and do not rinse – allow to air dry.  This is a nice refreshing thing to do on a hot day.

Citrus spray: thinly slice a lemon and chuck it in a pint (~1/2L) of water.  Bring that to a boil and then let it sit overnight.  Alternately, use a few drops of lemon oil in an appropriate amount of water.  Spray in areas where you think fleas might be hanging out (remember that lemon juice also acts as a bleach so watch out for fabric).  Spray it onto your pet as well, and put a few drops under his or her collar to keep fleas at bay.

Diatomaceous earth is something you can sprinkle into your carpets and in your yard.  It has no effect on humans or pets (it’s just dirt) but the granules are sharp and will puncture the exoskeleton of insects, causing them to dry out.  Also a very good humidity and odor buster.

Router Incognito

I saw this post at the end of May and it was just so ridiculous that I felt I had to try it at home. You could do this with a modem, too, I suppose, or any other piece of electronica you want to keep out of sight.

Our wireless router is hidden in the chaos of the Pie’s desk, so needing to hide its unsightliness from view is not an issue for me.  I’d much rather the Pie tidied up his desk more often.  Regardless, perhaps the subtle awesomeness of this new router cover will inspire him.

So you take a hard cover book.  Like these ones. They’re old editions from the library at work that are now out of date.

Then you cut out all the pages.  Like so.

And you’re left with the cover.

Which you then slide over your router.

I used a slightly bigger book than my router, because the air vents are on top.  And so I made some wee supports out of skewers to hold up the top of the cover for air flow purposes.

So if you feel that your router is unsightly, here’s an idea for you!