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649848 tn?1534633700

Sunday Weigh In - August 7, 2022

Good morning.  I can't believe another week has gone by; summer will soon be over and time for school to start.  I don't know about other parts of the country, but most of the schools in my area will be starting on the 15th.   It seems like they keep getting earlier every year!!  

It's been kind of busy here, as I've had several projects going on at once.   We got out broken mower situation all taken care of and husband made a new canopy for the new mower.   I'm still practicing my calligraphy as much as I can, but am trying to branch out and learn other things, too.  I got some new tools for my workshop and yesterday, husband helped me turn a wooden bowl - he didn't know how either, but he was able to teach me how to set up the equipment!!  We learned to actual process together.    The bowl turned out quite well; now I have a "Show & Tell" project for our woodworking meeting on Tuesday.   I also have to do the "demo", which is a demonstration of a skill we have that others might be interested in learning.  I'm going to do my demo on pyrography (otherwise known as woodburning, but can be done on a variety of materials.   I've got most of my demo planned and will finalize it today.  

In addition to all my extra projects, I'm still working on a thorough house cleaning  and we even managed to take a load of things for donation at the local Hospice Thrift Store.  

So - busy, busy!!  I decided to double up on my fluid medication for a couple of days (doctor said I could when needed) and I managed to eliminate several pounds of "water weight".  I haven't weighed this morning, but on Friday, I was almost back to my lowest weight in a while!!  Yay me!!  

I read an article a couple of weeks ago that said "planking" is the easiest/best way to help tone the stomach.  It said that holding a 1 minute plank every day will make stomach muscles stronger and help burn stomach fat.  IDK if it's really correct or not, but I decided to try it.  I couldn't hold a plank for a full minute (yep, I'm not as strong as I used to be), so I started with 30 seconds and worked up.  I did miss a couple of days, but I'm back on track again and am up to holding for 45 seconds.   It doesn't sound like much, but when you're out of shape and muscles have gotten weak, it seems like forever.   The article didn't say how long it should take to tone those muscles, but I'll let you know in a few weeks whether it works or not.  :-)

Anyway, I can't really claim a loss, even though I did lose some of the water weight.  I'll just say, for right now, I'm "maintaining".  

So, how was your week and are you reaching your goals?  Let us know how it's going.  

~~Wishing everyone a wonderful, successful week~~
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134578 tn?1693250592
The 30% garden vinegar is called that because regular household vinegar has 5% acetic acid, and garden vinegar has (you guessed it) 30% acetic acid. The recipe for mixing it that calls for salt, kind of sterilizes the soil for anything new to grow there, so when we're spraying out the planter boxes at my mom's (she uses them to grow vegetables, but they are empty right now and dandelions like them a lot), we just use the straight 30% vinegar. Where there's some crabgrass in the front yard that is determined to keep appearing, we add the salt, since there's not supposed to be anything there at all besides barkdust. The 30% vinegar definitely kills broadleaf weeds without needing any assistance from soap or salt, but it's a post-emergent killer, not a soil sterilizer, so as new things grow one has to keep spraying the vinegar. My family and my mom's neighbors all pressed us not to use anything like RoundUp, so we went with the vinegar. We're over there working all the time and have the pump sprayer in the shed, so we can readily spray things that pop up. It will be the new owner's lookout once the house sells.

Yes, we did consider selling the house totally as is, but  the problems were not cosmetic, and were very likely to cause holdups and low offers (if any offers came in at all). For one thing, my folks moved out and took what furniture was worth taking (their apartment is only about 25% smaller than their house), but that still left a lot of junky furniture (a sofa, two deteriorating armchairs, shelves, wobbly side tables, plus a huge, very old and heavy freezer that had duct tape holding the gasket on). We couldn't have sold the house with that in it, any offers would either have been contingent on it being gone, or would have been for thousands of dollars less than the value of the house just for the hassle of having to deal with it. And then there was the oil tank, which is an environmental issue and had to be removed, not to mention the black mold spot in the oak floor the size of a pizza, the old wall-to-wall carpeting that had what seemed like pee in it, and the raspberry-red walls in the bathroom. If this was just a matter of selling the house at any cost and splitting up whatever the proceeds were, with the heirs, that might still have been something we would have considered, but my mom and her husband need every dollar they can get from their house, since assisted living is so expensive. The real-estate agent said that if we put $10,000 into the clean-up, we could expect to get $50,000 more on the price, and not a lot of contingencies. So it's worth doing.

Son is not in school yet, it will be the 30th. In the meantime, we're trying to get a few summer things in, so he will feel like he had a vacation! :-)
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Right - I get that household vinegar is only 5% acetic acid and I saw that the garden vinegar is 30% (or more).   I know that vinegar breaks down quickly in the ground, so other things would be able to grow in a short time.   So you're adding salt to the garden vinegar to prevent weeds from growing in the bark area?   I have a "rock area" which is probably equivalent to your bark area that I want to keep weeds from growing... Because I worked in environmental services, I don't like to spray chemical type weed killers because they end up in the aquifer, but sometimes I've not had much choice.   I didn't even realize until I read your post that there was a "garden vinegar" - how could I  have missed that in all my years of growing plants, lawns, gardens, etc??  :-)    I'm going to look for the garden vinegar and will add salt for the areas I don't want anything growing - such as my rock area, fencelines, etc.   I appreciate the info.  

Oh yes - when I sold my Auntie's house, I made sure it was empty.  My friend and I spent hours and hours going through things to dispose of.  We took an entire van load of craft supplies, etc to her church to be divvied up between the church women and the school arts so it could be used.    Yes, the old fuel tank would be an environmental hazard, as would be the mold spot on the floor.  Raspberry red bathroom walls seem a bit intense (lol), so yeah, I might have wanted to change that.  Fortunately my Auntie was pretty subdued and her colors were all pretty neutral (beige carpets, white walls except in the bathrooms, which were pastel blue and pink).   I get the need to sustain your mom and her husband in assisted living.  Auntie was there and you're right - it's expensive.   $50K more for spending $10K is a good payback.   Auntie's would not have been that much.

Oh, my - schools here started this week - some on Wed, some Thursday.   Unreal that summer is almost over, when it's still 95°+ outside!!
Yes, about the vinegar, sorry if it was repetitive to something I already posted, (I kind of thought so but didn't bother to look back on my earlier posts to check!) It was new to me, too, though I'd heard of using household vinegar for years. But the idea that they sell a more acidic vinegar for this purpose was something I just found out on YouTube when looking up what kind of a formula to mix to put on weeds. There was no option to using something more dangerous, the outcry when I hinted we might spray was intense. My sisters said not to do it, the next-door neighbor said not to do it, etc. etc. But they weren't the ones dealing with making a big, weedy front yard into something that might actually attract a buyer. So that's probably why I'm enthusiastic about it. You can spray that stuff on a dandelion when it's sunny and come back in ten or fifteen minutes and the leaves are brown.

My mom and her husband's house was very nicely done, they remodeled it when they bought it and had classy professional landscaping. It was fine up to about 5 years ago, but from then to now, it got very little maintenance. Mom was the one who managed the weeding, the cleaning, etc. and she just got weak, and her husband was almost clueless. It wouldn't have occurred to them to hire cleaning help or yardwork help; it might have been that they were pinching pennies, but also my stepdad didn't like having strangers in the house. As a result, by now the weeds were entrenched, the carpets getting dingy, and oh my, just general layers of dust and grime. Add to esoteric touches like macrame curtains and a raspberry bathroom (with a light fixture painted cobalt blue) and you can see their house wasn't in the usual ready-to-sell style! lol
We're leaving the boring wallpaper up, but are going to sand and refinish the oak floors (original to the house, built in 1943). The idea is, we take things to clean and ready, and the new buyer picks the paint colors. (Though, I will say, we didn't leave the raspberry walls in the bathroom.) I took down their old house numbers, which were those carved redwood kind that they used to sell at the home-improvement warehouse stores in about 1979, and they broke. Too bad, they needed to break. So now what is up there is a piece of Tyvek with nicely lettered house numbers in black ink, so jobbers can find the house when I call them in to do something. And it actually looks better than the old, deteriorated redwood house numbers! :-)

So anyway, we are leaving some things as is, except everything got a cleaning including the basement floor. But the one or two things that we spent money on that could be considered aesthetic choices, I think will pay for themselves.
134578 tn?1693250592
Oops, forgot to weigh this morning, but yesterday, I was down .5 of a pound from last week. I'll check tomorrow but wouldn't be surprised if that's where I am today also. I just haven't been eating as much as I often ate in the bad old days, and have also stayed pretty active.

We got the messy weeds out of my mom's yard and the barkdust spread (by "we" I mean largely the hard-working landscaping crew). It was really hot, and every inch of the yard had weeds along with some pretty nice original landscaping (they had to be pretty alert to what to take out and what to leave in). My husband and I were there in between the crew's visits, spraying any weed that rashly popped up, with 30% garden vinegar. I felt for the landscapers because of the heat, but they got theirs back by charging $2,900 when done, $1,400 more than I originally budgeted. We couldn't have sold Mom's house if the yard looked like it originally did, though, and they did a good job. Last week we also had the removal of a 60-year-old fuel-oil tank from the basement, to the tune of $900. My how the money goes out when you want to sell a house! I've still got to deal with floor refinishers, cleaning crew and handyman, and to find a broken-window repair company and a locksmith. (Don't want their iffy lock to fail when a real-estate agent is trying to open the front door for a buyer!) Once those last things are done, though, that will be it. It will be a satisfying feeling. There wasn't money in the budget to paint the exterior (or much of the interior either), but what has been done is good.

Our son's new kitten has been a big hit, helping him ease the pain of the loss of his favorite cat in June. New kitty is a flame-point Siamese, (though mostly white still because he's so young). His name is "Agedashi," which is a way of preparing tofu squares by coating them in rice flour and frying them lightly. They're creamy inside and slightly golden outside, so the color is right, and my son always orders them at his favorite sushi restaurant. We just call the little guy Dashi (pronounced "doshi.") I posted a picture on my photo page. He's so little and light that he makes our two grown cats look like creatures from another species.

Hope everyone has a great week!









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Congratulations on the 0.5 lb down.  

Do you mix anything with your vinegar prior to spraying weeds?   I, typically, use a couple of cups of table salt, along with some dish detergent, along with my vinegar, but I also only use household vinegar.   It's cheap, as is the salt and I've read that it's the salt that keeps weeds from coming back.  I'm interested in the garden vinegar and how well it works.

You're right that it takes a lot of money to get a property ready to sell.  Sometimes, I wonder if it's just as well to sell "as is" for a cheaper price and let the buyer make whatever changes they want to make, paint their own colors, install their preferred flooring, etc.  I've seen people go to the expense of painting, putting in new cupboards/cabinets, carpet/flooring, only to have a buyer say "oh, I really like the house, but I don't like that carpet" or "it's really nice, but those cabinets just aren't my style"... etc.   When I sold my Auntie's home, The RE agent said that as long as the house was clean and livable, we would be good.  The carpets were old, so we knew buyers would want to change them; the cabinets were old so would probably be replaced, etc.  We did a super good cleaning job, throughout the house, had the carpets and tile professionally cleaned and let it go at that.   We got an excellent price without the work and output...  It sounds like you've done the necessary things in your mom's house and with real estate what it is, today, you'll probably get a good price.

I'm so happy your son's kitten is fitting into the family so well.  We never forget out old pets, but a new one can really help ease the sting of losing one.

Has your son started school yet?  I'm curious if he likes it - at least as well as most kids like school.  :-)

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