Making Life Easier at Home

This blog post is going to be about all the things that just plain make my life easier. I am a hard worker, but inherently lazy. I want things to be easy. I NEED them to be easy or I am a wreck. As in…. I could not function well until I made a few changes, and now the birds are singing and the sun is shining.

This is my unii make up holder. It’s called a pallet actually and that is how I use it. One hand holds the pallet and the other hand paints away. It has a lid, but I….. um….. ripped it off. I told you, function at all cost. I kept the lid so that when I travel I still have it, but lid-less I can paint away much easier. It’s pricey at $29, but I use it every.stinkin.day. So price per use is pennies! Here is a tutorial on how to get your make up out of the plastic holders and into your unii. Buy {here}.

My clip art and font folder…. LOVE…. I have a pretty good grasp on my fonts and clip art, but what throws me are the 15 sets of DJ Inkers stuff I have. That’s like 3,000 images… So I stuck all my user manuals in the folder. When I buy from TpT I simply take a screen shot of the file I bought, print, and file.

Don’t know how to take a screen shot? Here is how.

1. Find the button on your key board that says screen shot or PrtSC. It should be on the top row of tiny keys on you PC.

2. Push it. Don’t panic. It looks like nothing has happened. But your computer has the image stored in its memory. Now you need to get it.

3. Click on your start button and open the program “paint”. Your screen will now look like this:

4. Copy the picture that you cannot see by clicking the clipboard button (upper left) and choosing paste. You are now pasting the image your computer has stored so that you can use it. Here is my clip art screen shot from TpT.

5. Crop your screenshot and save it as a Jpeg.

This is ready to be printed and filed in my clip art book. I love Melonheadz. She made me the graphics for my American Heroes unit as well as a ton of my other units.

OK back to things I can’t live without.

This little baby my hubby purchased from Bed Bath and Beyond. It’s not exactly pretty, and I would put it away if we were having a party, but it makes my life easy! I can put my screaming hot flat iron in and it won’t burn anyone! I am always worried I will burn up my countertop. I place it in its holder while I grab the next section of hair, and I don’t burn down the house. It can also be hung onto a cabinet, but that takes bending down. Remember I’m lazy. You can buy it from BBand Beyond ($14) or online {here}

My hair is ridiculous. I have a lot of it, it’s long, and it has multiple personalities. It has sections of sweet Julia Roberts curls, sections of Gweneth Paltrow straight, and sections of Whoopie Goldberg wild woman hair. So on any given day, with any given hairstyle, I have to convince the parts of my hair to play nicely with each other. This leads to long blow drying sessions, a chair, and a whip. I use my third arm (actually called the Hair Made) to help with this process. I love this thing. I don’t have to hold my own blow dryer! LaZy, and happy! Buy it here for $18

Glass measuring cups. This is going to seem crazy but I can almost cook Thanksgiving dinner in my 12 Pyrex measuring cups. Why so many? Because I microwave everything in them and half of them are always in the dish washer. I hate microwaving a bowl of corn and burning my hands on the bowl… or worse using hot mitts and the bowl goes slipping out of my hands, burning my legs. With the Pyrex and its handy handle I can grab and go…. look Ma no oven mitts!

Windows Live Writer. If you have windows you probably have this. You can write your blog posts from this program and it lets you do so much more than blogger. This is especially true with your pictures. You can size them, and add borders, and really so much more. LOVE this program. To see if you have it on your PC, go to start and type in “Windows Live Writer” on the search bar.

See what I mean about the photos being soooo much easier and cooler?

6 laundry baskets. Now remember I am LAZY. I don’t want to shuffle through what gets dried or not dried… I have separate baskets. The rule in my house is: If you wear it to work it goes in the front baskets. These clothes are washed in cold and dried for 10 minutes to de-wrinkle. Then I hang them to dry. This helps with my hubby’s polo shirt collars and not shrinking our clothes. The stuff in the back baskets get washed and dried like normal. No sorting! I got the back baskets from Hobby Lobby ($10 each). The front ones are actually black trash cans from Home Depot ($4 each).

My camera…. hello lover…. I LoVe my camera. It takes great photos and it is the bottom of the line for DsLrs… so I guess that makes it more affordable…. It’s not cheap, but it has made a world of difference in the photos we take. Especially photos of my sweet baby niece. Here’s Brooklyn at 5 days old.