Kelly Update and a Great Podcast

December 9, 2016

...s this blog focuses on do not get counted by economists. All that cooking, cleaning, gardening, child and elder care count not one bit towards the sorts of calculations economists obsess over such as gross domestic product and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. This is particularly unfair to women who tend to be more responsible for what happens in the home. And let’s not even get into the ethical difficulties of placing a dollar value on human bei...

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The Secret of Tidiness Revealed

Mr. Homegrown

December 14, 2016

Domesticus, Tidying up

18 Comments

...gotta be put away. The result? Clear surfaces and floors makes for easier cleaning. That’s it. We’ve seen and tried a lot of housekeeping schedules and schemes. In my humble opinion they are too complicated, hard to stick to and, in the end, doomed to failure. Clearing the deck, on the other hand, is both savage and simple. Marie Kondo, the reining prophetess of getting rid of stuff, would likely argue that de-cluttering is a necessary first step...

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Putting Your Civic House in Order: How the Young Members of the Family Help

Mr. Homegrown

July 10, 2017

Gardening

3 Comments

...d the community wealth. The removal of disease-breeding dump heaps and the cleaning of backyards improved hygienic conditions and therefore lessened the work of the health department. It is impossible to estimate the far-reaching beneficent effects of this civic housecleaning and garden-making campaign. The general conclusions arrived at by the committee are: that the chief lesson of the garden-paying for things through work-is within the understa...

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Essential System #5 – First Aid Kit

Mr. Homegrown

August 31, 2006

Preparedness

2 Comments

...t of other things Any prescription medications that you take Syringe – for cleaning out wounds – you can also improvise this with a water bottle Antibiotic cream If you already have a first aid kit you can pimp it out with a few of these items. We can’t emphasize enough the importance of large bandage material such as the sanitary napkins. One acquaintance of ours who was unlucky enough to have been severely cut by falling glass in the Northridge...

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Preparing For El Niño Storms

Mr. Homegrown

January 5, 2016

Preparedness

16 Comments

We begin this post with a gutter cleaning selfie showing the precipitous drop from the front of our house as well as a view of the “flipper fence” handrail I built for the in-laws. The much promised El Niño rainstorms are on our doorstep this week. For those of you in the rest of the world who might be unfamiliar with the phenomenon, every decade or so weather conditions in the Northern Pacific conspire to heat up the ocean which, in turn, causes...

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