Lightbulbs and Lakes of Pee.
Apr 22, 2008 Tips, Tricks & Tutorials
Welcome to another installment of Mel’s random tips, where Mel shares her hard earned wisdom (usually from screwing up) with you, loyal readers, fans, stalkers and underwear stealers.
Tip # 1: Crystal Cat Litter.
Crystal cat litter is that oddball silica stuff found in dark places along your grocery store shelf or hidden between all the other clay stuff in your favorite pet store.
It looks kinda space agey, with it’s clear little crystal looking pellets mingled with blue–sometimes, all of them are blue–but generally the uniform look resembles…yep, you guessed it, crystals.
These bags of shimmery cat-shit collectors tout promises of being good for the environment. Why are they good for the environment? Well, they say that their little crystals soak up amazing amounts of pee! Most of them promise ONE BAG for ONE CAT for ONE MONTH! Guaranteed! By using their products you’re saving space in land-fills, saving yourself money, and that’s good mojo for the world and everything else.
Unfortunately it’s a big crock of sh*t.
I purchased a six pound bag of these crystally pee-absorbers last Wednesday for our cats. Luckily both myself and my husband were a little leery of the product and it’s almost-too-amazing long shelf-life; we bought a small bag of old-fashioned clay litter. We’re using that now.
The bag said four pounds for one cat–the bag was six pounds and we had two cats. The experiment was to see if it would do anything at all like what it said it would on the package.
It did. For the first four days.
After four days the litter box turned into this piss-colored, blue/green mess that stunk of plastic and…well…you know… cat-p*ss. (There really aren’t enough horrifying words to describe what this can smell like, mixed with plastic.) Two or three times a day, I’d remove any solids and stir the crystals up as per instructions. All that did was make me gag and retch as what I’d imaged the smell of 100 pounds of stale piss left in a plastic tub to cook in the Florida sun for a year, came wafting up my nostrils.
The bottom of the litter pan became this…bubbly lake of bright green p*ss. The silica stopped absorbing after four days.
So four days for two cats from a product that swears it’ll last 30 for a single cat. I sense LIES AND DECEIT.
Sure, I’d like to help the environment. But I’d also like to not have my cats have to sink their paws into a small lake of their own urine every time they get into the litter box.
Seriously. Stay away from crystal kitty litter. Maybe try the recycles newspaper bits–but not this shit. This sh*t was NAS-TAY.
Tip # 1: Save A LOT of money, help the environment, and not stub your toe in the dark!
Once upon a time, the Pence household used plain old fashioned normal light bulbs. 
They were silly people who were paying a lot of money for their electric bill and having to replace light bulbs every month or two. (Florida is famous for it’s power brown outs, inconsistencies, and we think whomever wired our house was a drunkard. So whenever we used normal bulbs, they’d blow out or burn out in a matter of a month or two.)
Lo’ and behold, we met these bulbs:
(Actual bulb from my desk lamp!)
There are many different shapes to these, but they’re all known as Compact fluorescent. This spiral shape is especially good for desk lights, and they last around eight times longer than a normal old-fashioned bulb.
We replaced all of our light bulbs with these last year. We’ve managed to knock our power bill down a significant chunk of moolah. And, we haven’t had to replace any of these bulbs that we’ve put in yet. They don’t get hot. I’m able to reach in and touch the bulb after it’s been on for several hours and they are really bright.
They’re not cheap, but they’re not entirely out of normal price range, either. Consider slowly replacing your old bulbs with these. You’ll use less power and save yourself some money.
If you’re interested, here’s a linked guide to other types of Compact fluorescents and other light bulbs: Lowe’s Light Bulb Buying guide.
If you have cash in your pocket to burn, do some research into LED lights, too. Brighter, clearer, much like the above bulb–they don’t burn hot and they don’t use a lot of electricity, either. Also make EXCELLENT Christmas lights and decorative lights for stringing up everywhere. They last forever, and they’re a little kinder on the juice.
So remember kids (for the tl;dr crowd): Crystal litter = lake of p*ss, LED lights or Compact fluorescent light bulbs = less power, more money in your pocket.
This has been another Random Mel Thing, brought to you by the letter WTF, and the deliciousness of a cup of genmaicha tea.
Tags: cats, life, Stuff we buy
I am Becoming a Tea Whore
Apr 16, 2008 Food
Image via WikipediaThis is NOT a sponsored post. I really, really like tea.
Not to be confused with a tea snob, because a tea snob probably knows way more about brewing tea than I ever will. They probably know specific temperatures, the correct alignment of the sun, what time of the day is best for what and how many leaves, precisely, to use.
I however, am just a tea wh*re. I love tea. I will give any tea a chance. I’ll let any kind of tea, regardless of it’s brewing, to pass my lips at least once so that I can say I have tried it and whether or not I like it.
It all started several eons ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth when I was a small girl. My parents and my grandparents drank tea like like thirsting men in the desert enjoy water. Specifically, my Grandmother’s house was filled with Red Rose, or Tetley Tea and my home filled with the same. My father started his morning with a cup of tea, same as my mother. My father liked his tea with very little milk and sugar, while my mothers, as my father jokingly remarked, like “swamp water tea.” A lot of milk and a lot of sweetener.
Off and on through the years living with them, I’d endulge in a cup of tea, but it never truly grew on me. Not until this year.
Now, whether it’s a sign I am growing old and crotchety…crotchetier? –or whether it’s simply a sign of tastes changing as one grows older, I have found myself obsessed, pleased, and calmed by tea. It all started with four tea bags of Genmaicha tea handed to me as freebies from the local organic health store and I haven’t quite been right since.
I’ve had a slew of samples from Adagio teas, some of my favorites are: Cirton Green, Kukicha tea, White Monkey, Chocolate tea, chai tea, Lemon Lavender and Mint tea.
I used to start my days with coffee and drank near a full pot every two days. That’s a lot of coffee and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the healthiest decision. There’s something terribly soothing about tea, now that I am older I’m able to appreciate it.
Lately I’ve been on a tea prowl. What can I add to my taste-collection that I’m missing out on?
Are you a fellow tea-wh*re? What’s your favorite brand or flavor and where do you love having your cup of tea? I’m always looking for a new flavor to try, so do you have any recommendations for me to try?
Morning Magic.
Apr 12, 2008 Photography & Digital Art
During most early Florida mornings, dew forms on the sleepy shapes all around us. Our chilli pepper red Saturn and the two-tone gray rocks of our front garden, on the door and across still blades of vibrant green grass.
Most often at this early, you’ve no doubt just left your sheets for bed, showered and are readied for work. The linens on your bed still warm from deep sleep, the pillows still indented with your slumber-filled head. It’s when you’re in between your front door and car door, maybe your coffee is in hand or your keys and you’re still forcing bleary eyes open–the zinging of bustling cars hurrying off to work the grind behind you–that you notice it.
Despite all the jangling noise of car horns, engines revved, brakes squealing? There’s this invisible blanket that still remains over the earth this early in the morning, a covering for a world still half-dreaming, and perhaps that blanket is the very dew you see shivering on the hood of your car.
Getting into your car in these dewy Florida mornings can be like stepping into another world. When you shut the door, you leave the harsh cadence of sunrise rush hour traffic behind you. It becomes muted, background static to the mini-world of the inside of your car. All the windows have been covered by condensation. Little droplets splattered all over glass which reflect to you the glorious colors of the sun behind miniature palm trees. Maybe you press your brow to the glass for a split second just to watch all the hundreds of small mirror worlds reflected to you in the morning dew.
Maybe, for just a moment, magic exists for you before the hustle of everyday muscles through.
Tags: life, reflection, Writing
Four a.m. cup of tea.
Mar 29, 2008 Personal
As I am growing older, more insane and sprouting chin hairs long enough to let children swing like monkeys from them, I realize that I have well and truly screwed up my sleeping schedule.
I think it’s my brain. The brain that keeps me up until noon the next day writing silly blog entries about cat snot and my husband’s gas, the brain that tells me it’d be awesome to do a comic about my life with cats then reminds me that it’s a lot of work. And yes, the same brain that likes pink, shiny things and decorates her desk with Christmas L.E.D lights all year around while plastering Disney stickers from one end of it to the other. (Gosh, I just don’t know why I never sleep!)
I have some good nights and some bad nights. The L.E.D lights around my desk come in red, orange, blue and green. They’re cherry sized spheres scoured in little triangles to soften and throw the colored lights out in a bit of a glow. They fall against my desk and make miniature rainbows in the pink mardi-gras beads I have hanging from my upper shelf for no reason other than they are pink. And shiny.
Everything in the house is sleeping. My husband is snoring away, reminding me of the tide crashing along the shore and smashing boats into little pieces while passengers scream and are broken against the rocks. The cats aren’t chewing on my feet, hands, head or trying to get me to feed them by sitting on my face. The fan in my computer is a low whirr which moves air at a pace I imagine stately southern women fan their faces in the height of summer. There is no creaking of feet against the pre-fab wooden floor, no dog barking because some one a mile away sneezed—its stillness, in its noisiest, calmest form.
On good nights, it’s comforting. Despite the loud silence, it’s the living sort of silence which reminds me that the world’s just taking a nap as my brain zips along at crack snorter’s speed.
On bad nights, it can be a lonely sound, making me wish for the song of the birds at five am and all the horrendous caterwauling of everyday that means this house is awake.
On either of these nights, good or bad, as long as it is sleepless I tend to like to sit down at my desk and have myself four a.m. tea. Green tea, to be precise, of whichever variety I wish to try at the moment (though Gen mai cha, white monkey, chocolate and citron green (a unique flavor from Adagio) are my favorites at the moment) and go through a little ritual.
Source: WikipediaI use loose leaf teas because they smell like healthy, nature, wild leaves and some times like the tea my grandmother and parents drank. When it’s brewing, depending on the type, the leaves like to unfurl just as I’ve watched my cats stretch in the middle of sun naps, languid and slow. There are more colors than just green too, occasionally I can see red, brown, yellow and orange, spices as well as bits of stem too. For the three minutes or so it’s brewing, I turn into an idiot kid and shove my nose right over it. My glasses fog immediately so I can’t see anything but my mouth as well as my nose is filled with this wonderful, steam-scent of brewing tea. It builds anticipation and it builds a memory for me to hold onto until the next cup.
Drinking it is when I can just stop—read maybe, be slovenly, take my time through my own thoughts when I’d usually be zigzagging at a million miles an hour.
It makes the screwed up sleeping schedule not so very important. Or the thoughts. Or the worries about bills, or the silence, or the laundry which I need to do, or the floor that needs to be swept, or what I said seven years ago –oh my god I was such a dork—all of that floats away for a time.
It amazes me how utterly simplistically complicated creatures we are as human beings. That a ritual of tea, or coffee, or a moment even though sleepless, can leave us feeling so very much as peace and give us a few moments to remember how easy it is to grab a chunk of joy to keep for ourselves.
Life can sure do it’s best to keep the blinders on us, trying to fool us into thinking there’s nothing but despair, sorrow, and that attaining happiness is a long drawn out, expensive nearly impossible affair involving pills in addition to therapists. We can so easily forget to just stop and be.
What is your four a.m cup of tea? What is it that you like to do to just shed the stress, calm the mind and find some happiness for yourself?
