Friday Funnies

Think pink and not white snow. 

These pink blossoms covered the ground outside a NJ hotel during our recent Easter holiday road trip.

Happy Mother's Day 💐

Enjoy your weekend, Everyone.

DW "Easy Peasy" Clean

Do you clean your dishwasher?
Sure, it saves time-saver in terms of kitchen chores, but it needs to be cleaned too. As grease, soap scum and food debris accumulate, efficiency is reduced and the DW can become a germ-magnet. (Yes, gross, I know ☹️) 

Here's a quick and easy 2-step method touted by home maintenance guru Bob Vila. It uses easy-to find ingredients — vinegar and baking soda and no chemicals. Sure, there are other ways: using the powdered breakfast drink Tang® (several YouTube videos show how). There's also marketed "dishwasher" cleaners. All cost more than this method.

We hate dislike spending more — and who doesn't like easy?
Take out the bottom dish rack. Check the DW drain. Remove any trapped food items. This can improve drainage, increase cleaning, and prevent damages.

Use vinegar for the wash, then add baking soda for a rinse. (NOTE: you can use any brand of these products; these are only shown for illustration.)

Vinegar Wash

Start with an empty dishwasher.

Fill a dishwasher-safe container with 1 cup of white vinegar and place it on the upper rack of the empty machine. 

Close the door. Run the dishwasher through a hot-water cycle. When it's done, you should see that the vinegar washed away grease and removed any odors.

Baking Soda Rinse

After the vinegar rinse is done, sprinkle a cupful of baking soda across the bottom of the appliance. Run it on a short hot-water cycle. When it's done, you should notice that your appliance has a brighter, stain and odor-free interior.

Vila recommends a monthly cleaning to maintain the dishwasher. This is a two-for one cleaning day. I use vinegar to clean the auto coffeemaker every month; usually on the same day as cleaning the DW — easy peasy.

FYI: The oft-used expression "easy peasy lemon squeezy" is said to come from a 1950s advertising slogan for Lemon Sqezy®, a “washing-up liquid." This British detergent was sold in a squeeze bottle. In earlier marketing campaigns, two other ad slogans were used: "Washing-Up? It's easy with Sqezy" and "Quick as a wink away from the sink." The phrasing everyone knows started after a lemon version was marketed. Sqezy® formerly marketed by British manufacturer Starbrands Limited is no longer made. 

The Show Went On . . .

It was billed as a rain or shine event, but mostly rain, in downtown Nashua this past Saturday for the Nu Muse Festival, day-long music festival. This event was the kick-off in a series of 3 planned downtown music fests.

While event organizers had hoped to attract upwards of 3,000 folks to the city, but the weather didn't cooperative. There were several downpours during most of the morning. 

Thankfully, the music performances didn’t start until noon; they continued until 10 p.m. By early evening, the rain had lessened and even subsided for a few hours. Crowds were much less than anticipated, but no less enthusiastic.

The festival also included seasonal roll-out of the Nashua Street Pianos which were unplayed and covered due to the weather. Several artists and food vendors (thankfully) braved the elements. We did too and volunteered with the local CERT (community emergency response team).

Despite the day's miserable weather, there was a beautiful sight in the sky in between the evening showers — a double rainbow, the second one barely visible below.

Additional downtown music festivals are scheduled in July and September. Hopefully, Mother Nature will "get the memo" and bring better weather. Either way, the music will go on, rain or shine. 

The festival also featured installation of the Comeback Kitchen Table, a public art project spearheaded by City Arts Nashua. (More on that in a future post.)

Friday Funnies

Wonder if this fellow specializes in medical malpractice?

Seeing this office sign in CT last weekend reminded me of a 1940s song that I had heard about titled "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief." It was unexpected to see 2 out of those 3 covered here in this NJ signage. (It was across the street from the hotel where we stayed overnight.)

"Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief" was a popular song published in 1945, with music by Hoagy Carmichael and lyrics by Paul Francis Webster. The title and lyrics are a play on the popular counting game "Tinker, Tailor." 

The biggest-selling version of the song was recorded by Betty Hutton on June 29, 1945 and released by Capitol Records. The recording reached the Billboard magazine charts on December 6, 1945; it lasted 17 weeks on the chart, peaking at #1. And here it is:

It (Finally) Came

Yes, it's true, the platform bed that we ordered exactly 8 months ago today (we counted) was finally delivered. The (very) long story was recounted in mid-January here.

Briefly, we bought a new bedroom set (dressers, nightstands, platform bed, mattress), Sept, 4, 2016 on Labor Day weekend and were

wall decal above the headboard

given a 6-8 week delivery timeframe. The nightstands and new mattress were delivered in late Oct. We were told that due to "production" delays, the dressers and bed would be delivered Jan 20. The day before, we received a call that "the wrong bed had been sent." (We later learned that the furniture store had ordered the wrong bed.) We were given a new 4-6 week delivery for the correct bed.

January, February, March, and April came and went with repeated calls to the local store and the manufacturer with no clear explanation for the bed delay. Finally, a call came in late February telling us that a re-shipped bed had been damaged in Baltimore and would be reordered (again). 

Surprisingly, a few days before Easter, a call came that the bed was in Nashua, NH, at the local furniture store warehouse. Maybe the Easter Bunny would deliver it? We asked for delivery before we left on a holiday road trip to visit family. No, it couldn't be delivered until the week we wouldn't be home. Not wanting any further possible delays, we pre-scheduled delivery for this week.

Eureka the bed arrived early this morning.

And, now we're ready for the first night of sleep in our FREE bed.

You read that right. Because we complained loud enough about the repeated delays that the local store manager refunded the total cost of the bed, plus $100, and a refund for the delivery charges for the entire set. We already had the refund credited to our charge account, and now we have the bed — at last!

Did You Know?

In a previous post last week, there were photos of long and winding roads and I asked if anyone could identify the state we were driving through.

In addition to the roads, we also saw a lot of these items — clothes drying outdoors, barns, and cows.

If you guessed (or didn't know) we were in the state of Pennsylvania.