and Fall has begun

Our lazy summer days are represented by this calendar from two weeks ago:

Our weeks all-too-quickly went from the above, to the below:

Happy Fall!

My Decision to Line Dry

Here's another little-known fact about the writer of this blog: The power of suggestion is ten trillion times stronger for her. It's what makes her so agreeable!

I'm going to stop talking in the third person now.

You cannot suggest something to me (even indirectly) without expecting that I do exactly what you suggest. Please, don't use this against me. : )

For this reason, I pretty much only read one blog (other than friends and family). And even on that blog, I pretty much only read one author's posts.

And, to my admission, I pretty much do everything she suggests.

So, anyway, this is about my decision to line dry. Which basically means this is about Tsh's suggestion to Line Dry.

In all seriousness, I have loved line drying my clothes. Here are my reasons:

The smell! Oh, the smell!
Seriously, I would rather have a freshly line dried shirt than a bouquet of flowers. Not even kidding you. When I walk outside to pick our clothes off the clothes-line, I breathe deep. I think I love the smell even more because we've been using soap nuts to wash our clothes naturally. Because it's natural, there's no smell, which is a good thing. But there's something about smell that convinces us of cleanliness, you know?

Energy Savings
I actually do care about the environment, but I probably care more about our budget. And we definitely save some dough by not using our dryer. Enough said.

Laundry has a little more life to it.
Knowing that it might rain that evening is good motivation to get our clean clothes off the line. Motivation is something that I need, considering I tend to leave our clothes in the dryer or unfolded until my husband decides to do something about it. With line drying, I have to deal with the laundry today.

I love being outside, and I don't get nearly enough of it. Therefore, if the only reason I go outside on any given day is to get my wonderful smelling laundry, I'm okay with that.

Finally, I have one warning for you. You may end up looking down at this at the end of the day:

new city, new look

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Pretty great, huh?

First Day of School

First Day of Work

My new favorite book thing...

I'm a declutterer, a purger, a non-packrat, whatever you want to call it. And my husband is the opposite. When we moved, I told him that it may save our marriage if he were able to part with at least five of the following: records, board games, video games, and books.

We sold many of these things at a garage sale, and we both felt pretty good about it. I then proceeded to sell a few more books on half.com. I had a good experience with it, but PBS is better, for all involved.

It's free to receive books

Yep, completely free. The program is a credit system, the start-up "cost" consists only of posting 10 books you want to get off your bookshelf. After you post 10 books, you receive 2 credits and each book can be requested for 1 credit. Then for each book you send out, you get another credit.

It's really easy

I'm really impressed with the way they set up the site. When one of your books is requested, they make it incredibly easy to send out your book. They provide a printable wrapper to mail your book in and inform you of the amount of postage it will take to mail it out. You simply wrap the book, put stamps on accordingly, and mail it out-without a trip to the post office.

The cost is minimal

PBS provides only the cheapest shipping options, and on average, it's between $1 and $3 dollars to mail a book.

It makes Bryan AND LisaGrace happy

Bryan gets books he's always wanted for next to nothing, and I get rid of books I don't want or need. This is a rare thing indeed.

BTW, Danielle, thanks for telling me about it-I referred you when I signed up the other day-hopefully you get a free credit or something!

Click here to sign up. If you want to refer me, my email is alsburyhome @ gmail.com (remove spaces)

Marion the Librarian

I finally got a library card at the Iowa City Public Library. Woot!

Currently, I only want ONE book I want from the Iowa City Public Library:

They don't have it.

So I inquired about inter-library loan. They checked it out (no pun intended) and the only libraries that have the book are AMES and Indianola. Which is unfortunate because I know that the one in Ames is checked out, and I even know WHO has it checked out right now. : )

Already getting impatient with the library, I checked out amazon.com, just to see what the price was on this book. Guess what? It's being sold new for $.49! Well, more like $4.48 because the shipping is $3.99. BUT I had a $5 amazon.com gift card saved up from Swagbucks (you seriously need to sign up if you haven't already), so I went crazy and ordered the book.

It was completely free after the gift card!

I still need to make use of my local library...

and the latest HyVee employee is...

I WILL be a helpful smile in every aisle.