7 Quick Takes Friday, #37

1. I'm a dishwasher freak. If it's not completely full, I can't run the dishwasher through a washing cycle. It feels improper and illegal and I just can't do it. I fill it up so completely - utilizing every inch of space - that it rivals the cluttered kitchen aisles of Bed, Bath & Beyond. No. More. Room. But not so tight that the dishes don't get clean; I make sure it's all in good order.

On the other hand, I run into those times where it's pretty much full, with only a tiny slot left. There are no more dishes to be found in the whole house, but I badly want to get these clean so I can finish the job.

This happened yesterday, and I was doing my best to locate a stray bowl or mug for the top rack. Everywhere else was full and ready to be washed. I started to get itchy just thinking about running the dishwasher without it being completely filled - just one more bowl would do it. Just ONE more....

So I ate a quick bowl of cereal. For no other purpose than to make a dirty dish.

Welcome to crazy town.

2. Speaking of crazy, I've been heading that way since trying to download photos to purchase online prints. It's been SO long since I've ordered prints and I'm feeling the pressure to get it taken care of. Only, when I say SO long, I mean like, about a year ago. If I remember right. So there are approximately one million pictures to be located, sorted, and uploaded to the photo site. This takes approximately two million life spans and has sucked me dry of my life force.

The photo site can upload 200 photos at a time and if you do that amount (which I've done 3 separate times already) the standard time it takes is 120 minutes. 120 minutes. You could hand-draw the pictures yourself in that amount of time. I don't even want to think about how much money I'll be spending on the photos, but I do have a $20 coupon from the site, so hopefully that'll put a teeny tiny cutesy wootsy dent in my order.

But I'm not sure it'll make a dent in my ability to see straight after editing my one million pictures. Those things take time.

3. If I didn't take so many pictures, we'd be OK. But I'm such a bad photographer that I have to take about 8 shots of the same thing for one to turn out looking something like I want it to. And then the other ones are hard to delete because they're usually pictures of my daughters, and doesn't it feel sacrilegious to delete your child's picture? It does for me, anyway.

Would you like proof of my terrible photography skills? NO? Well, you're this close, you may as well look anyway.

There was the most beautiful sunrise the other morning. Since the kids were still sleeping, I ran outside to the street with a camera to capture it so they could see it later. But my camera is so plain and even if it did have some setting which would make this picture better, I wouldn't know how to use it. What I ended up with are terribly unflattering shots of one of the most colorful sunrises I've ever seen. (Not that I've seen a whole lot - I'm still working on enjoying the waking up part of the day.)

In all its not-fully-captured glory, the sunrise:

Make of it what you will.

4. My sweet little Lauren Jade - at 18 months - can talk like nobody's business. And often she talks about nobody's business.

While rolling on the floor together, rough-housing (ruffling!) before bed one night, she suddenly stopped. Looking at me with surprise and concentration, she said "TOOT!" before popping off a noisy row of toots. She was warning us, I guess. But the...the...duration...of her gassiness caught her off guard. With even more surprise than before, she yelled, "MOTORCYCLE TOOT!"

I snorted and cried and honked with laughter. We were quite the noisy pair.

5. How, in ancient times, did people deal with bad eyesight? I've been wondering about this because it seems like everywhere I go, a good deal of the population needs glasses or contacts to see correctly. Is this a recent phenomenon? Because I never really hear about bad eyesight in, say, historical novels. Which are the height of accuracy, as we all know. Were people with really bad eyesight just considered blind? I'm sure I would have been. How did they make a living or keep from getting hurt? Did they get treated differently for not being able to see? Or did everyone have bad eyesight, and therefore nothing seemed amiss?

I read somewhere that about 75% of the population (world? US?) needs corrective lenses of some sort. Has it always been so?

These kinds of irrelevant things keep me up at night.

6. I'm having a Pampered Chef party this weekend. I consider most in-home parties to be something to endure for the sake of a friend, but Pampered Chef is different: I love it. I love the cooking part, the eating part, and the kitchen gadgets part. I love that many items are in my price range and many items are in my dream range. In short, I'm really looking forward to the party.

What's your idea of a fun in-home sales party?

7. A while back, I saw an advertisement for washable, reusable lunch baggies. For sandwiches, fruit, veggies, chips, that sort of thing. We go through plastic baggies way too often and I've really been feeling wasteful about it. At one time I washed them out to reuse them, but after months of this I was starting to hate the sight of my countertops lined with ballooned out bags tented over every available surface. I'd love to find those reusable cloth bags again. Have you ever heard of anything like this or where I might be able to find some?



That's it for this week's exciting installment of 7 moderately Quick Takes - check out the entire link list at Conversion Diary, and enjoy your weekend!