New York Renovator

There are a few kitchen makeover contests going on right now. I think the one for TriScents is not accepting anymore submissions. Public voting will start May 8th. I’ll give more details on that when they come; right now judges are selecting the finalists before they open up the voting. I hope I am one of them! I made a short video of why I need a new kitchen. You can see the gallery of submissions here. Mine is titled, “The Saturday Matinee Kitchen Horror Show.” We all know why it’s named that, lol.

Another contest is the Electrolux Dream Kitchen Sweepstakes. I am going to enter this, too. They are currently taking submissions, and public voting starts May 9th. So far there are 109 submissions. I think if I submit the photo of the disgusting thing that is my kitchen, it will blow all competition away. The real problem comes with the PUBLIC voting. I don’t have a million friends and relatives who will click away for me. That’s the only thing I don’t like about these contests.

But still, maybe I will win! My only question is: what if I win BOTH contests? Wouldn’t that be so wonderful?!

My little seedlings are growing! And I’m about halfway through the period spent in hardening off the plants. After raising them indoors, I can’t just throw the little babes out into the cruel New York State world. They need time to acclimate to our cool days and very chilly nights. I’m hoping that by May 12th I can get these babies in the ground. You can see that the squash is already too big for its britches.

The threat of frost is still here, probably for another week. We did have frost last week, and some weathermen are calling for the chance of it this week. We had a hot start to our spring, and now we’re back to “spring” temperatures!

In the vegetable garden, the peas and spinach are just starting to show through the earth. I’ll snap a photo when they are larger.

It’s that time of year again! I am urging you to help out. It’s so simple to participate and even the smallest effort means so much! It’s the Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive! May 10th is the day!

On Saturday, May 10, Campbell Soup Company will join forces with the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) to Stamp Out Hunger! across America. Now in its 16th year, the Stamp Out Hunger! effort is the nation’s largest single-day food drive, having collected more than 836 million pounds of food since its inception in 1993.

To help Stamp Out Hunger! this year, simply leave a sturdy bag containing non-perishable foods, such as canned soup, canned vegetables, pasta, rice or cereal next to your mailbox prior to the time of regular mail delivery on May 10. Food items should be in non-breakable containers, such as boxes and cans. The nation’s 230,000 letter carriers will then collect donations from homes across the country and deliver them to food bank members of America’s Second Harvest – The Nation’s Food Bank Network and other hunger relief organizations in more than 10,000 local communities.

We all know gas prices and food prices have gone through the roof. For some, this may mean not getting that second car, but for others it could mean no food for the day! Where I live in Upstate New York, there are numerous food banks in my own community who rely completely on local donations from food drive campaigns such as this one. I’ll be blunt: there have been hard times for us when we have received help from food banks. We’ve tried to return the blessing by donating food when we can, too. And my husband is a part-time rural mail carrier, so he helps by donating his precious time (mail carriers do not get paid for the extra time it takes to pick up the food and take it back to the post office).

Please help out with this campaign. It means so much to so many people, and it requires so little effort on your part. All you have to do is put a grocery bag of non-perishable food at your mailbox. Even one little can of corn or a box of rice helps! Since I have been both on the receiving and the giving end, campaigns like this mean so much to me! There is no excuse for our neighbors to go hungry. If you want to help out even more, join your local food bank and help distribute food to needy families, or check out this community page for Stamp Out Hunger.

I read a story at Lucky Girl blog today. She discovered a wasp making a nest behind her car’s gas tank door. She didn’t have anything handy besides the gas in the gas nozzle. She did manage to kill the wasp, but she used some (precious) gas. And God forbid the wasp or pieces of the nest should ever spill into the fuel tank! You’d clog up your fuel line! It got me thinking about killing wasps in an emergency like that.

We have a TON of wasps around here. I wrote a post about The Mother of all Wasp Nests a few months ago. The nests can get bigger then a basketball, and there can be millions of wasps buzzing around. Because the back side of our house gets so blazing hot, and because the eaves of our house are so long and pitched, the wasps LOVE it around here. I could estimate that we have about two dozen small (but growing) wasp nests on the house right now. For outdoors, I have to use the toxic spray to kill them. I don’t like killing the wasps, because they are actually very beneficial to the garden. Wasps eat the nasty caterpillars and larvae that chew up the green plants I’m trying to grow. However some people are horribly allergic to stinging insects and have to wear medical id tags in case of being stung! I’m not about to take any chances with the pests around the home. Even though you leave wasps alone, they will leave you alone (for the most part), I do not like them around the house, so we spray the ones outside.

But the wasps also find a way of getting inside the house. Whether through an open door, or through the multitudes of openings my rickety old house has to the outdoors, they get in. We have a few nests INSIDE the house, between the exterior siding and the interior plaster walls (in the studs). They manage to get in the house, especially on chilly days.

What to do when you’ve got wasps inside the house? I have a can of hairspray for such an event. The hairspray hardens their wings and renders them useless. Be sure to use the super-duper kind of hairspray, otherwise the stuff won’t harden fast enough and you’re going to be doing battle with an angry wasp.