Sophia is selling her Pet Loo

For Sale - "Used" Pet Loo - not really used which is why it is time for it to go! Sophia is just too well trained for "outdoor" pottying, which means since moving to a townhome with no yard I spent the winter out in all kinds of weather, sometimes late at night, relieving my IG. Now it's just taking up space in the garage and my inability to train my dog is your gain! Sells new for over $300 (the USA distributor for this Australian invention is in Bellingham). Basically unused, asking $200. I know that seems like a lot of money, but it is less than re-doing the floors for one small room (which we just dropped almost a thousand dollar on Marmoleum to redo our bonus room where Sophia had a training "accident" over the holidays while I was working with her to use the Loo. And the floor is not redone yet - that's a weekend project! Time and money...)

Maybe your dog is more trainable than mine. Or you are just that much more unwilling to go out in the snow at midnight. Email wendy@pensandpixels.com if you or someone you know is interested.

Visit http://thepetloo.com/us/ to learn more about this product.

Product information from web site:
The Pet Loo is a backyard in a box, for your dog! This easy to use, innovative solution is ideal for pet owners who live in apartments, condos or houses. The Pet Loo is a hygienic, convenient and environmentally friendly way to allow your pet to do its business without relying on you for an opportunity.

10 Great Benefits of The Pet Loo.
1: Fits anywhere accessible to your dog like the Patio, Balcony, Laundry, Bathroom, Garage, Backyard, Deck.
2: Eliminates stains and/or puddles on your hardwood floors, tiles or carpets.
3: No more clean-ups on your floors and carpets.
4: Forget those early morning or late night dog walks.
5: You and your dog can stay inside when it's raining, snowing or icy outside.
6: You'll have peace of mind when you're unable to get home in time to walk your dog.
7: It's hygienic for you and your dog.
8: Easy to empty and clean.
9: Doesn't wear out. Good for all breeds of dogs.
10: No assembly required, just take it out of the box and it's ready.

Forbo Marmoleum and Me

Do you know the difference between linoleum and vinyl flooring? When I needed to cover the hideous flooring in my last house, a "farmhouse" on a 1/4 acre in West Seattle (it used to be a chicken farm long ago), I discovered Marmoleum, true linoleum made the old-fashioned way.

Who knows how old this vinyl flooring was. I assumed it was vinyl - and poorly installed. I was guessing from the 70s but who knew. All I knew is I couldn't stand it and it took 2 years to figure out what to do.

See, we intended to "blow" out the end of the kitchen and enlarge the space, and we anticipated needing to put down new subflooring. We didn't want to sink a lot of money into a fix that would let me tolerate being in my kitchen until the remodel. Marmoleum is a natural product made from linseed oil, wood flour, rosin, and jute. Not only is it environmentally friendly to produce, it ALSO composts when it goes to the landfill when you tear it out to do something new.
An ingenious fix was to just cover up the current floor with new flooring. We're not very handy, so hired an affordable contractor who used a special leveling compoung and prepared the old vinyl surface for the Marmoleum overlay. The two men who did the work (brothers) made a paper pattern cut out of the floor, and took the paper out to the patio and laid it over the linoluem we had purchased and cut it to fit exactly. I think they did a little trimming once back in the kitchen, but I have to say I was very happy with the end result.

Ultimately, we ended up selling this house last summer, and moving to a new Built Green townhome in High Point. If you read my blog regularly, you already know all about that! Remodeling our former home was just going to be to much for us since we weren't very experienced and ultimately lacked motivation to commit our lives to living in a rehab project.

Marmoleum is a topic of conversation in our home once again. The "bonus room" off of the garage, which is subterranean, has been a site of pet accidents and we have not been able to get the smell out of the carpet pad. We're ready to cut the carpet out just to get the smell out. I suggested painting the concrete floor a neat color until we were ready to put down bamboo or cork flooring. As you know, everyone's budget is tight these days and we're not ready to spend the money for the permanent fix. But we can't live with the carpet anymore, so something has to be done.

Ultimately we decided against painting the concrete floor mostly because it is a multi-step process, requires a lot of chemical preparation, and our home is open between floors and there is no way to close off this space while the floor is being prepared and painted. I did find what I think is the best paint out there for this project (DuraSoy One BioBased Paint). It is non-toxic, zero VOC, etc., but it still requires drying time and the inconvenience caused by tying up this space is a problem. My husband suggested Marmoleum again and I've been persuaded it is probably the easiest thing to do right now. Now we just have to figure out what color! The walls in this room are painted two different colors (macadamia and hosta from the Devine paint line). Of course, since I am color-blind, I can't really match it, and have to rely on my artistic husband to do that for me. But it will be something from the Neutral Color Collaborators even though I am mysteriously drawn to the reds of Sunset Boulevard. I don't think it will work in that room. I just know I am taking my paint sample sheet from Devine when we go to ecohaus or Great Floors to pick a color out. I saw an ad in last weekend's Pacific Magazine and maybe the price might be competitive with ecohaus. Stay tuned for more on this project!

More in today's Seattle PI: Read Today's linoleum flooring is a step up

Sponsor a Word

I thought this was so romantic of my husband of ten years to sponsor the word LOVE at the Online Etymology Dictionary. He included the excerpt of a Robert Frost poem that we had on our wedding announcements in 1997.

"Two such as you with such a master speed, cannot be parted nor be swept away, from one another once you are agreed, that life is only life forevermore, together wing to wing and oar to oar." Robert Frost

You can learn more about this dictionary and its uses and purpose here. And you can sponsor your own word here.

More musical nonsense

Ok this is ridiculous. I should have been in bed over an hour ago. But once I found the Britain's Got Talent clips with Connie Talbot I kept hunting because I needed to know if she won. And Paul Potts actually won - and I have seen a clip of him, also, a few months ago, and did not realize it was the same competition. He is an amazing singer.

So speaking of singers, Syesha Mercaod sang "I Will Always Love You", a song powerhouse Whitney Houston sang and can't really be beat. Until now. Another clip from 6 year old Connie Talbot.

If only I had kept singing in church - I stopped singing because I made people cry and it scared me because I thought it was a bad thing. And my 10 year old mind could not be persuaded otherwise.

Hearing voices in my head...

I watched America's Got Talent last summer and rooted for Cas Haley and Teri Fator both. Now I am watching American Idol for the first time (it is Season 7) and I obviously have missed years of amazing singing competition. I just had to share this clip from Britain's Got Talent.

@home : A front porch tour

Reminder - clicking on photo creates a full-screen image

We had a sunny afternoon on Thursday so I scrubbed out the fountain, rearranged my pots, and brought the furniture I bought for the deck, which doesn't quite work with our style there, to the front porch area. The Craftsman design of our townhomes in High Point are very classic, and our taste tends toward more modern indoors. The furniture totally works here! I had a lot of fun rearranging things. I don't even have a large front porch area (the door next to us has none, really - but that is also why I picked my townhome and not the one next door - the porch and the view) but it's enought to create the kind of ambiance I want to.

The native Alpine strawberry has returned (medium size red pot, on left). It not only survived a transplant in mid-season, and continued producing strawberries after our move, it has survived its first winter in a pot! I have great hopes for this plant, which I have had for four years now.

This is my new sitting and reading area. The plant with what looks like just plain dirt in it is freshly planted Knee-Hi sweet pea seeds. They are from last year, so I hope they germinate.

I moved my shepherd hook outside and hung a neat windchime made from volcanic remains on it. I moved my big basket planter behind the fountain, so it all cascades in layers from the back to the front. The master bedroom window is upstairs above the porch, and I listen to my wonderful fountain every night (we've slept with the windows open all winter, unless there was a wind storm).

You are here! I love our new doormat. It's so perfect. I can't tell you how many times on our travels we have looked for our location on maps, looking for the comforting red dot. It seemed so appropo to put it outside our front door for all our visitors!

Here's what the front porch looks like from inside the front door.

It was 80 degress today (Saturday). Insane! Even Sophia got too hot in the sun and had to go in.

My nice reading area on the front porch, where I can watch the world go by.















And in other pictures...

Sunrise at 6 AM on Saturday morning (this morning) taken thru the bamboo on our deck.

Havana peeks over the edge of the "salad bowl" pot and to the ground below.

Sprite sneaks along behind the budha to find more new plants to nibble on.

This is the window bird house we put up a few days ago, after the Black capped chickadees starting coming to the feeder. No visitors to the house yet!

Catalog Choice on The Today Show

This is the original Today Show segment that inspired me to start saving my catalogs so I could start cancelling them.

Catalog Choice : A real world application

I saw a story on NBCs Today Show in January about an elementary school that held a competition to see which class could eliminate the most catalogs from their home mail boxes. The kids, along with their parents, requested to be removed from mailing lists at home, and then the kids brought the catalogs to school to put in a big bin. 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades were competing against eash other. Many used an online service that I had not heard of, called Catalog Choice.

Herb Weisbaum as "ConsumerMan" contributed an article to MSNBC.com called "Stop the Catalog Madness!". I came across that when I was trying to find the original Today Show segment to post here - which I did finally find on YouTube (see video post above), or click to see the original video created by the school kids (which I had not seen before.)

My husband and I stockpiled catalogs February-March before finally sitting down to request removal last weekend with the help of the web site CatalogChoice.org. First we weighed the catalogs we collected. 16.8 pounds! It was a heavy pile. We then next measured how tall the pile was, and it was over 9 inches tall. Then we sat down together and Steve read me the title of each catalog and I used the Search feature on the Catalog Choice site to see if it was already listed. Most of the catalogs we have been receiving were listed on the site. And if you are receiving a catalog that is not on their list, you can suggest the catalog be added, and they will email you when the merchant has agreed to be included.

You might think this is a hard sell for merchants. Au contraire. Catalog Choice is a free service whose objective is to reduce the number of unwanted catalogs sent to American consumers, thereby helping the consumers, the environment and saving marketing costs for the merchants. With today's cost of postage, paper, and printing costs, I think some merchants are getting smart and realizing that it really is better for them to not be sending catalogs to people who are literally just going to throw them in the recycle bin without looking at them.

After inputting our catalogs we had three piles. The pile on the left is the very few (I think 5 total) catalogs we received that were not already on the CatalogChoice.org web site (we requested that they be added and we will receive notification by email when they do so we can process our request).

The pile in the middle is made up of single copy catalog titles that we requested to decline - 52 titles in all. The pile in the "round file" is duplicates of the catalogs in the center pile. So, had I already put in my requests to be removed from these catalog mailing lists, not only would I have saved trees, oil, electricity and everything else that goes into production and distribution for the middle pile, I also would never have received the catalogs in the right hand pile since they are other mailings from the same merchants.

Here is the list of catalogs I was able to request to be removed from their mailing lists:
Art.com
As We Change
CDW Solutions
Chico's
Crate & Barrel
Crutchfield Electronics
Danbury Mint
DHC
Doctors Foster & Smith
Domestications
Driving Comfort
Duncraft
Eddie Bauer
Flor
FootSmart
Great Windows
Griot's Garage
Hammacher Schlemmer
Harry and David
High Country Gardens
Home Bistro
Home Decorators Collection
Improvements
J. Jill
Johnston & Murphy
L.L. Bean
Lamps Plus
Lands' End
Macy's
Magellan's
Norm Thompson
One Spirit
Plow & Hearth
Pottery Barn
Relax The Back
Restoration Hardware
Roaman'
Shades of Light
Silhouettes
Smith & Hawken
Smith+Noble
Solutions
Spring Hill Nurseries
The Pyramid Collection
The Sharper Image
Time for Me
Tire Rack
Title Nine
Touch of Class
TravelSmith
Vermont Country Store Catalog of Goods & Wares
Woman Within

The web site notified me that four of these merchants have refused to honor requests placed thru Catalog Choice, but they provide phone numbers and web sites so you can contact the merchants directly. I got on the phone with Macy*s and spoke to Customer Service and made the request, altho I did not hear a keyboard in the background so I am skeptical that this request will be honored. I sent emails to two others thru their web sites, and Steve said he would take care of Griot's Garage by email.

Oh, and it was very interesting when we requested to be removed from Crate & Barrel. We received a notice on the screen:

All Crate and Barrel catalogues are printed on paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and contain 10 to 30 percent post-consumer recycled material. You can learn more about our environmental Initiatives on everything from furniture to packaging materials to our energy-efficient warehouses at www.crateandbarrel.com/environment.

Upon closer inspection of the catalog itself it does tout the FSC mark and statement and other things that tell you about steps the company is taking to reduce their environmental footprint. I will continue to shop there - in fact, I have a gift card from our holiday/housewarming/anniversary party that is burning a hole in my pocket. I think I am going to get a big wooden salad bowl so I can make proper Caesar salads.

It was hard to follow-thru and request removal from some of the catalogs, like Sharper Image, Hammacher Schlemmer, and Pyramid. They are fiun catalogs and we always find things to show to each other. But who needs to waste time looking at things they don't really have the money to buy anyway?

2008 is a year of conscious reduction in our household, and getting rid of the daily temptations in the mail box is a GREAT step towards freedom.

Something else I really liked about the site is that I could tell the merchant why I was requesting to be removed from the mailing list. The options are:

* Prefer not to answer
* Prefer shopping online for these products
* No interest in products
* I want to help the environment
* Duplicate mailing
* Addressed to person not at residence
* I receive too many of this catalog
* Other - has a type-in field where you can give specific reason

Honestly on many of these catalogs, I prefer to shop in the store (e.g. J Jill, Smith & Hawken, Crate & Barrel, etc). So I selected Other and typed this into the field that pops up. I think they should make that a menu option. For catalogs I never bought from before, requested, or know how I started receiving them, I answered "I want to help the environment." Sharper Image and Land's End and catalogs like those are web sites that I have used and will continue to shop from in the future. It's silly to get a catalog in the mail when you ordered from the web site. The merchant should learn to mirror the customer. If I ordered by phone from a catalog obviously I am a catalog shopper. If I ordered from the web site, I am an online shopper. By showing up in my mailbox they are trying to entice me to the web site to shop, and I am just not going to fall for it.

One wifely concession - I let Steve keep his REI catalog.

If you are serious about getting off of these mailing lists, you will also love the Catalog Choice web site because it lets you keep Notes on the site of actions you have taken. So I documented the phone call and emails I sent today using this feature. It lets you come back and check on the status of your requests, too. It will Confirm when you have been removed from mailing lists, letting you know which ones they are.

I hope our experience and illustration of how we were able to use CatalogChoice.org might inspire you to save your catalogs for a month and do the same. You will feel better for it, and free from constant pressures to spend you hard-earned money!

The Grand Unveiling : custom art for my new home office

I've been in my new home office for about seven months now. It has great new furniture, a custom California Closet for office supplies and everything else, and was painted a color that was inspired by our most recent international adventure, Italy. (You can read more here.)

The big wall above the Ferrari-red wing couch called for something dramatic. And preferably sunflower-y since that is my favorite flower, and of course the flower of Tuscany, the place that has inspired my entire office decor. I found a neat painting in an art gallery in Snohomish, but it was the wrong red and not a sunflower at all. It is difficult to shop for art when you 1) are color blind, and 2) live with someone with an artistic background and heritage. It can be intimidating.

I told my husband (the art "critic") that is might take a couple of years to find the right piece. And I was prepared to wait. Waiting is part of my new persona. I would rather do without altogether than having something not right. That's the criteria I used to get rid of so much stuff when moving from our old farmhouse a mile away to our modern townhouse in High Point. Scan Design of course was the answer for almost everything that's in our new house. And is where we had obtained the only furniture we brought with us from the old house.

His solution, and he was in cahoots with his father, I call him Ron-dad, was to commission his sister, Kimry Jelen, another family artist (and horse trainer, there will be a PBS special on her soon) to paint a piece for the wall. It would be the right size, the right colors, and it would be sunflowers.

Of course I didn't find this out until it was unveiled at Xmas. She was here over Thanksgiving scoping the room out - and the bold and bright Wing Couch dominating my office.

The painting arrived just last week. We still need to frame it - we are considering a metal frame to match the rest of the hardware in the room (and throughout the house). I couldn't be more happy with what she has produced, just for me and my space. Now I just wish my desk, which is inside of an armoire, faced the same direction so I could stare at all day!

Thanks Kimry! You did a fantastic job and I couldn't love it more!

Now I have to get rid of that floor lamp. Or find a matching shade. Steve! Better get shopping.

Note: clicking on a photo in blog post will enlarge the photo in a new window.

Birthday Break

Today is Sophia's 5th birthday. I sang happy birthday to her in the car while taking her out for a treat.

Last year for Sophia's birthday we had an early morning Iggy Ambassadors shopping party at the newly opened Scraps Dog Bakery and had birthday cake from Whole Foods for breakfast. This year her b'day is on a Tuesday instead of a Sunday so we had to have a more private celebration.

We stayed close to home and went to the Alaska Junction to visit Cupcake Royale. Unfortunately they are no longer allowing 4-legged children into the shop, and Sophia doesn't do well tied up outside - nor do I consider it prudent to do so since she is friendly and very portable and I worry someone might take her. So after a nice walk I returned her to the car briefly so I could go back and get her a "Plain Jane" baby cake (vanilla) and something for Mommy, a "Triple Threat" chocolate cupcake.

They come packed in an upside down cup with lid and upside down deli container respectively. Quite ingenious really.

We came home and I made some tea and then I fed Sophia her little birthday treat first. And then she sat and stared at me hoping for bits of my chocolate cupcake. Not happening, birthday girl! No more chocolate for you!

Happy birthday to my lovely Sophia! Our next celebration will be her adoption anniversary, which is on May 14th, when I will have had her in my life for three years. I can't imagine my life without her!