*****

Hello, lovelies! It’s Janet here from Love is Blonde. Thank you to my fellow Janet for having me here at Pink University today, where I will show you how to make delicious coffee in a french press pot.

Some of you probably already have coffeemakers, or perhaps you just get your daily caffeine fix from your local barista. But if you can learn the simple few steps below, I promise you will wow yourself and your houseguests with really smooth coffee, without spending a lot of money, and you can get rid of that ugly, hulking plastic appliance taking up precious countertop space!

Step 1: Buy yourself a french press. Mine is from IKEA (cheap!), and there’s really no need to spend more than $20 or $25. Here’s a 32 oz. one and here’s a small, pink 12 oz. one.

Step 2: Head on over to your local coffee shop to buy a pound of coffee beans, and ask them to grind your beans for a french press setting. This should be included in the price. Bonus — at my local Peregrine Espresso, a pound of beans comes with a free cup of coffee, maybe yours will too!

You don’t really need to know the difference between a french press grind and a regular grind, except to know french press is coarser than regular. Let the experts do the dirty work, just get yourself some coarse ground coffee. I like to pick a roast that has the word chocolate in the description, like this one below: “…flavors of caramel, chocolate, black cherry, and wine.”

Step 3: Boil as many cups of water as you’d like coffee. Except don’t let the water get too boiled. Ideally, you want the water to be just below boiling point when you pour it into the french press.

Step 4: While your water is heating up, measure out two tablespoons of ground coffee per cup of water, and put it in the french press.

Step 5: Take your just-shy-of-boiling water, and pour it into the french press pot, slowly to get all the grinds soaked. Give it a small stir if you’d like. (You can either measure your water before or after it’s boiling. I generally measure mine after, so the water goes from the stove, to the measuring cup, to the french press. But you could measure first, then boil, then pour. The key here is mixing 1 cup of near-boiling water per 2 tablespoons of coffee grinds.)

Step 6. Put the lid on, but keep the plunger up, and set the timer for 4 minutes. Now go do the dishes so you can enjoy your coffee in a clean kitchen.

Step 7: Once 4 minutes are up, slowly press the plunger down, which pushes the grinds down, and separates the grinds from the coffee. You’re done!

Step 8: Pour your coffee into a mug and add cream, milk, or sugar to your liking. If you’re used to highly-acidic, almost-burned coffeepot coffee, you might be surprised at how smooth and sweet french press coffee tastes, and how much less sugar you need. Which means it’s totally fine to have an extra cup.

If you like your coffee stronger, you can either increase the coffee to water ratio, or increase the brewing time. Or vice versa if you like your coffee mild. The measurements and times above are standard and will give you a good starting point. If you don’t finish all the coffee on one sitting, you can put the french press in the fridge and enjoy iced coffee later.

I hope you’ve enjoyed your lesson today, please report back if you have success (or any questions).

Signed,
Prof. Blonde

I’m so sorry I haven’t updated in forever; life has been a bit of a doozie (or is it doozy?) lately. But after approximately 22 hours of sleep this weekend, I think I’m back from the brink. How about a few updates?

My sweet nephew was born! I’ve been an auntie for about two weeks now. Not a very good one, seeing as I am here (DC) and he is there (Colorado). But on Friday I’m getting on a plane and I should be snuggling him by 8:30pm. His name is Nolan and I hope he stays this tiny and precious forever. (Photo taken by the new grandma over at kdalyphoto.com.)

I’m taking a digital photography class this summer that begins on Wednesday! This will be the first time I’ve been a student in more than seven years…yikes. I promise to show some of my work here, hopefully we will all be able to notice an improvement by August.

I’ve become increasingly concerned about chemicals in everyday life. Have you read this article? Quite frightening, isn’t it? Can anyone out there personally recommend a phthalate-free, paraben-free product line they love? I’m ready to invest in new hair, body, and cosmetic products if I can find something I like. (I bought Aveda shampoo and conditioner only to learn they aren’t nasty-chemical free….Le Sigh)

Sorry to end on a downer note. I’m counting on you to leave some happy comments to whisk me through the week and into Friday-night-with-my-nephew-squeeeeeeeeeeee!

OMGZ #2: I have somehow signed myself up for going camping this weekend. Like the sleep-on-the-ground, poop-in-the-woods variety. Oh, and it’s supposed to rain. I’m really only going for the s’mores.

OMGZ #3: My 29th birthday is in five weeks. Not that I actually care about my birthday at all. But I enjoy online window shopping in honor of my birthday. I need to start thinking about ways to make the final year of my 20s awesome. Is it possible to lose 20 pounds and have a baby at the same time, I wonder?

Remember this chair?

This $20 Craigslist bargain from two years ago has new fabric covering the cushions and a new home in our bedroom. I sewed the cushions myself with a little help from my DC-BFF. The pillow was clearance West Elm.

Here’s a close up the fabric. I can’t remember how much I paid for it, but it was in the ballpark of $10 at JoAnn Fabrics. So let’s call it <$50 for the entire mid-century modern chair ensemble. What do you think?

*****

Last weekend we went to Delaware for my mother-in-law’s birthday. Instead of spending a gazillion dollars on a bakery cake, I spent most of Saturday baking one, and photographing the adventure with my new camera. It was fun, messy, and more exhausting than cake baking probably should be.

But the cake was so good! My blog idol swears by Barefoot Contessa’s Beatty’s Chocolate Cake recipe so I had to make that. It calls for oil and not butter which I prefer because I think it makes for a lighter, more “box-like” fluffy cake. I knew I wanted vanilla frosting and searched some food blogs before settling on this buttercream one. Both recipes were perfect and I don’t think I’ll ever seek out alternatives (since I bake a cake only maybe once a year).

My MIL must have liked it, because she confessed to me that she woke up at 1:30am and came down to the kitchen for an encore slice as a midnight snack. And then my husband ate a piece for breakfast the next morning.

*****

While I’ve been a wee bit enthusiastic about domestic-ness lately, I must admit when I came home today to a house freshly cleaned by my monthly cleaning ladies I was soooo happy. My zeal obviously stops short of scrubbing toilets.

(You will see a theme here. I get a wee bit obsessive. I’ve had spinach quiche for dinner three of the last four nights…)

This lovely striped shirt from Nordstrom. Would be perfect for work or weekends, don’t you think?

This supercute $10 rug from Kohl’s. Only ten bucks! But I can’t figure out where in my house I’d put it…otherwise I would have totally bought it already.

These chic calling cards from etsy’s sweetbeaker. Except I REALLY DO NOT NEED CALLING CARDS. I’m bad enough about returning calls I currently get.

Thing I have been wanting, and I FINALLY ACTUALLY BOUGHT:

I am so excited I can hardly contain myself. Except…I have no idea how to use it. But I swear I’m going to start learning this weekend.

So tell me, what have you been wanting but not buying? And more importantly, what have you splurged on lately?

That blog post chronicles shoes that were cool from 1983 to 1986. I was in middle school a decade later, from 1992 to 1995. And yet, so many of the fashionable shoes were the same.

The first shoes I HAD to have (after a childhood dressed in hand-me-downs and items from Target) were a pair of Vans. Keds were not okay, and the Payless version of Keds were definitely not okay. They had to be Vans. I had a maroon pair, and I wore them until my big toe poked through, and even then probably for a few more months.

The next pair of shoes I remember loving, absolutely adoring, were a pair of Converse One Star sandals. In fact, I loved them so much, I completely wore through two entire pairs and I’m pretty sure my mother hated them with a fiery passion. I’m sure there are more weird memories about these shoes that will get left in the comments. But oh, I loved them so!

I also remember having some Dr. Scholl’s wooden sandals, thinking they were somehow good for your feet. But that can’t possibly be true, right? There is no padding! Ah, I’m such an old lady these days.

Surely I’m missing some quality early 90′s shoe fashions. What did you wear on your feet in middle school or high school in the 90s? Doc Martens? KSwiss? Adidas? I eagerly await your answers to help me get through to the weekend!

My parents were freaking ROCK STARS while they were here. In a span of about five days, they probably worked 65+ hours each. They got up early every morning, I fed them tea and coffee, and they worked until 10pm, 11pm, or midnight every night. We didn’t go out to one single dinner, or see one single sight. Unless Fragers or Home Depot or the tulips in my front yard count as “sights.”

They completed (with minimal help from Andrew and me): crown molding, a custom mantle and built-in bookshelf, a new front door, a totally spruced up entryway and 2nd bookshelf, and a new faucet. And my mom weeded the crap out of my front yard.

Here’s a view of the living room with the mantle and bookshelf and crown molding.

Here is the bookshelf in the back of the house. Crazy story – apparently behind this shelf is an entire little room/closet! First we found a hole in the wood, which was weird enough, but then we realize the whole shelf is removable, so we took it out and found another 2 feet of house! It even had a light back there. So weird.

The new mantle and bookshelf are gorgeous, but I think the most dramatic change is the entryway. We used to have an ugly wood door, and a REALLY ugly wooden structure thing that separated the entryway from the kitchen and did a very good job of hurting your eyes and not much else. Now it’s gone! And we also put in a full glass panel front door. Let there be light! (Don’t mind that damned blue tape, I’m still not done painting everything.)

We hardly did anything upstairs, but I did finally paint and hang my little birdies. Now I get to wake up and look at them first thing every morning, and my husband is reminded what a dork he married. Win-win, really.

There are lots more pics over on flickr, including the supersecret hidden room, the new faucet, and the be-curtained guest bedroom.

Thanks again to my awesome parents for all their free labor, and happy birthday to my dad! Love you guys.

This is my 500th blog post, and in honor of such an awesome occasion, I bequeath to you…..bullet points!

(But just you wait, because I was inspired by Lesli to do a big giveaway for my 500th blog post. And I have acquired items to give away, just not time to pull it all together. So I will do something fun to celebrate maybe my 503rd post or something.)

• Where was I? Oh right, BULLET POINTS.
• Getting back to my Colorado roots, I spent one day last week skiing and one day snowboarding. I was merely adequate at both. It became pretty obvious that I left my home state over a decade ago when the blue runs were too steep.

• My skis looked like they belonged on a seven-year-old. It was like riding the short bus of the slopes.
• The snowboard is mine, circa 1993, with a vintage early ’90s “girls kick ass!” sticker. I had one of those stickers on my lacrosse stick, too. I was terribly badass back then.
• You know you’re in Colorado when Elk Enchiladas are on the menu. I dare the Pioneer Woman to cook those!

• As a kid, my dad would hunt elk, and then we’d eat it for the rest of the year. Elk steaks, elk burgers, elk spaghetti sauce. I thought this was perfectly normal until I moved to Louisiana, where they eat even weirder food but then look at you funny for calling soda “pop.”
• This has nothing to do with anything, but will you please look at my sister’s cat? I want nothing more in life than to sedate this cat and then use it as a pillow.

• My parents are arriving this weekend for the Great House Fixer Upper Extravaganza of 2010. Somehow in between working 12 hours a day I am supposed to be buying a whole bunch of crap from Home Depot. Speaking of which, does anyone have a pickup truck I can borrow?
• We are going to attempt to install crown molding. I’m currently taking bets on the outcome of that project: 1. Parents disown daughter; 2. Daughter disowns parents; 3. Husband and I kill each other; 4. Value of home increases so rapidly we are forced to sell and retire at age 30 in a Costa Rican villa.

I think it’s time to wrap up the bullets. What is new with you, lovely readers? Please come back for more fun for my 501st post and beyond. I have big plans for us! Giveaways, house renovations, ruffled curtains (don’t ask), things I want to buy if mint.com wasn’t so damn honest with me about my spending, and more!

My photo collages, let me show you them:

This is our second bedroom, formerly seen in a terribly sad state here. As you can see, the lovely Lubi Daybed from CB2 is here, the walls are greige, the heinous vertical blinds are gone, and….that’s about it. But it already looks massively better than before, if still a bit boring.

I still need:

1. Curtain panels – I can’t decide between a funky print or or plain white/billowy. I just want them to be cheap and chic.
2. A rug or Flor tiles – If I go with plain curtains I might get a funky rug (maybe zigzag?), or funky curtains with a plain rug? Again, cheap and chic is the goal here, which is why I’m scouring craigslist daily.
3. Lovely things for the walls – but this can wait until I have some kind of color scheme.
4. Refinished furniture - I want to do something to make a few side tables a little prettier. And a dresser might be nice for storing extra clothes. Again, I’m waiting to come across a good bargain on something secondhand.

And then there’s the living room. We found a gently used Crate and Barrel sofa on craigslist for less than half the price of a new one just like it. As soon as this snow melts we can get it delivered, which will hopefully be before April. Honestly, I’m not super jazzed about chocolate brown (I’m more of a gray/pewter gal) but I think the price, shape, and quality are worth it in this case.

Clockwise from top left:

1. Flor Botanicals carpet tiles – I really love these but would like to wait for Flor to have a sale before I purchase them.
2. Spring Mint (the top, lightest shade) is the current paint color. Photo courtesy of this site.
3. Inspiration on a built-in bookshelf. My parents are building me one next month!
4. The plates on my wall. Chronicled at length in my archives.
5. The C&B sofa we’re picking up this weekend.

It’s possible I am the slowest, most contemplative home decorator ever. When I watch reality shows where entire homes are redone in a matter of 48 hours, it’s almost hard to believe that is even possible. I have lived here for 2.5 years and still can’t decide on whether or not to get an area rug, let alone what color or size, and even once that’s decided it usually takes me 6+ months to commit to spending the money on whatever purchase I have finally come to grips with wanting. So I hope my snail’s-pace progress is entertaining at least, and maybe in another 2.5 years those damn curtains will be picked out, purchased, hung, photographed, and displayed for all eternity on the blog.

love: I woke up to a text this morning from my husband telling me he won $900 overnight in Vegas while I was sleeping. (!!!)

hate: New sofas cost more than $900. (But the love majorly overrides the hate in this case.)

love: My parents booked a trip out to DC in March so they can spend five days fixing up my house. They’re going to build a mantle, build bookshelves, put in a new front door, take out some ugly wood siding stuff, and more. My own free handymen!

hate: I haven’t exactly asked for the time off from my boss yet. Why do I dread this so much? Probably because he NEVER takes a day off, not even on the weekends. No joke.

love: I bought some ugly ceramic birds on eBay today. I have big plans for de-uglifying them, though!

hate: When I told my husband I bought ceramic birds on eBay he laughed at me for about 5 minutes with a perplexed look on his face.

love: Thanks to Janssen‘s endorsement, I have started using mint.com. I love it, and no, I am not losing sleep that my identity will be hacked.

hate: It’s a bit of a shock when you think of yourself as a frugal person, and then you are faced with an analysis of every last penny you spend. Wow.

love: The lovely Katharine bequeathed upon me a Beautiful Blogger Award. Awwww, thanks K!

hate: I am such a terrible blogger 99% of the time and am the most terrible at award-y type things. I think ALL of my readers are beautiful!

love: Speaking of beautiful bloggers, Jen is going to help me make a new header. What should replace the beloved cherries?

hate: I feel like I work too much and at the end of the day it’s hard to be on the computer for fun. I often neglect this little blog.

love: My daffodils are starting to peek through the soil.

hate: Surely it’s too early for flowers and they’ll just get frozen to death?

love: When you leave your loves and hates in the comments! Helps keep me going at the end of a long week. Happy Friday everyone!

I didn’t tell you about it at the time because I was in a blogging funk, and well, it’s all just a bit embarrassing. In early 2005 we adopted our 2nd kitty, Hugo, a fat orange ball of love who was obsessed with food and freedom. And when I say obsessed, I really mean it. This cat was always hungry and would scarf down a bowl of food in mere seconds, come up for air and immediately start begging for more. Every time we opened the front door, all 22 pounds of him would sprint out the door, plop himself on our front stoop, and refuse to go back inside. Andrew often found this endearing, I found it maddening.

This is Hugo back in his Jenny Craig days. He got way fatter even though we didn’t overfeed him!

It gets worse, though. Hugo had a problem with peeing in the house. We couldn’t lay down a single carpet or rug anywhere in the house, or he’d pee on it. Sometimes if I left my gym bag or purse on the floor, he’d pee on it. Whenever we left town or had visitors stay at our house, he’d pee on the sofa. We tried everything to stop the peeing — we had 3 immaculately clean litter boxes, gave him kitty Prozac, tried Feliway, and consulted with the vet many times to rule out medical issues. But it just kept getting worse, and our house was getting to be quite disgusting.

When Melissa and Jen came to visit me last spring – you guessed it – Hugo peed. It was horrible! He peed on the couch and Melissa sat in it. Can you imagine anything more embarrassing than meeting and hosting a friend in your home for the first time ever and she sits in your CAT’S PEE PUDDLE? I wanted to die! (Thankfully Melissa happens to be an extraordinarily nice person who didn’t make me feel bad about it, but still! The horror!)

Plus, I just kept thinking, I pay an ungodly amount to live in this house (hello DC real estate prices) and I am too embarrassed to have anyone over? Seriously? I pay just how much for this stinkhole and I can’t even enjoy it?!

But there weren’t any good options, so for a long time we were stuck. Andrew loved this cat dearly, but we knew we couldn’t keep him. But what could we do? We could send him to the shelter we adopted him from, but we knew that was a guaranteed death sentence. We tried to find a no-kill shelter or foster home for him, but they were consistently full and not interested in taking a cat who wasn’t suited for re-adoption. I probably shouldn’t admit this publicly, but I considered euthanasia at a point when I truly thought we had no other options and it seemed the most humane thing to do. Thankfully, we tried one last effort on craigslist, posting an HONEST ad about Hugo, (we had done this in the past and gotten no replies) and HALLELUJAH someone wanted to adopt him.

Hugo really liked 1) food and 2) squeezing himself into too-small boxes.

This story is getting longer than I wanted it to be, but it really was a several-years-long family saga. There is a happy ending though. Hugo now lives at greenhouse/garden center on the outskirts of the DC metro area. He is the Official Customer Greeter and his new owners LOVE and ADORE him. They send us photos periodically. And he has several acres of land to roam, plus two indoor greenhouses, plus endless amounts of human attention 360 days per year. It’s kitty heaven on earth.

And my house is getting back to normal. The cloud of cat pee smell doesn’t knock you dead when you walk in the front door. We still need to replace the sofa, and the pillows, and put down some rugs, but we’re getting there. (Side note: OMG sofas are FREAKING EXPENSIVE.) We’re no longer woken up at ungodly hours by a starving, begging cat. We no longer have to break up death-match fights between our two kitties. We have about 1/5th the cat hair we used to have. Life is so much better, for me at least (Andrew is still sad). And no kitties had to be harmed in the process. Win-win, I say.

So you can imagine my horror when the other night at dinner my lovely husband suggested that we get another cat. Seriously. He thinks we can try again and get a cat who doesn’t have all these problems. He wants a lap cat. Of course, I told him no, and I assured him that my blog readers would back me up. Kinda like that time you vetoed the uber-sexual poem reading at our wedding – HAVE I THANKED YOU AGAIN FOR THAT RECENTLY?

So, back me up here, ladies. Tell us that one cat is enough. The next thing that lives in my house better be a baby. Or perhaps a Chia pet.