As we are not lovey-dovey with our pets, we refuse to pay to have them groomed, and we only bathe them a couple of times a year.

For home sellers, this is not a good practice as the animals will leave their smell every where they go.  But with all of the things a home seller has to stay on top of, the last thing you want to do is bathe your dog once a week.

Lo! and Behold!  On a trip to PetSmart for some Nature’s Miracle, the product to the right was found:  Doggy Deodorant.  Not to be confused with perfumes, this product is purported to be an Odor Neutralizer.  It was about $7 for the bottle, much like it shows online.

We’ve been using it for about three weeks now.  And it has done a pretty good job of keeping their scent down. They both receive a spray or two once per day, and I also spray their blanket daily in between washings.

The dogs are not excited to be sprayed, but they don’t run and hide when they see me with the bottle.

In short, I will be recommending this product to my home sellers who have dogs in order to help them with one more small aspect of keeping their home in Show Ready Condition. Remember: the Home Stager saying applies: “If you can smell it, you can’t sell it.”

We are quite proud of our Confederate Star Jasmine that we received as a gift just after moving into our house in Round Rock.  And we anxiously awaited the 4ft tall vine to grow up and around the column on the front of our house.  As you can see from the picture, it was pretty plain-jane back in 2002.

Seven years later, the vine grows so crazy it has to be trimmed back twice a year.  Due to its size and thickness, it attracts a large amount of birds when the weather starts getting cool.  At first, we thought having birds around tweeting would be nice.  Then, at sunrise on Saturday mornings, we were awoke by their comings and goings.  Then after a few days, we realized they were leaving tons of droppings on our bench and right outside our front door.  And with young children and a nurse in the house, we were not going to be able to tolerate that!  And if you’re selling your home, you absolutely, positively can not have buyers traipsing up to the door through bird droppings!

We tried spraying them out with the hose. We tried ripping their nests out.  We tried throwing things.  All of these were only temporary fixes.
Then we saw some thing at a neighbor’s house – they had a railing on the deck over their front door.  And they were having bird dropping issues as well:

This plastic Owl is available at your local home center for about $15.  And when placed, with eyes pointing out, will scare off the little critters pooping around your house.  Other neighbors have had issues with mud nests from a local variety of swallow.  By hanging one of these from their front porch light, the birds never returned. Due to the rapid growth of our Jasmine vine, we have to make sure the statue does not get over grown.  And we move it around because some of the birds had gotten used to him and came back.  They have several mounting options, including a hole in the bottom for pole mounting, and a small hole on the top of it’s head for hanging by a string or wire.

Lastly, this plastic bird is a nice way to get rid of pests – with out resulting to BB guns and poisons.  Essentially, they leave and go to someone else’s house. Problem solved!

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Home Staging Austin Home Stager

Then on Sunday, there was an article in the Austin American Statesman, Business section, Job Hunting? Beware of what recruiters see online” by Candice Choi of A.P. I was quite floored in regards to the statistics thay were provided:

1. One survey reported that 34% of the time, Social Networking sites are checked as part of the employment process.
2. And 19% said they plan to begin checking these same sites in the future.
3. Of those who check the Social Networking sites, 47% said they did so before contacting the applicant.

So, here we have a blog saying, “Be yourself”, followed by a newspaper article saying, “Becareful being yourself.” Hmmm. Interesting. Both make good points. So what do you do?

Personally, I signed up for Facebook for professional networking for The Stage Coach. I plan to figure out my account security on the site, to keep too many people from seeing too much about me, but will try to balance that with accessibility. And I fully intend to ask old friends to refrain from digging up pictures and posting them online – when they do, I will just ask them to remove the tag pointing to me.

Mainly, I plan to be myself. I will continue to jabber back and forth with friends from Chicago about the political craziness emanating from that town at this time. I will continue to keep up with my sister and her family, and keep her in the loop with ours. If some one feels that my book choices are offensive, or I crossed a line with my latest status update, it is probably in my best interests not to work with them. And I am OK with that, because that is who I am.

And I think that is the bottom line for these Social Networking sites: you have to accept responsibility for the choices you’ve made along with the consequences.

P.S.: Feel free to Friend me on Facebook!

So I played around for a while on the internet, and found Space Bag Totes.  My initial thought was not positive, as we tried space bags for our move to Texas back in 2002.  Luckily, the seals did not break until they were in the moving truck, so the weight of the other boxes kept the boxes intact.  Until the movers unloaded, but that’s another story.

I bit the bullet and ordered two of them today as a solution for bedding is really needed.  If each tote can really take a comforter, four pillows, and sheets and compress them down to one Space bag tote, it would give me back several tubs.  Plus, the tote comes with several other size space bags that could be used for decorative pillows…

In three to four weeks, they should arrive.  Hopefully I will be posting what a great storage solution they are…

Phase I of my plan was checking the old Credit Report.   I used www.annualcreditreport.com to get copies of mine and my wife’s.  Be careful of sites pretending to provide Credit Reports – or contact the credit bureaus directly.  This is a quick and easy way to stay ahead of Identity Theft.

Phase II was to cut back on the amount of junk mail/mailing lists that my wife and I were on.  For this, I visited www.proquo.com.  This site allowed me to send requests or print letters to various mailing lists for removal of our names from their lists.

Phase III occured later in the year:  we bought a paper shredder.  Still on the docket is to have previous years’ records professionally and securely shredded.  Some areas offer this as a free service shortly after tax season, so keep an eye on the local paper.

Lastly, I picked this last one up from Andy Rooney:  I saved every prepaid envelope and postcard we received in the mail from various advertisers looking to sign us up for some thing. For All of 2008.

Today, my daughters will be sealing up the empty envelopes with glue stix, and tomorrow they will be mailed back – empty.  Hear that Capital One?  Every single credit card offer you mailed to us this year is getting mailed back to you – without an application.  There’s a whole different pile for Subscription cards for magazines we already had subscriptions to…

Happy 2009!  Thanks for stopping.

A couple of weeks ago, Uncle Matt and Aunt Alison were in town, and I was putting Eliana (4yrs) down for a nap.  We were reading a story from a book of fairytales: The Little Red Hen.  For those of you not familiar with the story, The Little Red Hen and her chicks find some seeds, plant them, tend to them, harvest the grain, etc… with out any help from the Dog, Cat and Duck on the farm.

But when The Little Red Hen uses the grain to make bread, the Dog, Cat, and Duck ask for their share.  The Little Red Hen tells them no, as they could have helped her, but refused.  So she was only giving the bread to her chicks, who helped along the way.

Eliana tells, “That’s no fair. She should share.  There is enough bread for everyone.”

“Well, Eliana,” I tell her, “That’s what we call socialism.  Do you think it is fair that one person does all of the work and three others get to take a part of the reward?”

“Yes,” she tells me, “you should share.”

After leaving her room to nap, I went down to lament my concerns to my wife of having a Communist in the house.  After reviewing the story for the sake of the adults in the room, and adding Eliana’s reactions, our older daughter, Serafina, chimes in, “That’s not fair.  The hen did all of the work. Why should they get the bread?”

So, Thanksgiving 2026 is going to be interesting – mainly to see if these feelings still hold true for both of them.  And if they do, I imagine the conversation is going to be lively, to say the least.