Innovations

Remember the picture of the staged room with the lavender hat accent?
The general consensus via informal bloggie voting was that I should switch the hat out for a lime green one.

And so I did.
I thought it looked better that way.
You know who had an additional thought on the subject.

He was right, as usual.

The addition of a faithful orange cat to the display is fierce.

Using a live cat as part of one's interior design is truly an innovative decorating idea.

We've come across several innovative ideas lately.

Bernie just had to crawl under the table and use his back to lift the table up a half an inch so I could slide the moving coasters under the table legs. Once the coasters were in place, I could glide the table around the room easily.

Isn't that a great innovation?

Now I do have to admit that using live cats as part of your decorating scheme does come with challenges. The cats tend to move around at will; draping themselves first on the bed, then on a chair, and then under a chair

Tiggie tends to favor being boxed in by chair rungs when new people come by the house.

Lately there has been a steady stream of people coming by to measure and paint and whatnot.

Tiggie feels much safer under a chair like this one.

This chair works too; although with the stabilizing bar in the middle of the box, he does have to keep his head down when he wants to observe from under this chair.

Yes, using a chair as a fort is another great innovation.

After we got our new carpet installed, we were greatly troubled to see that our area rugs suddenly were buckling and bumping up in a most unattractive and unsafe manner.

We were constantly tripping on the lumps and bumps. After three days of tugging and pulling the area rug flat, only to have it buckle again right before our eyes, we went down to hardware store and got a carpet to carpet liner.

The liner is slightly tacky/sticky, and is designed to hold the area rug flat and stuck to the carpeting.

We were smoothing it out when our two boy cats came through to snoopervise.

They of course walked right across the liner...and we held our breath.

Maybe (we though to ourselves...) maybe this liner will work like flypaper, only for cats instead!

It would be perfect to solve our problem with decorative cats migrating throughout the house!

The kitties would just be stuck on the liner, not hurt or anything, but held firm until we gently released them to chase their greenie treats and use the litter box.

We thought the liner was a very innovative idea, for either holding an area rug in place, or holding a decorative cat in place.

For now though, we are just using it to hold down the area rug.

Once you start looking for innovative ideas, you come to realize that such ideas are simply everywhere!

Take going to the grocery store for instance.

Hasn't hard cooking an egg been a complicated and challenging task in your life?

It has been in mine. I regularly set a half dozen eggs to boil, then wander off to blog, and then later discover that I have boiled the pot dry, the eggs have exploded, and the pot is half melted on the stove top.

Bernie just hates it when I do that. The house stays smoky/burned egg stinky for days each time it happens. The marital bliss is impacted negatively as well. It is, in short, a bummer all around.

The other problem with hard cooking an egg for making deviled eggs is that inevitably at least a couple of the eggs just will not peel nicely. I know, I know...the trick is to use eggs that are about a week old if you want them to peel nicely, and to plunge them into cold water right away, blah blah blah...but even using all the great tips on how to peel an egg smoothly, there is STILL always one uptight egg in the bunch that just simple doesn't want to come out of it's shell.

Well, get a load of this innovative product:

For a mere $1.80, you get a half dozen medium sized hard boiled eggs, ALL READY PERFECTLY PEELED!

They taste great too!

Is this a wonderful time to be living in or what?

Coasters to move furniture easily, cat stick paper, ready to use hard cooked eggs...why, the only thing more you could possibly want is to be able to go look at houses on line and see each room in 360 degree virtual tour, (just give it a moment to load, then click on the words VIRTURAL IMAGES on the black bar just below the picture) while never having to leave your own home.

Pretty innovative I'd say.

Definitely cool.

(And, oh yeah, Texas housing prices are totally cool. You can tour other houses in Texas on line from this website. And yes, Houston is still looking for good workers; there are lots of jobs around here. If we had family here, we wouldn't be taking this job loss situation as an opportunity to to leave here and join our son in SLC, and be closer to our folks in So Cal.

If you know of a family, especially a young family who is out of work and wants a great house for a very reasonable price, tell them about Houston. "Houston is Worth It", as their motto goes.

As all the financial reports are reporting in terms of job loss and real estate losses: Houston: Actually, we DON'T have a problem!)