Club Biscotti

It was April when I first heard the noises. They were coming from the fireplace. The noise, it turned out was coming somewhere in the chimney, just above the damper.  Some research convinced me I had a family of raccoons living up there. As I've come to learn they had probably set up camp on the smoke shelf. They would make noise in the evenings. Mostly quiet during the day. Sometimes I would hear them purring! I knew that trying to get rid of them at that point would put the babies in danger. So, I decided to live with them for a while. They were pretty good tenants. They didn't make too much noise. They are very good about keeping their den clean and did not use their chimney home as a bathroom. If they had, their evacuation would have become a much more urgent matter.  I actually lived with these guys in the chimney for about two months. My research suggested that once the babies were big enough the family would move out. But after two months I got impatient. I figure...

Living in an old, established neighborhood with lots of mature trees is wonderful. Except for the white pine which had grown about sixty feet tall in a location that allowed it to quite effectively rain pine sap over my entire driveway. Since there are more cars here than fit in the one car garage we've had to deal with getting pine sap off the cars the last few years. It took some research online and some courage to try what people suggested but, through some trial and a lot of elbow grease I found a method that gets the sap off the car and gets the finish back to looking like it never happened. Briefly, I'd like to mention that this process is for cleaning the sap from the paint. Cleaning off the car windows can be accomplished easily with Windex and paper towels. I have been told that Windex will damage the finish on the car which is why I developed the following process instead.  Here are the things you will need: Rubbing alcohol 70% isopropyl; an old rag or a bag of c...

I like to shop at the local warehouse club store for cat litter because it means a better price and the large size containers mean that I have to shop for it less often. So, what is available there is a big part of which brands I tried. The three brands are Fresh Step, Tidy Cat and Arm & Hammer. I didn't look closely at the price. They seemed to be with in a reasonable range of each other. The most important thing for me was to find a cat litter that performed well. The reason I went through three different brands is that Fresh Step , the first brand I tried, was causing problems. It was odd how long I had been using it before I realized it was an issue. Maybe the company changed something about the litter, I don't know, but, I started noticing a couple of issues with it. This brand is very dusty. My cat is a Siberian, which means long-haired and thick fur. What I started to notice was that there was kind of a film, a residue, on her fur. I would have to wash my hands ev...

Sometimes two people can be in the same situation and come out with two different stories and two completely different experiences. Most of the time it's subtle and the stories mostly match up. Other times they're so different the two of you might as well have been on different planets. What happened, or from my perspective what didn't happen, is an incident I was present for (or was I?) but only found out about second hand. As the story goes, I was riding on the T (Boston subway) and an old friend of mine, who I hadn't seen in about 15 years happened to be in the same car. He saw me but, I didn't see him. However, he thought I saw him. He thought that I looked right at him and then looked away. He thought I purposely ignored him. Now, since I didn't see him, I certainly did not ignore him. In fact, I had no idea it even happened until nearly a year later when I was at a party with some mutual friends. He had told them all the story of how I had coldly, blat...

It's been a crazy winter this year. Weekly snow storms, endless shoveling and collapsing roofs all over the news making everyone worry. As I understand it, the weight of the snow is not an issue for the typical pitched roof home. There is a potential problem on the roof however... ice dams. All those icicles hanging from the edge of the roof are pretty but they're also a bad sign. What they indicate is that ice is forming at the edges of your roof. This ice forms because the temperature at the edge of the roof is colder than the rest of the roof. This may mean that you need more insulation in your attic to keep heat from rising up and creating this temperature variance. Ideally your attic is close to the outside temperature. Although I've been hearing that this year the conditions have been extreme enough that even homes with very well insulated attics are not immune to this problem. So, what happens when you get a build up of ice along the edge of your roof? The snow o...

One of the most important things that I have learned as an entrepreneur is how to handle requests from potential and current clients without losing my mind. What I mean is that when I was starting out I would go nuts every time a client wanted something. Every email and phone message felt like a crisis situation that had to be handled ASAP. The reality of the situation, however, is that my business is fitness. There are no fitness emergencies. Even if your business does handle certain types of emergencies it is valuable to know how to handle those requests that fall outside of the emergency realm. Understand that it is OK to say no. It is OK to say no to working on a weekend or even a week night. It is OK to say no to breaking your policies even though you make them up. You had good reasons for setting your policies the way that they are. Unless you feel that they are in need of modification do not change them every time a client asks you to. It's OK to say no to requests that ...