Author: suzanne day by day

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Wish List Wednesday: Gift Ideas for the Dudes

I have a handful of very specific dudes in my life, and each one of them is exceedingly difficult to buy gifts for. Also, two of these dudes have Major Milestone Birthdays coming up, in addition to the winter holidays, and so I am twice as stumped.

All images from amazon.com unless otherwise noted.

Mens Sunday Slipper My husband hates having cold feet, and these look warm and elegant. Or maybe these slippers with arch support? (Image from bombas.com)

Puzzle Mania: I could see three out four of the dudes on my list enjoying this book.

Murdoku: Speaking of puzzles, I got this logic puzzle/Sudoku mashup for my husband for Father’s Day and he LOVES it. Ooooh – there’s a new one out. Maybe he needs it?

Darth Vader Fortune Teller: This little fortune teller cracks me up and I think my brother would love it.

Upton City Coat: My husband mentioned recently that he’d like a new fall-weight coat he can wear to work. This is lovely. (Image from Johnstonmurphy.com)

Messenger Bag: Speaking of workwear, my husband is also on the hunt for a more adult work bag. His current bag holds a TON of things, though, so it’s hard to find an adequate replacement. (Image from buffalojackson.com)

Insulated Lunch Bag: Maybe if I got my husband a heavy duty lunch box, he wouldn’t need to stuff IT into his messenger bag.

Smart Bird House: Not sure if this would be better for my father or my child, but they would both get such a kick out of watching birds nest.

The Rolling Stones: The Biography by Bob Spitz: I think my dad would enjoy this biography, as he’s a big Rolling Stones fan.

Joggers: I got a pair of these for my husband a couple of years ago and he loves them and wears them all the time. Maybe my brother and my father-in-law need their own pairs?

Footed pajamas: These are another thing that I got my husband ages ago that he still loves and wears. The best part is that you can wear them and take your feet out of the feet part, just in case your tooties get a little toasty. (Image from feejays.com)

Apocalypse Survival Set: Perhaps you, too, have a prepper in your life. Although if you have a REAL prepper, they probably have heavy duty versions of all these things already. Maybe this is for the not-quite-a-prepper person in your life? (Image from uncommongoods.com)

Bubble blanket: My husband is often chilly and my daughter and I tend to hog the available blankets all to ourselves. He clearly needs his own. Also, I want about four of these for our house. *Oprah voice*: Everybody gets a blanket!

Waterproof headphones: Maybe this would be better for Father’s Day, since we live in a part of the country that has winter, but I think my husband would enjoy swimming laps a lot more if he could listen to his tunes.

Animal Print Socks: These make me super uncomfortable but I think my brother, who loves a good gag gift, would enjoy them. (Image from wanderprints.com)

Merino Wool Socks: For the less quirky men in my life, these Bombas might be more appropriate. (Image from bombas.com)

LED Sports Ticker: This would be a major splurge, but I bet my husband would LOVE this.

Flight Tracker: Oh wow, he might like THIS even more. He has always been obsessed with airplanes, for as long as I’ve known him. He would get such a kick out of this. (Image from theflightwall.com)

Backyard Hammock: Hammocks make me kind of nervous, but I think my brother would get a lot of use out of one.

Ring Toss Game: Maybe he’d get just as much enjoyment out of a game for the backyard? Or there’s always axe throwing.

Cordless Smart Jump Rope: The ceiling in our workout room is too short to use a real jump rope, so this would be a cool alternative.

Cordless Screwdriver: My husband and my father both need one of these.

Thermal Imaging Camera: This is another tool that I think my dad and husband would enjoy. Do I have any earthly idea WHAT they would use it for? Not really, but I think they would love walking around our homes and seeing what’s hot and what’s cold.

Portable Tire Inflator: If you have a person in your life who enjoys gadgets and/or tools and/or cars, this is another one of those surprise mega hits with my husband.

George Washington Cap: My father-in-law loves a good cap, and he also loves history and the United States. This cap seems like the perfect intersection of those interests. (image from thehistorylist.com)

Promise of a Nation: He might also really enjoy this coffee table book. (Image from smithsonianstore.com)

Funko Pop: My brother and sister-in-law 100% need me to create mini figures in their likenesses. (Image from funko.com)

Laser Measuring Tool: I think every guy on my list would enjoy measuring all the things with this digital tool.

Diagnostic Scanner: I definitely want to get this for my husband; I bet my brother would like one, too. My dad has one and it allows him to diagnose (and then repair, because he is A Car Guy) issues with his engine. I might need to look into it a little more to see if this is the exact right one for their specific vehicles, but this is definitely a contender.

Anything Speaker: Ah yes, yet another gadget that I don’t 100% understand, but I think would really appeal to my husband and probably my brother, too. Using some kind of bone conduction vibration technology, it turns anything into a speaker.

Fancy Sweatshirt: My husband is always a sucker for a good sweatshirt, and he tried this one on earlier this year and loved it. I don’t know if I can behind the yellow, but it does come in other colors. (image from jcrew.com)

Scent Subscription: My husband has been really into fragrances for awhile now, and I think it would be fun to get him a fragrance subscription service to allow him to sample a bunch of different scents. (image from luxesb.com)

Dopp Kit: A nice travel toiletry bag is always a useful gift. Just depends on whether the people on my list already have one or not.

Travel Hoodie: My brother has some long distance travel coming up, and I keep seeing this hoodie with built in eye mask everywhere. I love how efficient a use of space it is.

Well, this list got a wee bit out of control. But I do feel as though I have a better handle on what I might get these fabulous men in my life.

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Shortcuts

Sometimes I am a lazy bitch take shortcuts. Some of those shortcuts drive my husband nuts.

Front-loading washer and dryer with laundry and a red prohibition symbol over a basket of clothes
  • Refusing to use a laundry bin. I really have no idea why I am the way that I am. Is using a bin simpler, and more sanitary? Indeed it is. Do we have laundry bins, in our home, available for my use? Why, yes, yes we do. And still, I persist in loading my arms up with as much laundry as I possibly can hold and lugging the pile all the way across the house, dripping socks and tripping over the cat as I go.

  • Washing the sheets without their little holder. My husband, weary of our bed linens turning into a wet-in-the-middle sheet burrito each time we washed them, bought a handy little tool to keep the sheets and comforter from eating each other. They work GREAT. But I find it less convenient to attach them to the sheets than to simply deal with the sheet burrito. This may be the thing that tips my husband over the edge, hard to say.

  • Only doing half the towel replacement job. We have hand towels under our kitchen sink. Often, when I think to toss them in the laundry, I am doing fifteen other things and I forget, for a while, to replace them with new towels. The most frequent catalyst for remembering? My husband washes his hands and yelps, “There’s no towel!”

  • Letting damp dishes air dry. Our dishwasher has a drying function, but still, sometimes the clean dishes have a little moisture on them. Mug bottoms, of course. How else do you know that the dishes are done if there isn’t a little crescent of water in the bottom of your mug? (This is how! My husband isn’t the only one with handy little tools.) The other primary culprit is the plastic lids of our food storage containers, but sometimes a pot or a strainer or a plastic cup will have a little beading of water. My husband removes each of these from the dishwasher separately, dries them on the dish towel that I have of course completely remembered to replace, and only once they are completely dry does he put them away. Not me. I give a little shake then toss ‘em in whatever drawer or cupboard they belong. Literally nothing bad has ever happened from taking this little shortcut.

  • Not removing the lint after each load. Oh, good, we’re back in the laundry room. Why do I have so many laundry-related shortcuts? I DON’T IRON, EITHER. Okay, before you leap to the comments to warn me about dryer fires – my nightmare, seriously – I will assure you that I always, always clean the lint trap before I dry a load of laundry. I just do it before I dry things, rather than after. Sure, this sometimes mean my husband or child are cleaning out MY lint (although I do their laundry, too), but since I do the majority of the laundry in our household, I’m okay with that.
Kitchen countertop with water bottles, paper towel roll, storage basket, and small toiletry bag beneath white cabinets
These things will live here all weekend long. Yes, we still have the Zevo even though it did NOTHING.

Turnabout, as they say, is fair play. Members of my family are not immune to laziness cutting corners. Here are a few of the things they do that drive me nuts.

  • Leaving dishes “to soak.” Listen. LISTEN. I get it. Sometimes a dish benefits from a good soak in soapy water. (Although Dawn Powerwash cuts the soak time to five minutes, even for the most stuck-on grease and grime! I would accept any and all sponsorships, I love you, Dawn Powerwash!) But that dish should not be there the next day. Soaking returns diminish after about thirty minutes. Once in a great while, an overnight soak does seem to do the trick for a particularly obnoxious dish. But that is RARE and does not apply to, say, a bowl of oatmeal or a plate of melted marshmallow crust.

  • Walking around a thing as though it were invisible. Things assemble, detritus collects. That’s just a part of being a modern human, I suppose. But things should not live forever in a location that should be temporary. A sweatshirt’s home is not on a kitchen barstool. A pair of discarded socks does not make pleasing decor for the couch. The laundry room counter is not the perfect spot for an empty takeout cup to take up residence. I am not immune to letting something sit for a good long while. I’ve had a giant Hefty bag full of Clothes to Donate on the floor of my office for weeks now because I want to take it to the place where I volunteer, but I haven’t volunteered there in a while and I feel guilty and I haven’t been able to come up with a couple of hours to go volunteer and also the place is realllllly out of the way so it’s not simple to just drop it off, so I just yesterday tucked the bag behind my office door so I don’t have to see its accusatory mug anymore. But when the effort required to deal with a thing is, like, throwing it in the trash or moving it into one’s bedroom? JUST DEAL WITH THE THING.

  • Waiting to clean one’s beverage vessel. We all have our stainless steel coffee/tea mugs and our reusable water bottles and we use them. But when they need to be cleaned, they somehow end up congregating on my kitchen counters for days until the cleaning can be ignored no longer. Stanley carafes are not my idea of an appropriate knickknack.

Okay, your turn. Which of these shortcuts do you find most egregious? Also: I know you have shortcuts; time to spill.

Dinners This Week and Last
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Dinners This Week and Last

Last week, I created a poll so that you could vote on which meals from my meal plan would not end up being eaten. First of all, I love a poll so I hope you enjoy it. Secondly, I can only see the results of the poll by submitting another vote, which is a) stupid; I am the poll creator and should be able to see the results and b) misleading, because I can either click on a random item or use my knowledge as The Person Making the Meals to choose how to vote, but either way, I’m skewing the results. There has to be a way for me to see the results without voting, right? This is totally user error.

Anyway, these are the (slightly skewed by me) results of the poll:

Poll results showing Japanese Curry as the leading meal likely to fall off the plan with 17 votes, followed by arugula salad with 13 votes.

Clearly you don’t know me AT ALL. The Japanese curry was the only meal I ended up making from that list!

What did I eat instead? Mainly chipotle chicken tortilla soup, which lasted the entire week, despite my eating it sometimes twice a day. I may… be a teeny bit sick of it.

One night, I ate a Red Baron pizza-for-one. One night, I ate panang curry from the local Thai place. And then this weekend, I made honey chipotle chicken in the crockpot and used it for enchiladas. (Jenny mentioned enchiladas recently, and it got to me.) Which means delicious enchilada leftovers for at least another day. YUM.

But what else should we eat???

Dinners for the Week of November 9-15

  • Coconut Curry Chickpeas with Pumpkin and Lime: This is not my favorite meal, but my husband requested it and my philosophy is to make something if my husband requests it because that’s one less meal I have to come up with. Bonus: This is one of the few vegetarian meals my husband likes.
  • Quinoa Salad with Apples and Sweet Potatoes: This is one of those times when having a blog turns out to be AWESOME. I have no recollection of eating this before, or even having heard of such a meal before. But it turns out – at least, according to my blog – that we have eaten this before and loved it. In my notes, I said this: “I lost my nerve/energy to make the hummus dressing, so we stuck with the boring old oil and vinegar. I think the salad would have been better with more interesting dressing. Aside from that, this salad was AWESOME. I included goat cheese and chopped walnuts as toppings, and the salad was very hearty and satisfying. PLUS it produced enough leftovers for at least two more meals. So good! Definitely a keeper.”
  • Szechuan Stir Fry: I am putting stir fry back on the list because I am so very in the mood for stir fry. The bell pepper situation at my grocery store hasn’t been super lately, though – and bell peppers are essential, in my mind, to a good stir fry – so we’ll see how things turn out.

I’m also in a baking mood, although a mood does not always translate to action. I really want to make another batch of pumpkin cream cheese muffins but this ginger cake sounds amazing.

Let’s do a poll again, just because I find them delightful. You know what? Let’s go crazy and do TWO polls, one for dinners and one for baked goods.