Mmmm....BEADS....

I am, periodically, an avid beader. It harkens back to the time I spent crafting with my grandma when I was a kid. As a pre-adolescent, I tried my hands at braided bracelets using embroidery floss, and quickly realized that my lack of hand-eye coordination would forever limit my weaving skills to patheticness. Beading seemed like a good alternative, so I worked my way through spools of dental floss, creating what I thought were highly fashionable black beaded necklaces of varying lengths and blackness (I assure you that I was too white-bread to have dillusions of Gothness, but I still believed that anything--ANYTHING--looked better with a black beaded necklace!).

I started small (geddit!) with seed beads, and graduated to bugle, chevron, Cloisonné, lamp work, and everything in between. I would refashion store-bought necklaces and earrings to better suit my needs, and I would drag a complacent John or my sister to bead stores wherever I could find them. When my grandmother passed away, my mom very nicely sent me a beautiful selection of glass, ceramic, and wooden beads that my grandma had collected over the 40 some-odd years of her crafting.

In the last decade or so, I have amassed a serious collection of beads. It started out that I would store them in an old shoe box. Then they got so heavy and were bulging from the seams of the box, I had to transfer them to a plastic shoe box. Then it grew so much that I had to recruit a second plastic shoe box. Now I have four and three-quarters plastic shoe boxes full of beads and in sundry. I know the day is fast approaching where I'll need to figure out some better way to organize my lovelies. I'm a little scared for the future of my bead addiction, though...allow me an analogy that you're probably familiar with. When I was a kid, I saved my money and bought myself what I believed to be the most beautiful little wallet. I filled it with used gift cards, fake credit cards that came in the mail, and tape-laminated "ID" cards I made out of index cards. When I went to junior high and got my first school ID card, I proudly discarded my lame-oh fake ID cards. As I got older and accumulated more cards, I needed a better wallet. Slowly, I accumulated more OMGjustGOTTAhaveonemeatalltimes crap (lip gloss, compact, hair brush, dental floss, pens, etc etc etc etc) that I had to get a purse. I felt awkward and weird carrying around a purse, and would periodically bemoan the "need" to carry one, so I only used one big enough to carry my wallet, a make up compact, and chap stick. Eventually, I decided purses were kinda neat, and I really liked the bigger styles. And I found that the bigger the style, the more STUFF I could successfully carry around. Years later, I'm lugging around modestly HUGE cavernous purses from wince I cannot find a single damned thing (and having a black-case cell phone is the BANE of my existence!). So here's what I'm worried about with my bead addiction. I started out sharing a bedroom with my sister, and had a small tin container with beads. By college, I accumulated enough to warrant a shoe box. College necessitated a plastic shoe box or two. When we moved into the condo, it was two plastic shoe boxes and an old perfume box. By the time we moved into the house, it was almost 5 plastic shoe boxes full. So now I'm worried that I'll go all nutso and buy more BEADS (om nom nom nom nom nom nom) to compensate for the size of the house...

Scary.

Oh me, oh my how pretty!

In the last decade or so, I have ALSO amassed a serious collection of beaded necklaces. Previously, I used shadow boxes I snagged at Target to pin the necklaces up. This worked pretty darned well. But since moving and sorting through my necklaces, I decided I needed a better solution so I wouldn't keep wearing the same four or five necklaces all the time, and/or have to deal with the occasional tangled mess when I was too lazy to open up the shadow box and replace when I had worn. My sister has a teacup hanger/coat rack (similar to this) hanging in her bedroom and she sorts all her necklaces by colour/type. Ingenious, I thought.
A trip to Ikea led me to these lovely Grundtal rails. The fine folks at Ikea have them in their kitchen section, but also use them throughout their catalog/show room as an organizational tool. I scored 3 of them, along with some hooks.
The door to our master bedroom opens to a wall on the left. This is where I decided to hang the rails. After spacing, leveling, and marking my holes, I predrilled and then secured them to the wall using screws. This is the finished product:

I can easily arrange my necklaces according to attribute, and I don't spend valuable time in the morning trying to untie knots from tangled necklaces.

Of course, now that I have the room to expand my beading operation, I don't have the time to devote to it. I guess the beads will collect some dust for now. :o/

Anyone have a solution for sorting and maintaining a working bead collection?

The Little One Stops to Go to Heaven

Several weeks ago, we were driving back to work after lunch at home, and I started singing "The Ants Go Marching..." John gave me a bit of an incredulous stare as he navigated through the crappy court-bound traffic around downtown Riverside. He must have lived a deprived (depraved?) childhood. He'd never heard the song before!

I took that cue to fill John in on all the antics of the Little One (sucking his thumb, tying his shoe, climbing a tree, shutting the door, jumping and jiving, picking up sticks, going to heaven, shutting the gate, scratching his spine....).

I think John perked up a bit when he heard the bit about the Little One going to heaven.

You know how the vast majority of modern cities and metropolitan areas are built on top of older establishments? It's utterly fascinating to me that underneath 18th century cobblestone in London lies Viking London, and below that lies remnants of the Roman London. They're like a torte of human history! I believe that if archaeologists were to conduct an extensive dig in Riverside, they wouldn't find pottery and stone weapons from ancient human civilizations. No, they would find the petrified exoskeletons of ANTS.

During the later weeks of Spring, John spent a nice afternoon under the crawlspace, decked out in his Hazmat suit, lugging around a gallon of Ortho Home Defense. He emerged several hours later, coughing and covered in dust, but victorious. And for a while, things were fine. Then it got HOT and the frigging ants came barreling into the house.

The ants were bothersome and annoying and seemed to have the resilience of cockroaches. We'd wake up some mornings to see the shower pan covered in ants. Other mornings, they'd swarm the sink. Being that we have kitties, we were afraid of spraying any surface they might come in contact with, but that sure didn't prevent the ants from swarming the cat food bowl and automatic waterer. Oh no, nothing was off limits for them. We sealed EVERYTHING we thought they'd get into, and yet they always found something to munch on or some ingenious way of getting at what they wanted. We'd spray them with Bayer Advanced Home Pest Controller (and, yes, I shamefully admit to gleaning a bit of pleasure from seeing the little bastards stop dead in their tracks) when they infiltrated the house. But the clever little bastards would just re-route their journey and find another way.

We came to the realization that the ants were actually living in the upstairs floor and the attic. We followed their goose-stepping ranks from whatever they were feasting on up the walls and into tiny crevices between the crown molding and the ceiling. We sprayed the perimeter of rooms with the Ortho killer, and they'd be gone. A few days later, reorganized, they'd find another route and go after whatever they fancied. They harassed the cats and pinched whenever we'd sit on the loveseat in the living room (at least bees have the decency to go off and DIE when they sting you!).

Barreling into/out of the crown molding.

When the chemically engineered sprays weren't working, I tried greener approaches like filling a sprayer bottle with a mixture of vinegar and water, and spraying that on kitchen surfaces. It worked for a bit, but later the same day, they'd be back. I also tried bay leaves, to no avail--they just crunched them up and took them back to their nest. I didn't want to try Borax because I couldn't think of a way of using it without risking the kitties eating it and winding up dead.

Frustrated, we got some packages of Terro Ant Killer, which we had some success with back at the condo; the main ingredient is Borax, but it's in a liquid form inside a trap. Hopeful, we put them out on the counter where the kitties couldn't get them. The damned ants SWARMED them, forsaking all other morsels of sweetness and grease.

PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE

The packaging promised the ants would eat the bait, take it back to the queen, and wipe out the entire colony in a Gomorrah-esque explosion of ant guts and gore. Except, the ants would eat their way through one bait trap, and traipse off to some other locale in search of more food, seemingly unfazed. So we started replacing the bait traps as soon as they were getting dry. While this didn't diminish the ant population of the Chocolate Lava Casa, it at least kept them in the same predictable spot.

Then we started hearing rumblings of this stuff called Amdro. It ain't cheap, and we were leery of purchasing more Snake Oil Remedies. Desperate, we bought a jug of it. John put some around the perimeter of the house, and I put some in little disposable condiment cups on the tops of the cupboards, and we waited. The weather cooled drastically for a few days, so I chalked up the disappearance of the pests to the more amiable weather.

Then it warmed up again, and NOTHING. I'm happy to report that we've had three GLORIOUS ant-free weeks! Next spring, we're going to pepper the entirety of the dead earth surrounding our house with this lovely stuff. I still haven't seen any chalk-outlined ant bodies. I'm sure that when/if we ever rennovate the upstairs like we have planned and we pry up the floor boards, we'll be met with mass graves that would make Vlad the Impaler giddy.