sincerely yours, dena

Now that we live in Maine our friends and family have a little bit farther to travel to visit us. More times than not they stay the entire weekend. So in the guest rooms I have little baskets with goodies that they can enjoy during their stay. I also have assorted reading material bedside that includes state specific travel guides.

Goodie Basket fillings:

• Clean bath towels
• Hand cream
• Lip Cream
• Foot Scrub
• Qtips
• Cotton Balls
• Toothpaste
• Antibacterial wipes
• Nail file
• Guest Comment Cards

You could have greedy friends like my friend Bob and expect to take the basket home with them. Watch out for those kinds of friends.

I did a lot of web trolling before embarking on this project. I knew the magnetic paint had been well test and well received. The white board paint on the other hand has had mixed reviews and some alarming blog entries. Some whiteboard paint has to be wiped off within 24 hours or it becomes permanent. One web suggestion was to use shower fiberglass. Since I wanted a magnetic version, that wasn’t an option for me. In Lowe’s paint department I found a version put out by Rustoleum. I’m happy with the results but if you are going to homegrow your whiteboard I suggest you read the following tips first.

Tips:

• Sand the wall. Sand it good, sand it real good.
• Lots of coats. The paint can lies. It says 3-4 coats and they are full of crap. I put 10 coats of magnetic paint on. The stronger your magnets are the better.
• You are under a time constraint. You have 2 hours to paint once you mix the white board paint together. Don’t make the same mistake I did and in the last 15 mins cake the paint on and walk away. Cake the paint on and check it every 2 mins and roll over it with a relatively dry roller to avoid dripping.

• Trim it out. Because the paint lines will never have clean edges (no matter how good a taper you are) it’s good to paint and fire up some trim around your board. I used leftover door trim I found in the basement.
• Ink Jet printable magnetic paper is expensive. To save money, save the magnets that come for free on top of phonebooks. Sticker paper is a whole lot cheaper, print on it and stick it to the freebie magnet. You can use the magnets for every month things like: the days of the week, month name and reoccurring events (trash day) so you don’t have to rewrite it every month.
• Hide all permanent markers. Guest are idiots and don’t read before they write. Mitigate your risk by not keeping any other markers but dry erase near by. Once I feel capable of drawing straight lines I’ll use a permanent marker to draw in my calendar grid.

It’s a pretty simple concept actually. Companies best marketing tool is word of mouth, so what they do is pay marketing firms with members to try out their stuff and talk about with people around them. BzzAgent is one I belong to. They from time to time send me invitations to join a campaign and I get the opportunity to be involved or not. (The more involved you are, the better the campaign) The best part is the free stuff. They send you the campaign product and you use it in front of other people. So far I’ve done the Pledge Multi Wipes (which are gifts from god) and the Scrubbing Bubbles automatic shower cleaner dispenser. If you take the questionnaires on the site they try to get you involved in campaigns that similar to your tastes and lifestyle. They must deduct that I clean a lot, hence all the cleaning products.

My local grocery store recently started selling blood oranges. In my regular juice I squeeze the juice from 1 blood orange. I find it sweetens my oj naturally. Not to mention it prettied up my mimosa’s yesterday at brunch. The reddish juice sits separately until stirred making a dramatic look.

My nephew Eric (Edog) and I had some fun crafting with finger paint. Once he went to bed, I cut hearts out of his masterpieces and put together valentines for his parents to send out. A few weeks later I got my valentine in the mail personalized with his picture. Once he’s able, I plan on naming him the Chief Executive of the Finger Painting painting division of SYD.