Shaving Before the Beach

If you're my brother or any other male that I might know in real life, you can go ahead and stop reading now. Thank you. You're welcome. Love you. Have a nice weekend. (: Everyone else, primarily my ladies, please keep reading...

For many, Memorial Day Weekend signifies the unofficial beginning of summer. If you're lucky to live near the ocean like I do, you might be spending a good amount of time at the beach this summer. And if you're anything like me,  it's likely that you have experienced the irritation caused by salt water on freshly shaved skin. Ouch! We've made several last minute trips to the beach since moving to Hawaii, which means there has been a lot of last minute shaving on my part.

Since it's really starting to warm up, beach trips have been happening more frequently for our family. Wanna know what hasn't been happening frequently in my showers? Shaving. The baby bump gets in the way of bending over, and quite frankly, I can't even see everything, so it pretty much gets neglected. I do have some decency though, so I do attempt a quick shave before hitting the sand.

Recently I started using a trick that I learned in college to quickly shave outside of the shower. All you need is baby oil, a razor, and a sink. Apply a generous amount of baby oil to the area that needs to be shaved. Wet your razor and shave as you normally would, rinsing off the razor when needed. When you're done, wipe off with a dry towel and you're pretty much good to go.

The first time I tried this, I prepared for the sting of the ocean upon entering the water. I was pleasantly surprised when there was no sensation of acid burning through my legs and bikini area. At first I thought it might possibly be a fluke, but I've been using this trick for the past couple of beach trips, and have not been disappointed whatsoever. We' plan on doing lots of stand up paddle boarding over the weekend and I am once again looking forward to not having to deal with the horrible sting from the salt water.

If you're beach bound this weekend, be sure to give this trick a try! I'd love to know that it works for someone else, as well!

Have a lovely weekend and remember the meaning behind the holiday.

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Candy Crush Cheat

My name is Alex, and I'm a Candy Crush addict. You too? Have a seat.

I only started playing candy crush about a month and a half ago. That might explain why I still haven't given up and chucked my phone at a wall. I guess you can say we're still in the honeymoon phase, CC and I. One thing that can always manage to annoy me though, is when I run out of lives. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I have a solution. 

My sister tipped me off to this, but since she doesn't have a blog, I'm taking the credit. You can easily get more lives when playing Candy Crush on your phone by setting the time forward in half hour increment. Yup. It's that easy.

On the iPhone, you can head to: Settings  > General > Date & Time. Turn off "Set Automatically" and set the time forward half an hour for each life, up to five lives. Simple right?! Just don't forget to fix the time when you're done.

I recommend doing this just before bed or some other time where you won't be playing for a while because after you correct the time and have it set automatically, it'll be like 675:00 minutes until your next life. My strategy is to only set the time forward to just before the time I plan on waking up. That way, I can use all of my night time lives and still be good to go in the morning.

I'm linking up at the Wednesday Walkabout today.

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We Took Back The Mac

Oops. As I was typing my post yesterday and talking about how the PX had the MacBook Pro for $10 cheaper than anywhere else, I realized that Apple has a website for government employees with discount prices. After a quick Google search, I was on the Apple Store for Government site. Thankfully, I hadn't opened up our MacBook from the PX and was able to return it.

Source

Now, not everything is available at a discounted price. Like I'm pretty sure it doesn't apply to new iPhones, but we were able to buy the same exact MacBook Pro for $999 on the website vs $1189 at the PX and $1199 everywhere else. There was $42-ish in tax, but it was still less than what we paid originally. Even after adding three years of AppleCare and tax, the MacBook online was $50 cheaper than the PX one with the two-year PX protection plan. Score.

Special pricing is available to active, former and retired military members as well as their families. Employees of local and state government agencies are also eligible for this offer. Nice, huh? We opted for the free shipping for our MacBook which will only take five days.

And, as an even sweeter deal, members of the military (at least the Army) can download Microsoft Office for just $9.99 through AKO. I'm not sure what the other branches call their system, DKO(?), but Office for both PC and Mac are available for download there with a valid .mil account.

Next time you consider buying an Apple product, make sure to check out their government website!

Are you a Mac or PC user?

Neat iPhone Trick

Maybe it's just me, but I tend to not hear or feel my phone when it vibrates. I think since the iPhone 5 is lighter, there just might not be enough force behind it. So, while playing around with my phone, I discovered a cool little feature. I've never seen it posted anywhere and none of my friends knew about it. You can change the settings so that the flash blinks when you get a notification. Keep in mind it is a little blinding though.

To get the LED alerts, all you have to do is: settings> general> accessibility and turn LED flash for alerts on.

If you're driving at night it might look like there's a party going on in your car. The strobes are pretty intense so this might not be ideal for everyone. And use caution if you're at a meeting or something. I got several wtf stares earlier this week.

Homemade Kirby Dry Foam Carpet Shampoo

Yesterday I mentioned how much I love my Kirby. It is seriously the greatest vacuum that I could have purchased. It does just about everything and they last forever. The one thing about the Kirby that isn't great though, is it's price. Aside from the machine itself, the price of bags and soap can add up.

Using the Kirby as a carpet shampooer is fabulous. It has worked so well for me and taken care of all of my nasty high traffic areas. A couple of weekends ago I offered to shampoo my friend's carpet because her parents were coming to visit and her toddlers had wrecked the floor. About halfway through I ran out of soap. It's a bit expensive to order so I didn't have a backup and Jenn's carpet was still crappy looking.


Like I always do, I took to Google to see if there was something else that I could use for the carpet. I ended up finding this recipe to make my own dry foam Kirby shampoo. There was only one issue though, no ammonia. I half convinced that ammonia is an ingredient in meth and that's why you can't find it anywhere in this area. My mom always had it around the house, but I guess the junkies in Georgia can't be trusted.

Anyway, I replaced the ammonia with alcohol. I've used water+vinegar+alcohol to clean my couches and it's worked great so I figured why not..?!

The recipe that I ended up using to make the shampoo was:

• 12 cups Water
• 1 Tbs White Vinegar
• 1/2 tsp Rubbing Alcohol
• 3 Tbs Dish Soap (Dawn, Palmolive, etc.)

All you have to do is add the dish soap last to avoid creating too many bubbles, mix well and pour directly into the soap tank. This recipe will make about enough to fill up the tank one and a half times.

The mix smelled just like the shampoo that I've purchased and worked just as well. The stubborn stains all came up and by the time I was done, the carpet was white again. I have no idea why I never thought to try something like this before. I love cleaning with vinegar so it's like a double win for me.

'Tis the Season for Fall Scented Scentsy

Don't worry! I'm not going to try to sell you Scentsy. In fact, I get most of my wax cubes from Walmart. So after my trip there yesterday, I was ready to switch out my tropical smelling wax for something festive and more Fall-ish.

I know I'm not the only person who has made a gigantic mess trying to carefully get rid of melted wax that has lost it's smell. Wax on the walls, floors, table, etc. But there's an easier and less messy method to get the wax out of your warmer. Just pop the part with the solidified wax into the freezer for a few minutes. Usually I intend to only leave it in for five minutes or so but with two little animals plus a dog running around, it almost ends up being closer to 15 or 20 minutes.

Retrieving a Deleted Blogger Post

Last night I made a boo boo. I'm still not exactly sure how it happened, but I deleted a blog post accidentally. Damn it! I clicked the back button as quick as I could, searched the page for a restore option, command+z'ed. Nothing. When I tried looking up the cached post on Google, there was no option for me to edit and publish again, and I certainly didn't want to copy and paste the text to a new post.

I did find a solution though! It was a tiny bit complicated at first glance but it easily worked! This is my restored post, and you can learn how to restore your own blog here. You'll have to be able to find the cached post though your search engine and search through a bit of code, but other than that you should be good to go!