Since McCain used Paris Hilton in his anti-Obama ad she has come back with her own.

So yesterday Eli and I made a composter! The materials cost about $30 and took less then a half hour to design and build.
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Ingredients:
1 trash can (~$12)
2 8' pressure treated 2×4 (~$4 each)
1 2' section of 1.5″ PVC pipe (~$2-4
2 bungee cords (4 for ~$6)
some exterior grade screws

Mix it all together and you get a composter. I was really shocked at Home Depot when a 2' piece of PVC was $2 and a 10' piece was less then $4. I bought the 10' and have some left over. Instructables has some good how-to's on building composters of varying styles.

I reckon thirty bones isn't too bad considering something like this sells for about $200. Maybe I should start selling them to hippies at the Farmers' Market.

[Ed. Note] Bridgit and I had a discussion about the punctuation in Farmers' Market. According to the dictionary it is Farmers' Market though I wonder if it actually possessive.

So recently we went into paperless paystubs at work. That got me accelerating my hopes for a paperless life.

I hate keeping a file cabinet full of crap I will never use again

I have been slowly selecting paperless for most of our bills and stuff. The problem is keeping track and catching up with it all. Almost everything has the option to download PDF's which is perfect.

I have used Yep for a long time to keep track of PDF's but mainly things like manuals. I have been using the last free version, but if I am going to go into this full tilt I reckon I can spend the $34 to get the newer version(s).

I hooked up the scanner to start tackling the older stuff, now I just need to find a way to keep it out of sight.

So the plan will be to import pdf's right into Yep, and use the scanner to scan any paper stuff and then run it through Adobe Acrobat for OCR before adding it to Yep.

I think we are going to start opening mail once a week, and then once a month scanning.

A while ago I heard about a method for brewing coffee where you cold brew a pound at a time and make a concentrate that can be kept for a couple weeks. After researching it and trying it out a couple times here is what I have figured out.

1. Take 1lb of coffee and put it in a big jug or jar with 9 cups of water and give it a shake.
   
2. Let it sit for 10-12 hours on the counter.
   
3. filter it into a jar(s). It will keep for 2 weeks.

To drink I like a 2:1 ratio (2 parts water to 1 part java juice) for hot coffee use boiling water, or cold for iced coffee. It's that simple. The above recipe will almost fill two 1 quart jars.

Tips

• Use glass or metal containers so they don't smell like coffee forever.
  
• Grind the coffee at the store. Grinding a pound in a home grinder takes a bunch of loads and sucks.
  
• The coffee concentrate works great for cooking coffee flavored things.
  
• Cold brew has less caffeine and acidity.
  
• Because there is no heat there is no bitterness.

We have slowly been adult-izing our furniture. We bought a couch shortly before we got married. The latest addition is a new bookshelf/desk combo.

The old bookshelf I had made back in college to be a huge bookshelf 4'x6'. It was pine stained “golden oak” it was functional, but not pretty. It had the metal strips to adjust the shelf height and it contained a ton of books. We decided that we didn't need most every book we own in the living room. The desk was maple top and a nice small size 2'x3' and had steel pipe legs. It was pretty beat up because it lived in my folks garage for a while while I lived there after college.

The new shelf is from Ikea (EXPEDIT) and we were able get setup with two units that pretty much fit. We still need to add another door unit in one cube and drawer unit in another.