good small things

Two minor improvements to daily life here that are making me happy:


This is a baking soda shaker made from an empty salsa jar whose lid I very satisfyingly punctured a few times with a hammer and nail. This is a real improvement because I sprinkle baking soda on everything to clean it and and instead of always reaching for a soggy, torn generic baking soda box I have a much less offensive glass jar. Also, the easily accessible baking soda has liberated us from ugly germ-ridden dish scrubbers and sponges. Cost: free.


And here are a bunch of new kitchen rags. We've stopped using paper towels (except for throw up and squashed bugs, there I draw the line) and the old rags we had were really ugly and too frayed and holey to be useful. So I took an old Ikea towel that was starting to fray at the edges and cut it up and bound it with bias tape. Now I have lots of practice putting on bias tape and eight reasonably pretty rags that will add all sorts of charm to the seventeen times a day I have to clean up mashed bananas, muddy paws, fingerprint-encrusted windows, etc. Hooray. Cost: $1.99 for the towel (four years ago) and the bias was made from fabric I got from a friend's stash.

So that's what I'm focusing on instead of the daily parade of annoyances and disappointments. Here's a sampling from the last 48 hours: a cd exploded in the computer, I dropped a bottle in the tub causing the enamel to shatter, our computer was held for ransom by the people who were supposed to be curing it of a virus. Not to mention the fact that every freaking time I reach for something I realize it was in one of our lost boxes (I miss my rotary cutter). We're considering getting somebody in to bless the house, but I want somebody to burn some sage and invoke the goddess while Scott would prefer an exorcist (preferably The Exorcist).