Erik and I spent the last few days helping our son Ian, his fiancé, and their roommate move to a new townhouse apartment. They had lived in their old apartment for about 10 years, so there was quite an accumulation of stuff to move. When you’ve got furniture, loads of boxes of heavy books, and other household paraphernalia to move in a short period of time, finding efficient ways to move it without killing everyone’s…
The inspiration for this post comes from Liz Haywood, a clothing designer in Australia who has been focusing on creating zero-waste patterns. She shares her fashion adventures on The Craft of Clothes [https://lizhaywood.com.au] blog. In her November 1, 2021, post, she wrote about “Fashion in a dystopian world,” inspired by her children’s recent interest in post-apocalyptic fiction. She shared photos she found online showing the current concept of dystopian clothing, which includes a lot of…
Have you ever struggled to figure out which way to put a fitted sheet onto a mattress, particularly a queen-size mattress? Queen mattresses and their fitted sheets are fairly close to square, so inevitably I end up putting the sheet on incorrectly the first time around. While not an earth-shattering problem, it was annoying. And then someone had a brilliant idea and made a tiny but significant change to fitted bed sheets. Some fitted bed…
In the further annals of product packaging, I’ve been flummoxed by another item that isn’t easily recyclable: Desiccant packets. These are the little silica packets found in vitamins and other supplements, in shoeboxes, and in any product that needs to stay dry within its packaging. I’m sure I’ve thrown away hundreds of these in my lifetime. I don’t remember when they became common within product packaging, but they seem to be in loads of stuff…
I have a habit of breaking WordPress websites and putting them back together again. I’ve done so at work a few times and with this particular site. When I say “break,” it’s not that I’m trying to make them completely inoperable. What I’m attempting to do is make them more efficiently operable, usually by combining two separate sites. A little over a year ago, when the pandemic first hit, I didn’t have the energy to…