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Savin’ two bucks

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The flashlight on my keychain broke off again. This is the second time that’s happened, so it was time for a replacement. I bought the two-dollar twin at Walmart, brought it home and thought, “Y’know, the same thing is just going to happen again. It’s that little thing inside that snaps off. Could there be another way?”

Yes, there was another way. It involved searching downstairs for a tiny screwdriver that I know is just going to get lost. Sorry, tiny screwdriver. Life is hard.

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My original intent was to see if I could drill through the case and stick it on a keyring, but it turns out that my drill is at home and my backup drill Lloyd’s drill is in the trunk of his car. (He is/was gone.)

As it turns out, there’s a handy little hole inside the body of the flashlight. Some waxed twine and a couple of square knots later and I’m in business!

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Take that, winter darkness.

Dream dream dream

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I had to go to Orsheln’s to buy some dowels and overpriced masking tape (fist shake). while there, I …..

Wait. Let’s step back in time to remember that I am a crazy reason in winter when it comes to managing heat. I also have a great love of fire. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it, but I have always wanted to have a fireplace or wood stove. When I was a little girl, our alley neighbor had a tiny little cast iron wood stove and I seriously coveted it.

I have looked at small wood stoves, small pellet stoves, camping wood stoves and was thrilled to have found a portable, non-electric pellet stove online (click here).

The problem with a wood stove in this house, though, is that there’s no place to put it. It’s a big commitment to put it in our small rooms that are overcrowded with Lloyd’s stupid stationary bike that he never rides furniture.

But! At Orsheln’s they are selling a window pellet stove! A window model! Like an air conditioner! This solves all the problems of permanent installation and gives me the joy of cheap heat and fire! And – bonus – it gets terrible, terrible reviews on every site where it is listed!

Dangerous eating

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There is a lot of old food around here that needs to be taken care of. Lately I’ve been actually trying to cook it, with some….. unpleasant results.

I had an unopened bag of chicken tenders so I thawed it to make chicken and rice but the chicken was freezer burnt! Grrrrrr…. I cut those parts off and we ate tiny, tiny chicken bits in gravy. Alongside that. we had rice that can only be described as ‘dusty’. No, I take that back. It could also be described as ‘stale’ and ‘gross’. I told Lloyd to load up on peas for dinner.

This weekend I discovered I had the stuff to make veggie pizza! Yay! It used up that almost-expired can of crescent rolls, the almost-expired sour cream, the veggies that were almost too wilted to use, and…… the cream cheese that expired in July.

We are our first pieces and then waited to see if food poisoning would set in before we braved another. Turns out – we were safe!

……this time……..

Thrifty Saturday

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I like to look on the bright side of things, and rather than say that Lloyd and I kind of just sat around all day, I prefer to say that we saved about three thousand dollars.

‘How so?’ you ask? Well, it all begins with science fiction.

Lloyd is a big science fiction fan. (I am too, but he is in a completely different league than I am.) Robert Heinlein – a very big name in the genre* – is one of his favorites. While surfing the web, I happened to see that his bed is for sale.

It’s not just the bed Robert Heinlein slept in, it’s the bed he built with his own two novel-writing hands! I wouldn’t be so excited, except I looked it over and it seems that Heinlein and I have similar building styles. I think there might be a few L-brackets in there!

We spent a few frenzied minutes seriously considering bidding on it. It was listed at $1,600 when we looked, and really, we’d just have to get a couple of plane tickets, fly to California to pick it up, rent a U-Haul and bring it back home!

or…….

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I could buy some plywood and build an exact replica for a couple hundred bucks.

or……

I could go back to surfing the web and drinking coffee.

Decision made.

* I said ‘genre’. That may have been the first time ever.

By the power of THE SUN!

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A couple of weeks ago Lloyd brought home a solar oven that his school was getting
rid of, and I think he was a little hurt that I didn’t immediately test it out. (It’s not that I didn’t want to, Lloyd.)

Well, last week my kids were studying birds and one of the boys brought in some eggs from his chickens. Friday was incredibly hot, so after we cracked them to see inside, we tried cooking them outside in a dark pan with a glass lid. It worked! (We did not eat them.)

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Well, guess what we’re messing around with now, Lloyd? Woo-hoo! Using the 3-2-1 cake mix, we made one disastrous test cake using just a bowl (it spilled and couldn’t get hot enough),

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Next we tried one using the pot the the leprechaun left behind, and it looks like that’s the way to go! Before:

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After:

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Jar container hack

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Remember when I hacked a cuppow? (The sippy cup topper for a canning jar.) Well, if you do, can you tell me where I put that jar? I seem to have misplaced it and it would be awfully useful for this next thing.

The BNTO is an insert you put in the top of a wide-mouth jar so that you can carry two different kinds of food in one jar – chips and salsa / celery and peanut butter / Cheerios and nacho cheese – the possibilities are endless.

I saw thing thing and thought, “Hmmmm, that looks like the size of an applesauce container.” I let the thought rattle around in my head for a couple of weeks while I looked for my one good jar. It’s gone for good, though, so here it is in all it’s short glory.

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