Coffee heat rising

Frugal Household Hack: Conserve dish soap

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Dish detergent comes in a soft-sided bottle with a squirt nozzle for a reason: so you’ll use plenty of it and soon have to go out and buy a new bottle. When you tip the bottle into the sink and give it a squeeze (and maybe another and another for good measure), you use several times more of the stuff than necessary. Truth to tell, a little liquid dish detergent goes a very long way. So, it behooves you to conserve dish soap by transferring it into a container that dispenses it more frugally.

For quite a while, I used a cheap glass cruet (a vinegar or oil cruet) purchased at World Market (Cost Plus). This worked fine, except that I was always concerned that I might drop the thing in the sink, breaking it and creating a nice mess to clean up. And also, for reasons unknown in the realm of common sense, dish detergent is laced with wax, the better to clog up your drain and any container that collects a residue around the lid. This is why you’ll often find a gummy layer around the top of a detergent bottle: that goop is built-up wax. This kept collecting inside the cruet’s stopper, so I’d have to take the it apart and wash it out in running hot water every few days.

One day it occurred to me that I could put the stuff in a squirt bottle. The pressure of the squirter would force the liquid through firmly enough to push the wax on through, or so I hoped. And a single squirt should be all that’s needed to clean a frying pan.

Ta DAA! Turns out both of those are so!

dcp_2284I poured a bunch of clear detergent (I favor Ivory but couldn’t get it at the Safeway at the time I first tried this experiment, so used Clorox’s “green” variety) into a heavy-duty spray bottle. Yes, the viscous liquid will move through the squirter. And yes, just one or two squirts is all you need to clean a frying pan or greasy dish. And no! so far, after a couple of months the squirt nozzle has not clogged!

Only drawback is it’s not very pretty. But then neither is a detergent bottle. Keep it under the sink.
🙂

Making less…less

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Is there no end to merchandisers’ ingenuity in dreaming up ways to get us to pay more for less?

We all know that many a 32-ounce container no longer contains 32 ounces, even though we still pay for 32 ounces. But here’s an improvement on that angle: make the stuff inside the container weaker, so you have to use more of it to get the same result.

floatingflowersThe chemicals used to test the acid, chlorine, and alkalinity balance in swimming pool water come in small plastic squeeze bottles. You measure out a certain amount of water and then add a few drops of the dye used to test the concentration of the desired chemical. The two that you check most often are the acid and the chlorine levels. To test the acid level, you add four drops of phenol red to a small vial of pool water; hold it up against a white background and you can easily judge the water’s pH, which ideally should be around 7.6. A test kit, which comes with several testing chemicals and vials, gives you a table that shows you how much acid you need to add, depending on the size of the pool.

Well. Home Depot used to sell phenol red in one-ounce jars. Four drops would stain the test water a deep color, easy to assess.

Last time I went to the Depot to replenish the stuff, suddenly phenol red was available only in 1/2-ounce bottles. Ohhh-kayyyy…. So I bought two, by way of cutting the number of trips to Home Depot. Get it home, drip it into the water, and find the result so pale I can’t even begin to figure out what the pH level might be. It’s almost like looking through plain water.

I already know this is true of the phenol red sold at Leslie’s, which is why I refrain from buying the stuff there. But Leslie’s employees at least have some training in pool maintenance and can answer questions, sometimes even correctly. So next time I’m there I ask if they can sell me some phenol red that works.

Noooo, says the technician. But these great pool dip sticks are better.

Don’t think so, I say. I’ve never been able to get an accurate reading from those things.

Oh but these are soooo much better. Here. Try these.

So I buy the paper dip sticks, which do produce a brighter color but which don’t give you any clue—nay, not ONE CLUE—to how much or how little acid you need to add to balance the pH. Whatever result you get comes about by guess and by God.

Next time I’m in Leslie’s precincts, I complain about this.

Well, says the tech, you know…you don’t have to stop at four drops.

Say what?

Sure! Watch this!

He dumps six or seven drops into the vial. It pinks right up to a readable color.

You can add a fair amount more than the instructions say without interfering with the read-out.

Uh huh. Why didn’t your guy tell me that when I came in and asked about it, instead of selling me these useless test strips?

Because you didn’t ask?

Kewl. You have to know the right question to ask before you can ask it, don’t you.

You see what’s happened here: not only is the manufacturer distributing its chemical in smaller bottles, the better to charge consumers more, but the product itself has been diluted so that you have to use almost twice as much to make it work!

Rip-off artists in action.

Decluttered and recluttered

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PF bloggers hither, thither, and yon offer as a current gem of instant wisdom that when you buy a new clothing item, you should rid your closet of one, too.
😀

Did them one better today, I did. Actually, I did ’em 6.14 better.

This is the time of year when I like to make a run on Talbot’s, one of the very few clothing stores that sells pants that fit around my capacious rear end without leaving six extra inches of fabric around the waist. Talbot’s actually has two major sales each year, one after Christmas and one in the dog days of the summer. The summer sale, however is N.A., because their buyers’ taste in warm-weather togs is incomprehensible: runs to polka-dots and pastels. But their fall and winter clothes are always classic, handsomely tailored, well made, and fully worth whatever price you pay for them.

Because Talbot’s has moved out of the central city, the choice for the likes of moi was to journey to Scottsdale or to the far northwest valley. Decided to head to the north and west, because SDXB agreed to meet me at the nearby fancy grocery store for a cuppa. After leaving him, I dropped by Chico’s and B’Gauze before hitting Talbot’s (all in the same strip shopping center). Found nothing en route.

Talbot’s was having a 40% sale off already marked-down merchandise, plus an additional 40% off the cheapest item you purchased (“cheap” is a relative term in a joint like this). So, this brought the prices down to almost within reason. w00t! I got TWO blouses, TWO pairs of pants (one washable wool, one washable velour) that look like they were tailored for my bizarre figure, two knit pullovers, and a nifty knit vest: SEVEN highly serviceable and reasonably good-looking items. The bill was bracing, but only about half as bracing as it would have been had I purchased the stuff at presale prices.

Well, my New Year’s resolution is to start looking less like a slob and more like a normal human being.

I’ve fallen into the habit of wearing dungarees to the office…and just about anyplace else I happen to wander. This is partly because our office is isolated and inhabited solely by graduate students, and so there’s really no need to wear anything other than blue jeans, and partly because of my general depression: there’s no one in my life to care what I look like, so why should I care?

Gotta quit that.

All my jeans and easy-wash no-iron tops have resided in the master bedroom closet. Dressier clothing has been stashed in the closet of a bedroom that serves as the TV room, with the result that when I’m racing to get out the door, I grab whatever comes to hand from my bedroom closet: generally unironed jeans and a top that grows shabbier with each laundering. Occasionally I show up on campus in my decrepit gardening shoes, having forgotten to change to newer Danskos, a circumstance that I suppose ought to embarrass me.

So this afternoon when I staggered in the door bearing the weighty haul of the afternoon’s hunt, I went straight to work: dragged every piece of clothing out of the bedroom closet and threw out every stitch that was tired, ugly, or didn’t fit. Then I headed for the TV room and emptied that closet, too: tossed out another mound of old, dusty, tired, unsightly, and ill-fitting costumes from that cache. Then I transferred the jeans, the gardening clothes, and the swimming coverups to the TV room closet and filed the grown-up clothes in the bedroom closet!

And resolved that henceforth the jeans will be worn only around the house and maybe to Costco or the grocery store. Socially acceptable outfits will be worn to the university, to meetings, and to upscale malls where shopgirls won’t wait on you if you look like you’re one of the Clampitts.

I kept track of the ejected stuff: four pairs of jeans, three pairs of better slacks, two knit tops, eleven better tops, eight dresses or skirt/top separates, one sweatshirt, three better skirts, eight miscellaneous items, one sweater, and one pair of shoes, for a total of 43 items. Figuring according to the late successful yard-sale prices, that’s a potential $344 worth of resale clothing: about $20 more than I paid for today’s finds.

Hm. Should I try to yard-sale all this junk? Craig’s List, maybe? Naaahhhh…. Come Monday, off it all goes to St. Vincent de Paul.

But consider that: 43 is to 7 as 6.14 is to 1. (I think.) For every one new item I dragged into the house, I’m dragging more than six off to the charity. The used-clothing value of the outgoing stuff exceeds the retail price of the spiffy new loot.
Decluttering on steroids!

Today’s PF Post at The Copyeditor’s Desk: Freelance fees

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I just spent a couple of hours writing on how freelancers should set their fees, based on posts by Mrs. Micah and by veteran editor Katharine O’More Klopf. The subject seemed especially germane to The Copyeditor’s Desk, and besides…neither Tina nor I have posted there for a while. So if you will, please drop by CED to view Setting Your Freelance Fees, a subject that seems to be growing nearer and dearer to PF bloggers’ hearts as more of us struggle to cope in the faltering economy.

Jobs we’re glad we don’t have

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The neighborhood awoke to the sight of the Little Colorado flowing down the gutter on my side of the street. During the night the water main broke where it connects with Other Daughter and the Son-in-Law’s plumbing system, turning their nicely desert-landscaped yard into a swamp. As we scribble, the City is digging up the kids’ yard with a backhoe. The water is off for all the houses up and down the street and will be for another couple hours.

Fortunately, I happened to notice this an hour or so before the City showed up, allowing time to draw out and filter a few gallons of water. The tap water is full of dirt, but the Brita seems to have screened out the visible particulates. I boiled a couple of gallons so as to refill the dog’s water dish and have a little drinking water. Now I’ll have to replace the filters on the Brita and the refrigerator and run the Brita jug through the dishwasher. {sigh} Ain’t life ruff.

The City’s guys showed up pretty quickly. Other Daughter said they’d noticed the mess when they got up around 8:00 a.m., and the workers were here within 90 minutes or so. And if you think your life is ruff, just consider what it would be like to spend the day after Christmas shoveling water-laden gravel aside and excavating an unhappy resident’s yard. Several times…. The guy who came to my door to report that they were turning off the water said they’d just come from another burst main and would go to a third one directly after this.

It rained so hard last night, a couple of times I thought it was hailing. It was still pouring when I went to sleep around 10:00 or 10:30. So the rock and soil those guys are shoveling is waterlogged to the tenth power. Augh! what a way to make a buck.

One of the things I can’t grasp is the niggling resentment of the union wages autoworkers and other laborers have managed, over decades, to put in place, and the insistence that these folks’ wages should be pushed DOWN rather than that workers competing with them in other countries and in right-to-work (for peanuts) states here should be paid a fair rate. Tradesmen and skilled laborers keep this country running,IMHOone heck of a lot better than the billionaire financiers who put us in our present pickle, than the pretty faces on television and movie screens, than the chemically enhanced athletes that amuse us by chasing a ball around a field, and than Congressional representatives who just voted themselves a raise in their six-figure salaries.

Give the auto workers—and your city’s workers and your kids’ teachers—a raise, and make upper-level management and Congress take a pay cut. Now that would stimulate the economy!

And if you’re not in a job where the public begrudges what you’re paid for the privilege of shoveling mud, be glad of it.

w00t! Merry Christmas!

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M’hijito got me an AirPort, hooked it up to the stereo in the front of the house, and persuaded it (after an hour or so of technodinking) to talk to the Mac. Then he produced an external hard drive and loaded his entire lifetime collection of 14,100 songs into iTunes!

LOL! Now I shall have music wherever I go.
🙂 😀 🙂

May every reader’s Christmas be beautiful and fun and full of love.
For a Christmas money chuckle,try this one out.
And may none of you be reading from the Chicago airport.
snow

Photo:Mila Zinkova