Afraid you are going to forget where you parked at the mall or in a parking garage? Take a picture of the Floor number/section with your phone.
My boyfriend does this all the time and I think he’s so smart.
Oh. My. God. This is sheer genius.
I know - right? He’s my hero. I’m the queen of forgetting.
My tip is yard-related.
There are only a few herbicides that will effectively kill poison ivy, and most of them are very pricey. However, the cheapest, quickest method I’ve found to get rid of it is hot salt water. Just get a bunch of water near-boiling and dissolve as much salt into it as you can. Take the hot pan of water out to the poison ivy and pour it on there slowly, hitting as much of the leaves as you can. Poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) has a waxy coating on the leaves, which is melted away by the hot water, then the salt will draw moisture out, killing it within a few days.
This might sound funny, but I find cleaning/housework really tedious & boring so it helps if I have a few drinks while I do it, makes it go by faster. I’ll do it on a Friday or Saturday afternoon, put a ball game or something on TV in the background & have at it. I’m a single guy, live alone & don’t drive anywhere afterwards, so the potential harm is minimal & I’m usually amazed at how much I got done.
Tidy drunks of the world unite! 
Love the wine gift bag idea for storing plastic grocery bags! I sewed a bag to store plastic grocery bags out of two dollar store cloth placemats, ran a string through a tunnel at the top, hung it on the inner doorknob of the pantry. Stuff all grocery bags, department and drugstore bags, bread wrappers, etc. (I was told if you can poke your finger through it, it can be recycled) into it… I keep a couple grocery bags in an old bucket in the basement next to the litter box, fill up the bags as needed, tie shut. On trash day, take upstairs and put in with the outgoing garbage in the trash can. … All - ALL - receipts that come in the house go into an empty tissue box for future reference. When the box gets full, the receipts can go in with the newspapers (wrapped up tight in a sheet of newspaper so they don’t blow away) for recycling. … I was surprised by how handy a ‘garbage bowl’, like Rachel Ray uses, is, on the kitchen counter when cooking/prepping food. …I stuff lightly used paper towels and napkins into an old coffee can under the sink. Useful when wiping out the sink, wiping spills and smudges on the floor, cleaning up cat puke (cover with a couple paper towels for a few minutes, to absorb, pick up with a sheet of newspaper and just throw in the garbage)…I also rinse out plastic baggies for re-use, and even aluminum foil and saran wrap (though this is a pain, I’m anal that way and don’t mind doing this). … Oh, and since we have nasty driving weather in winter, at the end of summer I start squirrelling away necessities. I buy an extra roll of TP, a bottle of ibuprofen, a bar of soap, a bottle of dish detergent, a can of coffee, cans or boxes of pet food - just one or two items a week - and put them in my downstairs pantry. Also put a stick of butter, a packet of cheese, a pound of hamburger, a loaf of bread in my freezer. That way, there’s always something there when there’s a snowstorm and you don’t want to have to drive to the store just for a bottle of Advil or whatever…When I was really poor at one time, I would put a couple of scoops of coffee into a baggie kept in the freezer, adding more with each new can, so I never ran out of coffee. Same with laundry detergent - I would pour a cap or two of detergent into an old empty detergent bottle, adding more with each new bottle. So there was always that little emergency stash…Throwing used-once bath towels in the dryer for 5 minutes, ironing and re-hanging worn-once pants and slacks saves time and energy if you aren’t doing laundry every day.
I can’t believe I’d forgotten to share this tip - never mind ShamWow for picking up liquid spills from your carpets - keep a bag of toddler diapers on hand - press on to spilled liquid with your hand for a moment or two and everything sucks up into the diaper. You can’t even tell that there was a puddle of grape juice on your beige carpet.
Don’t cut them to smaller sizes - just let the one spot dry and reuse next time.
I agree! Absolute genius!!
Ha! I do this all the time. After work, I sometimes pour a glass of wine or beer, turn on the TV or music, and clean the kitchen and make dinner. It turns tedious, boring work into something kind of relaxing and fun.
Is there a local/county history museum in your relatives’ home regions? Take the things you think might be very valuable historically and see if those museums might want those items based on the fact that your relative was born there/lived there and was involved in those little slices of history.
Another idea: Get someone with a good digital camera to take very well-lit photos of memorable but more disposable things, like phone number lists and such. Document them nicely with information about who wrote/owned what. Post them on a “family history” webpage, or post to Flickr/Photobucket with your detailed captions. Then allow yourself to let go of as much of those items as possible.
Salinqmind, could separate your paragraphs with either some coffee filters or papers towels? Thanks.
thumps descamisado with cardboard tube
Of course! That is a far better practice than mine, which is to throw everything in a drawer and hope I can find it one day.
Of course!
I’m some other form of royalty of forgetting. I’d forget to take the picture.
My advice: stay the hell out of the house; it’s easier to keep it clean that way.
Thanks, Ferret Herder those are great suggestions. I will actively find some institution or other interested family member to take on some of this stuff. Some things, such as the ones I’ve mentioned can’t simply be disposed of - but I yearn for fewer items stored in my house.
I suppose then that one of my tips, after a bit of reflection, are for any young’uns reading.
You will spend roughly three decades of your life acquiring things. The first two you will collect some things from childhood that you’ll carry with you, but it’s really in your twenties, thirties, and forties, that you start to get “stuff”. You will perhaps buy houses big enough to store your stuff as you have families and they acquire things too.
By the time you hit your fifties, you’ll probably start feeling the incredible weight of the yoke of so many things to maintain, keep clean, and store. The next 3 or more decades then are spent trying to find new homes for the stuff and the cycle continues.
So, my tip? Not that anyone will heed it - Less is definitely more and will free up more time than you can imagine.
My tip is to use “Sudsy Ammonia” as your all purpose cleaner. It cleans everything, from glass to laundry.
Take 1 gallon distilled water. Add 1/2 - 1 cup ammonia and 3 squirts Dawn dishwashing soap. I put some in spray bottles for glass and leave others int he gallon container for big jobs.
I’m loving these, and it’s inspiring me to clean up around here, which is great!
I have an old dish detergent bottle that I keep next to the sink, filled with water and a couple teaspoons of bleach. I use it to wipe down surfaces at the end of cleaning the kitchen, or any time something might get contaminated with chicken juice or whatever.
I reorganized my kitchen, so the things I use together are stored near each other. The baking implements are in a drawer under the KitchenAid, while the silverware is in the drawer nearest the table, etc.
I also keep plastic storage stuff in a cabinet, and all the lids in the drawer below it. That makes life a lot easier.
My favorite tip of late: if my 6 year old complains about how I do something, she gets to do it instead, in addition to her other chores.
(I like the sudsy ammonia too - much easier, cheaper, and less perfumy than the retail “all purpose” cleaners.)
We do this too! Except we crank up classic rock while we do it. It’s a great way to make the time go faster and get more done than you thought you would.
There are people who *don’t *drink while cleaning?
Sorry for running on like that - must be the brandy in my morning coffee…zzzzzzzzzz…
One more thing: that rubbery shelf liner is useful in many ways. Besides lining shelves, putting in between dishes and no-stick pans, under the tie-on cushions on hard slippery chairs, under vases, laptops, and small appliances - a square is useful for gripping and opening lids of jars. Also to remove pet fur from couches or even clothing.
A few of mine:
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Swiffers. If you’re still using a broom to sweep your kitchen floor, or any other smooth floors, I pity you.
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Collapsible laundry baskets. They hold a ton of laundry when you need them, and sit in the back of your closet, taking up essentially zero room, when you don’t. Not to mention, you can grab the handles of one laundry basket in each hand, so it’s easy to carry two baskets up or down the stairs at once.
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Dry-erase calendars. Don’t ask me why, but for some reason these just work much better for us than normal calendars.
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Keeping trip-packing lists on your computer, e.g. as Word files.
This is a great time-saver and organizer when getting ready to travel: you don’t have to build your packing list from scratch ever again. I’ve got a basic skeleton of a packing list, and saved versions for pretty much everywhere I’ve been in the past several years. It’s most helpful for recurring destinations (e.g. the in-laws’) where the list can get refined over time until it reaches a state of Platonic perfection. But it’s also good for non-recurring destinations. I may not use that Hawaii packing list again for Hawaii, but if we go to the Virgin Islands, the Hawaii list will probably work pretty well.
- If you have the space (e.g. in basement or garage), buy a chest freezer. The vast majority of foods freeze well if packed reasonably well, and it can save you a hell of a lot of trips to the grocery store.
In my chest freezer right now I’ve got a ton of frozen dinners and pizzas, a bunch of bags of frozen corn, peas, broccoli, and other vegetables, frozen chicken that I’ve done any necessary KP on and cut into single-recipe-sized portions and put in freezer bags, several loaves of bread, a few packs of hot dog and hamburger buns, and up until recently I had several bags of frozen raspberries that I’d picked in the summer of 2008, but I just finished them off with a series of quite delicious raspberry cobblers.
I don’t freeze beef (ground or otherwise) - for some reason it seems to usually get freezer burn before I use it. But I’ve frozen ground beef dishes (chili, spaghetti sauce, etc.) lots of times. In addition to enabling you to make fewer, larger grocery runs, a chest freezer allows you to prep or cook things when you have the time, so you can do things easily when you don’t have the time.
Everybody probably already knows this one, but just in case: the inner bags from cereal boxes make excellent freezer bags. They work better than the heavy-duty ziplock freezer bags.