Folding t-shirts in 2 seconds

I was practising this yesterday.

I'm a lot slower than the lady in the video, but:


How To Fold A T-shirt In 2 Seconds

I originally saw it on Better Homes and Gardens, which the whole family watches on Friday nights when Hub Club isn't on.

(Ruth, this one's for you ;-) )

Too much housework

When we have too much housework and not enough time I spend an hour a day fixing the things that bother me most and then I stop. The garbage. The compost. The kitchen. The vacuuming. Our dogs shed enough dog fur that if in any given week the fur was reassembled and given the kiss of life, we would have another dog.

Never clean before the guests arrive

I thought about this excellent hospitality tip as I vacuumed and cleaned the kitchen this morning. It came from Nicole's blog, here.

Really useful!

vacuuming

I just turned on the vacuum cleaner to do the daily run-around. It went for about 20 seconds and then made a *bzzt whutft* noise followed by silence, and the smell of burnt post-electrical. I am wondering if this is a bad thing.

Well, life is vanity anyway.

Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.

-Ecclesiastes 2:11


and later in the same chapter

22 What has a man from all the toil and striving of heart with which he toils beneath the sun? 23 For all his days are full of sorrow, and his work is a vexation. Even in the night his heart does not rest. This also is vanity.

Herb ordering

A lot of people (3) have expressed surprise that I might put our herbs in alphabetical order in our shelves. Indeed, the word 'obsessive' was heard to escape my first wife's lips.

But I only had to do this job once, and in the process I discovered that four lots of coarse black pepper, three lots of ground pepper, three small bottles of cumin, and three lots of nameless mixed spices appearing to be prototypes for KFC were surplus to requirements. Plus any containers whose use by date was greater than five years old got donated to charity (or something—I'm sure I've heard someone say that missionaries and people in ministry love to receive this kind of stuff...), and suddenly the pantry was looking cleaner in an anti-entropic kind of way. Behold, it was very good.

Boiling the house

When you boil something, you really know that it's clean. The boiling point of water is 100 degrees centigrade, at normal atmospheric pressure. Once you've boiled something for ten minutes—a syringe, or a dummy—you know the little microbes that were sitting on it have been well and truly fried. Knowing this, I clean kitchen wettexes by sticking them in the microwave for 1 minute and 11 seconds on high.

it's easier to push 1-1-1-start than 1-0-0-start. Rice gets cooked for 12 minutes 22 seconds for a similar reason.

It occurs to me that one way of cleaning a house would be to warm every surface in it to 100 degrees for 10 minutes. Of course, this would be impractical, but even restricting the heating to kitchen and bathroom surfaces would represent a useful and immediate increase in the level of household hygiene. I imagine the nests of cockroaches hiding behind the oven, microwave, refrigerator and under the sink would be perturbed by the experience as well. And it would be a good way of heating the house in winter.

Imagine being able to phone up your kitchen and bathroom when you were fifteen minutes from home and instructing them to fry all microbes for 10 minutes, and to have a nice cup of tea waiting as well.

This seems to me so obvious that it is a wonder that no-one has thought of the idea before now.