Darkoshi

If you have rubber grip pads to help with opening jars, don't only use them on the lid. Place another in your other hand which is holding the jar, or place one under the jar while pressing the jar against the counter while twisting the lid with the other pad.

Even if you use some other tool to twist the lid of the jar, it still helps to have a rubber pad to hold the other end of the jar in place, or to help twist the jar in the other direction at the same time.

Rubber foam shelf liners work well as rubber grips.
Rubber-coated work gloves work well too.

In sub-freezing weather, to prevent plumbing pipes from bursting in case the water freezes, I leave the indoor faucets dripping. Both the hot and cold water, as I read in the past on a plumbers' forum that (counterintuitively) hot water pipes may be more prone to freezing than cold water pipes.

To dampen the sound of the dripping faucets, I used to put a sponge in the sinks to catch the drips. That worked pretty well. But perhaps it depends on the type of sponge. Lately I've been noticing that once the sponges are saturated with water, the sound of drops falling on them gets fairly loud too.

So I have switched from sponges to brushes. For example: dish-washing brushes, tub-scrubbing brushes, or plastic hair brushes. I lay them under the drips with the bristles facing upwards. The bristles break up the water droplets into small trickles of water, preventing much of the thump thump thump sound.

There are 4 huge banana spiders* in the back yard. As in hand-sized with big thick abdomens. I've been keeping an eye on them (full of anxious dread) through the sun-room windows over the last few weeks since I discovered them. The one that was biggest to begin with disappeared, which had me concerned. (A spider whose whereabouts you know is better than a spider that could be anywhere. Or maybe even a spider and its millions of little baby spiders that have exploded from its swollen abdomen.) Maybe a bird got it, but its web seemed undisturbed. Slightly before that one disappeared, I discovered another one nearby. So there were 4 to begin with, and now are still 4.

*I looked up what kind they were. They have the tell-tale fuzzy black bands of the banana spiders on their legs. Unless someone asks to see a photo, I'll spare you all the horror of having to see it on your screen.

Maybe those spiders are the reason I haven't been getting bit as much by mosquitos outside lately.

Another unforeseen benefit of them is that today, upon seeing an ~2-inch (wolf?) spider in the garage, it didn't scare me at all. I had a little chat with it, and told it so.

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Around the same time as discovering the banana spiders...

I saw a black wasp fly into the doghouse on the porch, so I pulled off the top piece of the dog house's roof to discourage the wasp from building a nest in there. But I was shocked to find a nest already inside, right under the piece I'd pulled off. There are several wasps on or around it at all times. But at least they don't seem aggressive. I'm hoping they'll go away by winter, so I can remove the nest then. But I haven't had time to look up whether that's likely to happen, or if the nest will just keep getting bigger. I'm curious now whether wasps have queens like bees do, and what the wasps are doing while they're all congregating there on the nest. They seem sociable with each other.

It's a good thing the dogs aren't here, and that even when they come by to visit, they mostly ignore the doghouse.

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I've seen tiny black ants on the floor in several rooms. Not enough of them to make me want to bring out the ant bait yet.

In the niece's bedroom, there were a lot of crumbs around the bed/mattress. I'd been getting ready to vacuum it up when I discovered those tiny ants as well as another tiny insect... after taking some photos and zooming in, they appear out to be saw-toothed grain beetles. I think I've gotten rid of all or most of them now.

New trick for catching small bugs like that and ants:
Scoop them up with small piece of paper and drop them into a white bucket. (Having it be a white bucket makes it easier to see them in there.) Most of them don't think to start crawling up the sides of the bucket, so that gives me time to catch several at once. Then I can take the bucket outside, turn it upside down and give it a few thumps to shake them out into the grass.

Such as the small freezer compartments in the mini refrigerators often found in motels...
(It was so full of ice that the little freezer flap wouldn't even open more than part-way, because of ice on the hinge area.)

First I tried chipping away at some of the ice with a screwdriver. That didn't work well.

I thought of using the motel room's hair-dryer, but it was mounted to the wall and the cord didn't reach far enough.

I looked up the refrigerator model's manual online. It said NOT to try to chip away the ice as that could cause damage. It said NOT to use a hair-dryer as that could deform the plastic parts. It said to turn the refrigerator off and wait for it to melt. With a warm bowl of water inside to speed things along. But that would have still taken too long.

I tried tossing teaspoonfuls of warm water onto the ice at the top of the hinge, but that didn't work well.

So then I ran hot water on a washcloth and used the warm washcloth to melt the ice, with a towel at the bottom of the fridge to catch dripping water. I wrung out the washcloth over the sink and repeated it many times. Once I got the flap to open all the way, I continued melting away much of the frost and the ice inside the freezer compartment. Using a small hand-towel would have worked well too, maybe even faster.

I prefer menstrual pads that have wings. But nowadays most companies make the wings long and narrow. Those kind of wings tend to come unstuck* and then they start sticking to my skin instead. Ouch. This hack prevents that: cut a notch in each end of the wing to make it shorter on the part that folds over.



*You have to fold a long narrow flap onto a curved surface; of course it's not going to stick well that way. What are the people who design these things thinking?

When food is too spicy-hot, stir in some mayonnaise (or more specifically Vegenaise; I haven't tried it with any other brand) to make it milder.