Things I've Learned Recently

* If you take the paddles out of the breadmaker right before the last rise, and put little pieces of foil over the posts, you don’t have to stand there for 5 minutes shaking the pan like crazy, trying to get the bread loosened and out of the pan. It slides right out, pretty as you please, first try.

* If you stand in bathroom putting Clairol on your hair, and squirt the bottle too hard, it will go through the tiny crack between the open door and facing, and make big splashes on the wall behind, which you will not notice until your husband goes into the bathroom later in the day and shuts the door, and all of a sudden you see the wall in your bedroom that was behind the door, and “OH NO! Where did those huge blotches of brown come from???”

* Further, I have also learned that you can NOT clean hair dye off the wall, even though it is NON-permanent dye, by any means available to the average householder. No, the stuff just smears around making an even bigger mess.

* Another thing I’ve learned recently, or at least it’s been emphasized through some searching I’ve been doing -- it’s often hard to find addresses on a website that is designed to sell people something. Does that make sense to anybody? I’ve been checking out local CSA’s, and one even went so far as to give a link for MapQuest so you could put in the addresses and see how to get there. Just one problem, NO where on the entire website do they give an address, just a very general location. I even tried putting in their farm name, and still could not locate them. If you want people to come to your farm, why don’t you have an address that’s easily seen?

* Just last night, I learned that not all toilets are created equal. I was doing online research trying to find one for our hall bathroom, and discovered that:

1. You can’t enter “commode” in the Google search engine and find the fixtures I was looking for. That brings up bedside commodes and portapotties. Nope, it’s got to be “toilet” to find the “permanent-put-it-in-your-bathroom” kind of fixture.


2. There is some interesting engineering and fluid dynamics with getting toilets to flush using the new, smaller amount of water. Seriously!


3. Recognized name brands do not necessarily get good reviews. In fact, one I thought would be good was trashed repeatedly in reviews, and one I’d never heard of got good reviews everywhere.

* It’s hard to find colors to match that weird harvest gold so popular in the 70’s (which our huge tub & surround happens to be).

That’s just what I can think of right off the top of my head, and I know there's more! At least I can say I’m still learning!