MeghanJG's Profile

Be careful with items made from plastic, particularly furniture and safety items like strollers or car seats (although I don't know anyone with a second-hand car seat). The plastic softens over the course of a couple of years, so if it's more than two years old you want to ditch it because it will not hold together well.

My family is doing a lot of bickering this year, which is no different from any other year, but for the first time someone is considering calling off the holiday get-together altogether. If that happens, I'm taking my 9 days off work and going to ride a train cross-country, which I've always dreamed of doing. I actually missed a whole bunch of holidays during my mid-twenties and at this point feel obligated to make it up to my mother, but if someone else pulls the trigger on the whole thing I'm not complaining.

Love love love Ella's Chic Nursery! Can I have that now, with a canopy bed instead of the cradle?

In Bethesda, Maryland, where I live, the farmers' markets are becoming dominated by craftspersons and shop owners. There aren't too many farmers left.

We have a farmers' market in the middle of town that was started many years ago and has a plaque out front that says they're on the National Register of Historic Places. I go there to buy fruit and flowers plus jam around holiday time. I have to wade past the flea market out front with people selling jewelry, tacky art, and bed linens before I get to the actual farmers' market. Once inside, there are five booths selling produce, one woman selling handbags, another booth selling photographs, two booths that sell fresh flowers and plants, one booth that sells old-fashioned clothes and accessories but never seems to be open, one booth selling jewelry, and a couple of baked-good vendors, most of whom have storefront businesses. There's a kind of rotating group of butchers or people selling Maryland crabs, but that's it. There's little haggling to be done, and I suspect that one or two of the produce vendors actually buy the produce elsewhere and sell it here for a profit. The point is that the farmers are getting squeezed out of the farmers' markets by sellers of manufactured or handmade goods, and it does a disservice to the growers and to the community who want to support them and are finding diminishing opportunity.

GAH!! Balcony/fire escape grilling is not only illegal, but it's incredibly dangerous.

Am I the only bibliophile that hates owning books? In my BK (Before Kindle) days I mostly read books in the bookstore. On the few occasions I purchased one, since I just couldn't wait to finish it, I turned right around and left it at a tea shop or on the Metro within a day or two. There are a few titles I'd feel sad not to own, like Alice in Wonderland or copies of books whose authors I know, but the physical object of a book always seemed more like a burden than a pleasure.

Even now, I wish there was a way I could "cross off" books on the Kindle that I've already read.

At Easter I was in a house with 11-foot ceilings and the cabinets DID go all the way up. All I could think about was, "what on Earth do they put in those cabinets?" The answer was...not much or nothing. It just looked very weird. The kitchen was also very poorly organized and I wondered if the excessive cabinetry encouraged excessive "stuff," since they clearly had a ton of storage, but most everything was shoved into the arms-length cupboards and shelving.

My favorite Martha moment was years ago, when she had as a guest on her show a woman who made gossamer crepes for a restaurant in New York. The guest spontaneously decided that her crepes needed more sugar, and [gasp] stuck her hand into the sugar bowl to scoop it out. HORRORS! How could such an uncouth cretin make such wonderful crepes?? The look on Martha's face still makes me laugh, remembering.

The two little bins from the county just weren't cutting it, so I have two of these for my apartment for recycling--one for glass/plastic and the other for paper. I really like them for this purpose since they are bigger than the bathroom-style trash bins but smaller than the kitchen style, so perfect for recycling. The drawback is that the rim is solid while the body is expandable, so if you try to put a bag inside of it the bag will have a larger diameter than the rim and you won't pull it out again. Our community has small recycling collection stations that are frequently emptied, so I collect my recycling in the bins and then bring them to the recycling collection station every couple of days. However, I don't throw wet trash in them and they've lasted me a year already.

Stiletto: try putting a cutting board over the sink.