RMkoske's Profile

Huh. I didn't think I'd be the only one to say this, but maybe I'm weirder than I thought.

I keep a strap wrench in the kitchen. It's almost infinitely adjustable, so it will open anything from a stuck soy sauce bottle to a five gallon jar of pickles.

Not a cheap choice, I suppose, but I like the way it looks in my utensil jar on the counter and how I never ever have to strain at all.

These cookies were one of my first experiences as a child of "just 'cause it is pretty, that doesn't mean it is good to eat."

We made ours with broken-up lollipops, and the flavor was fine, but managing to eat them was difficult - you could eat the cookie, but the candy was too thick and hard to crunch up and too big to fit into my mouth. I ended up eating the cookie and then struggling with a sticky, sharp piece of candy...and the long eating time of the candy center meant I only got one cookie!

Ours had a higher candy-to-cookie ratio than those pictured, so maybe that was the problem.

I always wonder if fruitcake hate is related to the booze - do people hate it because it has booze? Because they get ones that don't have booze (and need it)? Because they get ones with cheap, bad booze? To confess, my mother made it with just grape juice, aged over about a week. I didn't start liking fruitcake until I was an adult, and didn't know it was traditionally alcoholic until just a couple of years ago.

I try not to post off-topic very often, but you hit a pet peeve.

"In lieu of" means "instead of," not "in light of" or "in addition to." People often say "In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be given to xyz charity" in funeral notices. They're not saying they want donations in addition to flowers or that they want donations because of flowers. They want donations instead of flowers.

So the first sentence of the post makes no sense whatsoever.

And now that I've been bitchy, I'll say that I've been pretty impressed with all of the "real citrus" air fresheners I've encountered. They're the only ones that don't disgust me more than the original poo smell. I really don't feel a need for air fresheners generally, but it is nice to know that there's a non-aerosol alternative if I'm every forced to buy an air freshener.

Eh, I don't think that it is wise to buy anything just because it is green, or American, or local. Quite often the best thing you can buy for the environment is nothing at all.

I just wanted to point out that this high-end designer garment (whether you like it or not, whether you think it is worth it or not, that's what it is) with tons and tons of handstitching done with expensive labor may not be actually as overpriced as it looks.

I can't imagine ever paying $1,400 for a garment. Not even the $800 I mentioned in my example. Even so, it is nice to see someone doing high-end stuff with recycling in mind, and the designs are very DIY inspirational. I think those were the two reasons it showed up here.

My mother used the non-worn edges of an old 100% cotton sheet to make napkins. Because the fabric was tightly woven and old and soft, she just ripped it into squares and did no finishing whatsoever. The napkins had a tiny fringe of frayed fabric, but didn't leave strings or continue to fray. Super easy, though judging which fabrics would behave and which would turn into a snarled mess of strings might be hard.

And I second theora55 - polyester napkins aren't worth the trouble. They absorb nothing. And just because your napkins are cotton, that doesn't mean you'll need to iron them. As long as I don't let them sit wadded tightly in the pile of clean laundry, they come out just fine without ironing.

The best napkins are also not-white. We have black, green, pink, purple, blue...and we use cloth napkins when we eat pizza, because there's no fear of sauce stains. White ones are too much trouble, pretty as they are.

Heh, I like those peanut butter kisses, though they weren't a super-favorite. If I could get my hands on them without resorting to mail order, I'd probably buy them occasionally.

Instant trade-aways...marshmallow ANYTHING. Hershey's Special Dark minis. I also always disliked those Necco wafers.

For a higher creep factor while still avoiding plastic, you can buy glass jars and bottles at the thrift store (and save them from your household) label them with creepy potions names, and fill them with colored water, spices, bits of nature and et cetera. Many dry filler ingredients (like lentils, for example) are shelf-stable, so you could keep the decorations for next year.

I've done it this year to decorate my cubicle at work, and popular opinion says the creepiest thing on my shelf is the small glass jar with golden raisins and lemon juice. It made a really gross-looking swirl of milky yellow with puffy wrinkly things in it. I labeled it with an appropriately gross name, and now it is really yucky creepy but completely compostable.

(Natural fall things, while gorgeous, don't say "Halloween" to me. Of course, I still dress up in a costume if I can, so I may be in the minority on this one.)

I can't acutally see the color variation on the tile in the photo. (The photo is too small for me to see past the variations in light.) The description is lovely, though. I wonder if you could plan to buy odd lots of tiles in different colors to get this affect for less than a single-color tile roof?

Jems, I didn't see it mentioned that the four Pyrex cups were ordered separately. It seems unlikely to me that someone would place four separate orders for the same bowl.

I know that Amazon has frequently shipped my orders piecemeal - three items, three separate boxes, even though I ordered them all at one time.