Assorted lifehacks and oddities. NO KINGS
Nov 8, 2024 by HTV9
This is not exactly rocket science, but it’s something I liked trying. Ate a small citrus fruit and kept the peel. Had some chicken with sauce on it that was looking good, but I didn’t have the energy to go wash my hands afterwards. Just used the peel to hold on to the chicken. As a bonus it improved the flavor
Oct 11, 2024 by HTV9
Tonight I anointed my sweater with the kiss of ketchup. Lots of ketchup. This is my second favorite sweater so I wasn’t too pleased. In a lot of cleaning handbooks and guides there’s this guide to stain removal that is a bunch of arcane wizardry and mystical chanting, more or less ordering you to go and buy:
acetone
vinegar
chalk
stain removal fluids of various make
stain removal pens
rubbing alcohol
club soda
oxygen bleach
other bleach
a time machine
an entire cow
Which is fantastic and all but here’s my method.
Step 1: Mess up a fabric item with something
Step 2: Wipe off most of it with a paper towel
Step 3: Wet down either a bar of soap or the item itself, and then scrub at the item with the bar of soap til each fiber is soaped, or something like that. If it’s really bad, get the other side too.
Step 4: Wipe down the stains with liquid soap
Step 5, most importantly: Shove it in a laundry basket and wait a bit, at least an hour, before you run it through the usual laundering. The dryer will cook the stains in there if they haven’t come out after laundering, which is why it’s harder to remove stains that have already claimed their territory on your clothes after it’s been laundered; I do not know how to get rid of those.
Should work on most stains before they get set in.
Update from 1/23/25: Yes it worked on the sweater quite well. It should work on many other stains. I’ve also learned that baby wipes help to prevent stains also when used right away after sopping up any liquids. Handy since they’re more portable
Oct 2, 2024 by HTV9
Ingredients:
1 bag of aquarium sand
A few pebbles
Reclosable plastic container
Fork
You can close it up when it’s not in use so you can keep it in a high traffic living room or office without as much fear of it spilling
Sep 24, 2024 by HTV9
Strictly speaking this isn’t necessary as a post but I’m just so proud of it. Here’s how the wooden plant marker looks in the garden. That mint does need water so it got a pitcher of it after I took this photo and will get a good drench tomorrow.
Update 7/10/25: The mint plant has since gotten fertilizer, mulch, and regular watering. Unlike a lot of stuff in my garden it’s alive and thriving. Maybe stuff that’s known to thrive a little too much in “regular” gardens with less tough growing conditions is the stuff that will survive here.
Sep 24, 2024 by HTV9
Here’s a plant marker for mint that grows directly in the soil on the North side of the house. It got planted there due to the least amount of sun and the greatest amount of moisture throughout the Texas year. Directly in the ground would make other gardeners in other places quake in their boots because in most places it would just spread all over the place and take over, but in Texas I’m lucky it’s even survived. It’s amongst grass and needs to be avoided with the lawn mower hence the need for a label. So here’s how I made this. I got an old cheap wooden spatula. Labeled it with a permanent marker. Colored over that very thoroughly with white crayon, then colored the other parts with light brown crayon. Then, I ran a lighter over every part of it just until the crayon melted and ran, so the wax would kinda work its way into the wood and make it somewhat more waterproof. My hope is for it to last longer outdoors in the elements like that.
Update from 1/23/25: The plant marker and the crayon is still there. The sun has bleached the permanent marker right off it. I’ll be adding black crayon to label it and hope that stays.
Sep 6, 2024 by HTV9
This is both easier and harder than it looks. Easier in that all you do is color on the plant pots. Harder in that if they’re outside it’s best to wait for a nice day temperature and weatherwise. It would be a lot easier to do this with brand new pots that were brought indoors for art. I think I’ll be doing this instead of sidewalk chalk for some sections of pavement, but only in very small areas that aren’t subjected to foot traffic ever as the wax would make walking slippery otherwise. Could also work for some areas of fence posts and stuff like that.
Edit 7/10/25: The colors have faded a great deal on this. I think next time I’ll try using something that is UV resistant though I don’t know what that would be
Aug 14, 2024 by HTV9
Hey, it dried! Look at it! Doesn’t happen in any other month in Texas for us because of the weather patterns, so I think I’ll be restricting my herb-drying endeavors to just this month in the future. I’m not really sure what I’ll do with it, but in my experience this is good stuff in a pot of tea. Just a one-inch-sized piece in a whole pot is more than enough to flavor it well in Winter. Here I’ve stuffed it into a container with a spoonful of sugar then shook it up, which is my attempt to help ensure that if humidity does get into the container, it makes the sugar melt and the orange peel not get moldy. We’ll see. Next time I’ll be saving glass spice jars for my home-dried herbs.
8/16/24 Update: Well, this doesn’t taste too great, it wasn’t organic orange peel. I’m going to try it in a simmer pot. However, it still worked ok in a wildly inappropriate for the season black tea with the dried orange peel, some candied pineapple and a pinch of cinnamon. I think I’ll make this in the middle of winter with too much sugar and some actual cinnamon sticks.
Aug 14, 2024 by HTV9
So this is a practice run of stockinette stitch. It’s probably suitable for a beginner knitter. I’m not going to put in a tutorial here of how to knit or purl, cast on or bind off, or overhand-knot and weave in yarn ends, because you can find all those in various places online, but if you can do those five or six techniques you can make this. Here’s why you’d want to. This is relatively smooth 100% acrylic yarn. I made this thing in about a week of work for a few hours at a time. I hated every minute of it because I despise knitting but figured stockinette stitch is a nice knit so I may as well see what it does. Turns out it was worth it. You know how microfiber cloths are touted as like, this great cleaning thing that picks up dust and dirt really well, but you can’t toss them into the laundry machine with everything else? This dusts really well, without additional water. And you can toss it into the laundry machine with everything else. It will shrink, however. Here’s the pattern, in plain English:
Use bamboo knitting needles that are 8 mm wide, or bamboo chopsticks that are round (I think they’re usually that same diameter, at least they seem that way in the United States). 7/10/25: You can also use any kind of knitting needles that are 8 mm wide, I don’t see why not
Use 4 medium 100% acrylic yarn, which is handy since that’s the most common kind
Cast on 20 stitches
Knit 20 stitches
Purl 20 stitches, then alternate knitting and purling until you can fold it over diagonally and it’s roughly square because the sides are pretty much equal to one another. It’s about 30 rows total, not including the cast-on and bind-off bits.
Bind off.
Use a yarn needle to use overhand knots to tie the last bits of yarn on there then weave in the ends.
Update 8/16/24: Forgot to mention that this works really well to dust off crystals and rock collections. It would probably work great to dust off fiddly stuff like that too, but probably not like, silk flowers and plants unless you have time to burn
Update 12/4/24: This also works pretty well to dust electronics like laptops and cell phones, nooks and crannies of larger objects, windowsills, desk surfaces, and I’m gonna experiment with it some more. It could also in theory work pretty well to dust cars on the interior
Update 6/2/25: This is pretty much the same as a microfiber cloth. Can dust everything a microfiber cloth can, and if you made it out of biodegradable materials such as natural fiber it would be totally eco-friendly. Can dust walls, windowsills, venetian blinds, just about everything. For smaller more delicate knickknacks I like to use a brand new blush brush instead. This can also dust houseplants and cacti
Update 7/10/25: We are still using these. They get washed, they lose some fibers, but they still work.
Aug 6, 2024 by HTV9
Here’s what I did. I added some pineapple juice then orange juice to this ice cube tray after taking out the electrolyte cubes in there and rinsing it out. Chopped the top and bottom off an orange, put shallow slits down the side of it and peeled off the peel without the watery parts using my thumbnail. Sliced the orange into wedges then into smaller pieces and put a few in each ice cube tray. Arranged the orange peel on a plate with paper towel to then (hopefully) dry on a windowsill this August to add to potpourri sachets. Then, after the usual mopping up of juice splashed where it shouldn’t have been (down the sink! the cabinets! the floor! damn it!) I carefully placed the ice cube tray in the freezer where it miraculously did not drip onto the freezer walls/floor. Something else beat it to the punch and I have no idea how that happened. The remaining orange wedges went into my cup and it’s goooood.
11/8/24: They’re still good. In water. However it’s really hard to get them out of the ice cube tray, takes a good 20 minutes of waiting, so I think I’ll see about getting some of the silicone trays or something next time
7/10/25: These didn’t last as long in the freezer as I had hoped. They became bitter several months into storage. Not as much of a success as the electrolyte ice cubes
New Book of Days 