Welcome to My World

We always lament the tendency for bad things to happen to us in big piles, all clumped together. We ourselves have the tendency, though, to ignore it when lots of good stuff happens all at once. Today, for a nice change, I’m going to rant mightily about the cool stuff that came up.

Let There Be Clean Clothes!

The spiffy little hand-powered washing machine I ordered last week turned up. Two loads of clothes are already up and drying now, and they’re quite clean. It really does take less than ten minutes to wash and rinse a load of clothes; quite literally from the dirty clothes piles (I’m forcing myself to get in the habit of sorting them into color/white piles) to the clothesline takes less than ten minutes.

After a stumbling block (you shouldn’t skip the step in the instructions where you’re told to wring out your clothes — the suckers drip otherwise and that’s a bad thing indoors ) I’ve gotten the hang of this thing and it’s definitely going to save me a ton of money (and time). I can probably wash four times the amount of clothing in the same period of time it takes the laundromat machine to run one cycle.

I did, sadly enough, thoroughly trash one pillow tonight (it was ripped already and didn’t exactly fit in the washer, so trying to make it fit anyway was what we call a “bad idea”), but it was a pillow given to me a couple years back by someone I’d rather forget anyway. It also wasn’t the most comfortable pillow in the world to begin with. Lesson learned: don’t shove ripped things into small holes. They rip more. Then they leak whatever’s inside them. Feathers are a serious bitch to clean out of a bathtub drain, even when there’s just a few of them.

Still, this thing kicks some serious ass. It’s fast, it’s cheap, does what it promises, and will save me a big wad of cash.

Cheap Good Cat Litter

I’d written previously about switching to non-scoopable sandy crappy cat litter. $2.25 for a moderately big bag of the stuff (about 20 pounds or so, I think) and it tends to last about two weeks before it turns nasty and needs replacement.

Walmart has, thankfully, leapt into the fray with a “generic” offering of its own in the scoopable market. At $0.19 per pound (versus $0.11 per pound for the non-clumping stuff), or $5.40 for a 28 pound box, it’s going to work out costing about the same (possibly a bit less, actually) given that a single box of it lasts a lot longer (with non-scoopable litter, you basically have to toss the stuff out once it starts to stink; scoopable litter is essentially good-as-new once it’s been sifted/cleaned).

Enough to Fill a 1GB Card

The two extra batteries I ordered for my digital camera finally showed up today, too. They both appear electrically compatible with the camera and charger, and so far, they hold a charge just fine (and honestly, they last longer than the “OEM” battery the camera came with). Now I’ve got three usable cells instead of one; this means I might actually be able to fill the 1GB card I got for it last year around my birthday without running out of power. This hopefully means I’ll be adding more new pictures to the gallery that I haven’t reconstructed yet …

“Worship the gods as if they were present.”
[Motto inscribed on door of Chinese temple]

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