Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Use for old textbooks

Whenever my husband needs a weight for something, the first thing he reaches for is my old nursing school textbooks. When he needs to go on a ruck march, a few of these quickly add up to the 30-50 lbs he needs to weigh down his backpack. Unable to use a vise clamp for glue work, such as the time when he wanted to apply pressure to our t-molding strips over the newly installed kitchen floor, a couple of hand bells and my nursing text books were called up for duty. So if you're about to graduate from nursing school, unless you want to retain those books as really expensive weights, sell them back. On second thought, do they even print up these monstrosities anymore? Perhaps there's now an apps instead of textbooks.

Sump pump or swamp thing that is the question


Whether it will pump endless gallons of water away from my yard, or sit idly by as a sinister swamp creeps closer and closer towards my back door, that is the question.
Yesterday, the swamp thing immerged and showed us it's true colors.
I give this 3/4 horse power (HP) flotec a big double thumbs down!  Time to find myself a new friend named Wayne.

Sunday, February 2, 2014

Skin care for knitters

It's winter, my skin is dry and cracks form on my fingertips constantly. Like a paper cut, only wider, this really hurts. As a kid my mother showed me how to use scotch tape on a paper cut, and it works wonderfully to ease the pain. While working in the E.R. I learned that plastic tape was hard on frail and sensitive skin, and I discovered paper tape. One of my pet peeves was discovering an infant or elderly patient with plastic tape all over their delicate skin. The bruises and skin tears that would occur from tape removal were horrible. I'm definitely a paper tape proponent. Sure it can wash off over time, but it doesn't damage the skin the way the plastic tape did. And when my fingers are cracked and split, I find comfort and pain relief in a bit of paper tape. Often I can wash my hands or get them wet a couple times (as it dries quickly) before I have to replace the tape. This is cheaper and more effective than a Band-Aid in my opinion.