Bugs in the cupboards—If you find some of those little worms or flies/bugs crawling around inside a box of cereal or a bag of flour—you have weevils. These items will need to be tossed, and then clean and scrub out the cupboard they are stored in. Freeze any flour-type item for at least 24 hours before putting them in the cleaned cupboard and I take some dried bay leaves and put them on the bottoms of the cupboard shelves, lay on a sheet of paper and then store my dry goods. The bugs don’t like the smell of the bay leaves and there is no scent of bay leaves in any of my cornmeal, pancake mix or flour. I’m bug free.
Medicine cabinet cleanout time—Every home should do a medicine cabinet clean out at least once a year and get rid of any expired medications and old prescriptions that are no longer valid.
Pour any liquids such as cough syrups that have separated. Pitch it in the sink drain and flush it down. Rinse out the bottle and dispose of it.
Keep medications in a cool, dry place. Let’s face it, the bathroom cabinet may not be the best and safest place because of the heat and moisture from daily showers.
Medicines also need to be kept out of reach of small children. One subscriber found her 4-year-old son standing in the bathroom sink looking through the medicine cabinet—just to see. He had crawled onto the toilet to get into the sink. She promptly moved all medications to a locked cabinet in another part of the house.
All those caps—Storing the many caps that the men and girls in my family manage to accumulate gets to be quite a chore. We’ve put up numerous hooks on the back wall of the big closet—two rows of them in fact. But with heads heads being covered multiple times on a daily basis it gets to be a problem and many of them end up on the floor.
A neighbor of mine shared her idea with me and it works. She said to take a chunk of baler twine and slide it through one of the holes that adjust the cap. You can stack several caps on a single string and hang that from the hook. It works pretty well for the caps they don’t wear on a regular basis but want to have handy for “town.”
Brighten those lights—Did you know that one swipe of a clean cloth can take the dust off of a light bulb enough to increase the lumens by 50 percent? Guess I’d better be dusting my light bulbs after the summer dust and heat. Maybe now I’ll only need one light instead of two to read the paper.
If you have hints or ideas to share, send them to PennyWise, Box 518, Kadoka, South Dakota 57543; or email them to [email protected]. If you send me your name and address, I’ll send you a free copy of the PennyWise Newsletter. Please mention High Plains Journal when you write.
