live from sublurbia

Works for me wednesday!

I wrote earlier in the week about the use it or lose it aspect of gift cards as more and more retail establishments fall into bankruptcy. In keeping with this theme - something I learned the hard way with gift cards and vouchers is definitely “use it or lose it”.

Or at least be careful in how you use it.

I’m a listener to Public Radio; a contributor, too. “Back in the day” as my parents would say, you could get a real deal as a contributor to your local station. There are some decent gifts now, too, and you can also decide to not accept a gift and increase your donation to the station by that much more.

Sometimes they run contests. One year, I won. Two round-trip plane tickets, whooohooo! I had plans to be married within a year or so, and figured I’d use the tickets then. My letter came in the mail and I filed it carefully away (mumble mumble big pile of papers here or there). I called the airline a few months later only to find they’d gone out of business.

Another time I was given two unlimited day passes on the local commuter rail system. Not bad at all. I offered them to a co-worker as a free way to try the system. Thankfully, he turned me down, and I ended up using them myself on a couple of occasions when I forgot my wallet. Even more thankfully, there were no ticket checks on those days. Looking more closely at the stubs I realized the tickets had expired a few years earlier. The station was digging back pretty deep into that prize closet.

Got a gift card? Won a prize? Use it or lose it, man. Use it or lose it.

_{For this and other Works for me Wednesday ideas, check out the mothership of WFMW: rocksinmydryer.net.}

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Normally, I am a huge fan of gift cards. This is teacher appreciation week, and I’m racking my brain looking for a little something to contribute. I hadn’t planned on gift cards, but I’ve not yet come up with something. Probably baked goods and/or a veggie/fruit plate for them to nosh on.

However, considering the way things are kind of going a bit off of the deep end economy wise, that gift card in your wallet may just turn to dust:

Brian Riley, senior analyst at research firm The TowerGroup, estimates [Linens’n'Things filing for bankruptcy protection] will freeze about $42 million in consumer gift cards, affecting about 400,000 customers. Gift cards become valueless when a company files for bankruptcy protection.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/business/20080502-1211-linensnthings-bankruptcy.html

Go find something you need, need to replace, or need a backup for. And don’t buy gift cards off of people that they “aren’t going to use” unless you’re sure the store is still accepting cards.

I know this is saturday, but I may repeat it for WFMW. It qualifies as something I probably will learn the hard way. I’m sure I’ve gotten short changed on these cards before … I’ll just link this.

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Works for me Wednesday!

On a scale of Food Network Chefs, I’m somewhere in the middle between Sandra Lee and Rachael Ray. I use a lot of boxes or cans or pre-prepped ingredients, but I do pretty well when faced with fresh ingredients and a hungry crowd.

Recently, I’ve been coming into the “ends” of things at cooking time. The last of the mustard, the last of the pasta sauce, the last of this or that. Not enough to really “do” something, but enough to flavor something, maybe.

One of my favorite tricks for jars of pasta sauce has been adding the pasta to the jar during meal preparation. Once I’ve poured out the sauce I can, I take a big scoop of pasta and pour it into the jar. Next, I close the jar and shake it, using the pasta to capture drips and drabs of sauce, then pour the contents back into my serving dish.

But that still leaves quite a bit of sauce in the jar to finish up or rinse down the drain before the jar joins the rest of the recyclables. I happened to have planned ahead a tomato and lentil soup for the next day, so instead of rinsing the sauce down the drain, I added drinking water to the jar, shook the sauce and water to make a think flavored soup, and added it in place of the required water to the tomatoes and lentils ready to go. If I hadn’t had the soup ready to go, I could have frozen the liquid to use another day.

The same is probably true for the mustard I just rinsed away, too. Mix it with a little water or chicken broth, then add to a baked chicken dish or chicken crock meal. Spice it up with the last of the container, rather than washing all those flavors away.

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Works for me Wednesday!

Once the office work day ends, another set of races begin. Get the kids. Supervise homework while dinner cooks. Cool food enough to serve hungry children. Try not to scorch their little taste buds. Actually manage to serve the adults warm food at the same time.

For a while, I simply mixed frozen veggies into each serving of kid food, then tossed the plated meals in the refrigerator for a few moments. Mixed results, mostly good, until it was time to rotate out the hurricane stocks of canned veggies. At the same time, I realized the kids were ready for actual plates and bowls made of glass instead of plastic, current data on BPA aside. So I borrowed a trick from the hub: keep the plates and bowls cold, using the refrigerator.

This time, I put the empty bowls and plates in the chiller. Then I started dinner. By the time the meal was cooked, the dishes were rather cool. I pulled the dishes, added hot food, popped them back into the fridge, and waited a shorter amount of time than I had with frozen veggies or room-temperature plates. As the kid meals continued the cooling process, I plated the adult food as usual, and everyone could sit down at the same time to meals served at their desired temperature.

The idea hit me like a bolt of lightning as I pulled a dish of leftovers out of the fridge for re-heating. The heat just transfers to the dish, glass or plastic. If you start with a cold dish, the temperatures balance out more quickly. Now if only I could convince a few restaurants to do this with the perennial kids’ favorites such as the scalding-hot mac-n-cheese meals or spaghetti … I guess that’s what large tables and pocket book treasures are for.

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Sometimes I buy things and I don’t know why. It might be tied to my early reading of plucky-girl-adventure stories, where a hatpin or other random cool thing saved the day. I think I love saving the day and hope somewhere deep inside the plucky-girl-adventure stories will happen to me.

I’m sure there are at least three things within my line of sight that I don’t get as much use out of as I’d hoped. Kind of an impulse thing that I’m working on; but one part of my mind always whispers about the possibilities. Sometimes I’ll buy an item, though, and actually use it years later. This is one of those times. Behold the awesomeness that is (click the jump to see more):

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I’ve probably still got little scars on my skull from an incident involving the top bunk bed, a deck of cards, and a quick if bloody lesson in gravity. I try not to make up for it with my kids by swaddling them in cotton wool or making them sleep in helmets, but I can’t help cringe to find the kid asleep on the floor in the morning, on the other side of the room from the bed we put her down in.

Wolfie wasn’t that bad. The only time he fell out of bed he was sick with an ear infection and loopy on cough meds. And “bed” was a mattress on the floor, so he only fell a good nine inches, if that.

But Helvi is a rolling machine. The foot board, head board, and wall keep her from rolling too far most ways, but she keeps rolling off that last side and down to the next mattress in sequence (a cheap mom’s trundle ;)). One night I distinctly heard a “thump” as some part of her anatomy whacked against the side board of the bed. I made plans to get a bed rail the next day, but I found three stores with empty shelves before giving up. Must be something going around.

I ended up with a padded side rail using a folded towel instead. She still can whack it on the way down, but she’ll have a softer ride.

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And here I’ve only run one! Just my luck. :)

Anyway, here’s an oldie but a goodie … Sticky Notes to Defeat the Mean Potties.

I have one answer for her. Post-it^tm notes. I always lose mine, but a headband or diaper cover works, too.

I occasionally am caught off-guard in an auto-flush bathroom without my little helpful squares; usually I’ll have something else (cloth wipe, cloth changing pad, other soon-to-be-washed garment) to work in its stead.

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It seemed like a good idea a the time. Bored kids. Rainy day. After a day out exploring in the rain, we figured we should get under cover for the deluge and to grab a snack. To keep the kids busy, I grabbed a busy bag I’d prepared, and set them loose to vandalize the place while our food was made ready.

“I’m so blogging this,” I told my companion mom. We watched the kids mark up the floor, asked them to not write on the walls; I kind of surprised her when I admitted I’d never set my little graffiti artists loose before. Of course, I wasn’t thinking it was vandalism at the time … but is it? Tell me what you think in comments. Follow the jump to see evidence from the scene of the crime.

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