Top tools of 2010

Happy New Year!!

This is an incomplete list of tools that were new and handy for me in 2010. By new, I mean that we got them last Christmas or this year, not that they are new to the world, just new to our world. And handy is as described

Microfiber cloths -- 36 pack from costco for ~$15 from the automotive section; among my peeves about cleaning, rinsing is probably one of the highest peeves. And for mopping this is definitely true. By having a giant pile of these cloths, I forego rinsing and just dump the dirty cloth in the laundry machine. Particularly useful for mopping since I have about 250 sq ft of tile to mop and I do it by standing on two cloths and "skating" around the tile.

Electric kettle -- Christmas present from 09; great for coffee which is its primary use, but also has been great lately since my mother-in-law uses it to make tea, wilk, hot lemonade, and to fill her water bottle.

12 cup French press -- we previously could only make one mug of coffee at a time. Now we can make up to 3. On weekends when we both want coffee, this simplifies things greatly instead of making a mug's worth, cleaning the press, and then making the second mug.

Summer baby gate -- one of the few gates that stretches 10 feet. Keeps L away from my husband's TV/sound system/gaming systems. Sturdy enough. We bought different 2" screws to go into studs and modded it so the door isn't in the middle section but on one end.

Diaper liners -- L's been in cloth diapers since she was 5 m.o. but I didn't bother to buy diaper liners til this Sept nearly a year later. What an idiot I am. The liners are flushable and hold the poo so it just plops out into the toilet and flushes away. SO much easier than scraping loose poo out. Also reduces the gross out factor which really bothered N. Worth every penny and I cut them in half since they are too big and I run them through the laundry if they are poo-ed on.

Text messaging -- N and I welcomed ourselves to the 21st C by learning to use text messaging. Long story short, very useful for short communications particularly for me because I'm now frequently not by my computer, but I can have my phone on me. (We used to do a lot with IM.)

Kitchen timer -- both the microwave and the oven have timers on them, but on a busy morning those can be unwieldy. Having a separate, digital timer on the fridge has been super handy for lots of things -- steeping coffee, reheating pizza slices in the toaster oven, keeping track of bread rising, reminders to check things on the stove, etc.

Neilmed -- It's for rinsing the sinuses with saline. Mother-in-law gave us a bottle in Feb, but we didn't start using it til fall. Has made a noticeable improvement for me with allergies. If I visit a cat-hair infested place, I can come home and rinse out my sinuses and be in good shape pretty quickly. Trying it out with the current cedar allergies, but results are inconclusive -- I'm still kinda miserable.

Plastic scraper -- I saw these scrapers in a kitchen store and modded a plastic lid from some disposable container to that basic shape. Very handy for cleaning out leftover dough that would otherwise get stuck in a sponge.

Kitchen Aid -- anniversary gift from my husband; I learned to make sourdough bread this year and have been making 2 loaves a week for most of the year. Hand kneading is laborious and the little one always seemed to want some TLC in the middle of it. The kitchen aid mixer with dough hook has definitely streamlined the process. However, at it's very high price; seems like it will be years before it gets paid off. Feel I should use it more, but I'm not much of a baker aside from these breads.

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None of the links are affiliate links, I get nada, but thought they'd be helpful.

I realize that this post is not about Jesus and was not written in the morning over coffee, but there are coffee related tools in the list. Hopefully, that counts enough.