This story category covers easy step-by-step instructions on a variety of home, food and entertaining topics.
WHAT THE PROS KNOW | If you, like me, have been tying all your scarves with the same two or three knots for years, and you want to add new and different twists and loops to your repertoire (I know I do), then this Frugalbits post is for you. Read more
THE CREATIVE SOLUTION | Cut flowers straight from the garden or the corner store are a fine if conventional way to bring spring indoors. But bedding plants, which are becoming more plentiful everywhere as the gardening season takes hold, make equally attractive, arguably more novel and definitely cost-effective arrangements.
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SAVE TIME & EFFORT | What’s on your bucket list? Exotic travel? Learning how to play an instrument or speak a foreign language? What about creating a digital inventory of the gazillions of snapshots and slides you’ve got stashed in drawers and boxes around your house? That fun (hahaha) undertaking is on my list for posterity (plus iPad) reasons but was buried near the bottom until a recent article in the NYT persuaded me to push it to the top. Written by my tech journalist crush Farhad Manjoo, it outlined the various options for converting all manner of old media—photos, videos, cassette tapes, paper documents—to new digital versions. Yeah! Just what I’d been looking for, a relatively painless not-so-expensive fix. Read more
While not everyone has huge pieces of art gracing the walls of their home, most people do have plenty of little pieces, whether they are favourite photos or original, miniature works of art. But just how do you display these smaller things? You can hang them on the wall in thoughtful groupings to create a tableau, or you can find a way to set them on a table. For years I had been looking for an elegant way to display framed art or photos on a table top. I have never liked plate stands and using an easel seems derivative; finally, I designed an easy-make support of my own. Read more
FREE IS GOOD | If the best things in life are free, what’s the deal with university tuition? In B.C. the average tuition fee has increased 96 percent in the past five years.
As it happens, you can get a university education without paying a cent, and what’s more, from top-flight institutions like MIT, Stanford and Cambridge. As long as you’re more interested in learning than in obtaining a formal degree, many universities provide courses and lectures online for free. Read more
SAVE MONEY & TIME | Is the high and climbing price of gasoline weighing on your mind? On Saturday, the Vancouver Sun reported that over the past week the price of gas across Metro Vancouver jumped to $1.40 a litre and that locals should brace for increases as high as $1.60 a litre heading into summer (CLICK HERE for the story). Last spring The New York Times ran a practical piece on ways to save on gas with reporter Michelle Higgins recommending, among other things, that drivers download an app like GasBuddy.com to help them find cheap gas while on the road (locally try online at VancouverGasPrices.com); that they fill up with regular instead of premium; and that they check to make sure their tire pressure is right (CLICK HERE for the story).
Fabulous as Higgins’s 13 suggestions are, she neglected to mention a proven way to economize on fuel, save on time spent in traffic and reduce injuries to drivers and passengers: Avoid turning left. Read more
LIFESAVER | Everyone has their own definition of personal insanity. Mine is wasting colossal amounts of time trying to log in to all the Internet stuff—websites, social networking platforms, and software applications, whatever—I subscribe to. Experts warn us to mix up passwords to keep hackers at bay, but that’s created a nightmare for me, and plenty of embarrassing moments when I’ve needed to access key information quickly and couldn’t do it. Read more
WASTE NOT | According to a 2010 Globe and Mail article, plenty of people still let their fingers do the walking through the physical pages of a hard copy version of the Yellow Pages. Funny, I don’t know even one of them. Everyone I know from 8 to 80 has switched to the computer to find the telephone numbers of their favourite businesses. For me, the Yellow Pages has become a shelf-grabbing dinosaur, and I cannot remember the last time I leafed through my copy—oh wait, yes I can. It was last week after two copies of the latest tome arrived on my doorstep and I picked up one them to look for a way to opt out. Read more
By this time of year, when the garden is devoid of flowers, the florist shop is not the only source of plant material to put in an attractive vase. Cuttings from a potted plant purchased at your local supermarket or corner store can take their place.
SALE ALERT | This is hardly the time to suggest that you rush out and buy stocking stuffers with another 354 shopping days left until Christmas, but we’ve decided to do a little pre-Christmas shopping at Eddie Bauer this week because they’re having a sale on our all-time favourite Christmas stocking gift, the Sweater Stone and we plan to stock up. If you’ve ever put one of these tools to work, you’ll know why we’re excited; if you haven’t, you might want to listen up. Read more
