I recently purchased a nice leather messenger/briefcase bag from Rustic Leather. I like everything about it, except for one element: the Timbuk2 messenger bags I previously used had dangling reflective tags which made me more visible when walking at night.
I looked for something similar to attach to my new bag’s copious amount of D rings, but did not find anything like those tags – so I decided to make my own.
I went to Walgreens last weekend to buy two LR44 batteries (the ones about the size of a thick aspirin) for a cat laser toy. Looking through the wall o’ batteries I found them – at $5.29 each!
I thought that was rather excessive, so instead I looked around to find the display of cheap book lights that run on LR44s. And since it was stocking stuffer time, I found a whole endcap of such items. So for $5 I bought TWO new keychain lasers that ran on three LR44s AND came with three more spares, a total of twelve batteries for $5!
For future reference, American Science and Surpus sells 10 LR44s (AKA AG13) for $1.95, plus other coin batteries (e.g., CR2016 and CR2032).
Sometimes you would like a glass of wine at home… but if you are the only person imbibing, or you and your partner aren’t up for finishing an entire bottle, what do you do with the unfinished portion?
Wine stores and websites will sell you all manner of devices claiming to preserve your leftover wine via various methods of removing air from the partial bottle to prevent oxidation. These usually involve a cork replacement through which either a reverse pump sucks out the air to create a partial vacuum or an inert gas is pumped in to replace the normal air.
But the point of these gadgets is to keep the wine from being in contact with air – so all you need is an appropriately-sized bottle with an airtight closure. This is what I use:
I’m old enough to remember the trick of checking the coin return slot when passing by pay phones – you can still do that for vending machines, but spare change isn’t worth what it used to be. And there’s far too much competition now for redeeming soda and beer cans/bottles (though if you live in a household of heavy drinkers of either sort, you can probably redeem enough for an occasional latte).
But if you want better odds of finding a minor windfall, do this:
My father had a regular route in his Lynn neighborhood, and would frequentlyy come home with $10-$25 left behind by bar patrons (who probably shouldn’t have even been driving) missing their pockets or pulling out loose bills as they fumbled for their car keys.