Category: Simplicity

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This Is It

If there’s one subject on which I have written a good many words over the years, it’s the topic of Getting Rid of Stuff. Way back in July 2014 – nearly ten years ago! – I was Feeling the Urge to Purge. Then in September I was wondering how much distillation it would take to get Drunk on Life.

By late February 2015 an alert reader was commenting that “The number of times you talk about purging, your house must be completely empty by now,” – and that was just before I’d posted about The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.

I regularly listed things I was getting rid of as 2015 continued, pausing in July to toy – for the first time – with the idea of Zero Based Budgeting: starting from zero and adding in what I was sure I wanted to keep, instead of starting from Dear Me What A Lot and subtracting only what I was sure I didn’t want to keep.

Black and white. An empty room with a fireplace, an open door, and a busy floral pattern in panels on the walls.
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In Search of a Working Kettle

Despite what the US Embassy in London may say, microwaving is not the right way to heat water for tea. For one thing, an explosion of superheated water as you take your mug from the microwave creates the very opposite of the soothing and restorative effect a good cuppa should have. The proper way to make tea is with water boiled in a kettle, and these days that’s usually a super-convenient electric kettle.

Except.

As Consumer NZ wrote in 2019, “We’d expect even the cheapest kettle to last at least five years of household use” – but their survey showed that 85% of kettles are defunct before they reach that age.

Diagram of an electric kettle controller.
What could possibly go wrong?

This does not surprise me in the least. Over the course of our marriage, the Caped Gooseberry and I have seen no fewer than five electric kettles bite the dust – including the one that memorably died the day after we moved house.

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In Praise of Old Technology: the Sewing Box

For those who are so misfortunate as to have never encountered one, allow me to provide a definition. A sewing box is a toolbox for needlework. It may take the form of a box, a basket, or – if one happens to have friends with deep pockets and dainty taste – an elegant table, an egg, or even a converted walnut shell. (In the case of the person with deep pockets and no taste, there is such a thing as a rhino foot sewing box.)

Painting: a woman sits by a table sewing. On the table is an open sewing box. On the floor beside her is a basket of sewing, possibly mending.

I have recently managed to acquire one of these delectable items (a box, not the disjecta membra of maimed African megafauna) and I don’t know how I managed for so long without one.

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