So *that's* why I hang my laundry

This week, I responded to a post in the r/Frugal forum on Reddit asking, "What's your lowest payoff frugal tip?" That "lowest" is not a typo; the questioner was interested not in learning tricks to save a bundle of money, but in hearing about frugal habits that are "more about principle than the actual savings." Comments included things like reusing plastic bags, cutting dryer sheets in half, and saving packaging items like twist ties and rubber bands—a habit one commenter said has saved them "tens of cents."

I chimed in to talk about how I always hang my laundry, weather permitting, even though the savings are minimal. Each load I hang instead of running it through the dryer saves about a quarter-therm of gas, which is currently worth about 40 cents—more than the 24 cents it cost when I first wrote about it in 2012, but still far from impressive. Since it takes at least 15 minutes to hang the laundry in the morning and take it down in the evening, that works out to $1.60 an hour. That's barely 10 percent of New Jersey's current minimum wage of $15.92 an hour, making line-drying an even worse financial deal than it was in 2012. And it reduces my carbon footprint by a mere three pounds.

In my 2012 post, I concluded that the real reason I hang laundry is because it makes me feel good, even if the practical benefits are small. But when I commented about it on Reddit, another Redditor replied to point out that there is another practical benefit as well: "you’re extending the life of your clothes by hang drying them instead of blasting them in the dryer." Now, in theory, I knew this already, but I'd never been sure just how significant a perk it really was. After all, how could I tell how much longer my clothes were lasting as a result of being hang-dried? Short of buying two identical garments and line-drying one while tumble-drying the other, how would I even test it?

But just one day after seeing that Reddit post, I hit on what economists call a natural experiment. I was darning up some holes in my blue knit shorts, the pair I'd bought at Sears back in 2015 when there still was a Sears, and it occurred to me that at the time I bought them, I hadn't expected them to last very long. In college, I'd owned a few pairs of sport knit pants from the same company, and I'd quit buying them because they always developed holes within a matter of months. But now, here were these shorts just getting their first little holes after 11 years. So either Lands' End had started using much sturdier fabric some time between 1995 and 2015—not a very likely scenario—or line-drying had made the difference. 

However, it isn't quite fair to say these shorts lasted 11 years when their predecessors lasted less than 1. Being shorts, they were only worn during the summertime, or about 3 months out of every 12. Still, that means they remained intact over 33 months of use, while the knit pants I owned in college never made it more than 6 months. In other words, line-drying the shorts had prolonged their lifespan more than fivefold.

I wouldn't go so far as to extrapolate from this that all my clothes are lasting five times as long thanks to line-drying. These shorts are a knitted cotton fabric, like a T-shirt, and some of the other comments in the Reddit thread suggest these are particularly vulnerable to dryer damage. However, probably about half the garments in our typical laundry load are knitted items, including T-shirts, socks, and undies. If all these garments are lasting five times as long, we're saving 80 percent of what we'd otherwise spend on them. That's roughly a 40 percent savings on clothing as a whole, even if the other half of our clothes gains no benefit at all from line-drying.

How much is this in dollar terms? Well, according to my budget spreadsheet (yes, of course I have a budget spreadsheet), Brian and I spend an average of $389 per year on clothing and shoes. Let's assume shoes, which don't go in the laundry, account for $89 of that, leaving us a nice round $300 a year for clothing. If this figure has had 40 percent knocked off it by line drying, that means our clothing budget without line-drying would be $500, or $200 higher. We do a little over one load of laundry per week—say 60 loads per year—and we line-dry about three-quarters of them, or 45 loads. So that means each load I hang on the line is saving us not just a measly 40 cents on fuel, but also about $4.44 on clothing costs. Add it all up, and that's a savings of $4.84 per load for roughly 15 minutes of work, or $19.36 per hour—well above our state minimum wage, and more than 2.5 times the paltry federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

Mind you, knowing all this isn't likely to change my behavior in any meaningful way. I'll still line-dry my clothes in nice weather and resort to the dryer only if it's freezing cold or rains for days on end. But now, each time I do it, I'll have the satisfaction of knowing that it actually is saving us money. Spending 15 minutes out in the sun and fresh air will be just the cherry on top.

Cost Plus Drugs is great...until it isn't

Once again, my apologies for being late with the blog. I do have a good excuse this time; my sister's family was visiting from Sunday through Tuesday, and I spent more or less the whole time with them at my parents' house in Hopewell. So I didn't get a chance to finish up this post until Wednesday. Now, on to a few words about health care costs.

When Brian retired last February, I did a lot of number crunching to find the best prices on the health coverage his job would no longer provide. The state's Get Covered NJ website helped me compare basic health plans quite easily, and a little online searching helped me find a separate plan for vision care. (Side note: the dental discount plan I chose turned out to be a complete bust. The dentist we'd been going to for years wasn't in the plan's network, and the local dentist we decided to try instead charges way, WAY more than the estimates Aetna provided for "average costs" under the plan. Unfortunately, we didn't learn this until we showed up for our appointments, so we ended up paying $100 in cancellation fees and going back to our old dentist. Add in the $145 we paid for the discount card itself—counting the extra $20 I decided to pay for prescription drug discounts that turned out to be worthless—and that's $245 wasted instead of saved.) 

Then, since our new plan had a high deductible, I also used its website to help me check out-of-pocket prices for all our prescription drugs. For most of them, I found that it would be significantly cheaper to buy from Cost Plus Drugs, a Mark Cuban venture that offers generic drugs at rock-bottom prices. The way it works is right there in the name: They charge you the wholesale cost of the drugs from the manufacturer, plus a 15% markup to pay for their overhead, plus a $5 dispensing fee for the pharmacy that makes up the prescriptions, plus shipping, which is a flat $5.25 for most orders. 

All that can add up to a substantially lower price than you'd pay at a retail pharmacy. For example, one of my rosacea medications, a 15% azelaic acid gel, would cost $81 a tube if I bought it from the nearest in-network pharmacy. If I bought it through my health plan's mail-order pharmacy, that would drop the price to just $26.14 per tube plus shipping—but that pharmacy is Amazon, which I don't want to use unless it's the only option. If I used a free discount card from GoodRx, I could get the medicine from a local chain pharmacy (which isn't in our plan's network) for around $36 a tube. But at Cost Plus, the total price including shipping is just $24.27.

This sounds great, and it is, but there are a few downsides. One is that Cost Plus only offers a limited selection of medicines. However, all of ours are on this list, so that wasn't a problem for us. The second is that they aren't in the networks of most health insurers, including ours, so we have to pay the full costs out of pocket. But I didn't consider that a deal breaker because, in the first place, our plan's high deductible meant we'd be paying for most of our meds out of pocket anyway. And even if we happened to hit our deductible in a given year, the plan would only cover 60 percent of medication costs after that. At our local, in-network pharmacy, just our 40 percent copay on the azelaic acid would come to $32.40, which is still higher than the total price from Cost Plus.

The third problem is the difficulty of transferring prescriptions to Cost Plus. Most pharmacies will happily transfer a prescription from another pharmacy for you. So, if I'd been using Amazon or another in-network pharmacy, I could have simply transferred over the prescriptions I had at OptumRx, our old plan's mail-order pharmacy, and used the refills I had remaining. But Cost Plus doesn't do this. You have to ask your doctor to send them a new prescription for each medication you use—and if the meds were prescribed by different doctors, you have to do this multiple times. It took several attempts to get in touch with my new doctor, as well as my dermatologist, and get them to send in my prescriptions to Cost Plus, but I managed it in the end for most of my meds. And once Cost Plus had the prescriptions, it was perfectly straightforward to use. They sent me a notice to say the prescriptions were ready to fill, I went on the site and placed the order in a few minutes, and the meds arrived in about a week.

The fourth problem came up with the last remaining medication I hadn't transferred over yet. This was partly my fault; I thought I had an extra tube of the azelaic acid on hand, which would have been enough to get me through to my next appointment with the dermatologist, so I was planning to ask for a new prescription then. But that extra tube in the drawer was actually a different medication, something we were no longer using. So, with just a few weeks' worth left, I reached out to the dermatologist last month and said, "Hey, I don't have enough of my meds, can you send a new prescription to Cost Plus?" and they obligingly did so. Within a day, I received a message from Cost Plus saying they had the new prescription...but unfortunately, the medication was out of stock. They promised to notify me as soon as it was back in stock, but they gave no indication when that would be.

For a couple of weeks, I waited, keeping a wary eye on my supply, to see if the medicine became available. I considered calling the doctor again to ask to have yet another prescription sent to a different pharmacy (since you can't transfer prescriptions away from Cost Plus either), but the high cost deterred me. Finally, I tried getting in touch with Cost Plus customer service to ask if they had any idea when the meds would be back in stock, and here I ran into the fifth problem: You can't. There's a FAQ on the website and a chatbot who doesn't know anything that isn't in the FAQ, and there's a feedback form on the site you can use to email them a question and hope someone answers. (I tried it over the weekend and got a response on Monday, but all it said was, "We don't have an ETA at this time. You will get an email when it's back in stock," which is exactly what they'd told me already.)

I finally settled on a solution I'd used once before when I ran out of this medicine while on vacation: I bought an over-the-counter preparation of azelaic acid instead. It's only 10 percent azelaic acid instead of 15 percent, but it should be good enough to get me through to my appointment next week. If Cost Plus doesn't have the prescription strength back in stock by then, I can ask the dermatologist to send a new prescription to another pharmacy (ideally one where I can use my GoodRx coupon). But the whole situation made me kind of nervous. If they could simply run out of this medication, could it happen with others as well? Could I log on one day to refill my prescription for, say, my thyroid medication, only to see that it's out of stock and there's no indication when it will be available again? 

I went searching online to see if anyone else had experienced this problem, and I found not one but two Reddit threads where people complained that their medications—much more essential ones than mine—had been out of stock for weeks or even months, with no indication when they'd be back. I also found a bunch of negative reviews on both Reddit and Trustpilot accusing Cost Plus of still graver errors. Some people said their doctors had sent their prescriptions to Cost Plus multiple times and they still weren't showing up on the site. Others said they'd been charged for medications they never received or had orders canceled with no notification. Worst of all, some said they'd ordered medications that were supposed to be temperature-controlled, and Cost Plus had shipped them in a regular envelope in the blazing summer heat, making them unusable. And all of these people said that they were unable to get a satisfactory response from customer service, if they got any response at all.

All this makes me feel torn about relying on Cost Plus in future. On one hand, it's much, much cheaper than the alternatives for some of our meds. But that's assuming we can actually get them there, and that seems far from guaranteed. Right now, my inclination is to keep using Cost Plus when possible, but make sure to have a backup available. I plan to refill all my meds as early as possible, and if they aren't available within two weeks of the time I need them, call the doctor and ask to have the prescription sent somewhere else. I'm not worried about the cold-chain problems, since Brian and I don't take any medications that require temperature control, but if we ever do, I'll make sure to get those somewhere else.

In the course of writing this post, I also learned about a couple of other alternatives. There are two other online pharmacies operating on a cost-plus model that can ship to my area: Blueberry Pharmacy and Midtown Express Pharmacy. (Reddit mentioned the first one, and I found the other through a search on CostPlusPharmacies.com.) Unforunately, Blueberry doesn't offer most of the medications we use in the appropriate dosages, and Midtown Express doesn't let you check prices online. So for now, it looks like my Cost-Plus-plus plan is the soundest one.

Gardeners' Holidays 2026: Tomatofest

This has been a summer of extremes. So far, we've had two triple-digit heat waves, both followed by powerful storms and flooding, interspersed with a multi-day stretch of nose-stinging wildfire smoke. Right now the temperature isn't too bad (a mere 88 degrees Fahrenheit, according to our little weather station), but the humidity is at a wilting 55 percent. 

All this has been rather unpleasant for us, but it seems to suit our tomato plants just fine, because they've been producing like gangbusters. What you see here is just a small fraction of what we've picked in the past week or so. (The little round ones are our trusty Sun Golds, the larger round ones are Premios, and the knobbly yellow ones are a new variety we're trying called Goldie.) Not shown are all the cherry tomatoes sprinkled on salads and falafel wraps, the bigger ones served sliced on top of veggie burgers, and the couple of pounds of mixed Premio and San Marzano paste tomatoes that went into a batch of the Roasted Tomato Fettuccine from The Clueless Vegetarian. (Brian used only a half-pound of pasta for this, rather than the full pound the recipe calls for, making it extra tomatoey.) We're eating tomatoes at almost every meal, and we still can't keep up.

Fortunately, our other veggies are producing at a more measured rate. So far we've harvested just 14 cucumbers, evenly split between our Boston Pickling and South Wind varieties. A few of these got sliced up for salads and falafel, but most of them have been turned into pickles. Luckily, we were able to use home-grown dill for these as well, as not all of it has flowered yet. We've got one half-full quart jar in the fridge right now and one just-started one, which should be ready just in time for a visit from my pickle-loving sister and her family next week. Our pepper plants, likewise, have produced only two fruits so far. And our zucchini plants, which according to tradition ought to be burying us in produce right around now, have so far yielded only three modest-sized squash—though we're hoping that just means they got off to a slow start.

This certainly seems to be the case for our raspberry canes. Normally, they'd be all done with their first crop by now, and possibly even starting to gear up for the second. This year, it looks like the early crop is barely half over. The canes in the front half of the bed seem to be picked clean, but the ones in the back still have loads of berries on them that aren't even ripe yet. As a result, we were actually able to top this year's anniversary cake with fresh home-grown raspberries for the first time. If the delayed harvest continues, this first crop may last us throughout the month of August, and the second could conceivably keep going until the frost hits.

Alas, we can harbor no such hopes about our plum trees. After getting only a modest harvest from them last year, this year it looks like we'll get nothing at all. There's not a single fruit to be seen on the branches, and even the foliage is looking a bit feeble. I'm starting to fear that the black knot, which we've been fighting so diligently for three years with fungicide and heavy pruning, is taking over, and even if the trees survive, they'll no longer be fruit producers. I hate the idea of replacing these cherished trees after 13 years and starting all over, but the thought of having them just sitting sitting in our yard for decades looking gnarled and barren seems even worse.

In short, our garden is currently serving up a mixture of wins and losses, which I guess is pretty much par for the course. It can be frustrating at times, but at least it's never dull.

You can't make a (good) sponge cake without breaking eggs

Once again, I must apologize for being late with this update. Even after shifting my regular weekly blog update from Sunday to Monday, it seems, I still can't consistently meet the deadline. My excuse this time is that Monday was the CCL National Conference, which I watched on live stream. After spending the whole day, from 8:30 am to 5:30 pm, listening to speakers on Zoom, I just didn't have the energy to put in another hour in front of the screen updating the blog. (Why are Zoom meetings so exhausting, anyway? I walked for hours on both Saturday and Sunday, and being on my feet all that time wasn't nearly so tiring.) 

Speaking of Saturday, Brian and I spent it celebrating our anniversary in our usual unconventional fashion. We strolled around for several hours in Montclair (a shorter and more affordable jaunt than New York), then headed home for dinner and Brian's homemade anniversary cake. This was his seventh time making it, and he was comfortable enough with the recipe to try something a little different: making the mousse with vegan cream. (The Trader Joe's brand that worked so well for us is no longer available, but we've had reasonably good success with Country Crock.) And since he was already doing that, he decided to take a whack at finding an egg-free version of the sponge cake, as well, and making the whole cake vegan. 

Well, as it turns out, this is a pretty tall order. The cake recipe he uses is a traditional Genoise sponge, and eggs are a pretty essential component of that. They're the sole leavening agent, the main source of moisture, and the main ingredient by volume. However, an Internet search on "vegan Genoise sponge" turned up many different recipes that purported to get around these problems, so he decided to pick a fairly simple one and give it a try.

For this first attempt, he chose the "easy and fluffy" vegan sponge from Bianca Zapatka, which claimed to be "fool-proof." This recipe didn't contain any aquafaba or other egg substitutes; instead it relied on the old vinegar-and-baking soda combo for leavening. Unfortunately, this trick, which works so well in the classic wacky cake, was not nearly so successful here. Even the photo on the webpage shows the allegedly fluffy cake as quite flat, and Brian's was not any loftier. It might have been all right if he'd wanted to serve it straight out of the pan, but torting it—slicing it into two even layers—proved impossible. When he tried, he ended up with ragged slivers.

Concluding that the wacky-cake method wouldn't work for this purpose, Brian asked me to search out a vegan sponge recipe that used aquafaba. I found him two: one from Coconut Craze, which had only four ingredients, and a much more elaborate one from World of Vegan, which added corn starch and a "vegan buttermilk" made from plant milk and vinegar. Brian tried the simpler one first, and it produced a cake he described as "tantalizingly close" to the Genoise sponge. Unlike the first cake, it was genuinely light and fluffy—so fluffy that it lacked structural integrity. When Brian attempted to torte the cake, it simply disintegrated. (Also, when we tasted the fragments, we found they were ludicrously sweet. In taste and texture, it was more like a giant marshmallow than a cake.)

Time was running short at this point, but Brian decided to make one more attempt with the other recipe. This one came out almost exactly opposite to the previous cake in every respect. Far from being too light, it was dense and doughy, and despite having just as much sugar, it barely tasted sweet at all. In both flavor and texture, it was more like a cornbread than a cake. It was much easier to torte than either of the previous sponge attempts, but it was clearly unsuitable for use in our anniversary cake.

After these three failures, Brian was tempted to try simply subbing aquafaba for the eggs in our regular Genoise sponge recipe (from The Joy of Cooking) and see if that worked. But by this time it was already Friday night, and our anniversary was Saturday. So, reluctantly, he decided to go with the egg-based sponge that we knew would work. Thus, our anniversary cake ended up being dairy-free but not vegan. And, much as I hate to admit it, even the vegan cream didn't work quite as well in the cake as real cream. It appears to be a bit more temperature-sensitive, so while the mousse made with it was stiffer than a cream-based mousse when freshly made, it lost its structure more quickly when left out at room temperature. Hence, the layers in the cake weren't as well defined, and they had a tendency to slide apart while being eaten. The cake was still delicious, but it wasn't as stable. 

We also have a new problem: what to do with the remains of the three unsuccessful vegan sponge cakes. They're currently chilling out in the freezer, waiting for us to finish up the remainder of the anniversary torte. Once that's gone, Brian will start tinkering with them to figure out what they might be good for. The first two, which had good flavor despite their poor sliceability, might work well in some sort of trifle. And Brian thinks the not-very-sweet third one could take the place of the biscuit layer in a strawberry shortcake. 

Despite these three consecutive failures, Brian hasn't given up entirely on the idea of making next year's anniversary cake fully vegan. He still wants to try the standard Genoise sponge recipe with aquafaba and see how it turns out. But that's an experiment that should probably wait until all the other cakes in our fridge and freezer have been dealt with.

Recipe of the Month: Creamy Vegan Cabbage Pasta

Recently, I signed up for the New York Times newsletter "The Veggie," which deposits an assortment of vegetarian (though not necessarily vegan) recipes in my inbox each week. I've downloaded several of these that looked like good potential Recipes of the Month, but for most of them, the timing wasn't quite right. It's already too late for the "Vegan Spring Vegetable Frittata" (made with tofu instead of eggs) and "Soba Salad with Grilled Mushrooms and Tofu," which calls for snap peas. At the same time, it's too early for "Basil Tofu." A disappointing start to zucchini season put the kibosh on "Smashed Zucchini with Chickpeas and Peanuts," and the deer damage to our bean plants ruled out "Spicy Noodle Stir-Fry with Salt and Pepper Tofu," which requires 10 ounces of fresh green beans. You may yet see those enticing titles later in the summer, but for now, we're going with something less time-sensitive: "Creamy Vegan Cabbage Pasta." 

Unfortunately, I can't link to this recipe, as I recently ditched my All-Access New York Times subscription in favor of a cheaper news-only subscription that came as a freebie with my PBS donation. But the gist of it is pretty simple: shred a whole head of cabbage, then saute it in olive oil until it's browning a bit. Add sliced garlic, fresh thyme, and a touch of crushed red pepper (Brian cut the amount from the recommended half-teaspoon to a quarter-teaspoon for just a hint of spice). Whip up a white sauce out of oatmilk or cashew milk, nutritional yeast, olive oil and salt, and toss that with cooked pasta, crushed walnuts, and the sauteed veggies. Season with lemon juice and black pepper, garnish with shredded basil, and serve.

Most of the ingredients in this recipe are things we tend to keep on hand. The only exception was the oatmilk or cashew milk, which the recipe specified should be "full-fat" to make a creamy sauce. Brian was all for substituting a mixture of soymilk and a bit of our favorite plant-based cream, but I argued that for our first time making the dish, we should stick to the recipe as closely as possible. So we grabbed a container of Lidl's organic oat milk, which wasn't too extravagant at $3.99. (As it turns out, "full fat" in the case of oatmilk means it's had fat added in the form of rapeseed oil, a.k.a. canola. But it was certainly rich enough to get the job done.)

This dish looked pretty nice with its garnish of fresh basil, and it tasted pretty good too. There was nothing all that exciting about it, but it was a nice, simple, satisfying meal. Its biggest weakness was that it was a bit short on protein. I remedied this by adding a scrambled egg on the side, but that sort of undermined the spirit of making my Recipe of the Month a vegan dish. If we make it again, we might try topping it with some white beans or tofu, and we'll certainly try our usual soymilk in the sauce. Overall, this Recipe of the Month isn't mind-blowing, but it looks like a useful addition to our repertoire.

I was thinking I might be able to give you a bonus recipe here as well. Having purchased the oatmilk and found that it was as creamy as advertised, I wondered if we should take a crack at trying to use it in a plant-based whipped cream. I did a quick search and found a promising-looking recipe at Green Heart Love, which involved supplementing the already rich oat milk with a nearly equal volume of melted coconut oil and stabilizing it with some cream of tartar. Unfortunately, although Brian followed the recipe's very specific instructions to the letter, this worked no better than any of our previous attempts at making vegan whipped cream from scratch. The chilled mixture almost as soon as he started beating it, forming clumps of fat that steadfastly resisted any attempt to blend them back into the liquid. 

Since we still have plenty of oatmilk left, I might have one more go at trying to whip it using a simpler method, like this one from Chef's Resource. But if that doesn't work, I'm going to throw in the towel and use the rest of the oatmilk for pudding—topped with coconut whipped cream from a can.

Defining frugality

NOTE: This post was originally published in May 2010. I accidentally hit "unpublish" and couldn't figure out how to undo that, so it's now republished as if it were new.

 

I just read what struck me as a fairly pithy definition of frugality. It was in a New York Times article about, of all things, a pharmaceutical company based in Israel. One thing that sets this company, Teva, apart from the giants of the American pharmaceutical industry is the way it uses resources (for example, no corporate jets). The article quotes one of the company's officers as saying, “Frugality doesn’t mean doing less. It means doing as much or more with less.”

The thing I like so much about this line is that it counters one of the most common misconceptions about frugality: that it's the same as deprivation, as going without. That kind of thinking leads people to assume that the only reason to be frugal is that you have no choice—in other words, that frugality is for “poor people.” The point that I've tried often to make, and that the Teva executive made particularly well, is that frugality doesn't mean going without; it means getting the most you can out of what you have. It's about abundance, not scarcity, and it can benefit people on every rung of the income ladder.

The formula that Amy Dacyczyn (all hail the Frugal Zealot!) used to express this idea in her Tightwad Gazette books was, “Frugality without creativity equals deprivation.” If you try to save money without thinking creatively, you'll end up going without. But if you put some thought into using your money effectively, you can spend less without feeling deprived. In fact, your frugal choices may end up enriching your life (as I discussed in my Associated Content piece, “Saving Money Isn't About 'Sacrifice'”). I'm pleased to see that there are at least a few folks in the corporate world who take the same view.

More small solutions

Welcome to the next installment in my quick fixes series, all about the small ways we solve problems in our lives without buying new stuff. This time, I've got not three but five small solutions to talk about (though technically, one of them is still in progress). 

Quick fix #1: Earring storage

This year, Brian's birthday project for me was something I'd been needing for a while: a better way to store all my earrings. I'd been simply hanging them on the edge of a box on my dresser, which had some hair clips and other miscellaneous items stashed inside. This arrangement kept most of my earrings visible and easy to access, but it had some major downsides. For one, it could only hold earrings with shepherd's hook backs, so the few pairs I had with straight posts had to live in boxes. And more seriously, whenever I went to fish something out of the box, I'd dislodge some of the earrings and spend the next five minutes hunting for them.

Brian gave this gift to me in stages. On my birthday itself, he presented me with a sketch of his plan for a freestanding rack that could take the place of the box on my dresser. But when he found out I was actually using the box, he came up with a new design: a wall-mounted rack with several tiers. For the second stage, he built a prototype of this design out of cardboard, hung it up, and let me test it out for a few weeks to make sure it worked for me. Then, during the recent heat wave, he disappeared into the workshop (the coolest room in the house) and emerged with the final version, built out of scrap wood. The three tiers hold all my hook-back earrings, and the small tray at the bottom holds the post-back ones. And there's even a bit of room to spare in case I acquire more.

Quick fix #2: Reinforced sunglasses

About a year ago, my fit-over sunglasses cracked just above the right lens. I made two attempts to repair them with Superglue, but it didn't hold. We then tried reinforcing them with a thin strip of plastic glued across the top to bridge the gap. That repair held for several months, but last month it failed as well. So we decided to get out the big guns: plastic welding. We followed the basic procedure in this video, except we didn't remove the lens because we were afraid we wouldn't be able to get it back in. We just added a dab of glue over the break, dropped on a short length of metal snipped from a paper clip, and melted it into the plastic with the soldering gun. We also didn't go through the lengthy process of concealing the melted patch with multiple layers of glue and powdered graphite; instead, I just added a lick of black nail polish and called it good enough.

With this bit of metal shoring up the weak area, I felt pretty confident that the shades wouldn't break again—at least not in the same spot. So imagine my surprise when, last night, I pulled the sunglasses out of my pocket to find that, once again, they'd cracked right across the top over the lens. My puzzlement was short-lived, however, as I quickly realize that this time it was the left side that had broken in exactly the same way. So Brian has now repeated the entire procedure on the left side of the glasses. They don't look terribly pretty, but they should hold up, at least in this particular area.

Quick fix #3: Car windshield shade

When we bought our Honda Fit 15 years ago, one quirk we discovered was that its windscreen was too large for a standard-size windshield shade. We tried mocking up a shade out of cardboard, but it was unwieldy, so we sent away for a two-piece folding shade specially sized to fit our vehicle. That shade served us well until this spring, when we discovered that the fabric on one corner of one of the pieces had worn clean through, exposing the metal rim. I tried patching it up with duct tape, but after a couple of months in the hot sun, the adhesive melted and the tape started sloughing off.

Looking for a more permanent fix, I went hunting through my scrap bin for something to patch it with. The best candidate I could find was an old cloth face mask left over from the pandemic, which was reasonably sturdy but also flexible. I snipped off the ear loops, wrapped the mask around the corner of the shade, and applied a little hot glue to hold it in place. Then, to make sure it stayed put, I stitched all the way around it: up one side, across the top, down the other side, and across the bottom. 

I realized as I worked that I probably should have skipped the gluing step, as it was a lot of work to force the needle through four layers of fabric plus an extra layer of glue, but I got it to work in the end. The patched shade looks a little quirky, but it's secure now, and it can easily be unfolded to deploy it and folded to stash it away when not in use.

Quick fix #4: Thrift-shop wallet

This is yet another example of duct tape not proving to be a permanent solution. Last winter, after the zipper broke on my wallet, I attempted to cover the torn edges on my spare wallet with electrical tape. Unfortunately, it didn't stick very well, so I switched to black duct tape instead. That held up a little better, but eventually it also started to peel off, leaving the frayed edges not just exposed, but also covered in sticky residue. 

So I decided to give up on this flimsy plastic wallet and invest in a secondhand leather one from eBay. Unfortunately, my new-to-me "The Sak" wallet turned out to be far less sturdy than I thought. Only the outside was made from real leather; all the interior bits were fabric covered with a plastic coating, which began wearing off almost immediately. Within a matter of days, it was in even worse shape than its predecessor.

Luckily, I now have a replacement for it. Yesterday, after my monthly CCL meeting, we stopped by Goodwill, where the accessories bin yielded up this beauty:  a nifty little black quilted number big enough to hold my phone, notebook, bills, coins, and large assortment of cards. With tax, it was only $4.25 (clothes aren't taxed in New Jersey, but apparently accessories are). I was so pleased with my find that I elected to round it up and donate the change, since even at $5 it's a bargain.

Quick fix #5: Pants patching

Last month, I discovered that my pride pants—the blue jeans I'd mended with a little rainbow of embroidery floss—had a threadbare spot on the thigh. Not wanting to detract from my previous visible mending job, I tried to cover this hole as invisibly as possible with a patch on the inside secured by stitches running across both horizontally and vertically. 

Unfortunately, within just a few weeks after this patching job, the jeans developed a new, much larger threadbare area on the same thigh. I'm attempting to patch this one using the same method, but since it's a much bigger area, it's taking quite a bit longer. Because I'm hopeless with a sewing machine and I can't handle more than about half an hour of hand-sewing at a stretch, it's taken me several sessions just to get the horizontal stitches down, and I've still got all the vertical ones to add. 

Even as I'm going to all this trouble, I have to recognize that I probably won't be enough to extend the life of these pants by many months. If one thigh has already worn out, the other one probably won't be far behind, and that one will take another major effort to patch. If it were any other pair of pants, I might just give up and send them to textile recycling, but I'm so attached to my little rainbow repair that I'm willing to put in the effort to keep them alive just a little bit longer.