Plastic Bags

A friend brought back from the UK an interesting small plastic bag, presumably from a supermarket. It is very thin and on it is printed: "The CO-OPERATIVE bag; designed to compost completely in the garden. Reuse this bag for shopping, to collect vegetable peelings. When worn out, put in your garden compost bin, or place in general waste. This bag turns into compost just like potato peelings. It is made from home compostable material. www.co-operative.co.uk

Anyone have any ideas on this for Israel? I understand that millions upon millions of small plastic bags are going into landfill every day here.

Old Diaries & Address Books

Never throw away old diaries and address books, UNLESS you have checked and copied everything of importance. Today I am so used to corresponding by email and fax that when I have to use the postal services I often find I have forgotten the address or it is in that old address book that I finally threw away just last month.

Refrigerators

For most refrigerators you can buy an extra shelf. Worthwhile calculating the highest items you may need for the fridge and rearrange the shelves accordingly but not necessarily in equal heights, I have the lowest shelf at only 9 cms. and I use this for pies, cakes, and low plastic containers; the one above at 14 cms. and here I purchased two large deep plastic trays where I put most of my small items such as cottage cheeses, eshels, yoghurts. This makes it much easier to find them as all you have to do is pull out the tray.

Threading a Needle

For those of you who still use a sewing machine and whose sight is not what it used to be, try using a small but strong magnifying glass to get that thread through that small hole. It works. You just need to learn the right angle to hold the magnifying glass.

Israeli TV Shopping Channel

I don't usually land on this channel – but recently my attention was caught by their advert for an electric floor cleaning mop that required no bucket of water, no bending to squeeze out water and apparently left the floor very clean and the price appeared reasonable. I almost ordered it on the spot. However my internal combustion engine came into play and I remembered that I should first check this out on GOOGLE, which I did. And lo and behold, the complaints listed there were long and mainly identical. This is not the first time that I have checked out goods on the internet before buying something completely new for me and thereafter had second thoughts about the purchase.

Expiry Dates

I have written before about such dates on foodstuffs, but I was surprised to find a manufacturing and expiry date on a new container of insecticide – the difference – 2 years.

This makes me wonder whether the quality of the goods today is the same as that which was produced a few years back. I have one container of insecticide that I have been using for many, many years and it still does the job extremely well. Just never thought to look for the date, and there isn't one.