Since the weather has got rather autumnal and wet of late, we decided to pack away the garden stuff for the winter.

While hosing the dirt off pots, and packing away the hose itself, I noticed the hose had sprung a leak at a rather inconvenient position in its length.

We’ve got more hose to use in the cellar (as we had to buy it in a stupidly long length to start) but are there any alternatives? The split is about 2inches long, but just a split not a full on hole, so I don’t know whether a puncture repair kit would fix it. If it doesn’t, any suggestions on what we can do with the short lengths on either side of the split? Or the whole broken hose in general?

(Photo by Onatos)

John made pancakes for breakfast yesterday (mmm pancakes) and while we were digging around in the back of the cupboard for the golden syrup, I found two half bags of brown sugar.

One of them John put to one side when he realised it was just white sugar tinted brown and the other was from the time I obsessively baked ginger cakes. Neither bag had that much inside it but still too much to throw away – and both of them were practically solid lumps.

Is there any way to reclaim it from lump form? And if it’s gone lumpward, does that mean it’s probably past its usefulness? And if it’s beyond culinary use, any other suggestions for reuse?

(photo by hilaryaq)

We tend to buy 1kg or 2kg nets of onions – plastic nets, with 1cmx1cm ish holes – but can’t think what to do with them once we’ve finished the pack. The same goes for the rare occasions when we buy big packs of oranges or lemons.

We use smaller nets – the type that garlic comes in at the supermarket – to make little bird feeders to hang in trees but the nuts and seeds mix we use falls out of the bigger holes in the onion/orange/lemon nets.

Any suggestions how we can use them again?

(Photo by upn)

I suspect this is another recycle rather than reuse thing but again, I’m not sure how to go about recycling them.

Until recently, we didn’t have a printer at home and when I was at work, there was a helpful box in reception or the photocopying room that mystically took away my old ink/toner cartridges and turned them into money or unicorns or something.

As my description of the work-recycling process might indicate, I don’t know where those cartridges ended up so now we have a printer at home, I have a couple of cartridges and don’t know what to do with them. We’ve got a HP black and white laser printer and an Epson colour one (both second- or third- hand, I might add).

A quick search turns up a variety of options but aside from Oxfam who I suspect aren’t lying, I don’t know if the companies do with the money/cartridges as they say they will. And what about the Epson ink cartridges that Oxfam can’t take?

Any suggestions?

(Photo by aarenyes)

Aside from formal social functions, frogs and the general state of the world, I don’t get stressed out by many things these days. My work is pretty enjoyable and if my colleagues (the cats) annoy me, I can just stroke them to calm me back down again.

But one thing that still manages to really get my goat is pencils with broken leads.

I love writing in pencil and get bizarrely attached to them sometimes (I had one when I worked at the uni that I kept through two jobs and three office moves) but sharpen, sharpen, lead snaps, sharpen, sharpen, lead snaps, sharpen, sharpen, lead snaps – then I snap. Said pencil is thrown across the room, therefore shattering its lead even further and making it throughly redundant as a pencil.

But if you’ve been reading this site for a while, you’ll probably have guessed by now that I don’t like throwing stuff away. So as was sung about in that old sea shanty, what shall we do with the broken pencils, what shall we do with the broken pencils, what shall we do with the broken pencils, early in the morning?

(Photo by lusi)