It’s getting to that time of the year when we pull all our winter gear out of storage for re-use and the annual glove-pairing gala begins.

Do gloves migrate north for the summer? And do some of them get lost on the journey there or back? That’s really the only explanation I can come up with for how I seem to end up with so many odd gloves, lacking a partner.

Or perhaps my grey and turquoise mitten got distracted when I moved house and is still flying back to the old place – but that was six years ago so it should really get with the program.

Anyway, whatever has happened to them, I now have a few random gloves and mittens. I could start an odd mitten/glove wearing trend – like with odd socks in the early 1990s – but I doubt it will catch on. Any other ideas about what I can do with them?

(Photo by akkia but stunningly like one of my missing gloves…)

Last week, I wrote a bit of a rant about how much I hate it when pencil leads are broken (HATE) and asked what I could do with the formerly-useful pencils.

But I didn’t think about the resultant sharpenings.

If the pencil is wood, I guess they can be composted – right?

But what about previously-foam-cup pencils that can’t be composted?

I know it seems a really small thing and almost isn’t worth caring about, but any suggestions?

Ahoy there, old bean, it seems I’m in a bit of a to-do regarding some expired dried pulses.

Half a pack of the old blighters, gone right orff or at least past their use-by doodah, jolly bad show.

Have a sneaking suspicion that there are a whole plentitude of purposes for the little chaps. Any conjectures?

Toodle pip!

(Photo by kris_b)

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)