Reusing Tea Tins

I hate to throw away those nice little round tea tins, but haven't found them very useful for holding anything else since I can't ever tell what's inside... I finally figured out that you can just wrap them quickly in brown paper and then write what's inside and the date. Then when that stuff runs out, I can cross out the old writing and write something new. In this way I can use the same brown paper for years! Alternately you could use pretty paper to wrap them (wrapping paper, newspaper, art store paper...).

To do it quickly, I just rolled the tin along the edge of the paper and drew a little dot where I wanted to cut the paper. Then I used the book as a straight edge and connected the dots. I cut the paper and then used that as a template to cut a few more sheets. I used Scotch tape to attach.

Drip irrigation

I saw this in the neighbor's yard—a very cheap drip irrigation system. This way the water has time to soak deep into the soil and you don't have to stand there watering for an hour a drip at a time or have all the topsoil get hard or run off. All you do is drill out a hole in a plastic bucket, put a stick through the hole and then fill the bucket with water so that moisture seeps out slowly through the cracks and fibers.

The Green Revolution

Interesting thought in a New York Times article. "A redefined, broader and more muscular green ideology is not meant to trump the traditional Republican and Democratic agendas but rather to bridge them when it comes to addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature and terrorism."