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Table Salt Used to Indicate a Person’s Social Status
By Kaye Nemec While table salt is an important flavoring ingredient in modern day cooking, it had a much more significant reputation in earlier centuries. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that...
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How to Dispose of Medicine
By Chad Upton | Editor You should regularly check your medicine cabinet for expired drugs. Because, if you’re like me, it’s probably more like a time-capsule than a medicine cabinet. Yesterday, my wife...
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The Most Popular Types of Liquor
If you’re throwing a party or just having some friends over, you may want to have the basics in your home bar. A good place to start is with the most popular types of liquor. At a real bar, there is...
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The Real Names of Brand Name Products
By Kaye Nemec The weather is getting cold and the air is getting dry. We’re going through more Kleenex and additional Chapstick. We’re cooking warm meals in our Crock Pots and soon we’ll be getting out...
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Most Medications Still Good After Expiration
By Chad Upton | Editor If you check your medicine cabinet, chances are good you’ve got some expired medication in there. Are they still safe and effective or are they fit for the trash? First of all,...
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9 Volt Batteries Contain 6 AAAA Batteries
By Chad Upton | Editor The batteries in most consumer electronics produce 1.5 volts each. Different products use different numbers of batteries to achieve different voltage requirements. For example, a...
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Property Donations are Tax Deductable
By Chad Upton | Editor While it’s pretty common to get a tax receipt for monetary donations to charity, not everyone knows you can get a tax deduction for donating household items too. Some of these...
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Why We Clink Glasses When We Toast
By Chad Upton | Editor Many of you will be clinking glasses with family and friends this time of year and there are a number of theories about where this custom started. One belief is that ancient...
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How to Dispose of Household Hazardous Waste
By Chad Upton | Editor Every home has things that should NOT go in the trash. Yet, many people don’t know what to do with them or even what some of these items are. Some examples are: batteries compact...
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The Calendar is Named After The Pope
By Chad Upton | Editor Many different calendar systems exist, but the calendar used by most modern cultures is known as the Gregorian Calendar. It may also be called the Western Calendar, Civil...
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Potatoes: Green Means Stop
By Chad Upton | Editor If you eat potatoes, in any form, you’ve probably come across a partially green one. Most importantly, don’t eat the green part — it’s toxic enough that you may get very ill, and...
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How to Clean Up a Leaking Battery
By Chad Upton | Editor Most household batteries are “alkaline” batteries. Under normal use, they’re relatively safe and stable. But, they are prone to leaking potassium hydroxide when the conditions...
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Fertilizer Can Melt Snow and Ice
By Chad Upton | Editor If you need to boil water while cooking, the recipe may suggest that you add salt to the water. This salt is not for taste, it’s for efficiency. The salt lowers the heat capacity...
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Toilets: Taboo for TV Until 1957
By Kaye Nemec Prior to the very well thought out Leave It to Beaver pilot episode in 1957, it was considered taboo to show a toilet on television. If you consider how frequently bathroom scenes (some...
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Baby Proofing Your Home on a Budget
By Kaye Nemec For those of you with babies approaching the age of movement, it is time to start opening up your eyes to all of the dangers hidden within your once perfectly safe home. Stores like...
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Not Making Your Bed Kills Dust Mites
By Chad Upton | Editor There’s a hot debate on whether you should make your bed or not. Some people believe it teaches children discipline, others like the look and/or feel of a made bed and tight...
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The Fastest Way to Fold a Shirt
By Chad Upton | Editor Whenever I see neatly folded shirts in a clothing store, I wonder how they fold the shirts so perfectly. One time, I noticed an employee using a piece of wood to help them. But,...
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Why Aluminum Foil is Dull on One Side
By Kaye Nemec Hopefully you’ve all read Chad’s previous posts about aluminum foil retainers or how to properly use aluminum foil in the microwave. The post about aluminum foil retainers is a life...
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Secret Uses for Olive Oil
By Kaye Nemec A few weeks ago I accidentally bought waterproof mascara. For those of you familiar with waterproof eye make-up, you know that the term “waterproof” is not used lightly. It is also soap,...
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The Meaning of Care Symbols on Clothes Tags
By Kaye Nemec When it’s time to wash a new item of clothing, most people check the tag to see what the manufacturer recommends for washing and drying. Sometimes instructions are easily spelled out,...
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The Signature Line on Checks is Not a Line at All
By Chad Upton | Editor Although personal checks are antiquated by modern payment standards, they still have some valid uses. For example, they’re still popular for personal and bill payments by mail....
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Searing Meat Does Not Lock in Moisture
By Terry D. Johnson The idea that searing meat locks in the juices has been around since the middle of the 19th century. According to the theory, searing changes the structure of the outside of the...
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Things You Didn’t Know You Could Clean (or Cook!) in Your Dishwasher
By Kaye Nemec Dishwashers were an amazing invention. Long gone are the days of hand washing and drying dishes every night. Now we can simply load up the dishwasher, turn it on and wake up to a fresh...
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Label Cords Cheaply and Easily
By Chad Upton | Editor Sometimes you have to temporarily disconnect your home electronics. It can be difficult to find a device you can spare or remember which cables to put back later. Use bread...
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How to Keep the Shower Curtain From Sticking to Your Leg
Showers should be refreshing, but it’s impossible to rejuvenate when a shower curtain is constantly rubbing your leg like an annoying dog. To combat this problem, some shower curtains have magnets or...
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Sink Plungers are Not Toilet Plungers
Thankfully, my current home has good plumbing and I haven’t needed a plunger in a long time. But, I can’t say the same about previous places, especially some of those places in college! The best way to...
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The Five Second Rule Works Best on Carpet
The “five second rule” is an unofficial pass to eat food dropped on the floor—provided only a few seconds have elapsed. The general wisdom is that it takes several seconds for bacteria to transfer to...
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Tomatoes Lose Flavor in the Fridge
Thanks to modern refrigeration, we can keep our food fresh longer. The problem is that the cool temperatures of the fridge don’t preserve all foods equally—as much as we’d like to believe it. People...
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Poinsettia Plants Aren’t so Bad after All
As the holidays draw near, there are PSAs everywhere about how to protect your pet from the most dangerous of plants: the poisonous poinsettia. While the holidays do bring some extra challenges and...
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Forgetting Why You Came into a Room
Walking through doors causes your brain to reset Have you ever walked into a room for something, only to forget exactly what that was? You’re not alone—it happens to everyone and psychologists call it...
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