If you’re going to be sweeping anyway, go ahead and just brush crumbs off the counters onto the floor. No one will ever know.

Walking Tacos

My college roommate gave me this one. Not only is it easy to make, but it's portable, too.

All you have to do is take fun-sized bags of Fritos and combine them with browned hamburger, cheese, onions, peppers, and anything else you care to put in your tacos. Then you can just hold the bag in your hand and eat out of it with a plastic fork. Good for car trips or picnics, or if you simply don't feel like doing the dishes.

Book Review: Yoga For Wimps

I was really skeptical of yoga when it first became popular. I thought it looked like a bunch of uncomfortable poses and meditative mumbo-jumbo targeted at people who already look wonderful and skinny. Not my cup of tea. But when I picked up Yoga for Wimps, there was none of that. The poses are all easy. They each have at least one color photograph of a model doing the pose- and the models are all normal shapes, with not an unhealthily skinny person in the lot. The instructions are simple, and they even give permission to "wimp out" of a pose if it's too difficult. (Though they still want you to try.) It can be seen as a beginning, a way into the more difficult forms of yoga, or it can be all the yoga you need.

My favorite thing about this book is the section targeted to specific problems. There is an entire yoga session dedicated to achy feet, and another one called "The Cure for Museum-itis, or Shopping Without Dropping," which are poses you can do right in the mall to help you keep going longer.

Whether you've been needing an excuse to get into yoga, or simply want to dip your toes in, this is a perfect book for the random housekeeper.

Toilet Paper, the uses of

Toilet paper can be a girl’s best friend. I have found that there a lot of products sold in stores that can be satisfactorily substituted with toilet paper. There are the obvious ones, like tissues for blowing your nose in, though of course you should keep a box of lotioned Kleenex around for colds, when your nose gets tender with all that blowing. You can also dust with them pretty well. My mother always used a wad of toilet paper to wipe out the grease from the bottom of our pans, since we had a septic tank and pouring that down the drain would have been a bad idea. The great thing about using toilet paper for all this is that you can throw it away when you’re done, leaving nothing to sit, damp, in the laundry basket growing mold.

Since toilet paper obviously can’t stand up very well to any serious scrubbing, you will inevitably need rags. Old socks work just as well as any thing you can buy in the store, and if the heel is worn out the rough spot there can make for the perfect texture for cleaning. If they have holes it makes it that much easier to tear them open so they lay flat, but it’s a cinch to just cut them with fabric scissors. I prefer men’s socks since they tend to be rougher than women’s, but any sock will do, really. If you feel like it, you can choose which texture of sock works best for whatever task you’re doing. I would imagine baby socks would work quite well for certain delicate tasks, but I’ve never gone that far.

Foggy Bathroom Mirrors

"When you're taking a bath, a good thing to remember besides soap is that the bathroom won't steam up so much if you run the cold water first. Then bring it up to the proper temperature with the hot.
"After a hot shower, you can run the cold water full blast, for a minute or so, to clear away the steam."
-The I Hate to Housekeep Book

I am trying to decide whether they had bathroom fans in 1965, and I'm thinking not. Because this doesn't work half so well as just turning on the fan. Doing both at once, however, seems to speed up the process, so it's not a totally worthless tip.