How to keep all your hastily jotted notes in one place

Mar 4, 2009 | How to

For someone who loves gadgets, I’ve settled on a decidedly low-tech way of keeping all of my random notes together. Everything that comes out of my printer that is not used goes, upside down, into a cubbyhole to be used as scratch paper. I haven’t bought small notepads in years, so my desk was always littered with dozens of those pages with the address where to send the wedding present, recipes, URLs, notes from customer-service calls, guest lists, passwords, menus, FTP settings, grammar tips, and all manner of other ephemera scribbled on the backs of them. That stack of paper (consistently a couple of inches high) is great for shopping lists, taking measurements for projects so that I can bring the piece of paper from the kitchen outside downstairs to the saw (and forget the paper on the saw and so have to grab another one for the next measurement), and leaving notes on the door that say “Buy cat fud!” But they weren’t so great for keeping track of everything I was trying to keep track of.

Fascination with gadgets is in my blood and I am no stranger to electronic organizational gizmos. My dad created a searchable index for the contents of all of his Vette Vues magazines on his TRS-80. My uncle suggested he had too much time on his hands, while I thought it was an excellent use of his time. There is an old Palm Zire 71 sitting on my desk, now being used as an address book. I’m on my second Windows Mobile phone and have downloaded all kinds of note takers. I’ve created databases and Word files to act as repositories for all this information. I’ve investigated many and downloaded some productivity tools designed for declutterization. Devised filing systems to collect and organize all this stuff. Unless you use any of them, though, they are just more clutter. The road to clutter-overload hell is paved with just these sorts of good intentions to categorize all those scraps of information. The way out of that hell is to find a solution and stick to it, no matter how much you want to resist the simplicity and dead-treeness of it.

This is working for me:

Composition books. The saddle-sewn kind, not spiral bound or anything with pages that tear out easily. I’m on my second one and am astonished to see that my first one covers December 2005 to December 2007 (clearly, I haven’t been diligent about recording everything in these notebooks or I’d have gone through a lot of them by now). Nothing is organized beyond that it’s all in one place. I recently had to find all the information regarding passwords and access settings for several e-mail addresses (of course, I thought I’d recorded that in a file), and it took just a minute to look through one of these notebooks to find it all. All jumbled together on just these four pages are

• phone numbers and part numbers for some not stupid-expensive yet high-quality drawer slides (Gliderite, and we’ve been very happy with them) that I found recommended in the home forums on GardenWeb (by far the single-most useful site for whenever I do any home-improvement project or appliance purchase) when researching the kitchen project
• measurements for the proposed soapstone countertops (we ended up using slate) specs from a Tom’s Hardware System Builder article when I was researching building another computer (I bought one instead this time)
• info on Vista 64-bit vs. XP 64-bit
• dates, flight options, and other details for C2’s friend’s wedding in another state (all for naught because C2 didn’t get back from Chile in time, but I can tell you how much a flight from Seattle to Garden City cost last December)
• a list of Paul Newman’s movies because after he died I realized that I hadn’t actually seen more than a few of his movies, and that’s nearly unforgivable
• notes on adding extra brake-light sockets to my existing tail-light housings

There are so many better and more efficient ways to organize this kind of information, but unless you do the work necessary to keep up those systems, they’re useless. Besides holding information I may need to retrieve later, my composition books end up as journals. I can see that I was researching a new cell phone at the same time I was looking for oxygen and acetylene tanks for a Christmas gift at the same time I was looking for pork marsala recipes for dinner with friends. At night, I can use the light from the Zire’s screen to find the part number for my headlight clips in my composition book.

How to drain pasta not like an idiot

Dec 1, 2008 | How to

Often in his 49 minutes, total, of down time each week Captain OCD watches the Food Network and gets lots of good ideas for dinner. That is, when he’s not watching Mr. Rogers for Grown Ups. I have an aversion to any kind of contrived audience situation, so every time I hear a !BAM!, or applause when the onions are taken off the heat, or a band play the Braised Cabbage out to commercial, I cringe. And, while I like Paula Dean in theory, her accent and laugh nearly drive me to pour Crystal Drano in my ears to hear the comparatively sweet music. Which means I don’t spend a lot of time in front of Food TV (a frequent cruiser of their Web site, though, as I’m always searching for recipes). But as I was walking through the room one day I glanced at the TV and saw something similar to this:

Our counters are slate, our sink is fireclay. Both well-suited, I’m assured, to withstanding hot temperatures. But the sink was expensive and the installation one-off, difficult, and permanent. The counters involved lots of hauling and cleaning and cutting and arranging and mortaring and grouting and sealing. By me. So I’m reluctant to subject either to extreme temperatures lest they crack, and there are various trivets around to set things on that come straight from the stove. I believe that pots with the colander component rate with zip-top bags near the top on the scale of genius and indispensable inventions, but to drain a pot of noodles involves setting the pot on something that is not the counter or the sink, lifting the colander out while it drains water and drips over the counter as I put it on a trivet in the sink, because it’s still dripping, to lift it off the bottom of the sink, and then pouring the near-boiling water left in the pot into the sink. None of this is done in a vacuum so there is often not a lot of extra counter space for this operation. What else have I missed by not watching the Food Network?

Captain Obvious, signing out.

How to sew through denim without breaking your sewing machine

Aug 25, 2008 | How to

If, like me, you’ve never met a pair of jeans that don’t need to be shortened, thus requiring a new hem, then you have struggled with breaking needles when you try to sew across the seams (unless you’re Captain OCD, who takes the minimalist approach), especially this kind, flat-felled seams:

I worked with a guy whose wife hemmed his jeans for him. Instead of cutting them off and using a sewing machine, she turned up the legs, existing hem and all, and hand-stitched the new hem. Which resulted in a bunched-up, uneven mess varying from three to four inches above the bottom of his pants with erratic and inconsistently-sized stitches visible from the outside. Because she then ironed the jeans to achieve that all-important center crease, the folds on the inside of the legs, results of the subpar hemming, were even more visible. Don’t let this happen to you.

You want your jeans to look stock, so in most cases you must use a sewing machine. First, buy yourself some heavy-duty thread in the appropriate color, which means the same color as the topstitching on your jeans or the color of the original hem stitching and not the same color as your jeans. The thread is called variations of heavy, topstitching, buttonhole twist, etc. Then buy yourself a gross of regular needles or one needle manufactured especially for the heavy-duty demands of sewing thick denim.

Here’s the trick: After you’ve cut off the existing hems (don’t lazy-out on this step), ironed the raw edges under, and pinned them to the appropriate length, grab a hammer and take it and your jeans to a hard surface. Now, whack the seams a few times to break down the fibers and you’ll be able to sew through with relative ease with no broken needles or missed stitches. Depending on the fabric and the construction of the seams, you may need to go slow (very slow) and help the needle through by turning the wheel with your hand. Sewing through full-speed-ahead is what breaks the needles when they come upon a particularly dense section of fabric.

As you can see below, the color of the stitching on the new hem matches the original stitching.

After a few washings and wearings the new hem will look as used as the original hem (that’s how they came from the store). Whether you want your jeans to look like someone else wore them to muck out the barn before you bought them is a discussion for another day, one we can have while we’re sitting on the porch yelling at the neighbor kids: “You call that music?”