Ratcheting Pruning Shears – why has the FSM hidden these from my gardening life until now? Haha, naughty branches of various scraggly and overgrown shrubs and trees: you daunt me no longer!
Since it’s December, let’s use my new pruners as the kick-off for our first 2012 in retrospective thread – what’s the best tool/gadget/gizmo/hack you’ve found this year? I reblogged a 99 life hacks post I found to my tumblr a while ago – some of these are ingenious, and it provoked me into a few new ways of thinking about bulldog clips and various other things around the house.
e.g.
How to keep your cat from unrolling toilet paper
Categories: Life, technology
25 years of the WWW 
For my birthday you could, if you like, donate to the Ada Initiative 
*waves extravagantly at the internet* We’re back! 
ObFreeFallSpaceJump post: a little detail I was glad to discover 
Hoyden About Town 
I bought myself a laptop stand and am now no longer terrified of falling asleep on the lounge with my laptop on my knee and waking to the sound of it hitting the floor.
I got a laptop stand a few months ago, and it’s been very useful for getting stuff done while still being with the family in the sitting room.
I’m sure a really evil cat could get around that.
Hmmm, that trick may work for cats, but not toddlers…
What I would like is a laptop stand that you could use in the bath. Then again, if I had such a thing I might be in serious danger of dissolving…
I now have “Soluble Human” lodged in my head (to the tune of “Detachable Penis”).
Ditto, angharad, it’s not a cat that unrolls the toilet paper here, it’s my 3 year old. Getting the rolls up high is the answer: in one toilet, the rolls live on the window sill, and in the other a cloth basket hangs from a robe hook, with toilet rolls inside.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the usefulness of one of those avocado keeper things you see around the supermarkets, to the point where I’m considering getting the onion keeper and maybe the lemon keeper as well. Apart from anything else they make it easier to see which part of the fridge other people have shoved them into since the last time you used them.
Somewhat more seriously, one of the most useful things I have in the kitchen is one of those sticky mat things for opening jars.
Mr Tog was astonished to be introduced to the usefulness that is an apple corer a few weeks ago (I’d had it for years, he just never knew what it was for). Makes apple pastry desserts ever so much easier.
angharad, I love those sticky mat things! I’m a total sucker for all those little everyday ergonomic wonders.
We have an apple corer that also slices the apple into segments in the same action as coring. It requires a bit of oomph to use though.
I loved that 99 life hacks post – I used one of them yesterday (putting one of those plastic bread tags on the end of a roll of tape so you don’t lose the end!)