This past Mother’s Day marked ten years without my mom. I was 19, a sophomore in college trying desperately to become a respected adult when she died. Predictably, caring for and losing a parent is one way to really accelerate that process. Over the last decade, I’ve struggled to process not only the loss of my mother but also the loss of our future together. I don’t know what she would have thought of my writing or interior decorating. I don’t know what trips we might have taken or how she would have reacted to the challenges of the pandemic. I don’t know, and that is one of the nastiest things grief does. As I’ve navigated my heartache with sympathetic...
s. Buy a Product? I recently posted about the Bora Portamate lumber rack, and a reader asked a fair question – why not build a DIY solution out of wood instead? For me, it comes down to why do I DIY? (Shown above and in the front-page image is Ben V’s workspace, featuring his DIY modular tool cabinet setup. You can read more about his workshop projects here.) There’s no hard rule as to when I might go the DIY approach and when I might buy a commercially available product. I still design and build a lot of projects, and I have more planned for the next couple of months. While I have seen wall-mounted lumber racks made out of...
I started buying Rayovac alkaline batteries a couple of years ago, starting around 2014 when I came across a holiday promo and posted about. Rayovac claims that their batteries last as long as Duracell. Some batteries were made in the USA, others in China. I sought out the ones with made-in-USA packaging. I bought more Rayovac batteries the following year, and more again the year after that. Almost every year now, I buy multi-packs or bulk packs of Rayovac batteries. They are made in the USA and had decent pricing. I like using rechargeable batteries in some devices, but don’t really want to put pricey NiMH cells in kids toys. Rayovac’s disposable alkaline batteries worked well enough at good pricing, or...
