Blown away by my latest life hack
It’s not just the mail that must get through. When you write a weekly column – week in, week out, rain, hail, shine or, for this week’s instalment, during a power cut on the wildest night of the year – the words must also find a way out.
This is not as simple as it sounds. While Truman Capote famously wrote his first drafts in pencil, and JK Rowling lugged a typewriter to her local cafe to pen Harry Potter, I’m part of the digital generation. When Google goes offline, I’m suddenly lost for words.
Thus, as I sat alone in the dark in the wee small hours on Wednesday, trying to lure my thoughts like sluggish moths to the dim glow of a laptop whose screen was in power save mode, I started to rue the questionable decisions I’ve made thus far in life.
Such as: why do I always leave it to the last minute to meet deadlines?
And: why didn’t I think to charge my jolly laptop before the power lines came down?
Also: why don’t I own any scented candles? The only candle I could find in our house was a wedding gift, its wax softened and shrivelled after seven lonely years in a hurricane lamp on the windowsill upstairs, its fuse long-since rendered impotent.
On the plus side, when the lights went out, I could no longer see the four loads of unfolded washing on the couch beside me, or the unwashed dishes on the kitchen bench.
When asked how she managed her work-life balance as a writer and mother, JK Rowling came unclean: ‘‘I didn’t do housework for four years. I am not Superwoman. Living in squalor, that was the answer.’’
Squalor and downloading domestic shortcuts: that’s my deal. If I spent as much time actually doing housework as I do avoiding it by reading life hack listicles on the internet, our house would be as spic and span as a Spray ’n’ Wipe commercial.
From American consumer watchdog Clark Howard’s eponymous website, I once learned ‘‘44 Home Cleaning Hacks You’ll Wish You Knew Sooner’’, such as donning socks to dust, disinfecting the dish rag by chucking it into the dishwasher and buffing the scuffs off a leather couch with shoe polish. Note: this only works if you’re one of those matchy-matchy types whose best brogues co-ordinate with your couch.
When Buzzfeed advertised ‘‘17 Lazy Girl Cleaning Hacks That Will Forever Change You’’, I picked the pet hair off the rug with a lint roller and added a squirt of Toilet Duck to our bog brush pan.
Emlii.com’s ‘‘38 Unparalleled Cleaning Hacks That Will Transform Your life For Good’’ saw me shampooing my hairbrush and polishing my engagement ring and the once-white rubber soles of my dirty sneakers with toothpaste on a toothbrush. (Use someone else’s, obviously.)
From lifehack.org, I learned how to scrub my oven clean with vinegar and baking soda (not that I actually did it), how to lift the soap-scum ring around the bath with a cut lemon, and how to pick up the pieces of a broken wine glass by pressing a piece of bread over the shards. Clearly, this is easiest with cheap white bread rather than artisan ciabatta.
My own time-honoured housework hacks double as crisis management tools:
❚ Need to dry your favourite pair of wet jeans in a flash? Bung them in the dryer with a couple of dry towels for half an hour.
❚ The cheaper your synthetic bedsheets, the better they are at collecting dust off Venetian blinds,