Recycle Baby Food Jars

I think the end is in sight for baby food from jars. Karston is much more interested in what we're eating, and so far he hasn't refused any food when he's in the mood to eat. So some day soon, no more baby food jars. That's nice (much better than when he would barf back anything not from a jar!), but I've still got a ton of small jars that might be headed for the recycling bin. Still, reduce and reuse are key components to recycling, so I've been looking for other ideas. Here goes!

You can use them to hold beads or buttons. I store the jars upside down for this, so I can see what's in the jar through the clear bottom instead of the opaque lid. I arrange them by color. You can also store screws or other small parts with similar groups that fit in one jar, and arrange by size. eHow.com has a page on this type of Baby Food Jar Organizer.

My friend Cheryl is good at decoupage (tissue paper and glue on a clear stratum for a nifty stained glass effect), and I think she could make cool votive holders with tea light candles. Turns out that's not a new idea either, because eHow.com also has a page on How to Use Baby Food Jars for Decorative Votive Candles.

While there, I noticed that eHow.com has a page on How to Use Baby Food Jars to Make Gifts, and another on How to Make Gel Air Freshener that you could put in clean, empty baby food jars.

Next I turned to Google to dredge up ideas. I turned up a list of uses for Excess Baby Food Jars, and some entries under Crafts from Recycled Stuff. And finally there's Eileen's Favorite Camp Crafts and Other Fun Things from Baby Food Jars. That covers a whole bunch of uses for these baby food jars. I think my favorite (after convincing my crafty friends to take them! that even worked for the first several months) is to donate the jars to a local school or a Girl Scout troop for their arts and crafts!

Update 11/24/2006: And (duh) there's always using them as jars in the kitchen! I stored leftover chocolate chips in one recently.

Vote!

Despite the chilly, overcast, drizzly weather, we went out to vote after work this evening. Google Maps got to the right location out in the sticks, just leaving us the questions of who to pick. That's where you should look at Project Vote Smart if you haven't seen it before. Local newspapers can be helpful if biased, but for those of us who get our news from Jon Stewart (who said, You know this isn't a news show, right?), it's the Internet and PVS instead.

Karston especially liked the "I voted!" stickers.

Ooh, the nerve!

This afternoon, we noticed that a large patch of monkey grass (liriope) was mashed down in our yard, between our front door and my garden. It looks like a deer snoozed in our yard last night! Ooh, the nerve of those deer! I don't want them in my yard, no not at all! White-tailed deer are very destructive to their environment (ripping grass out of the ground so it can't grow back, ripping bark off trees when trees are most vulnerable) and they're a dangerous disease vector for people (Lyme's disease anyone?). I don't want those germs in the same yard where my son plays! Plus I'm sure snoozing in the yard means munching on my garden, and I don't approve of that either. Bah humbug.

Fall!

Well, today it's officially (according to me) fall in my neighborhood. When I drove to work this morning, most of the trees were turning colors, and dropping yellow leaves on the road. Most of those leaves were still attached yesterday after work. I know the calendar said it turned fall last month, but I wait until the trees tell me it's fall. Based on my drive to work this morning, my neighborhood hit fall a little sooner. At least it's a colorful season this year!

Hidden iMovie Installer

I need to spend some quality time with iMovie HD, to import footage of The Kid before there's too much footage to touch! (It doesn't help my motivation that there's 40 minutes of footage where Daddy got "record" and "pause" confused -- so what if Record shows a red dot? and Pause parallel green bars? Not all red means stop! So I'll get to throw away some boring stuff.) After reading this post, I wanted to be sure I could install iMovie HD without re-installing my whole system. However, I don't have a System Restore CD, just the Mac OS X Install CD, and it doesn't have a .images directory. What to do? A little work with the find command, and the answer is to look in the System/Installation/Packages/.packages directory instead! Easy cheesy!

Acrobat Toolbar

It's funny that so many people want to get rid of the Acrobat toolbar in Microsoft Office, because I've been looking for it! I want a hyperlinked version of my dissertation without having to create all of those links manually, and Acrobat Professional just won't convert a Word document to any kind of PDF for me. I don't want to make all those useful hyperlinks in the Table of Contents by myself! I also have another issue, that Print To PDF makes 4 documents instead of one, but there's a fix for that.

Of course, I think the final answer is that I can't do it on a Mac because the folks at TidBITs can't either (see the third-from-last paragraph here). No wonder I had that feeling of swimming uphill.

Linda

I was having a normal day, and then I found out that a friend of mine didn't know she was pregnant, went to the emergency room with a placental abruption, and had a baby girl six weeks premature. They barely survived the experience. (I was six weeks premature, so I think that part doesn't matter. The doctors said all the same doom-and-gloom about me too. Although, at 4 pounds, I did weigh a little more than Violet.) I had nine months to get used to the idea of me being a mother with a baby in our house, and I think I needed that time. Despite some less-than-ideal circumstances, Linda's very positive and wants the best for her daughter, so I'm sure she'll make it work out. That's where it gets really simple. Linda fiercely wants Violet, and Violet definitely wants Linda (all babies want mother, I've seen it). That's the hopeful part.

So that was my surprise of the month. I'll go back to having normal days, but one of my friends won't. Wow. What do I say?