I’ve mentioned before that food waste really bugs me. I also like my cupboards to be tidy. And I think the UK’s 1/2 pint milk cartons are very useful. (Stay with me; I do bring this all together.)
I don’t like scrunched up plastic bags of pasta, or rice, or lentils, lying about in my cupboards, spilling over and attracting bugs; so any time that I have opened one of those bags, back home I pour them into a cleaned out jar. Here I buy very little in jars, so I use the milk cartons instead. They have a narrow opening, so I will stand at the counter and very carefully feed the grain or pasta into the little carton (which has been thoroughly cleaned & dried beforehand, of course).
On Sunday I splashed some water on my cell phone. I wiped it quickly, but thought I’d better dunk it in a bowl of rice (the accepted methodology for drying cell phones). I set my phone in a little chafing dish and poured over about 1/2 carton of rice. After half an hour, I figured the phone would be fine, so I removed the phone, carefully poured the rice into a pitcher, and then laboriously poured the pitcher into the milk carton. There, all done – a pain, but done. Some time later my phone started making funny noises, so I figured a half hour in the rice hadn’t been long enough. So back into the tray, rice poured back over it, and I left it overnight.
Yesterday morning, after retrieving the phone, I poured the rice back into the carton – this time with a makeshift funnel (fyi – tin foil funnels don’t work). I was careful not to spill any rice (no food waste here!) but that was not easy. The phone is now completely fine.
Yesterday afternoon Scout & I got back from a lovely walk at the beach. As usual, I tortured Scout by bathing her paws in a basin of warm water to clean off the sand. And my ear buds dropped into the basin. F*!$! So, for the third time in 24 hours, I poured rice over one of my electronic devices. This morning the earbuds were fine. But I just couldn’t face another ficking rice-funnel. I held the carton over the garbage can, tipped the glass into it, and whatever didn’t make it into the container is going out with the trash. Waste, schmaste.