Physical Solutions

I thought of something to make cold and flu season more tolerable.

(It doesn't involve avoiding colds or the flu, though I have been washing my hands several times a day, and I confess I considered wearing gloves at work. I'm not full-on germaphobe, though. A little girl coughed in my face on Halloween and I didn't wash it off.)

In our house, when a cold or flu or sore throat gets bad enough, we do reach for symptomatic relief, stubborn though we are. Usually the symptomatic relief is all jumbled under the bathroom sink. I've tried to organize it, but still, rooting under the bathroom sink with a head cold is hard. Rooting around under the bathroom sink when your husband has a head cold is hard too. ("ELLEN GET ME SOME COUGH DROPS THE NEW ONES NOT THE STALE ONES.")

But now, after my great idea, all the medicines are easily accessed from a chest-level shelf in the linen closet.

Now when Gary feels a cold coming on, he just reaches in the linen closet for the cold/flu container in the back, and perhaps he might pluck a few pills from the pill container on the right. If he has a sore throat, instead of whispering, "ellen my throat's sore get me some sucrets the red ones not the green ones" he can even ... well, one of us can plunk the sore throat container on the bathroom counter for the duration of the illness and browse at will.

Oh, and for those who are thinking, “Damn, that’s a lot of drugs,” what you see here is a drug larder. It’s our in-home personal pharmacy. It is stocked full of NyQuil backups and four boxes of Tylenol Cold and Flu capsules so there will be no 2 a.m. runs to the store. There are also medicines for illness we’ll probably never get again: weird one-off creams for plantar warts and gels for tooth pain and pills for bladder infections. (Sigh.)

Many linens had to be exiled to the basement to make this work, but I think it will be worth it. 

Comments

[Alice]

It will totally be worth it. We had a similar set-up at our old house because the various bottles of things falling out of the cabinet when looking for something specific was driving me crazy. I intend to replicate it at the new house when I reach the point of being driven sufficiently nuts by the current set-up. (The day will come, probably before spring. We have various things scattered across four different medicine cabinets and one shelf in the kitchen. Nothing is ever where I'm looking for it except the kitchen stuff.)

[TheQueen]

Alice - you just moved a year ago, didn’t you? I think it would take at least a year for things to gravitate to where they are used, as opposed to the organized place where they can be found. But, do you want to move them away from where they are used? I worry about over-organizing my house to the point that I can’t find anything. Like, right now I’m worried that someday someone will need to remind me that I put my father Jerry’s artifacts in the basement box with my stepdad’s stuff. It made sense to have all the male authority figures in the same box, but then I thought that really, Jerry should have gone in the childhood box instead. At least, since you moved you got to lay hands on everything you have, and you can’t really lose things to hyper-organization.

[Alice]

We did move last year, yes. And you're right about things needing to gravitate. I think part of why I haven't gotten too far with the medicine situation is because I don't want to deal with the overall situation, which is:

This house's kitchen is smaller than the one in our old house and it has much, much less storage. There are fewer cabinets and the cabinets themselves are shallower. The most useful place for all of the medications I actually need to access is the kitchen-- the bathrooms are problematic because of the family's varying sleeping schedules and their collective inability to sleep through sounds. The kitchen storage situation, however, is such that carving out space for medications will mean committing to a kitchen reorg and culling. Which: meh. Not today.

(And I have no fears of our house becoming too organized. My husband is a bit of a randomizer. I mainly just try to keep things down to a reasonably presentable level in the main parts of the house. And I deal with the basement by closing the door and never going down there.)

[KC]

I did this with my spices about a decade ago, because having little teeny bottles topple like dominoes whenever you're looking for something in that cabinet is No Fun and I didn't have spice racks. But I have not thought of doing it for bathroom collections of things - maybe when we get a little more overpopulated...

[TheQueen]

Alice - well, I suppose it’s a self-solving problem. Just don’t buy any more meds for a while, there’s your culling.
KC - my mom would take a marker and write the spice name on the lid. Even easier to find that way.

[KC]

I went for the frequent-cook-with-eclectic-spice-purchasing habits method, that being "every single bottle in there is different" (except the rosemary and thyme) and I'd already accidentally memorized which lid went to which spice. That would not be very helpful to anyone visiting the kitchen and trying to cook, however, nor would it be useful if one had a consistent brand of spices with all-the-same lids - writing the names on sounds like an excellent solution. :-)

(I secretly wanted a label maker - one of those ptouch things where you type in what you want and it prints out on the tape - from about age 17 to age 28 or so. I have since realized exactly how few cases it would be useful - and how *many* places I would want to use it - plus my handwriting improved, so I mostly stopped wanting one. Mostly.)

[TheQueen]

KC - Gary bought one to label cables and we have used it exactly once. Easier to print on Avery labels.

[KC]

With the labels, though, you're not supposed to print on a partial sheet with a laser printer (for good reason - if you get toner on the shiny backing, it can gunk up your printer), and inkjet is water-soluble (well, most Avery labels would not hold up to being washed, either? But inkjet printing is *really* water-soluble, like "don't drip on it" water soluble...).

But yes; cheap, easy enough, and not something you need to buy specific new cartridges for or find a particular place to store. But sigh for the labels zipping out of it and for the little cutter thingy...

Did it work well for the cables, at least? Are they a magical organized wonderland of wires?

[TheQueen]

KC - whaaaaaat? You can’t print a partial sheet? And the magical wonderland is behind the Tv,

[KC]

You used to not supposed to do it, anyway - check the package. Two things can happen: a remaining label can peel itself off inside your printer (because usually when you peel a label off, the sheet gets somewhat bent, so there's not only the difference between the thickness of the label vs. the thickness of the sheet, there's also some different geometry about the sheet), or if you have a laser printer and accidentally print on a label that isn't there, the toner flakes off and gunks things up. I have dealt with the later ramifications of both those things in offices, being the resident Copier Whisperer, and cannot endorse either.

That said, if you've got a simple-enough printer feed line and a flat-enough partial sheet of labels, and if you're *very* careful to only print on the labels remaining (rather than accidentally flipping the sheet around and printing on the shiny backing below the labels you meant to print on), it can work. But usually feed the sheet remaining-label-side first, and double-triple-check that you are in fact doing it the right way around...

[theQueen]

KC - Hm. Just an Inkjet over here, no toner. But let me check the difference in dates between when I printed the Russian Halloween labels and I bought the new printer.

[theQueen]

Last labels: 10/29/2017
New printer: 2/7/2019
Whew.I didn't kill my printer.

[KC]

It is usually at least mostly possible to remove peeled-off labels from the interior of a printer as long as you get to them right then rather than trying to run the printer again while it has a label or two in its innards, so if you've got an inkjet, it's probably fine-ish to print partial sheets as long as the sheet isn't crumpled and as long as the "leading" labels aren't peeled up at all (if you've got a corner of a label sticking up from the sheet and you feed that, sticky-side-forward, through the printer... well, the printer is pretty good at peeling labels off under that circumstance). But also if the feed is relatively direct (not going around too many corners - which is the case with many home inkjet printers), you've got a far better chance of label sheet survival.

(Russian Halloween labels???)

But also, if you had trashed your printer, you would know. Unless you hadn't printed anything since, I suppose?

[theQueen]

KC - Russian Halloween name tag labels from a few years back: https://www.mocklog.com/queen_mediocretia/2017/10/halloween-costume.html

[KC]

I saw that, I laughed, and apparently totally forgot it, because I was just suitably entertained again. Brain? It is like a sieve. A very holey sieve.