Did I Miss My Calling?

Still busy sorting and packing.  2pm Saturday is when I have to be ready to load my sister's van. That's less than 36 hours as I type this and I have to leave time for sleep (6hrs minimum) and a shower.  Have already been awake for almost 12 hours.

So, to the point of the title and pictures.  While packing and sorting I began to notice how many things I've made out of other things or repurposed in some way or another.  I seem to have quite a knack for it.

Pictured to the right is one of my crochet wrist bag kits.  Such kits will hold the ball(s) of thread and the project and sometimes the hook and the pattern.  This one is made out of a ziplock sandwich bag, a child's elastic headband and one of those clips for paper designed to lie flat after you fold the little rods used to pinch it open down.

When the project uses multiple colors I'll put the individually bagged balls into a larger bag together.  If it is just two or three colors that could be a gallon sized ziplock but for larger projects using many colors I use things like gift bags or the packaging for bed sheets like the one in the next picture.

The baggie pictured above is one of tenseparate kits all part of one large project--the crafter's tote which is my Secret Santa project.  Actually there are only 9 kits now as one of the 9 strips of squares is finished so there are now kits for 8 strips of squares and the Moebus strip that will be the bottom, sides and shoulder strap of the bag.  Waaaaaaaaaaaay behind on this project btw.

That project is sitting inside a gift bag atop a plethora of small projects ranging from bookmarks, to fingerless gloves, to headbands, and a drawstring purse.  That gift bag sits inside the lid of an apple box.

More repurposing.

Behind that gift bag are three more gift bags and a drawstring bag made of the same material as a set of our bed sheets as it was their packaging.

There are a total of 17 separate projects in the apple box.  I didn't count up the kits inside the projects.


Another example of re-purposing and dare I say, ingenuity is represented by this picture of the headphone jack on my netbook.

During my last visit at Mom's she started hearing voices coming out of my netbook when I was wearing my earbuds.  Around that same time I notice there was static that I couldn't eliminate unless I positioned the wire just right and did not move it.

When I looked at the two jacks--headphone on the left and microphone on the right--I noticed that the right one had a red ring around it and the left one a green ring.  The colors are not visible in the picture because I was too close an the flash bleached out the color.

I had always thought that those rings were just decorative and two colors possibly to identify them.  But when I started looking closer around the time the problems started last spring, I noticed there were tiny cracks in the green one.  I pushed on it and a tiny crumb fell out.  After that the problem seemed to clear up but only for a day or two so I don't know how or if that helped or hurt.

This problem has been on my mind as I anticipated the return to Mom's because my workstation is beside the bed in her room so I can't have it making noise.  It meant I couldn't watch video or play games while she slept but there was also the risk of the computer beeping and such.  To prevent that I would mute it but that made me miss a lot of important cues.  Seems to me there should be a way to mute the speakers without muting the headphones.

So yesterday while I was sorting I was thinking about it and it popped into my head that those rings might be some kind of insulation and thus the static when the plug touched something it shouldn't or was not seated properly in its connection.  I've heard that having such things fixed can cost more than replacing the computer so I was racking my brain for some way to test my theory by sticking something non-conducive in the spot where that crumb fell out.

Among the stuff I'd been sorting were a stack of labels off deli meat containers. Those reusable ones with the brightly colored lids.  I collect those containers and reuse them for various things both in the kitchen and office and bathroom and....  But why collect the lids you might wonder.  Well they are stuck on with an interesting glue that is kinda rubbery and stretchy and will stick to most surfaces and come off without leaving a mark.  A bit like post-it glue.  The best way to save those clumps of glue was to sandwich them between two of those labels as their slick surface was ideal.  Their slick surface is also ideal for holding post-its inside a book instead of sticking them to the page.

Anyway I decided to stuff a bit of that glue into the spot where the green ring was broken.  This was quite a tricky procedure because that glue has a property of returning to its original shape after you let go of it no matter how you have stretched and squeezed and twisted it.  But I finally managed to stretch a piece of it out thin as a string, hold it in place over the crack and push it int with a needle.

I've tested it several times in the last 24 and some hours and so far I've heard not peep out of the speakers.  Here's hoping.

i was quite pleased with myself.  Also feeling justified in my hoarding.  LOL.  Which came in a moment of deep questioning of my hoarding issue because of all the time I've spent in the last two weeks sorting boxes, bags, jars, cans, cartons and bottles.  Not the stuff inside such things but empty boxes, bags, jars, cans, cartons and bottles.  Nearly all of it is product packaging.  But there are the gift bags and the normal tote bags, backpacks and purses, and grocery bags and trash bags.

Oh yes.  Some people call it a sickness.