Hey Jan, did you notice that float bulb has our friend 'barb c's name on the bottle??? That's one she gave me last lunch meet! lol Xuan, I came by this idea quite accidentially, I had left some baby bulbs my friend barb had given me on my potting bench. I use the lower part of water bottles to grow seedlings or to also use as mini greenhouse toppers upside down over baby tomato seedlings. We had got some rain and the baby bulbs I left on the bench got soaked. I was potting up some tomato seedlings and took a bottle top I had just cut and turned it upside down for the bulbs to dry in, in the sun while I finished with my tomatoes. Then a light bulb went on! hah!! I could do the "MariaBulbFloat" this way!! See, that Maria is also the mother of amaryllis inventions!

I use an old three-gallon enameled pail I bought at an auction and an old pot lid that fits on the top (to keep the nosey cats out). It lives either on the floor or on the counter, depending. It's emptied to the compost pile last thing at night when one of us make the rounds to check on things in the barns before bed. In the summer it is sloshed out at the outdoor tap and left upside down to dry overnight. In the winter (does that still happen these days?) it is brought in and left to freeze in the wood room when we bring the last firewood in for the night. During major preservation orgies I use a giant SS bowl (probably 2 feet across) that gets filled to heaping and dumped as needed. My late MIL used a SS pail (with a lid - actually the lid I now use, sans pail; I wonder where the pail went?) for her compost enroute to her chickens. My own Mother used a lidded ceramic casserole as a collection point, dumped every morning after the egg shells from breakfast were added. My compost pile is literally a pile. During warm weather I stick a fork in it occasionally and have at it once or twice per season with the bucket loader to tumble it. Most of the time I just let Nature takes its course. If it gets too big, I just started dumping stuff on the ground next to it. Easy-peasy. Once in a awhile I add the gleanings from the (pet) rabbits' cages to boost the nitrogen component, but that manure (and more particularly, the bunny pee) is too "hot" to add it all the time. Mostly the cage-gleanings go on their own pile that I manage more intensively than the veg. compost pile, which is a totally laissez-affair. Every summer I plan to use saplings to make a nice cage around my veg. compost pile - laid up in a loose log-cabin-like framework. But in two-plus decades here I have always chosen the slattern's approach of just dumping stuff on the ground. That really pleases the skunks and opossums, no doubt. In the end I get nice friable organic matter that I slap around the garden so no evidence of my decades of sloth is apparent. L.

Oriental Trading has piggy banks. For some reason, I can't post the link to the variety of piggy banks, but from the page I've attached, in the search field, type in piggy bank and you'll see a few different ones. Maybe the Paint your Own one would be cute.....depending on how many you had. You could paint your little saying on it. Here is a link that might be useful: Oriental Trading Piggy Banks

The organization of our remodeled kitchen has really helped. I was fortunate that we could rework our kitchen so that we could add more cabinetry. Creative nesting and unnesting of objects in the few cabinets in our old kitchen was so annoying that I really hated putting anything away. I love having a variety of cabinetry. I'm not of the drawer-for-all-purposes ilk. I love matching the items I want to store to the right type of cabinet. For instance, my large mixing bowls, stainless and glass, are on the bottom shelf of a door cabinet. It's really simple to open a door and get a good view of the bowls from the side (instead of a view of the top items only in a drawer) and to grab a bowl from the bottom of the stack without having the sides of a drawer interfering. I would hate having to pull out the entire stack of bowls every time I wanted one near the bottom. I use a variety of these bowls just about every time I prepare something and for me, the fixed shelf is the ideal spot. An all-drawer kitchen would have forced me to compromise. I love having lots of upper shelves. I can space them as closely as possible to make as much of the vertical space as I can. The more surfaces I have, the less nesting I have to do. Roll outs, although not as convenient as drawers, allow better use of vertical space. If a drawer is too deep space is wasted and if a drawer is too shallow it's unusable. I prioritized storage so that my most used items are in a drawer, on an upper shelf or in the front of a roll out or fixed shelf. Lesser and rarely used items get placed in the less convenient spots. That way, I have easy access to everything I need 90-95% of the time while keeping the flexibility of vertical space management with some non-drawer cabinets sprinkled in. My kitchen still gets messy but it always feels under control because I can zoom around the kitchen and get things put away quickly since a lot of nesting isn't involved. And I agree, our dw dish drawers have also helped with kitchen tidiness. It's a lot less daunting when only half a dw at a time has to be unloaded. I hated getting down on the floor in my old kitchen to find something on the shelf of a base cabinet. But I love the fixed shelf base cabinet that I have in my new kitchen because I was able to pick and choose the items that are best stored there. This type of cabinet offers more storage than any of my drawer or pull out cabinets. I think an all-or-nothing approach forces items to be stored in less than ideal spots. I would hate having my large bowls in a drawer but conversely, I would hate having my pots and pans on a fixed shelf. Adding some variety allows options and in mho, a better chance for optimizing storage.