The final mortgage payment was made early this month \u2013 thirty years and never missed or had a late payment. Yes, the light at the end of the financial tunnel, bright and so very, very restful. And it also meant that late this month I could purchase a couple of nice-to-have items, one of which I had been considering for quite a while \u2013 to whit, a Sodastream unit, to make carbonated beverages. I\u2019ve never really liked soft drinks, but I do like plain carbonated water; no sweetener, no flavorings. The bottled kind tends to go flat almost as soon as the bottle is opened. Although the plain unflavored HEB house brand in aluminum cans is acceptable, the cans take up space on the shelf and in the recycle bin. A couple of years ago, we tried out a countertop unit that made carbonated beverages, (A freebie from Amazon Vine) and it was ok, but the CO2 cartridges were expensive and didn\u2019t really last very long at all \u2013 so, back to the drawing board. I had heard good things about Sodastream, not the least of it being that they are made in Israel. So, I ordered a Sodastream package from Amazon which came with three one-liter bottles, two CO2 cartridges and two small bottles unsweetened cherry and lime flavors. A couple of days of use and I am pretty happy with it. The CO2 cartridge attached very easily, the bottle of cold water hooks up readily, and you can choose three degrees of bubblization. Now as soon as we go through the last three cases of HEB-brand bubbly water that my daughter bought because there was an offer to buy two, get the third one free \u2013 we\u2019ll be Sodastreaming, exclusively.<\/p>\n
The other semi-frivolous purchase was a bookshelf\u2026 you do know that we have a lot of books? Yeah, I was scrolling down through a friends\u2019 FB page, and encountered a short video ad for a tall, six-level rotating bookshelf, which supposedly could hold 300+ books, while only taking up a small amount of floor space. Well, my attention was grabbed. The house is small, the existing bookshelves overflow as it is, what with the collections for research,\u00a0 general history,\u00a0 Texiana,\u00a0 books for pleasure reading, those copies of books published by the Teeny Publishing Bidness, Wee Jamie\u2019s overflowing collection \u2026 and one of the bookshelves so designated was an inexpensive folding number that I bought in Greece which has begun to fall apart. And that corner of the home office was in a horrendous state anyway \u2026 So, I found the exact same six-level rotating bookshelf on Amazon and ordered it. Putting it together was a bit tricky; it took the efforts of both of us and a stepstool. While it\u2019s constructed of thick bamboo panels, there are reinforced panels and lots of flat-head screws connecting all shelves and the upright panels. I\u2019ve loaded in all the levels, starting at the bottom and so far, it\u2019s holding up well. The unit only occupies a small footprint, relatively speaking, rotates easily enough, and each of the six levels holds anywhere from 35-25 books. (More, in the case of very skinny volumes, less when it comes to brick-thick doorstoppers like J. Martin Hunter\u2019s Trail-drivers of Texas.) Swapping out the old bookshelf for the tall rotating shelf meant reorganizing the existing shelves, rearranging stuff, throwing away things like owners\u2019 manuals for appliances which had long since worn out and junked, or been given away \u2026 and turning up odd items, like some letters from my grandmothers posted to me in the early 1980s, an envelope of photo negatives processed at the AAFEs in Greece, and a Laura Ashley home goods catalog from 1986. No, I\u2019m not a hoarder. I just loved the Laura Ashley English country cottage look. I kept that catalog as a memento and wish that I had also saved out some \u201880s Banana Republic catalogues. I loved the original,\u00a0 high-quality Banana Republic items, and their catalogs were literate and fun to read\u2026<\/p>\n
I am already thinking about another rotating shelf\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The final mortgage payment was made early this month \u2013 thirty years and never missed or had a late payment. Yes, the light at the end of the financial tunnel, bright and so very, very restful. And it also meant that late this month I could purchase a couple of nice-to-have items, one of which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aint-that-america","category-domestic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10185"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10187,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10185\/revisions\/10187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}