John Borwick's blog

A couple of weeks ago I learned about Amazon’s Subscribe and Save Program.  You order items in bulk through Amazon, and tell them that you want them every one, two, three, or six months.  In turn they give you a 15% discount and free shipping.  Also you don’t have to worry about buying these items at the store.

We just signed up for it; here’s what we’ve ordered:

• Paper Towels (30 rolls each 6 months)
• Laundry detergent (6 bottles each 6 months)
• Dishwasher powder (8 boxes each 6 months)
• Clif Bar variety pack (24 bars each 3 months)
• Cinnamon Harvest cereal (6 boxes each 3 months)

You’ve got to know that you like the products because they only ship in bulk.

This is very “non-Lean” of us (see Lean Manufacturing) to have so much stock on hand, but that’s the only way you can get the service today.  Maybe this can eventually lead to grocery delivery 2.0 (this time, it won’t go bankrupt).

I am not a very “handy” person–I don’t tend to fix things around the house.

A couple of months ago a carpenter built some bookshelves for us, and along the way he gave us a couple of shims to help straighten out our china cabinet.  This is when I learned that shims are awesome.

Shims, in case you don’t know, are tiny flat wooden doorstops.   They are little pieces of wood that you can put in odd places to fix things.  They are like the duct tape of wood.

So far we have used shims for three sorts of things:

1. Leveling out furniture around the house.  Our house is old and nothing is at a 90 degree angle, so all our furniture needs a little bit of straightening up.  We just put 1-3 shims under the appropriate furniture legs, and things flatten out.
2. Keeping our car window from falling down.  This is a little embarrassing.  One of our car windows falls down on its own.  We took it to the shop and were told that we would have to replace the entire window motor, which costs around $400-500, to keep the window from falling.  We tried duct tape, but shims work the best.  We have two shims in this window now, and although it looks horrible, it works very well.
3. Holding a blanket in place to serve as a door to keep our cats out of a room.  We are now getting the bookshelves painted, and today the painters primed everything.  We want the cats to roam the house, but we do not want them to “explore the paint.”  There is no door to where the bookshelves are.  Today I jury-rigged a blanket to cover the entryway, using an impressively sturdy Chip Clip (like for potato chip bags) and 4 shims, which are pressing the blanket to the entryway frame vis-a-vis a drop-down part of the ceiling.