F ³: The Least Expensive

A question making its way around Twitter right now:

What’s the least expensive thing you own that’s made the most positive impact in your quality of life?

If you want to take a look at some answers, here’s a decent thread.

Replies range from truly inexpensive items to more expensive ones which produced a remarkable impact in relationship to their monetary cost. Some respondents waxed eloquent about things they found or got for free. Then there are the priceless items, like pets. Or library cards.

I was intrigued by the answers that spoke most directly to the question, to my mind: low cost, big impact. Some examples:

Blackout film for bedroom windows
Better Than Boullion
Microplane
Library step stool
A grabber device
Ear plugs
White noise machine
WD40
Reading glasses
Long metal shoe horn

Several years ago my mother-in-law gave me some wooden tongs for removing hot items from the toaster oven. I actually didn’t know what they were for, at first. Since then I’ve discovered how useful they can be. Life changing? Well, probably not. But they make you realize that you just don’t have to burn yourself

over and over again. Life is hard, but not everything has to be a struggle.

What about you? What’s the least expensive thing you own that’s made the most positive impact in your quality of life?

Village Green/Town² Comments

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Teacher Gifts

Today is the last day of school before the Winter Break. It’s a good time to remember the far-reaching nature of our public school system. You may not have children. You may have sent your children to independent schools. It matters not. You will be impacted one way or another. Yesterday I read a long thread on Facebook about several waves of illness in the schools right now. There’s influenza A and norovirus, I believe. And of course there’s COVID. Apparently in some individual schools the rate of illness is high enough for school admin to notify parents. When I was little the acceptable holiday gift for a teacher was one of those lovely floral handkerchief squares. (I don’t know what it was for male teachers. They were rare in my elementary years.) These days the range of teacher gifts is wider and I have fond memories of Target gift cards which I have written about before. I think it’s safe to say that giving one’s teacher Influenza, norovirus, or COVID is not the ideal holiday...

They Can Wait

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Separate and Unequal

Remember “Separate but equal”? Remember how that really meant that Black schools languished in broken-down buildings without adequate heat or toilet facilities, with cast-off, ragged learning materials, underfunded and largely ignored? The Supreme Court struck that down in 1954. The evidence was clear that separate was not equal. Plessy v Ferguson had led to - - no, endorsed - - deeply unequal schooling and opportunities. We tend to think of Brown v Board as being purely about racial integration. It was not. It was about the logical consequences of segregation. And they were not, not, not equal. The ruling in 1954 didn’t transform public education for non-whites into a land of milk and honey by any means. But it articulated some essential truths in a way that made including everyone a legal precedent which could be relied upon and built upon. It was better than what came before it but it rested upon unsteady ground. It did not necessarily change the hearts or minds ...

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