My husband has been eating a lot of yogurt for breakfast, and I hate to just toss these cute small cups. I’ve been washing them up hoping to come up with lots of different ways to reuse them. So far I only have a couple.

Yogurt containers are excellent to use when the girl wants to paint. She can clean her brushes in the container, and I don’t have to worry about cleaning all of that paint from a cup. It works well since you don’t need much water.

She also uses them in the bath tub. She loves to pour water from the yogurt cups. It keeps her entertained and it’s much cheaper than bath toys.

Next spring I will be using yogurt cups as seed starters for our herb garden. The cups are the perfect size to get a plant started. It sure beats buying small pots.

So that is it for how we are reusing yogurt containers. Do you recycle yours? Share your suggestions.

Lately I’ve been clipping coupons again. I usually clip coupons and let them expire before I ever think of using them. Our local newspaper has recently added coupons to their Sunday newspaper. I’m actually finding coupons of products I buy.

I don’t really file my coupons in my coupon holder. I try to put them in order that they expire, so maybe I can keep up with coupons that are expiring soon and use them. To make coupon clipping more fun, I want to have a goal for the money we saved. Maybe we will go to the movies or do something else once a month. Hopefully by having a goal, I will remember to consult the coupons before making my shopping list.

For the past few weeks, our computer has been acting up. We have a bad harddrive, so I had just chalked it up to it and didn’t think too much more about it. Apparently it was more than the bad harddrive.  We got an error message about a missing .DLL file. Well, that is easy enough to fix. You just use the recovery console on your Windows disk to replace the missing file. That didn’t work and after half a day of fooling with it, we decided just to reinstall Windows.

At least we didn’t lose any files since we didn’t format the drive. But still it’s a pain because all of our programs needed to be reinstalled. This brought to my attention the importance of keeping up with your driver disks and purging the older ones that you no longer use. We built our computer five years ago. It took me a moment to remember the brand of the motherboard and video card. At least most of our disks are in a CD binder, but at least half the disks are obsolete. It’s time to have a good purging.

Our computer has been very reliable. We had a harddrive failure in 2008. That could have been the last time we opened the case because it was quite dusty in there. We bought some can air – a supply we used to always have on hand – and cleaned out the inch thick layer of dust. I think that helped more than anything to get better performance from the computer.

So, from now on we will keep a check on the inside of our computer. When we check the smoke alarm batteries with the time change, then we will also check for dust in our computer.

The ants seem relentless this summer. It has been so dry that the little suckers have been invading every small space in our home searching for food and water. The ants unfortunately found the cat food. Last summer the ants found the cat food. After spending what seemed like an eternity picking out the ants, I decided that from now on we would use a plastic box with a lid for cat food.

This year I guess the lid wasn’t on tight because the ants found the cat food. I was about to toss it all out when my husband had this solution. Close the lid and place the plastic box outside in the scorching heat. The ants will die and the cats will then eat the food. I thought he was crazy and a little of a sadist but thought it wouldn’t hurt to give it a try.

Lo and behold the next day the ants were indeed all dead. It worked and it was so easy. I hate to admit that he is right but this time he was right on. From now on I will make sure that lid is closed.