Things I wish I'd known about earlier...

Some people cleverly assess, "You don't know what you don't know."  I think I'd like to add, "...until you know now that knowing then would have been so much better."

Do you ever have those moments where you just think, Boy, I wish I would have known about that long ago!?  I get those moments regularly.   Here are a few:

1.  When you take your own family pictures on your digital camera, often you can set it to some sort of "Blast Mode" where it will take up to 10 pictures in timer mode with programmable increments.  This would have been incredibly handy to know about back in the day when we would take one, then go back and click in timer mode to take another, then another, then another.  Now we say "go" and get 8 or 10 shots, where one of them turns out quite good!

Keep clickin.  I need your eyes, boys!

2. Medicines of many variety.  There's nothing like living with the pain of some condition for a while only to find out once you're better that there's treatment that can take care of {it} quite easily.  As a very generic case: Did you know that you can get Neosporin with pain relief now?  I've found that a wound heals in like 3 days when I use triple antibiotic, and like a week or more if I don't!  I can't believe it took me so long to stop trying to "tough it out."  (There are many other medications that cure various ailments that aren't worth waiting to see if my body will heal itself, but for your sake, I won't bring them up.)

3. Dash-board back-lights.  They are quite simple to replace, in the long run.  For the first 8 years of us driving our Corolla, I was certain that there was no back-light to the temperature control panel.  Then one day, I thought out of the blue, "I wonder if it covers bulb replacement in the repair manual?"  Voila!  There was an answer!

4. You can get bits and bobs to replace parts on your car on Ebay.  In the car mentioned in (3), we bought it with a blank in the dashboard where the clock should have been.  You know, a base model really is a base model!  A few minutes on Ebay and $10 later, we solved the problem that had eluded us for so long.  (Honey, remember when we bought that little LCD clock that velcroed to the dashboard?  You remember, the one that melted right off in the hot Tennessee summer?)

5.  Once Jen got a Home Depot line of store credit and was given a power sander as a free gift.  For years I used it and wondered why the suction bag wasn't collecting any of the sanding dust.  Well, turns out that poky plastic thing is meant to perforate the sandpaper so the fans can suck up the dust. Duh.  I should have read the instructions, and I could have prevented LOTS of dust in the basement.

6.  Last summer we had this problem with our oven that it smelled of gas, and wouldn't turn on unless we were willing to cook at 450 F.  Even then, it would sometimes take 45 minutes to heat up.  Something was wrong.  Well, about 9 months later, we get to poking around and find out that the ignitor was worn out.  Twenty bucks on Amazon, and we were cooking like champs again!  (Why did we not investigate for 9 months?  You got me!)

7.  Going to bed with a hot water bottle or letting an electric blanket warm up your bed for you is blissful.  Granted, you could also heat up your house for the night, but isn't it just so much more economical to heat up the part of the house that you are most concerned about?  I mean really.  No reason to heat the whole house just to generate a warm bed for you to hop into.

8.  You can get a car battery backup to keep in the trunk instead of jumper cables.  Then you don't have to worry about pestering a stranger for a jump, situating cars, and worrying that some helpful soul will actually damage your car trying to do something he knows nothing about.  My dear old dad gave me one for my birthday a few years ago (or was it Christmas?  I'm getting to old to remember), and we've probably already used it a dozen times!

9.  Baby powder on your feet at the beach helps keep the sand from sticking to your sweaty skin as you make your way back to the car.  This is a helpful hint we just tried out this summer, and whaddya know, it works!  I can't believe we've been tracking sand around all these years.

10.  I made many batches of apple sauce, and later on baby food, by pressing rendered fruits and vegetables through a sieve.  Little did I know that after cooking them, running them through the food processor as good as pulverizes them to a pulp.  Now seriously, this sounds obvious, but there were many years that I didn't treat it as obvious.  Moving on.

11.  I know this is commonplace now, but seriously, I can't get enough of the 110V to 5V USB chargers.  Remember when you had your ONE choice for your cell phone charger, and if you forgot it you were toast?  Now with common charging cables, and most of them compatible with USB plugs, these nifty adapters are incredibly useful.  For that matter, I picked up a couple of the 12V USB chargers for the cigarette lighters in the cars, and now we have no excuse for having a dead cell phone!

12.  And this lesson I seem to have to learn again and again:  Toss the old food rather than eating around it.  I have learned this lesson many times, (which means I haven't learned this lesson, right?)  I don't dare list examples, because it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

What are some of the things you've learned along the way that would have been helpful to know earlier?