Normally my husband’s metal music makes me want to live in separate homes, but I had to laugh when I heard the lyrics to the Body Count song “Institutionalized 2014.” And before you judge me, no I do not condone the misogyny or xenophobia, but Ice-T’s frustration over his forgotten password was hilarious. If you haven’t heard the song, basically Ice-T can’t log into his email because he forgot his password so he calls customer service for help. The customer service rep sends a new password to Ice-T’s email address that he can’t log into without the password. Catch-22 anyone? Ice-T is the digital Yossarian.

We have all been there. My most recent frustration was trying to get my landline fixed. For the past year or two, occasionally I wouldn’t be able to get a dial tone when I went to make a call. Sometimes the phone would heal itself, and sometimes I had to call for repair. I was keeping the landline in spite of its high cost and quality issues because we had experienced two, week-long episodes without power. Plugging in my antique rotary dial phone and connecting with the world gave me a sense of security that I wanted to keep.

Unfortunately, scheduling repairs had become extremely cumbersome. There were ridiculous hold times and female-sounding voice recognition software that heard “repair landline” and sent me to sales or tech service or billing, none of whom could help me. I decided that it was finally time to cancel the landline. For what it’s worth, she heard that one correctly.

As I’ve gotten older, I appreciate the little things that make life easier the most. Here’s a tip that I hope will make your crochet projects a bit easier too. Working with more than one strand of yarn can lead to tangles. It’s super frustrating. For the Give a Dog a Bone Dog Bowl Mat project, I used five strands of yarn held together. To eliminate the tangling problem, I came up with a low tech solution. I pre-wound the five skeins together onto a spool shaped piece of cardboard that you can see in the picture at the top of this post. Using the pre-wound yarn prevented tangles, although I still had to periodically untwist my work. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was much, much better than passing skeins of yarn over and under each other to undo knots.

Even though I can’t help you with spotty WiFi, I hope that this tip will keep you happily crocheting instead of angrily detangling so that you can use all of your time saved to wait on hold for the cable company.

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