C a r o l y n D a u g h t e r s

Fun with Champagne Corks

You’ve probably been wondering what to do with the cork after you pull it from the champagne bottle. If you’re like most people, you throw it away. Total waste. Dude, it’s 2012. Recycle, repurpose, reuse. Geez.

Here’s an idea a friend and I tried out the other night. First, use the wire cage to make a seatless chair with a crown cap back and a footrest made of cork. Next, add mood lighting by sticking one end of a piece of wire into the remaining cork and the other end into a candle. Now light the candle. All kidding aside, my friend and I made this furniture by ourselves with hardly any outside help.

Later that same night I was rocking a headache so I popped two Advil. Around 2 a.m., I woke up feeling those two pills stuck in a capillary or wedged somewhere between my throat and my thorax (if the throat and the thorax are the same thing or if the Thorax turns out to be a Dr. Seuss character, I’ll just run with the “stuck in a capillary” theory). My first thought was, man, that hurts — I should get up and take some Advil. One day some doc’s going to x-ray my chest and locate several years’ worth of Advil all piled up in a neat esophageal column.

I’ve been grilling. Lots. The other day I tried to turn on the grill but nothing happened. Turns out I needed to replace the propane tank. Cakewalk, right? Nothing doing. I pulled, prodded, and tugged the tank, hurt my hand, gave up, took an Advil, felt that sucker park itself atop my right lung, decided against taking more Advil to ease the chest pain, got back in the propane game, twisted hard left, and — finally — voila! I then hooked up a new tank. Back. In. Business.

Now don’t be all, duh, how hard is it to change a propane tank? So you’ve been a grilling genius for the past 20 years, so what. Don’t be like that. Don’t hate. Hating is nearly (though not quite) as stupid as throwing out perfectly good champagne corks.