Helpful Hints

Following on for our call for household tips last month (see ‘Eco Corner’ below), we thank Julie Gardiner for supplying us with these innovative ways of using coffee filters - this is the Rethymnon Coffee Morning Bugle, after all! Oh, by the way, in case you were wondering, we couldn’t find a picture of a coffee filter in ‘free to use’ clip art, which is why there is a photo of coffee beans instead.

COFFEE FILTERS: NOT JUST FOR MAKING COFFEE!

1. Cover bowls or dishes when cooking in the microwave. Coffee filters make excellent covers.
2. Clean windows and mirrors. Coffee filters are lint free so they'll leave windows sparkling.
3. Filter broken cork from wine. If you break the cork when opening a wine bottle, filter the wine through a coffee filter.
4. Recycle frying oil. After frying, strain oil through a sieve lined with a coffee filter.
5. Weigh chopped foods. Place chopped ingredients in a coffee filter on a kitchen scale.
6. Hold tacos. Coffee filters make convenient wrappers for messy foods.
7. Stop the soil from leaking out of a plant pot. Line a plant pot with a coffee filter to prevent the soil from going through the drainage holes.
8. Do you think we use expensive strips to wax eyebrows? Use strips of coffee filters instead!
9. Put a few in a plate and put your fried bacon, french fries, chicken fingers, etc. on them. Soaks out all the grease.
10. Keep them in the bathroom. They make great ‘razor-nick’ fixers.

And if any of our readers have any other (printable!) suggestions, we’d love to hear them!

As we reported in our January issue thanks go to Anna Capernaros for suggesting that we make this a regular feature:

Anna writes: ‘Following on from the recycling information that has been given in previous issues of the Bugle, each month we will be publishing suggestions for eco friendly alternatives to commonly used cleaning and health and beauty products using natural products readily available in most store cupboards which have not been tested on animals. Let's save the planet and money too!! Feedback is requested as we have not tested all of these out yet (and we do not guarantee the results!), and please feel free to submit any of your own tips. This month we give you an ‘alternative’ beauty tip. Facemask for clear skin – Take some fresh baking yeast and mix with warm milk into a thick paste. Apply to your face and leave on for 20 minutes. Rinse off with warm water and then splash your face with cold water. This will apparently leave your skin feeling very soft and helps to control spots.

Apart from using the blue and yellow recycling bins for household waste other items can be recycled as follows:

Disposal of broken electrical goods. There is a depot just outside town which will take anything ‘that had a plug on it’ (including washing machines and fridges). Drivers, take the National Road towards Heraklion in Misiria. Turn off the highway after about 100—150 metres, hang a right and you should soon see recycling bins etc. The depot is open from 6am to 3pm on weekdays, and from 6am to 12 noon at weekends. For further information call 28310 57940. For large objects that need collection call 195 from any phone.

Old telephones and small telecoms items. There is a green bin in the entrance of the main OTE office..

Batteries. various places in town including OTE, DEI, Germanos, Marinopoulos and Champion.

Old cars. DRAKOS on the left hand side of the National Road a short way out of Rethymnon. They even pay you as they recycle the spares and give you a paper for tax purposes!

Funky Photo Gallery

Thanks go to Ruth Swan for providing us with this photo from Italy. Now we know that ‘Dudu’ is the name of a Brazilian football player, but where we come from ‘dudu’ is associated with a fragrance that just isn’t terribly nice. So possibly a misguided choice as a name of a perfume?

And here you can see a strange Cretan insect (bizarre spider?) that Anne Stockhill spotted on a wall in Chromonastiri (a village a few kilometres South of Rethymnon) last summer. If any of our readers can tell us more about this fascinating creature, please get in touch!