Lily’s death is hitting me harder than I anticipated. It was easy enough to stay distracted over the weekend, but now that I’m home alone on maternity leave I keep thinking about my kitty. In an effort to stay distracted, I’m throwing myself into my nesting projects.

Over the weekend Nicole brought the phone from her play kitchen to me complaining that it was “broken”! The phone was still working, but the sound had faded. I expected the batteries were nearly drained from frequent use. Turns out they were starting to corrode! Back in our costco days we had stocked up on what seemed like a life time supply of batteries. That was over half a decade ago. The ones in the phone were just passing the expiration date. Thankfully I had removed the batteries from all of Nicole’s baby toys since inactivity is the fastest path to corrosion. But her current toys? I knew we had used batteries from those same costco giant packs, and now viewed them as ticking corrosion time bombs. So today I opened up every single battery powered toy to check. Fortunately no other batteries were starting to corrode, but I did through out some near expired ones. I know, so not frugal of me. Better than than lose the toy, though.

Since I didn’t want to go through this exercise every year, I decided to make a chart.

Now I know approximately how many batteries are close to expiring. I can sort by date & type to get a sense of how many batteries I’ll need to stock my box with. Or at least a minimum count. I still expect that most batteries will be drained long before they reach their expiration.

Posted in For the Home | Tags: Organizational Goodness