Finding the right tool

While my husband has always claimed to be a "tool guy" and does in deed invest in the proper tools for a particular job, I have always been one to try to make do with what is at hand. This trait shows up on my desk where pencils may be found standing in an orange juice can, or my closet where socks are organized in shoe boxes, and in my cooking, where "lasagna" may have a few substitutes -- such as tuna for the ground beef, condensed mushroom soup for the tomato sauce, and egg noodles for the pasta.
For all the monetary savings that this tendency realizes, it does have a cost: I have trouble throwing anything away! Yogurt and cottage cheese cups wash up nicely to serve as food containers for left-overs. Old magazines are stored in cereal boxes with only slight alterations necessary. And as long as we subscribe to the newpaper, I'll never need to purchase rubber bands.
I can be shamed out of practices. My neighbor on Euclid Ave laughed at the memory of her mother washing out bread wrappers for reuse. I smiled but winced as I thought of the plastic bread bags that were clothes pinned at that very moment to a line over the kitchen sink. I gave up this habit and could stand tall when, years later, a married daughter reported that one should never store other food in reused plastic bread bags. "The very idea!"
I believe this to be an inherited trait but in each generation it may be fading slightly. I remember my mother washing out bread bags but laughing with her sister at the memory of her mother's instruction to wash out drinking straws.
There is a certain satisfaction in having put what may have been a "throw-away" to use, but I don't know that the creative urge would be enough to spur it in me without the duty instinct bred by mothers and grandmothers. I wonder if Scarlet O'Hara experienced the pleasure of creating a dress from her drapery.
After attempting to up-load travelogues of two short family excursions, I am deciding that this blog is not exactly the right tool for that sort of thing. But this is the tool that I currently have on hand, so I'll use whatever ingenuity I can muster to make it work. And I'll be pleased if there are family members who enjoy the photos that offer a peek into our lives.