 Good morning, Hank, it's Tuesday. As you may be aware, the internet is bursting with life hacks that either do not work or do not improve your life, but today I'm gonna share with you seven life hacks, all of which I learned from my wife, all of which work, and all of which have dramatically improved my life. Okay, so first, this is our bed, and it is amazing not because, like, the mattress is fancy or whatever, but because the sheets are clean. For much of my 20s, I was profoundly unhappy, and in retrospect, a legitimately large part of the problem was that I was not changing my bed sheets often enough. Listen, the world contains many sensorial wonders, but none is as pure as getting into a bed with clean sheets. I don't want to overstate this or anything, but if you change your sheets once a week, every week of your life will feature at least a few moments of absolute splendor. Also, semi-related, when I was in my teens and 20s, I believed that it was unnecessary to launder bath towels, because since they were cleaning off my newly bathed body, they were getting cleaner with each use, that worldview is incorrect. Okay, second, the double loop. If you tie your shoes like this with a double loop, you don't have the annoyance of double knots, but also your shoes will never come untied. It's a game-changer, and it takes, like, two extra seconds. Third, soap. When you're down to a little bit of soap and it's sliding through your hands and splitting into pieces and et cetera, combine that little bit of soap with a new bar of soap so that no soap is lost or wasted. Fourth, kitchen sponges. Oh, God, Hank, kitchen sponges. So the average well-used kitchen sponge contains around 82 billion bacteria per cubic inch, which, according to the author of one study, is the same density of bacteria you can find in human stool samples. Sponges are usually warm and wet and full of air pockets, which makes them great breeding grounds for bacteria, and so I used to put them in the dishwasher to try to sterilize them, but it turns out this might make the problem worse. So now we mostly use rags for cleaning, and when we do use sponges, we dispose of them when they start to stink, as recommended by researchers. Speaking of things you shouldn't put in the dishwasher, wooden cutting boards, which until I met Sarah, I thought just fell apart in the natural order of things, but it turns out only fell apart when you put them in the dishwasher. Before we move on, let's pause to give thanks to Josephine Cochran, inventor of the automatic dishwasher, a tool that has saved literally millions of human work hours at only the small cost of destroying our wooden cutting boards and failing to sterilize our sponges. Right, okay, next, put stuff on your walls. For many years I lived in apartments with bare walls because I thought decoration was an unnecessary expense, but in fact, decoration can be very cheap. You can put up album art you like, for instance, or follow along with this art assignment video to make your own prints, or go to student art shows at local arts organizations, and also, if like me, you spend a lot of time inside, it really enriches your life. Like, I've been looking at this photograph of three farmers on their way to a dance for a long time, and it never gets old, nor do these pictures of the artist Nina Kachadorian recreating Renaissance portraiture in an airplane bathroom using nothing but materials from the plane. Lastly, after Sarah and I got married, we went on a honeymoon in the Caribbean, and look, the real life hacks are not about how to maximize soap usage or whatever, they're about how to connect more deeply with the world and the people who inhabit it, but that's not the life hack I learned on my honeymoon. What happened was that I brought a couple beers down to the beach, but forgot a bottle opener, so Sarah proceeded to use her two-day-old wedding ring to open the bottles. True love. Hank, I'll see you on Friday.