Step N Store, Step Stool Tool Box 20″

I ordered a “Step Stool Tool Box” two days ago and it was supposed to arrive by today, Saturday, but I now see on the Amazon site that it should arrive by tomorrow.

Several days ago I was thinking that I needed a stool so that I could sit on it and clean my floors with a scrub brush or sponge. I had this thought several months ago too, but never found anything that I wanted to order. But, as I was looking through my online images on Amazon Photos recently I saw a picture of a metal stool I had taken a couple of pictures of while in Walmart. It was a well used blue painted metal stool that an employee had left out on the floor and I even turned it on it side to get a better second picture. I think this stool may have been on rollers that when you sat on it, it locked the stool in place.

So a couple of days ago I had been shopping in Publix, perhaps for bread. The nice thing about Publix is that they will let me buy a half loaf of bread or a half package of ciabatta rolls. This is nice because sometimes when I buy a whole package, some of the bread molds before I eat it all.

I was walking out the door and heading toward my car when I happened to see a black woman, who actually looked at first like a “street person.” She was sort of dressed like a street person, and she was carrying a toolbox, or something that looked like a tool box with legs on it in her right hand. My focus immediately went to the thing she was carrying. I realized what it was and so I stopped her to ask about it. I said something like, “Excuse me. May I ask about the box you’re carrying? Is it a stool also?” She was nice enough to stop and answer my questions. It was a stool. It was made of sturdy plastic. She had bought it more than five years ago (and seems like less than 10 years). Part of her telling me how old this purchase was was that she also told me how much it cost “back then,” but that it would probably cost more now. This also told me that it was sturdily constructed. She had bought it at Lowes. She even opened the metal latch and opened the stool top to show the tool box area inside. *I don’t recall what things she had in the toolbox, but I began to think that she might be coming to Publix to perform some maintenance work.

I thanked her for her time and information and she walked toward the store’s front sliding glass doors, and I headed on to my car. Seems like I had purchased two items, but I don’t recall what they were. I think one of them was something I intended to buy, and the other was… and with this rehearsal in my mind, I think I just recalled the second item. I had passed a BOGO display which had Duke’s Mayo on sale. That’s what I had bought. Two jars (plastic jars) of Duke’s Mayonnaise and I probably paid about $2.50 for each. I think most places sell this size of Dukes at about $4.67 per jar.

I put my small plastic bag of groceries in the car and sat down on the seat and closed the door. I immediately went online on my phone. Even though she had said she bought her stool/toolbox at Lowes, I went to Amazon and found several listed. I even found one that looked almost exactly like the one she had been carrying. *I would think that if you make a good product with all the necessary features, then you don’t have to re-create the wheel and the basic design works for a while. What I found, that looked good to me was, “Step N Store, Step Stool Tool Box 20” and the price was $57 plus tax. I ordered this immediately from my phone, which I normally do not do. Most products I order from Amazon are ordered from my Windows laptop (and my easy chair at home). So from the time I had first seen the woman carrying her stool/toolbox and the time I had finished ordering it on my phone, from my car, was probably about 15 minutes or less. And, it was supposed to arrive by Saturday, which I just saw has been postponed till tomorrow, Sunday.

I just watched a couple of reviews of this product on Amazon and one person used it as a step into their camper. Another used it to reach items in higher cabinets in the home. I looks very well made, and the reviews seem to confirm this thought.

**I had thought of getting rid of my old Craftsman toolbox and had said something to Ray about him taking a look and keeping what he wanted and getting rid of the rest. He said he would be willing. If the size of my new stool/toolbox is large enough I might just keep the few tools that I might still need in it. I’m thinking that I might still need a hammer, a wrench or two, a screw driver or two (flat & phillips head).

One tool I purchased several months ago, and have found very useful is a small pen-like box cutter. They came 4 to a pack, in four different colors. I keep one in my car. One beside my easy chair, and one in the kitchen drawer with my can opener, vegetable peeler and apple corer. Not sure, but I may have given one away as a gift. **One nice thing about these cutters is that they have a little locking mechanism that allows you to slide the blade out to a certain length and then, with the same hand, lock the blade into position. You can unlock it with one hand also. They are so handy for opening various packages. A box is delivered from Amazon and a cutter slices right through the sealing tape. I can make four quick slits in the plastic packaging holding bacon, and peel the plastic back to easily remove the bacon.

I made a good number of German Noun Cards with various images on each card representing each noun. In German, it is important to assign the correct “definite article” to each noun. In English we only have one definite article and it is “the.” No matter what we are focusing on we always say “the cat,” “the lawn mower,” or “the reward,” but in German there are three definite articles based upon assigned gender. Masculine nouns have “der” as their definite article. Feminine nouns have “die” as their definite article and neuter words use “das” as their definite article.

I thought that if I needed to learn the specific definite article for each noun individually, that would be almost impossible for me, so I came up with a learning trick. My trick, and it worked for me, was to create noun cards and create a collage of images representing the different nouns on each card. But that’s not the whole trick. What works is to just put nouns on one card that have the same definite article. Only nouns that have the “der” article go on one page, another card only has nouns that have the “die” definite article and on another card only “das” nouns are shown.

The better the image I used for each noun represented that noun “for me,” the more chance I had of remembering it. And, if I laid those nouns out in a pattern that helped me remember them in a certain order, that was also better. But the idea was that I am a visual learner, and I remember images, and so if “die Katze (the cat) image was on a page, and I remember that “die Auster” (the oyster) image was also on that page, and others such as the picture of a lime (die limette) then when I needed to remember a noun, the other nouns on that page helped me remember which definite article they all used. I remembered that card had a cat, an oyster, a lemon, a lime, a scale, a tomato, a shovel, a wheelbarrow, etc. and if I remembered the German noun for each I then remembered that all of those nouns took the feminine definite article, “die.”

It worked and I managed to learn 767 German nouns and their correct definite articles and I had a high retention rate over time. If I could visualize the separate noun cards and remember a key noun’s definite article, e.g. I put “die Katze” on every “die” card, and I put “der Apfel” on every “der” card and I put “das Buch” on every “das” page, and then if I could picture the other nouns that were on a page with a cat, I knew they all had “die” as their definite article. All the nouns that were on a card that had an apple, had “der” as their definite article, and all nouns on a card that were showing a book had “das” as their definite article.

So, for the German noun for the word “catalog” (der Catalog), I found a picture online of the Sear’s Christmas Catalog for 1964. The cover was mostly red. But, I also found images for several of the inside pages of this catalog, and one was a toy page and it included the “Rock’em Sock’em Robots.” I happened to see these catalog images just before I started to write this posting, and one thing I noted was that the inside pages were basically black and white. No color, or at least the toy page I am referencing was a cheap black & white page.

*And, that’s a major difference between 1964, when I was 10 years old, and 2024, when I am 70 years old. You didn’t go online to look at all the toys you might want for Christmas. But, it was fun looking through those black & white pages of the Sear’s Catalog for those items most wanted that Christmas. Maybe a small “Stirling Moss” slot car track & cars for your kitchen table. Or maybe a “Marx Mystery Spaceship” which actually included a gyroscope. A football? Well I usually didn’t have anyone to throw the ball back and forth with, but it was still fun to throw it up in the air and catch it myself. Not sure where or when I bought my Globus Stamp Album and started trying to fill it with used stamps.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, TV was totally different back then. It was analog and not the beautifully detailed, crisp digital images on the large screens. And, it wasn’t even in color until maybe 1968 for the Gibson family. We had a Zenith Black & White portable TV that was fairly heavy. There weren’t all the Cable channels that we are bored with today. There were three major networks, and where we lived we were able to receive ABC and NBC, but CBS which was in Greenville, NC, we couldn’t quite get, so I missed out on “Gun Smoke” and “Bozo the Clown” (after school). TV didn’t run all night. It ended at 12 midnight, and started back up at 6 am each day. And while it was off the air, they ran a “test pattern.” However early on Saturday mornings WRAL Channel 5 would start the first of two Sci-Fi movies at 6 am, and they would run back to back until 9 am. The problem was that about 15 minutes before 9 am, the sun was high enough to start affecting our TV reception from this distant channel. Many was the morning that at about 8:45 am, I would run outside, on our front porch, to adjust our TV antenna. I would then run back inside and this might work for a few minutes, but almost always I would miss the last few minutes of the second movie. That’s a minor frustration when you don’t know what happened to the hero, or the girl, or even how the monsters died or were defeated.

Christmas was special because it didn’t start in October each year. Preparation for Christmas started shortly after Thanksgiving day. And, there were certain shows that played every year, and you knew it was Christmas because they only played briefly before Christmas. Burl Ives would be singing “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas, it’s the best time of the year,” or Charlie Brown or Rudolph the Red Nosed Rain Deer would be saving Christmas once again. Our family didn’t celebrate the religious events and reasons until I was a little older and only seriously after 1977 for me.

So, being able to buy a stool/toolbox from the front seat of my car and looking at the color photos of the item from a web site is very special. Sears is gone, and Amazon is here. But, then one day, Amazon will be gone, and who knows what will take it’s place. I guess life as we know it in 2024 will seem as old fashioned as life in 1924 seemed to us. Well, us being “me” because mom was born in 1915 and she would have been nine years old in ’24.

I have a couple of the “Marx Mystery Space Ship” toys that I bought online several years ago. None of the gyros still work and they each have at least one clear plastic astronauts canopy that is cracked or broken. I also bought a complete set of “The Golden Book Encyclopedias,” several years ago and the set included about 5 atlases, which I did not originally have. But these thin books had tons of color illustrations. Not color photos, but drawings illustrating the various topics. There might be a few color photos but most would be black & white photos. Still, there was something magical about these books that contained so many ideas, and the covers alone were worth the price of admission.

My “Step N Store Toolbox” arrived on Tuesday. Not much to say but that it appears to be “as advertised.” The construction is simple and sturdy and there appears to be adequate space inside to carry necessary household tools or cleaning supplies. There is a plastic insert tray that fits inside and sits at the top, providing a little space on one side for a tall spray bottle. There is plenty of room beneath the tray insert for other storage. The stool is sturdy, and I both sat on it and stood on it. In the kitchen, I used a nearby counter to stable myself as I stepped up on the stool, but I would need my extra “Stepper” exercise step as a pre-step if “I was positioning myself to change a light bulb in the middle of the room.”

I think this is one of those “excellent purchases” that will prove to be worth the small cost.