This has got to be one of the simplest and most common-sense tips I've ever written about. In fact, I often wonder why most people don't know about this tip. After you wash a set of linens, store them in one of the pillowcases. By doing this you'll ensure that you never have mismatched linens. (It's the simple tips that I love the most).

When you send a get-well card to a friend in the hospital, make sure that you put your friend's home address on the return part of the envelope. By doing this, you'll ensure that the card reaches your friend even if he's already left the hospital. (Contributed by Jere Randall).

There's a great new show on The Food Network called "Food Detectives." It's hosted by Ted Allen (who's a nut) and uses Popular Science magazine as its technical resource. The show recently experimented to see which home remedy was the best in removing chewing gum from hair. Being The Tip Man, I already knew all of the home remedies, but I didn't know which method worked the best. OK, let me stop here for a minute to say that I test almost all of my tips for you people except the intuitively obvious ones. This has caused some suffering on my part but I do it for my readers and the column. Having said that, I refuse to put gum in my hair to answer the question of which method is better. The Food Detectives got four suckers/participants to do the testing for them. What were the results? Cooking oil worked the best. But let me add a tip that the TV show didn't mention. If you have trouble getting the cooking oil out of your hair, use laundry detergent as shampoo. Just make sure you rinse all of the detergent out of your hair when you're done.

A couple of weeks ago, I shared some rubberized shelf liner tips with you. (This stuff almost has as many uses as duct tape). Midge Detwiler e-mailed me some shelf liner tips of her own:

• Use it in a baby's high chair to keep the baby from sliding down.
• Use it as a table cloth on your pontoon boat. It will keep everything from sliding.
• When transporting a cake in your car, put the cake pan on top of shelf liner first. Midge says the cake won't move even when going up and down hills!

Tim Thompson lives in Gainesville. E-mail Tim your ideas for tips, tools or tricks.