Yesterday I was working on a programming project with my laptop, on the counter, and I wanted to write some stuff down. There happened to be a pencil right there on the counter, so I grabbed it and looked for a writing surface. Then the idea struck me - use the counter itself!

It made for a great writing surface - big enough for me to take all sorts of notes. The downside was the cleaning up. An eraser got most of it out (with some effort), but, if you look hard enough, you'll see the marks that the eraser made.

But the convenience by far made up for the pain in cleaning. I'm thinking about getting a pane of glass to put over my counter, and using a grease pencil on that. Convenient, and easy to clean up.