Fixing a screen

I've neglected the "making stuff with other stuff" genre for a while, so to make up for lost time, here's a little whoop-de-doo about fixing a screen with another screen.   Not super creative, I admit, but satisfying nonetheless.

This was a screen in a door; people* had pushed on the screen to open the door instead of the frame to open the door, and so the screen ripped right at the edge.  

[* "People" could be named, but -- side eye in the direction
of husband --won't be named nonetheless].

Duct tape was not an effective fix, by the way.

Fortunately, I happened to have a screen from an old storm window.  I'd saved a few of these out in the backyard for use in my solar dehydrator, and was very happy to sacrifice a large one to do new duty in the front door.   I had help from a neighbor, the bald-faced hornet who'd been so busy building a residence in the eaves next door.  

Little baldy was actually deceased, poor critter.
I knocked her off the screen.  

The mesh of a screen is held in place in the frame with a string of tubing -- in the picture below you can see a bit of this white tubing I've pulled out from one corner as I start to remove the old screen.  Prewash enjoys the porch in the background. 

I borrowed this tool (below) from a handy friend; it looks a tad like a pizza cutter, but is actually used for squooshing the tubing into the groove.  You can reuse the tubing (at least, that's what I did, and it worked just fine).  

Here's the screen I'm repairing, on the ground, with some of the tubing lying around, and empty screen frame standing, and the replacement screen obviously still way too big for its new frame.   A bit of trimming with scissors fixed it all up.

And that was all!  About 15 or 20 minutes of work, and about $0 spent, and done.  Better yet, the only trash was a bit of left-over tubing (I had the tubing from both screens,  but only needed enough for the one front door screen). The old frame will go to a scrap metal collector we know.  I've rolled up the old nylon screen, and we'll see if Habitat Restore wants it.  Someone with a smaller door than mine might be able to use it, after all!

My flower mask

 Church:  I like to have something to do with my hands while I listen to the sermon.  And, inspired by our congregation's Flower Team that does amazing displays every week, I made a flower mask.

It's multi-layer (four layers of fabric), and the stitches holding the flowers on go only through the first two layers.  

Not everyone at my church wears masks.  Okay, actually, very few people at my church wear masks.  I wear a bunch of over-the-top masks  --- kitty cat with whiskers, mustache mask, appliqued church logo, beaded and buttoned --- and I tell people, "I do this so no-one has to walk in to church being the first or the only one.  If I'm there, they're not alone."    And for whatever reason, there are now more masked parishioners.

I can't wait to wear this one, though.   Next Sunday!

Stunt dog

You know that scene where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid jump off a cliff into the waters far below?

My dog is practicing to be a stunt double, so she can perform that part herself, and to play the role of the jumper who didn't manage to survive the fall.

Look how good she is already . . . 

She's ready for an agent to sign her up.

Adventures with(out?) Bedbugs: A year-plus later

A year or so ago, we had a bedbug infestation in our home.  Here are the previous episodes of that Epic Adventure Story, gathered:

1. Discovery and Naiveté
2. Dracaris, the Heat Gun
3. Professional Options
4. The Incinerator
5. Ozymandius (the last bedbug)

The very very short summary is that we had no idea what we were doing at the beginning, we tried a bunch of different things, and we landed on killing them with special heaters we ordered for $1000, following up with an $800 professional poison treatment that may or may not have been necessary. 

"The Incinerator" (our name), officially called "the Cube".
This picture makes the fan and heater look bigger than they are because
Prewash is so far back; they're about 24" high.

After our Incinerator/Cube heat treatment of the house, we've been bedbug-free with the exception of that last desperate crawl of Ozymandius, the Defiant BedBug, up my bedroom wall.

That is, we were bedbug free until May, when my husband woke me at 4 a.m. one morning to say he saw bugs in his bed.  And indeed, they weren't just any old bugs; they were bedbugs.  Dang it.

Given that this was May and Ozmandius had disappeared the previous August, I don't think that this was the same population, hiding out and waiting to spring forth again. No, I think this was a new infestation. And in talking to our friends, we get the sense that bedbugs really are more common than we'd like to think. 

The stories our friends tell make for some good (if skin-crawling) coffee-time discussions.  Andrea noted that whenever people talk about having bedbugs, they start to lower their voices or even whisper: "we have  . . . bedbugs."  Dan talked about being in Costa Rica, and pouring boiling water on his mattress to try to keep the population low.  Sarah's kids brought home bedbugs from summer camp; she responded by burning their bunkbed, putting diatomaceous earth all over the floor of that room, and sealing the room up for an entire month.  She said she was fortunate the kids didn't have a lot of furniture in there for the bugs to snuggle their way into.  

In our case, this past May we now knew what we were doing, and we already had The Incinerator. Despite the impressive name we give it, this cube really just gently heats a space up to somewhere between 120° and 130° F. Bedbugs die at temperatures above 115° to 120° F, although they have to be kept there for a while, the same way it takes a while for a person to die of heat stroke or hypothermia.  So when my husband noticed the bugs, we hauled out The Incinerator, plugged it in to three different circuit breakers in the house, opened up the closets and drawers to let the heat in there, closed off the room, and went about our daily business. We repeated the day-long heat treatment two days later, just to be sure. I'm delighted to say, the bedbugs are gone.  Murdered in our beds, so to speak. 

This Round Two experience was by no means pleasant;  I think both of us had a bit of insomnia and anxiety at the time about the beasties in our home. On the other hand, it was reassuring to know that we knew what we were doing, and it felt positively triumphant to be able to get rid of these guys in just three days. Bam!

We had talked about selling off the Cube after our first bedbug experience, but now we're determined to hang on to it, both so that we can sleep easier through the night and also so that we can share this amazing  contraption with friends if they ever find themselves in a similar predicament.

Adieu to a shoe

My sister and I, living hundreds of miles apart, had the same apprehension before our different Lasik surgeries to improve our long-distance eye sight.  What each of us worried about -- to the point that we asked our doctors for reassurance -- was, "would our feet get cold?" 

Cold feet is a huge part of my life, due to poor circulation down among the toes, which might or might not be due to a cold wintery day in which my sisters and I were stuck outdoors in a snowstorm and got a bit of frostbite on our feet.  Who knows how it started?  I'm now a person who wears shoes even in 80+ degree weather.  The rest of my body can be steamy warm, and my feet will still be clammy cold.  (So it was a relief to each of us to know we'd be able to wear socks and shoes during the Lasik surgery).  

All that is a lead-in to why it's a big deal to me that my most-favorite-ever pair of summer shoes is nearing the end of their life.  

These shoes had it all:  

• I got them used from a so-called thrift store, an environmental and economic double-win;
• they're a color that matches much of my wardrobe; 
• they are flexible and easy to walk/run/jump in; 
• in fact, on some of my trips out of town I've used these as my running shoes, 
• they have awesome traction so that I can ride a bike in them (making them super awesome compared to most smooth-bottom dress shoes); 
• they are just dressy enough that I can wear them with dresses; 

but most of all . . . 

• they keep my feet warm in the summer.

If I could keep these shoes forever, I would.  Alas and alack, they're nearing the end of their presentable life, and nowadays I use them only as work-around-the-home shoes.  I'm thinking that 2021 might be their last summer of use at all; it's probably not worth the effort to stow them when I put away summer clothes and bring out the winter wear.

Awesome traction underneath;
but now my toes are peeking out the sides.

After months of hunting, I've found a nearly-as-nice successor pair (not quite my color, but I can deal).  

That eases the sadness of saying good-bye, a bit.  Adieu to my shoes.

If I were the Empress of Email . . .

 If I were the Empress of Email  . . . 

• Nobody would be allowed to change topics without actually starting a new thread.  If the subject line of an email reads "Questions about Timely Topic" and the writer happens to include a toss-off line about "We should also chat sometime about the Meandering Matter", then that thread is NOT the place to continue to the Meandering Matter conversation.  Start a new email conversation, with a new email subject line, people!
  
  
• It would be possible to grab an email and move it to a spot on my computer screen where it would STAY.  To heck with the fact that I turn around to grab a cup of coffee only to find three new emails have come in, and now that thing I that was going to respond to --- that thing already mired in a giant list --- has chunked down three spots on the list. If I were the E-mpress, I would  sort my emails into piles, and put the piles in different places, and they would stay where I put them.  Because I would be the Empress of Email, that's why.
  
  
• I would be able to write my own notes on the outside of the email.  I could say, "add this to Guinevere's agenda", or "read the attachments before the meeting", or "ask Makesha about precedents before responding to Tamir".  I wouldn't have to open up the danged email again and hunt through it to remember why it's still mired there in my In-box; I could just glance and see why it's still there.  That's the power of an Empress, after all. 

Here are things I do to cope, while I await Total Domination. 

• I start "reply" drafts whenever I can, with notes to self about what's still needed, to move things out of the in-box.
• I "snooze" things that I'll want to read at leisure, so they leave my in-box during the busy times of day and come back later.
• On evenings and weekends, I make judicious use of "schedule send".   If I compose a reply to someone on Friday night or Saturday, unless the matter is super urgent, the person won't get my reply until Monday morning.   That keeps them from replying back during the weekend, which gives me a little bit of email relief.  (A little bit).  That helps me to feel I'm using out-of-normal-work-hours as a catch-up time rather than as an extension of normal work days.  
• I have a few special mailbox folders with symbols to keep them up at the top:  "@ to print", "# waiting" (good for things like packages that promise to come soon, or emails to which I've responded "I can do this if you give me X, Y, Z information"), and "# appointments" (for agendas and/or info about upcoming meetings).   A new such mailbox -- now that I in a job where all sorts of stuff requires consultation and/or permission -- is "* agenda mtgs" (to hold matters I need to ask The Big Cheese about). 
• Mailbox folders that have info about past projects change to having "z-" at the beginning, to move them down where I don't have to look at them (as in "2021-spring-calculus" has now become "z-2021-spring-calculus").

Bucket list

When we were visiting my sister a few weekends ago, she mentioned that someday she'd like to milk a cow.  "That's on my bucket list," she said.   I-daughter immediately pointed out how appropriate that was ("milk a cow" and "bucket", that is), and -- to entertain ourselves on the drive home later -- I-daughter and I came up with the following Bucket List of our own.   Suggestions for additions are welcome!

Bucket List

• Milk a cow
• Make maple syrup 
• Bail out a boat
• Mix cement
• Pick peaches
• Write a limerick about Nantucket*
• Drum or busk
• Paint something large
• Chicken wings and beer
• Chill champagne
• Sing the "Dear Liza" song (very annoying)
• Put out a fire: bucket brigade

* My favorite in this vein:

There was an old man from Nantucket

Who hid all his cash and a bucket.

His daughter, named Nan,

Ran away with a man,

And as for the bucket, Nantucket.