A new leash on life . . .

I've got this song running through my head -- not your usual Christmas song, but a Muppets song.  Apparently, none of my kids nor my husband had ever seen The Muppet Movie, [how?! how!?], so this past Wednesday, when our family Advent calendar flipped open to reveal "Movie Night", we had to rectify that.   

Side note: my running buddy June was raised Mennonite; she says that the Muppet Show was the only show, besides Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons, that her family watched.  Her dad, however, didn't like the Muppet Show, because it was too irreverent.  Be warned. 

My husband was mostly impressed by the guest cameos: Steve Martin, Orson Welles, Richard Pryor, etc etc.   My daughter said, "I kind of recognize some of those people. but they look so much younger than I think of them."  Well, yess.

For me, though, I was almost disappointed by my favorite song from the movie, which comes when Kermit and Ralph commiserate over women.  [Of whom there are disappointingly few in the movie, I must admit].  I was disappointed because for years -- decades even -- I've been singing the song to myself, and then in the movie they left some of my favorite verses out!   

How could that happen?  How could I know more words than Kermit and Ralph did?  It turns out that the sound track I'd listened to while growing up came from the British version of the movie, not the American. 

Through the miracle of the internet, I tracked it down:  "This is a rare clip from the 97-minute UK cut of 'The Muppet Movie', shown only in British theatres in 1979 and once on VHS. This extended scene features additional lyrics not included in the US/international cut." (Available here, with a list of glowing and bubbly compliments.  I'm not the only fan of this song.)

Just feast your ears on these awesome lyrics:

 A collie that's classy,  A laddie needs a lassie;

A lover and wife . .  . gives you a new leash on life!

Merry Christmas and happy holidays.  I'm going to take myself for a walk now.  

My homemade canning jar lid rack for the dishwasher

And here -- because I don't apparently have anything to do -- is a project I've been contemplating a long time, and I finally just gave myself the gift of a half-hour in the basement and made it. 

Behold the canning-jar-lid rack,
sitting happily in the dishwasher,
with canning jar lids along for the ride.

We do a lot of canning jar lid washing, and our dishwasher has no good way to stand them up like plates (does yours?  does anyone's?  no idea).  Apparently, it's possible to buy these racks online, but of course I'm all to-heck-with-buying-stuff, so I thought and thought and thought, and finally came up with this design.  It's inspired both by the existing peg-up structure that the dishwasher already sports so jauntily, and also by the fact that I had a bunch of skinny dowel rods leftover from making soap dish racks last Christmas season. 

When I made this, I got to play with a bunch of my favorite tools:  the cordless drill (so much!), the circular saw to  slice down the base strips, a new orbital sander because -> fun <-, a mallet to pound dowel rod pieces into the holes, and a bolt cutter to snip the dowel rods.  (That last one was not exactly super professional, and it means that the ends of the dowel rods have a crimped appearance, but it's not like gazillions of people are wandering through my kitchen to look at stuff inside my dishwasher, are they?)  The bars along the bottom are held together with really short-snipped dowel-rod pegs.  I like that this is an all-wood thing that is just held together with wood.  

Canners all know that you're not supposed to reuse the metals lids for next year's batch of applesauce or whatever (and then, we confidentially tell you that we reuse them anyway . . . shhhh!).   But the metal lids are perfectly fine for everyday purposes, and the Tattler plastic lids are fine for reusing over and over again in canning projects for decades.    Because of that, and because we use canning jars for storing leftovers, yogurt, butter, pesto, . . . basically, for just about everything . . . we seem to have lots and lots (and lots) of canning jar lids in every load.  

And now, my canning jar lids are upstanding.  yay!

Random thoughts on my computer co-dependency

I once went to a talk by a philosopher/psychologist who studied the way that tools can become an extension of our bodies: canes, glasses, scissors . . . if we get good enough with them, they begin to feel not like separate objects, but extensions of ourselves, he argued. Today my computer went through one of those required software upgrades and had to shut it self down and then reboot, leaving me with 15 or 20 minutes in the middle of the day during which I could not do anything with my computer. I had pored over my to-do list, and the only thing -- the only thing that I could do with my computer inaccessible to me there in the middle of the day -- was to go bug other people who were hard at work and tell them bad jokes. This is an indication that my relationship with my computer is perhaps a little bit too intense.

But at least I know a bunch of bad jokes. 

With my husband off in Madrid, I'm trying to get to bed at 8 and wake at 5. I try to finish up my email at 7 so I have one hour with no blue light, although I don't always succeed. One morning this week, I woke up and had 31 new emails waiting for me at 5 AM. Another morning I woke up and I had 24 new emails. Oh. My. Goodness.

My to-do list as an associate dean is getting so long, and so convoluted, that my paper planner method has become insufficient. Today, I combined my various to-do lists into an Excel spreadsheet, so that I could sort based on urgency or category of the tasks. I had 39 items at the beginning of the day. I had 45 at the end of the day. Well, at least I'm grateful for spreadsheets.

I love my "start dictation" button, and the fact that I can just speak aloud and have my computer write down mostly what I say. When my brain starts dribbling out my ears, I become a terrible typist. Huzzah for dictation!

Ugly shoe patches, preliminary success

It's that time of year again: the time when the weather turns chilly and when my toes turn colors.  I love going running with my friends, but that danged poor circulation in the metatarsal region of the body makes long runs problematic.  Even if the rest of my body is sweating, a long cold-weather run often means my toes are white, yellow, purple, or all three by the time I get home and remove the socks, and then the toes ache and throb for a half-hour.  Youwch.  

The solution is not better socks, or thicker socks, or more socks.  The solution, I'm sure from vast experimentation, involves a different kind of shoe, one that doesn't have mesh right across the toes.  The problem is airflow, not lack of insulation.  A shoe that has a solid upper, rather than [$@$#] mesh upper, makes such a wonderful, wonderful difference.

Alas, running shoes with solid uppers seem to be hard to find.   I have a *great* pair, one that I bought for $1 at a yard sale back in 2009.  The shoes are still useable -- in fact, this past September, I ran my half-marathon in them (whoop!).  But, y'know, shoes that I got in 2009 might not last for another decade.  Maybe not even for another winter, frankly.  And those shoes have a great upper, but the lower has little traction, so they're not great when the snow arrives.

Hunting through the several so-called Thrift Shops in my town, I've found a few other shoes with solid uppers, but they tend to be twice as heavy as my regular running shoes, and when I'm going out for a 1-to-2 hour run, that tiny bit of extra weight makes a big difference.  

So, here's this year's experiment:  shoe patches.  I have a pair of comfy trash-picked running shoes.  They're serviceable, but not my favorites.  Eh, the price for this pair was right, and I figured they'd be exactly the shoes to experiment on.  Here, pictured below, is the experiment:  shoe patches.  

The patch is material from a canvas bag/bag pack that had seen better days.  It was fun trying to lay pieces down across the shoes to get a good shape.  I tried various ways of attaching the patch; I'd run out of shoe-goo, and the hot glue gun technique was a Fail.   So then I grabbed a heavy needle and some button thread, and sewed the patch into the mesh itself.  

The result?  The shoes are definitely less pretty than before, and that's saying something right there.  But the real test is about airflow, and THAT result is much more agreeable: I've had a couple of long-ish cold-weather runs with them, and -- so far -- my toes have finished the runs pretty much the same color as when we all started together.  I'm going to declare preliminary success, and continue the experiment.

If these shoe patches do the trick, I will probably try to uglify some other shoes I like a tad more, ones that are in a little bit better shape, and that would be happy to head out onto the run and meet other shoe friends who are thumping up and down the same hills with us.  

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.

Governing values for a dean (well, for me)

So, there's this mindset I'm discovering in my new job.   Administrators hear a lot of complaints, and in particular, they hear a lot of complaints about the stuff that they themselves are doing or about their own personalities or whatever.   And the way that people deal with the criticism can sometimes be a kind of bunker mentality, to play defense, and to presume that no matter what they do, it's just never going to make people happy.  

This mentality is not me.  But I've been realizing that if I'm going to be working shoulder-to-shoulder with people in bunker mode, or even if I'm working on my own and have to talk with irate faculty/students/parents, I'm going to need a strategy that keeps me sane (optimistic, even) while still being able to work with people who are upset.  

I've decided to use a page from the book of Annie Grace, who runs the 30-day Alcohol Experiment:  to go with "curiosity".   I think (hope?) that I can respond mentally to a rant with a kind of "this emotion/information is not what I expected.  I wonder if there is information I am missing?  Can I figure out the source of the fear/anger?  What about this situation is really the key point to address?"   I've found that going for curiosity keeps me from taking a conversation personally, and it helps me to focus on the topic at hand rather than about my own feelings or my own righteousness.   Ironically, when I'm not trying to make myself feel better or justify my actions, I often end the conversation with both of us feeling better about a path forward.

All that is a lead-in to describing a set of "Governing Values" I've written for myself as a new Associate Dean.  I have a personal set of such Governing Values; I keep this list in my planner and try to re-read them about once a week.  I've been doing that for years.  The dean list is new to me, and we'll see how well it stands up to the experiment of my first year in this position.   At any rate, here goes:

Governing Values for Deputy Deaning

I am curious. This role is a fantastic opportunity for me to learn about myself, the college, and the many people here.

I am actively optimistic.   I bring positive energy that helps all others do their best.  I encourage the people I interact with, and cheer for their accomplishments. 

I am respectful.   I assume, as a default, that people are sincere and that they are capable.  I respond in a timely way to concerns.  I do not gossip or bad-mouth people.

I am consultative, and I use my position to be the voice of those who are not as easily heard.  

These statements are not perfect reflections of the truth --- in particular, when I re-read the sentence "I do not gossip or bad-mouth people" I feel all guilty because actually, I do gossip and bad-mouth people.   But I think they're good aspirations to have, and I hope that by keeping this list close by I can live more and more up to it.  

Will this work?  I dunno.  I guess we'll all have to be curious about how well these values steer me through the year to come.

mailbox construction

A while back, my daughter told me that she missed having a mailbox with a flag -- the kind of flag you raise to let the mail carrier you have outgoing mail in the box, and that the mail carrier lowers to let you know that they've passed by and maybe you have new mail.  Semaphore communication, with time lag.  

I myself was missing having a mail box.  Our new house came equipped with a tiny little mail slot, very low in the front door, which I can only imagine is a total pain for the mail carrier:  open the screen door, squoosh and fold the magazines so they can fit through the tiny slot, bend over low, lift the flap with one hand and push the mail through with the other . . . ugh.

So, I set about making  a pair of mailboxes, one for my kiddo and one for me.  Fortunately, I happened to have exactly the right material.  That is, I had some old wooden doors, the kind that come in various thicknesses because they had thick frames and skinny panels.  I'd disassembled these doors to use the long parts for some other lumber project, and I still had the short parts.  Clearly, clearly, these short parts want to become mailboxes in their next life.  

Et voila!  Here is an unpainted version.  Note the cool pointy-beveled front edge that used to be where the door went from thick to thin.  The flag is made from . . . I think a rod from some old blinds we no longer own and a spare piece of fabric.

I didn't have hinges lying around, so I improvised.  The bottom part of the box has two eye bolts, and the lid has two long screws that stick out through the eye bolts --- kind of like the bolts on the neck of Frankenstein's monster.   This system works well!

My daughter is going to have her front porch repaired and then painted her favorite color, and when that happens I'll use some of the paint to match the mailbox to the porch.  But since I've given her star-wars-themed presents for many of her birthdays, I stuck a Yoda sticker on the unpainted version when I gave it to her.  

Lovely!!!  (???)

Here's the second mailbox, now in service on my own porch.  Our mail carrier seems very happy to use this.  Yay!  And it's nice for us, too, that we no longer have to step on our mail as we walk into the house. 

 

Making a Mud Kitchen

In our latest installment of "Stuff Made Out of Other Stuff", the Miser Maker Conglomerate is pleased to present . . . the Mud Kitchen.

The main materials that went into the Mud Kitchen consist of

• a paint-spattered, plastic dishpan left in a dusty corner of the basement, by the previous owner of my daughter's home;
• four trash-picked garden(?) posts, rescued during a morning run from the fate of landfill burial a few years back, and
• a black wooden desk, put out at the curb by some of my neighbors, and disassembled by me and Prewash with help from my handy cordless drill.   (Actually, Prewash didn't really help very much in the disassembly, but she was very happy to keep me company).  

Oh, and apparently I also used a pair of 2x4's I'd gotten from somewhere.  Why the heck did I have those lying around?  No idea anymore.  

The two aspects that are the most fun of any project like this, as far as I'm concerned, are (1) making everything up as I go along, and (2) power tools.  

The making-everything-up part is an interesting puzzle.  Once I've got everything together, it's kind of obvious how it should work, but when I start, I've just got a pile of odd-sized pieces of wood and a vague idea of what the final product might look like.   I ended up using 12 different scraps of wood, most of which I had to trim down in some way.  

But the power tools, that is just playing -- so much fun.  I got to use my circular saw a bunch for the above-described trimming.   The jigsaw, for making a hole for the dishpan to sit in.  My heat gun, for removing the black paint (also works for frying bedbugs!)  A brand new orbital sander, used here for the first time.   (Where have you been all my life, orbital sander?   I own an inherited belt sander, gifted me by my dad, but as much as I love my dad I'm now a convert to the new tool).  And of course, extensive use of my cordless drill and its many fabulous attachments.  

It took me a month or so to figure out which pieces of scrap wood to use and how to bring them together, but I did successfully solve those puzzles and came up with a configuration I liked.  Last weekend I trundled down into the basement, disassembled the Mud Kitchen, loaded the pieces into the car, drove over to my granddaughter's home, and had her help me reassemble them for use in her back yard.   

Then I got to have fabulous meals:  mud soup, mulch waffles, chocolate cake . . . 

We've got another little maker in the making!

Playing it safe

It turns out, the buried treasure in the walls of my home amounted to 5 pennies and a soggy Jolly Rancher.

Two years ago, we had put in an offer on this house, and the old owners had accepted, and we were all super excited about making the move.  One of the questions I'd asked the owners was, "there's a wall safe in the dining room; what's the combination?"   

The sellers, they didn't know.   One of them told us that her sister-in-law had figured it out once, by listening carefully while spinning the dial.  They found a penny from 1973 inside; they wrote the combination on a scrap of paper, which they subsequently lost.  

Man, I can't imagine tossing the combination to a wall safe in the dining room.  It's such a cool conversation piece!

At any rate, we moved into the home, added a gazillion family photos to the wall around the safe, and then got busy with the school year.  Figuring out the combination has been on my to-do list for two years now, but of course it took a back seat to about 85 million other things that became more urgent once the pandemic struck.  My own efforts to play safe cracker never got me far; I guess I'm just not destined for a life of crime.  (Or I need to scavenge a good stethoscope?)

With vaccinations spreading in my social circles, a few friends of mine eventually took a crack at cracking the combination, but no luck.  So last week, I splurged and called a locksmith.  Because, really, what fun is an antique wall safe if you can't open it up?

The safe dial, hinged out, on its [patented!] three-arm hinge.

Fun facts: my safe was made a hundred years ago, based on a design that (the hinge proudly proclaims) was patented in 1909.   Because the company has been sold during the intervening years, we couldn't just look up the combination in company records, but the locksmith managed to unlock the mysteries of the Dining Room Wall Safe, using sensitive fingers and a bit of luck.  

The back of the [patented!] three-arm hinge had come off the safe, so the locksmith reattached it for me while regaling me with tales of army service in years gone by.  

A hole in the wall,
before we reattached the hinge to the safe.

We checked together that I could reopen the safe on my own (it's a funky sequence of numbers, truly), and I made sure I noted the combination in a few different places.   I paid the locksmith $100.70, although because of the sticky set of five pennies we recovered from inside the safe, the whole process came in at a bargain $100.65.  

Surprisingly enough, there were no pennies from 1973; the most recent one was 2017.  The soggy Jolly Rancher was undated (not to mention, very melty).   (Ew).  

Another image of the hole. 
It looks better with the door back in place.

The sol sticks around . . .

 5:36 to 8:37, that's sunrise to sunset today.  

If you include "civil twilight", it's 5:03 to 9:10.   I love the sunshine of solstice.

Behold, the view from my front porch at 9 p.m., still light out.   

It'll be light at 5 a.m. tomorrow, too, long before the road crews show up to do that work that their sandwich-board signs indicate they're revving the jack-hammers up for.

How my life is coming apart, but on purpose

I'm slowly and methodically cleaning out my math office, getting ready to move to our big old administrative building.  And as part of this cleaning, I'm going through my 5-drawer filing cabinet, trying to think about what papers I might realistically actually ever look at again.

The answer seems to be, if I do think about it, "not a lot".   I've been teaching math here for almost three decades.  I've saved syllabi, grade sheets, exams, worksheets, . . . will I ever look at any of these again?  Probably not.   I've been on committees that wrote reports.  I've led workshops for other mathematicians.  So much paper from my past, paper that's not realistically likely to be a part of my future. 

So I've been cleaning out my file drawers, bit by bit.  Because it's me, I can't just chuck it all: the idea of creating so much trash would wig me out.  Instead, I've been pulling apart my life, little by little, separating things into piles.

Here's the main sorting center. 

Going clockwise-ish around the photo from the bottom left corner I see:

• a chair for sitting in,
• now-empty hanging folders,
• now-empty manilla folders, in good enough shape to reuse,
• colored printer paper with one side blank for reuse in other projects
• a six-inch stack of white printer paper with one side blank for reuse in other projects (ah, "precyled" paper!)
• an amazing collection of paper clips and binder clips, 
• a box of to-be-recycled printer paper (both sides already used)
• a small bankers box of paper that I might actually want to look at again, so I'll move it with me.

Not pictured is another box of mixed paper to recycle, and another giant box of to-be-recycled printer paper that already filled up, so that the photo above shows the second, not first, such box.  

Also not pictured is a pile of my past calculus exams, which I'll gift to our new visiting faculty members, which they can use (or not) to come up with exams of their own, or to offer to students as study guides.  I feel like that might actually be a helpful gift.  

I've finished about half of the filing cabinet now, maybe a tad more.  I'm about to get to the section with papers I've written, which will be a little bit harder to pare down, but still has vast potential for winnowing.  (I really, really, do not need draft copies of papers that I have final, formal versions of.  I probably don't even need paper copies of the final versions, but I bet I'll keep a copy of each paper anyway because . . . well, not sure, but I probably will).

This sorting, not surprisingly, takes a bunch of time.  But it feels good to do it.  It reminds me of what I've heard about something called "Swedish Death Cleaning", which I admit I don't actually know very well so I might have the description wrong, but what I seem to have heard is that this is the cleaning that elderly parents do of their own homes so the kids don't have to go through so much stuff after the parents die.  For me, this paper sorting feels like I'm saving some as-yet-unknown person (a family member, a colleague, who knows?) a bunch of headache of having to wonder which of these papers might be relevant to anyone else.  

money well spent . . . ceiling fan fixture

 Here's the view from my bed this morning, looking up.  

The ceiling fixture used to be a dim little light fixture whose power cord was threaded through a little pencil hole in the plaster, and that was screwed directly into the plaster.  Last summer, I kept my room cool (?) with a window fan, which was noisy, and promised myself I'd install that ceiling fan soon.   But that was before I realized there was no fixture box up there.

At any rate, I hired my favorite team of household do-everything guys, Nate and Todd.  They sliced holes in the plaster, installed a solid fixture box that wouldn't come crashing down on my head, ran a few modern wires through the ceiling, installed a new switched outlet and switch in another part of the room so we could add reading lamps, and repaired the plaster.  Oh, and then they hung the fan because even though I could do that part, they were already there.  

It was a bit pricey (almost, but not quite, $1000).  But I love my ceiling fan; it's beautiful and quiet and makes sleeping in hot weather so much nicer.  

blanket words

The other night, I was lying in bed with random thoughts flitting through my brain -- the way they do when my brain has decided that it's worked hard during the day and gets to have a party for a little while --  when my brain seemed to seize hold of the realization that the word "blanket" must come from the root word for "white" (Spanish: blanca/blanco;  French:  blanche/blanc).  When we put a blanket on a bed, are we white-washing it?  A blanket of snow seems so much more meaningful once you can think of it as "a whiteness of snow".

The next day, with my brain back in service to the rest of my body, I did a bit of etymology hunting.  It turns out that, indeed, blankets were originally made of all-white linen, there being few ways to dye cloth back in the day.   So, we'd say something like "throw that white thing on the bed", and "that white thing" became every other thing we'd cover ourselves with at night.   When he was very young, N-son (who didn't watch TV then) saw a red stuffed animal that someone told him was "Elmo", and from then on he named all stuffed animals "Elmo", including the beloved black-and-white panda bear he still has now that he's 21.  If Elmo can be a panda, just about anything linen can be a blanket.

"Linen", by the way, comes from the same word that gave us "line": ropes and thread were made from flax (Latin: linum).  

Maybe I was thinking about this because my sister recently gifted me with a quilt she'd made herself.   ("Quilt" comes to us from Middle English and before that Latin, culcita, the same root word that gives us cushion; indeed, "quilts" have moved up in the world, having originally been the mattresses/cushions we slept on rather than the puffy blankets we lie under).   This quilt is anything but white; it blankets the bed without being anything like a blank canvas.  

Prewash lies on her own "quilt"; a linen blanket that
I sewed into a pocket cushion stuffed with two old pillows.  

Our mother, when Alzheimer's disease started affecting her, responded by labelling everything-but-everything in the house with helpful sticky notes.   My sisters and I found these everywhere as we helped my father clean up her thing after she died.  These notes were a testament to her powers of organization and attention to detail, as well as a sadly comical picture of the losing battle:  "a green necklace from our trip to Alaska; no longer in this box"; "Pieces of string too small to save".   My sister named her quilt in homage to that last sticky note; she describes it as a quilt made of "pieces of fabric too small to save".  

It's the perfect quilt for a treasure hunt when my kids or grandkids come over.  Can you find . . . the super hero? an owl?  roses? horses?  butterflies? monkeys?  hearts?  And it's so cheery.  Cheery enough that when my body starts going to sleep but my brain is still partying, apparently that's where my brain goes to hang out.  Thanks, sister!

Did I fix my bricks? I don't know . . .

I guess I'd be in trouble if the Big Bad Wolf came by, since -- even though my home is made of bricks -- huffing and puffing seems to be bringing it down.  Or, rather, one part of one brick wall inside my house has been flaky for a while. 

Here's the wall: it's in a room we call The Library; it's a wall we share with our neighbors (an interior, not exterior wall, therefore).   Clearly there's some kind of difference between left and right, and I don't actually know the architectural reasons for why those two sides are different.*   

*update:  It's possible there's a moisture source we'll have to fix --- I just double-checked, and it turns out that that portion of the wall is actually shared with my neighbor's porch, not interior space, so there might be a longer term issue.   Eh, we'll figure it out.

At any rate, the right side seems generally fine, but the left side has been gently crumbly for a while now.  Above and below are photos I took last September (2020).   It looks like someone tried to seal the brick with some kind of (varnish?) something, and it was flaking off, and the bricks underneath were likewise kind of soft and crumbly.

I send these photos to my favorite home repair team, Nate and Todd.  Is this something they felt comfortable dealing with?

They referred me to one of the masons they work with.  I forwarded the pictures along to the mason, who came over sometime early fall 2020 for a [pandemically moderated, masked] in-person inspection and consultation.   He suggested I could probably take care of it myself.   I should sand the bricks down ("like, with my belt sander and regular sandpaper?"  yes), and then paint the bricks with a sealant from the local stone supply store. The dust from the bricks would be a hassle -- cover everything, open the window, grab a big fan, wear a mask, etc.  ("Ooh, I already have masks!").

Nate and Todd agreed this job could well be feasible to do on my own.  They suggested wire brushes instead of a belt sander, and they regaled me with the proper use of multiple drop cloths and ways to seal off the room from other, cleaner, parts of the house because of brick dust.  I stored away the knowledge and thought about dealing with this between semesters, in December . . . but December came and went, and so the project lingered, and the brick flaked gently, and we eventually arrived at May.

Last weekend, fully vaccinated and having a bit (= a lot) more freedom in my schedule than I did during classes, I finally went to the stone supply store.   They scoffed at the idea of sanding or scrubbing the brick, and offered me a slightly different kind of sealant than the mason had suggested.   I felt like a patient getting second and third opinions.

You know how sometimes you put something off forEVER because you think it's going to be a major project, and then it turns into Not a Big Deal?  I think, all told, working on the wall took a bit over one hour, maybe 2 hours, tops.   Much better than the 2- to 3-day project I'd envisioned.

A bunch of that time was spent hauling stuff around.  Our home is very linear, so getting stuff from the basement up to the second floor involves a lot of walking --- zigzagging, but in an upward direction, as we walk long hallways from one stair to the next.   I brought up the shop vac, and a step stool, and a bunch of painter's tarps.  

I started by reading the instructions on the sealant, and then started gently removing the most egregious flakes.  It didn't take long before I realize  that opinion #3 wouldn't cut it; the wall still had layers of flaky white varnish that were incompatible with sealing the brick.  Since I didn't have wire brushes, I grabbed the belt sander, put tarps all-the-heck-over-everything, and got to work removing the flakiest stuff.  The dust wasn't nearly as miserable as I'd feared it would be, and the shop vac was a champ at cleaning it up.   And then I sprayed the sealant on, and let it dry.  Then I packed everything up and zig-zagged it back down to the basement.

Will this work?  No idea.  The wall definitely looks much better right now than it did a few days ago, and it's not snowing on the bed anymore.   

* Now that I know the exterior side fo the brick needs work too, I'll get back in touch with the mason again.  In the meanwhile,   $80 worth of sealant and a few hours of my own time seems like a reasonable first attempt to avoid a more costly and elaborate procedure. 

Covid-19 in my corner of the world

In my little city, the number of daily deaths is now down to "only" about one or two a day, and the number of new daily diagnosed cases is in double digits, down from triple digits.

One of my running buddies is from a family that is highly vaccine hesitant.   She was a bit uncertain herself, and so she decided to talk to her doctor about whether to get vaccinated.   (I have to say, I'm really impressed that she decided to go that route instead of chasing internet stories or friend-sourcing her info; it's so easy to fall into confirmation bias, especially these days.)

After the conversation with her doctor, she made the further choice to stop talking about vaccines with her mom until she herself had made it through the process.  She got both shots with almost no side effects, and as she rounded the plus-two-weeks corner, she was getting ready to tell her parents about her experience.   But then both her mom and dad came down with Covid-19, and her dad's case is severe enough that even after being released from the hospital, he's still on oxygen at home.  So she figured now isn't exactly the best time to say, "hey, mom and dad!  Guess what I did in spite of you?".

Her dad, after a week or two, is slowly coming off of full-time oxygen needs.  My friend just did her second half-marathon this month. Not like those two things are related at all; I'm just so impressed with her stamina and with her ways of navigating choices in the world.

Window shade thingies

Here's the latest installment of "stuff made out of other stuff".  I keep being amazed at how incredibly satisfying I find it to solve a problem using a bunch of creativity (and also a bunch of scrap that happens to be lying around), and this is my most recent problem-solving happiness.

Here's the problem to solve:  the main window in our Kitchen of Many Delights faces west, which means that during about seven months each year, the evening sun shines right in and blinds the cook.   When I'm the cook, I don't mind; I love having the sun in my face, even if it's so intense I have to squint and turn away.  But my husband, not so much; for him it's like being interrogated by enemy operatives about where the Resistance is planning to sauté onions next.  Or something.  At any rate, my husband is the main Dinner-Maker these days, and it seems unfair to have him tortured just so he can get noodles and salad on the table for his loving wife.

The main window in the Kitchen of Many Delights is very oddly located in a well that sits behind the kitchen sink.  It means that we can't easily get to the window.  In fact, in order to hang a curtain there last summer, I had to get a step stool, climb up onto the counter, and then balance carefully while I reached across the well beyond the sink.  Hanging a curtain is possible, but it's not a feasible thing to open and shut a curtain often; adjusting the curtain requires step stools and clambering.

Last summer, we just hung a curtain all summer long, which suited my husband just fine, but left me a bit sad, because I'm such a sunlight fanatic.  

Okay, so that's the problem.  Ready for the solution?  Scrap lumber, leftover paint, and a bunch of nails rescued from some trash-picked furniture that I'd disassembled.  I used these to make shade thingie.  (I'm sure there's a name for these, but I haven't been introduced, sorry).

Here's the new view from inside the Kitchen of Many Delights, looking out.  

These slats block the sun from shining straight in like a torture-interrogation device, but they let light in indirectly.  Lovely!

Here's the view from the outside.   Can you tell that every individual slat come from a different kind of board (they're different thicknesses, different textures, etc)?  I bet you can't.  And since this is on the side of the house that no one can see from the street, I bet no one else will be able to tell that either . . . not that I'd care if they did.  The side bars were a large rescued former fence board that I zig-zag cut with the jigsaw; you can see that I ran out of material for the bottom slats, but the slats that are already there are quite enough to do the job, so I'm fine with stopping there.

And that's my latest happiness project, costing $0 and giving me the chance to make a mess with a few of my power tools.  Yes!

Three thoughts on . . . binder clips

Thought number one:  A single string and a bunch of binder clips team up to make a pretty good substitute for a bulletin board. 

I have an exposed brick wall in my Command Center, and I don't really want to cover it up with a bulletin board, but I also want a place to post things. So for the past few years, I've had just a single strand of rope across the wall, and I've "pinned" papers to that with binder clips. You can still see the string underneath my twine-bulletin board below.

Binder clips are not only good for paper, they're also good for grabbing onto things that normally don't hang (like a tube of toothpaste or a stuffed animal), and turning it into something you can hang from a hook, if you like hooks . . . which I do, as you can tell from this old "hang it all" post.

Thought number two: Thank goodness that binder clips don't snag on other papers (like paper clips do), or let things fall out (like file folders do). 

I really like using binder clips to organize related stacks of papers --- for example the first set of student essays, the second set of student essays, etc.--- and then lay these stacks flat on a shelf.   In the place of a file folder tab, I just label another small scrap of paper that I fold over the exposed edge, like a mini wrapper, and attach it with a binder clip.

Thought number three: binder clips are almost indefinitely reusable. 

I guess being me, I kind of had to say that. Hooray for things you can use in multiple ways, and use over and over again!

My dog doesn't eat my shoes

Our previous dog, Miser Dog, ate bike gloves (not the cheap ones, but my husband's expensive $50 gloves, but only the right hand.  Always the right hand.  My husband was left . . . so to speak . . . with a bunch of "on the other hand" gloves).  Miser Dog also loved destroying my undergarments.  Oog.

Prewash chewed up a bunch of things when we first brought her home four year ago . . . the toilet plunger was her most exotic chew toy.  But she's morphed into a particularly non-destructive pooch.

Here, for example, was the photo I snapped as I woke up one morning earlier this week.  She was contentedly snoozing near my bed, half on her own bed, with my completely un-molested pandemic slippers lying near by.   

There are so many things we take for granted in life, and it's good to pause every once in a while to remember to be grateful for those things that seem unremarkable . . . and this morning, I'm remembering to be glad that my dog doesn't eat my homework or my shoes or my underwear.   In fact, even the toilet plungers have been spared in recent years.  

Life is good.

A twine bulletin board

For the latest installment of "Stuff I made with stuff I had", I bring you a twine bulletin board.

I had been helping N-son clean out a rather messy situation, and decided it was time to retire a painting that one of his older sisters had given him more than a decade ago.   It was one of those canvas things stretched across a wooden frame, the kind you can buy in any art store or craft store, and in N-son's case, the canvas had acquired punch holes and rips.  

So, I removed the canvas from the frame with my staple remover.  I stuck the frame in a corner for a few weeks pondering what to do with it, hoping that a useful inspiration would strike.   

Eventually, inspiration did strike, and so I grabbed my beloved cordless drill, and made holes in the frame every 1.5 inches.  I had happened to have a large spool of garden (?) twine that had been sitting in my "useful junk" box for years.   I threaded that twine through the holes, doing my best to keep things tight, and . . . 

. . . Voila!  I have a bulletin board that complements my brick wall really nicely.  (Instead of push pins, I use binder clips).  

coming clean: confessions on a vacuum

My husband had a birthday this week, and to celebrate I bought him a vacuum cleaner.  

I feel like doing so loses me so much of my "cred" as a Miser Mom.  We already have two perfectly functional canister vacuum cleaners --- they're old, and have required a bit of service (which we got from a local repair guy), but they work.  We also have a roomba, which was a splurge itself.  Heck, given that it's me writing this, I should add that we have a trio of wooden-handled brooms, too, and we could probably do a decent job of cleaning much of the house with no electrical assistance at all.  

So purchasing a new vacuum cleaner is out of character for me, both because of "purchasing" and because of "new"  . . . buying this particular gift makes me feel a bit like I'm living a double identity.  My husband really doesn't like the old canister vacuums -- he finds them heavy and clunky and cumbersome, but he just figured that dealing with them was part of being married to me, much like cooking without garlic is part of what I accept about being married to him.  

But wait, there's more.  It wasn't just that I kind of generically purchased some random new machine; I followed the thread of a forum in which people enthused about household objects, and decided to take their advice and buy a cordless, stick vacuum cleaner that cost a bit over $800.  Serious money, that.  When I mentioned to my guy that I was thinking about getting him a vacuum cleaner for his birthday, he lit up; when I mentioned which one and what price, he almost staggered.  And then he told the kids, and they kind of staggered (except I-daughter, who said, "but this is what you do:  you're frugal most of the time so you can spend your money on things that you really want to spend it on.").  

In action!

At any rate, this does feel a bit like an existential experience for me, which I know is not the way that most people approach vacuum cleaners.  There it is: I loved keeping our old canister vacuum cleaners going, and my husband didn't love it, and so now we have a very, very fancy and very modern vacuum cleaner instead.

A few other random thoughts:

We've donated the canister vacuums to our local refugee resettlement organization, but we're keeping the robot vacuum (and of course, the brooms!).  

My husband has a friend who is a monk, and whose life makes my own life look totally hedonistic, who told my husband that he'd heard that it was an insult for married people to buy each other gifts that come with an electric cord.  What can I say?  It's a cordless vacuum cleaner?

I actually do love pulling out this vacuum cleaner and just doing a quick clean-up of stuff; it's much easier to move around than the canister ones, I have to admit.  Also, when you release the trigger to turn it off, the machine makes a noice that sounds like a cross between a purr, a hum, and "yum", which is a truly delightful noise.