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.  

Does trashing a trash-picked thing count as trash?

There's a beautiful chair I'd trash picked from the curb near my old home a few years ago.  This chair graced my sewing room in the former home, and then it graced the Command Center in my new home, and then it broke.   Maybe Goldilocks visited, or maybe we were a bit rough in tossing it around when we vacuumed around it, or or maybe it's just really, really old and it finally decided to split, so to speak.

I waited patiently for a new chair to appear, and eventually a "free to take" notice about a glider appeared on our college's electronic bulletin board, so I brought home a replacement chair.   Then I put the beautiful, broken chair out at the curb.   

We've already put our trash cans out at the curb twice this year.  I'm conflicted about how to count the chair.   If I pulled it out of the trash in the first place, does it "count" as trash when I put it back there?