Miser family update, kitchen windows

 Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Family household.  These September days are full of pane . . . but it's the good kind of pane, thanks to our kitchen windows.

Early in the week, my husband and N-son took a trip to tour the USS New Jersey.  Along the way they stopped for lunch and snapped the first photo above, serendipitously fitting right into the upcoming Family Fun Foto (although prompting me to remark, "oh yeah! I forgot that sometimes people eat at restaurants!")

K-daughter shows a lovely corner window in her kitchen, with "Dried flowers, mama's wooden bowl and A-child's LOVE sign we made when she was 3 weeks old "

Y lives in the city, and shows us "Our window that mirrors the neighbors. Sometimes we flag each other down and chat while we're in our respective kitchens."

I-daughter also has nearby neighbors, and shows us "The kitchen window: where my plants live" . . . "(Also where my plants go to die)"   I just want to say, she gets that from me!

Guess who sent the last picture in the top row?  L1's photo reminds me of a Patti Page song my mom used to sing to me, and that I sing to Prewash constantly:  

L2 shows us her amazing thrift scores: "The nearest window to my kitchen, And the mini trampoline I got at a yard sale the other day . . . $2 "  Oh, yeah.

My sister-in-law shows us how she is bringing in dinner by her window in NH (nyum!), and how her husband and his bestie hang out at their kitchen window in Las Vegas.  

N-son, like Y, says, "My kitchen window is good for having conversations out of and is a great source of air when I cook".

And me, I show both my kitchen windows. The wide short one is new; we put it in just this summer in the south wall, with an exhaust fan that is useful for cooking (for example, when you use the broiler to make bread, and the the instant pot to make vegetables, and you forget about the bread, and then turn on the exhaust fan to get rid of the smoke). And the last window in this series was the already existing kitchen window . . . in a well behind the sink, because . . . well, who knows WHAT the designers were thinking?

If you look out a kitchen (or other) window around these parts, what might you see?  You might see A-child pedaling along "just like Uncle N-son", she says.  

Or you might see I-daughter sporting a shawl she just knit herself, from yard she spun herself.  

Or you might see me walking on a tightrope that someone strung up between trees in our park.  I used N-son's hand for a while, . . . 

. . . and then I didn't use his hand, at which point I decided to get down, ever so elegantly and dignifiedly. Ever so.   

And that's the news from our family, which continues to be transparent in our adventures.  May you and yours stay safe and find soft landings when the rope that you're on decides it's time for everyone to dismount.  

Taking attendance on Zoom

There are about a gazillion reasons why in-person classes are easier and more productive than Zoom classes . . . but I've discovered one (1!) way in which doing something via Zoom is easier.

I've started taking attendance via the Chat tool. At some point during each class, when I feel it's good to see if we're all present (and paying attention), I ask everyone a simple and fun-ish question (favorite breakfast food, a good way to relax, etc). I have the students type their answers (but not submit it) into the chat, and then we ALL submit at the same time. [I think this takes pressure off of worrying that people will judge what you write]. 

After the meeting, I cut-and-paste the chat into a spreadsheet, and  then I sort. All the "From Peter to you", "From Sylvia to you" lines come in one bundle, alphabetized by first name, so it is easy to see who was there and who wasn't.

I also snagged a cool idea from the MAA (Math Association of America) listserve; I've got a template email for students who seem to be missing from class.   It essentially says, "I see you missed class; I hope everything's okay.  If you need technical help, remember you can go here. If you need health or counseling help, you can go here; if you are getting overwhelmed, you can go here.  And as a reminder, here's our class attendance policy with how you ought to catch up on the stuff you missed."

So, there's that. 

Miser Family update: family footage edition

Life continues to be footloose and fancy free in the Miser Family household.   And just to share with you a bit of the family footage, I include the fun foto collage of the week!

In the top row, we have feet at work and play:

• I-daughter: These are not my feet. This is a non-representative sample of the feet at a rally/march on Wednesday
• N-son:  Resting up from a job hanging doors for a shipping transfer station
• L1: Sneakers at the lake. Just finished working out with these views
• Guinness got all feet in the air. He likes to use his feet as catapults

In the second row, we get to bare feet, starting off with bear feet, and wind up with stocking-feet:

• L1: We also went to a wild refuge today where the bears wouldn't always keep four paws on the floor
• K-daughter: B-child and I usually chill like this because she enjoys sleeping on my lap.
• L2:  Last time before my toes go into hibernation
• I-daughter: These are all the socks I've finished this year (minus the 2 pairs I already gave away)
  [a proud mother comments: this week was really tricky for I-daughter. She told me she couldn't decide: show the socks she's currently working on? The socks she made this year? All the socks she's ever made and hung onto? Should she arrange the socks in the shape of a giant sock? This photo was not an easy decision for her!]
• And finally, my husband and I are having socks.

And in the final row, we trot out our finest and fanciest:

• My sister-in-law:  These are the fanciest shoes I own in Las Vegas (L) and my New Hampshire fancies (R).
• K-daughter: A-child's feetsies!
• Y: This pic is the only use I've gotten out of these shoes because I am walking around the hospital, going hiking on weekends, and playing piano.

I-daughter really grooved to the foot theme.  She writes:

Story time: every once in a while things happen which make me happy that my feet are my main mode of transportation (and I don't need to take care of a needy/expensive vehicle). Notable example: when we had 4 feet of snow and all the cars were stuck.

More recently: twice this week a driver hit the cars parked on my block. No injuries that I know of, but lots of loud noise and damaged vehicles, 

I'm sorry for the people who have to take care of their cars now. My feet are fine 👍, 

What else is happening?  We're very much enjoying the fabulous weather that has been coming our way.  I've harvested three cucumbers (if you can call them that) from my "garden", which is really dirt in a bunch of empty paint cans, sitting on my rather shady porch.

Jealous, anyone?  

I'm also starting to get into the groove of teaching students who are on the other side of the world from me.  At least, I think I'm starting to get the hang of it.  This week they'll have their first midterm, and I know that'll be an interesting feedback loop for all of us.  

My guy went to the Philadelphia rally in memory of/in protest of the death of Jacob Blake.  He said it was one of the most organized, carefully put-together rallies he's seen.  He's also ridden his bike across even more New York City bridges.  Activism, and active leisure.  

And that's the low-down from our family, which continues to put our best foot forward in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly grounded.

Adventures with BedBugs, Episode 5

 Is it time to start collecting the bedbug adventures together?  Maybe it is time.  Here are the previous episodes, gathered.

1. Discovery and Naiveté
2. Dracaris, the Heat Gun
3. Professional Options
4. The Incinerator

The past few weeks have taught me that bedbugs have two evil superpowers: 

• One, although it's easy to heat a particular bedbug to death,  they are famously persistent and hard to kill as an entire population, so that a battle of attrition won't work against them.   It's all-or-nothing, baby.  
• Two, if they bug you (so to speak), they're most likely to do it at night, so that even on the nights they're not (so to speak) bugging you, it's still creepy and hard to sleep.   

Persistence and psychological warfare, that's what they got.

The past few weeks have also taught me that bedbug infestations make excellent topics of conversation.  Everyone has an opinion, or curiosity, and my friends (when I do get to see them, or when we chat via email) ask about them all the time. It's not that I'd recommend that lonely people go out and find some bedbugs, but I will say there are weird up-sides to our past experience.

At any rate, we've been battling bedbugs.  When I last updated this blog, we'd used The Incinerator to heat up---in a very intense and very long weekend---each of our upstairs rooms in turn.  When The Incinerator was finally finished, I used Dracaris-the-Heat-Gun to carefully toast anything I could think of toasting on the first floor.   And then, at 4:23 p.m. on Monday the 24th (approximately), I saw a live bedbug on my bedroom ceiling, freaked and gave up, and called for an exterminator appointment on the first possible date.  And that's where I left off last time.

On the one hand, the Incinerator (aka, "The Cube") was a fairly pricey option compared to other alternatives, costing about $1300, not to mention the cost of the electricity for running it.  (Want your very own?  We got this one.)  On the other hand, once we were done incinerating the upstairs rooms, we posted it on Craigslist for $1000. in a way, we're thinking of this more like renting it for $300+electricity for the weekend, and that is way more cost-effective than any professional service out there . . . so, something to keep in mind for the future.

As an aside, and we got an offer within the day.    If that offer had been legitimate, that would have been great, but instead it was a guy who sent us a cashier's check, for twice what we asked.  Apparently, sending worthless cashier's checks is a standard Craigslist scam, so we reported the dude and will start over. 

Back to the main story:  The bedbug that I saw on Monday at 4:23 didn't have a name tag, but if it had, the name might very well have been "Ozymandius".    Why that name?  Because that bedbug was the last bug I've seen since.  (Not the last bedbug I thought I saw; in the middle of the night, several times, I woke up thinking they were with me, as per the psychological warfare noted above, but my trusty flashlight revealed nothing except maybe a hair or a bead of sweat.)  

I've seen no bedbugs, and believe me, I've searched.  I haven't even seen carcasses.  There have been no bedbugs in my bed, nor in my husband's, nor in the dog's.  There are no carcasses in the carpet, in the bathroom, or in the couch.  Every night I scout around nooks and crannies of the house with my flashlight; every morning I investigate in all our sleeping spaces; I'm coming up empty, here, people.  

Nonetheless, we emptied our closets, heating all clothes in the dryer, giving all shoes the Dracaris treatment, and then depositing everything into well-labeled [shudder] plastic bags.   Likewise for everything in our drawers.  The contents of my filing cabinets, we cooked in the oven at 170 degrees.   (I'm cookin' the financial books, folks: I admit it!)  

Monday morning, I woke at 5:30, threw my bedsheets and the dog bed downstairs for the washing machine to deal with.   I took Prewash to my office, where at 6:30, we taught my faraway students the joys of Riemann sums and sigma notation.  And at 7:02, the exterminators showed up at my home, to be greeted by my husband.   They made their first rounds -- they'll be back in three weeks, and then again three weeks after that.  

And . . . that's all I got for ya.  I don't want to say "we did it!", because I've heard too many stories about the difficulty of eradication.  But I can say it kind of feels like that at this point.  

I'm not sure what I'll have to talk about with people, now.  Ah, well.

Miser Family update: making faces edition

 Life continues to be rich and full of acorns in the Miser Family Household.   On a whim, I brought home a bunch of the acorns that are lining the sidewalks of our college campus, and drew faces on them:

They're not wearing masks, but my husband points out that's okay because they're only heads, so they already have anti-bodies.  (Oog).   This leads us to this week's Family Fun Foto theme:  

Make a Face. Not your own.

We start  in the top row with my acorns, rearranged a bit.  Next up, my sister-in-law says that since the only person in our family who has seen her condo in Las Vegas is L1, she thought the rest of us may be curious: "I took this selfie on our balcony on New Year’s Eve.  (That is an actual photograph, well about 1000 of them spliced together, by a photographer friend of ours. He gave us the image and we had it printed on acrylic.)".    And my husband drew a face made from 16 Hebrew letters.   I helpfully pointed out, "In English, it's left to right, but his guy is write to aleph."

In the middle row, we present a crab face eating my grandchild, two awesome faces that K-daughter and A-child made from wooden blocks, and happy food:  "D baked cupcakes from scratch and made the icing!".   And we end with Y's reason for being happy:  "Just spent 30minutes digging my fingers through all the crud that was stuck in my vacuum cleaner. But at least it was satisfying to see if working good as new afterwards."  If you can't quite see it, her clean feet are pointing at the two pieces of the (de-gunked) vacuum cleaner with smiley cord, on a very very clean floor.

In row three, 

• L1 gives us a dog smile.  (She posted this and asked, "Is anyone surprised").  
• N-son is working construction with his brother-in-law this week, and he drew a happy blue face (paradox, anyone?) on one of the scraps of wood on site.  
• And whooooo do you think knitted an owl face?  (I asked I-daughter if she did that just for us, and she said, "No, I started the owl ages ago... But this week's theme is conveniently timed ")  
• L2 made the kind of face she makes when she's in a nail salon, although I have to add that unless it's the kind of nail salon that also has hammers and cordless power tools, I'd make a "help me!" face. 
• And finally, the granddaughter of my next-door neighbor is so entranced by the acorn people on my own porch, that she's started collecting and shyly delivering more acorns to me.  I made three people for the next door porch, in thanks.  (These ones have hair, of a sort).

While my husband and I are in the (cross-fingers) last throes of battling bedbugs, I-daughter is wisely avoiding the inside of our home.  In place of church and waffles on Sunday morning, we've started a lovely tradition of going for Sunday afternoon walks, which I find so pleasant that I almost want to thank these little pests for instigating our new rambles.  This past week, we did a four-+ mile loop into a series of woods and marshes that are just a mile from my old home, and yet that I just discovered THIS summer, after 28 years living in my little city.

We didn't get to go on family vacation with my sisters and dad this August, but I-daughter says going on a walk through the woods makes her feel like we're fulfilling part of the family vacation tradition.  In fact, it's even more like vacation tradition because I am wearing my brown dress, which somehow I always seem to be wearing when we take the family photo, and which my sisters ride me for because it makes my brown sons hard to see when they stand in front of me.

See?  You can't even see N-son or J-son in this photo when I'm wearing this dress!

But summer vacation ended, and school has started.

We're all excited!  I had my first three days of classes.  From now until Thanksgiving, four days a week, I'll be teaching at 6:30 a.m. my time, 6:30 p.m. my students' time (my math class is a cadre of students in Shanghai).   The language difference, the tech issues, the time differences . . . they all make this a semester I'm sure to remember for many years to come.  I'm trying to deal with each little challenge as an adventure.  And, I guess, I'm fortunate to have lots and lots of adventures.  

And that's the news from our family, which continues to face our adventures with a smile.  With lots of smiles.  Even blue smiles.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.  

Adventures with Bedbugs, Episode 4

Here are some things I keep reminding myself about the bedbug ordeal we're muddling through.

1. I haven't seen any real evidence anywhere of long-term side-effects of these animalitos.  There's all sort of evidence that, although they are very, very (very) tough to get rid of, but also a kind of general mantra that people working with professional exterminators eventually do get rid of them.  I repeat to myself, "A year from now, we won't have bedbugs; this is temporary".  
   (I know that's not a guarantee, but it is a likelihood, so I'm sticking to this mantra).
2. If all of my DIY attempts fail, I can fall back on professional exterminators.  I don't want to, but if I can't get rid of the bedbugs on my own terms, at least I have back-up plans.
3. Everything I learn is actually kind of interesting.  There's ways in which this is like a big experiment, or a big story.  It's not at all fun having bedbugs, but sharing the experience of having bedbugs is kind of cathartic.  

And so, with that forward (and maybe even with that foreshadowing . . . .), let us return to where we were last week with our bedbug saga.

 Between 

• hypo-allergenic mattress covers protecting our beds (and, heck, while we're at it, the sofa),
• diatomaceous earth decorating the floors of my bedroom and a few other choice spots in the house,
• nightly hunting expeditions with my trusty flashlight, and 
• my beloved sidekick, Dracaris-The-Heat Gun,

we had managed to reduce bedbug populations dramatically.  During the week leading up to last Friday, I had only managed to find something like two dead bedbugs (on the bathroom floor: why?) and one live-but-extremely lethargic one (in Prewash's dog bed, which gets toasted daily).

But to deliver the final death blow to these invaders, on Friday we brought in . . . 

The Incinerator.

We'd had a choice between buying a $1300 version that promised to be able handle 200 square feet, and a larger $2400 one that could cover a bigger room; we went with the smaller one, because our bedrooms and other second floor rooms all fit the size requirement.  

Buying a $1300 professional bedbug heater sounds like a dramatic and even perilous step. Certainly, in my head, this was a piece of equipment that would dwarf the household furnace, requiring incredible space to store and patient expertise to learn to use properly, and even then, using it would risk burning down the house (which would probably get rid of the bed bugs, but would not necessarily solve the problem of getting a good night's sleep).   

So when it arrived, I was incredibly relieved to see this, instead.

Removed from the boxes, "The Cube" is even more innocuous looking, sitting next to its buddy "Cube Blower".   Perhaps they both want to be friends with R2D2 someday.

It comes with a helpful set of directions saying, in red type, "For Professional use only".   Even the quotation marks are in red, which frankly makes the warning sound more wink-wink-nod-nod than anything else.  I kinda love the directions.  Here is my favorite line, which I reproduce with capitalization and punctuation exactly as it appears in the brochure.  

Remove all Animals (dog cats, fish, turtles, mice, snakes, hamster's, etc.)

The rest of the directions say (in summary) that you have to seal up the room, but don't move furniture around too much.  You need to have the separate blower on while you run the heater, to circulate air in the room.  And then to operate the heater itself, you have to follow this tricky set of steps:

1. Plug it in.
2. Turn it on.
3. Leave it on for "at least 6 hours" until the room gets up to temp.

To be a bit more realistic, each step is a tad harder than it sounds.  

1. As for "plugging it in", the heater actually comes with three (3) cords, and each of these has to be connected to a three-pronged outlet on three different circuit breakers, which is probably where the "For Professional use only" caution comes in.  (The heater draws something like 36 amps, 12 through each cord.)   I found three such outlets by using fancy equipment called "lamps" which I plugged into various outlets around the home, and then turned on and off circuit breakers in the basement, carefully labeling them for future reference.      
2. As for "turning it on", there are two switches.  You first turn on the the fan-within-the-heater (in addition to having the separate blower running), and then turn on the heating element.  If you don't remember to turn on the heating element, then . . . you come back an hour later and find a noisy room that isn't particularly warm.  And then you can turn on the heating element and watch the thermostat rise slowly to 130 degrees, where you bake the room for 6 hours, and then move the whole set-up to the next room for at least another 6 hours.

So, I sealed up the bedroom, and I removed the dog cats and the snakes, together with the hamster's etc, and then I turned The Incinerator on, and left, checking every couple of hours on the progress.

3.  The fans are a bit noisy.   The directions say that we ought to keep the Cube running for a minimum of 6 hours, and that the temperature rises slowly.  "Slowly" is not an exaggeration; my fears of burning down the house turned at some point into fears that maybe we'd gotten a defective machine.  The machine is rated for rooms of up to 200 square feet; my bedroom is close to that (but with 9-foot, not 8-foot ceilings, making the volume larger), and it took an agonizing 8 hours before the temperature topped the magic 123 degrees (bedbug killing temperature), and inched up toward 130.    

 

There's a bit of technique in arranging the blower and the fan appropriately (that might be part of the professional use caveat.  It's really agonizing to have this heater on for 8 hours overnight, and see that the thermostat is still reading only 119 degrees.   Rearranging where the fan and blower were helped . . . but what I thought would take 18 hours, to heat up three rooms in sequence, ended up lasting all weekend long and then a bit.

A room that is 130 degrees is hot, but not burn-down-the-house hot.  (It keeps reminding me that in 2009, my husband was off in Iraq, where he regularly worked outside in 130-degree temperatures, and he's still, y'know, fine.)   But these guys draw a LOT of energy.  

And they do make the rooms very warm, even a day or so after.  

And I'd love to say that this particular experiment has been a resounding success.  

But . . . 

The night that I was heating my bedroom, I couldn't sleep there obviously, and I also didn't want to sleep in the next room over, because of the incredible noise  So I grabbed my sleeping bag and headed for the dining room, about as far away from my bedroom as you can get in the house.  In the middle of the night, I found a beddog in my sleeping bag with me.   That wasn't so bad, though.

But closer to morning, my beddog and I were joined by a pair of bedbugs.  Sigh.  The incinerator is definitely not large enough to handle the spacious rooms on the first floor.   I decided to continue with the experiment on the second floor, and just Dracaris the heck out of everything I could reach on the first floor.  We've already removed most soft stuff from that level, so although I knew it was a long-shot, I was willing to gamble.

But then.   But then I went up to the bedroom for something -- the bedroom that a mere 36 hours earlier had been though an Incinerator heat treatment.  And I saw a spot on the ceiling.  I got my step stool and flashlight from the other room, and came back to check . . .  and sure enough, that spot was a bedbug.  Alive. On my ceiling.

[As a minor aside, isn't amazing that bedbugs don't really run away like other insects?  It just waited for me to come back, identify, and murder it.  So very patient, the bedbug is.]

. .  .

 

And so I give up.  I'm not DIY-ing this anymore.  I called our local exterminators, and set up an appointment for early next week.  We're going to pack up all our (laundered, heated-in-the-dryer) clothes, stuff them into (shudder) plastic bags, and figure out how to leave the house for 6 hours, dog and all.  They're going to come spray the house with poison.  I'm going to cross fingers that my particular strain of bedbugs haven't developed a resistance to this particular strain of insecticide, and also that living in a row house doesn't mean that my neighbors and I start sharing animals back and forth.  

By the way, I am still extremely (extremely) fond of my heat gun.  I now think that diatomaceous earth is vastly overrated.  And that's where our bedbug situation stands as of Monday night.

Miser Family update: dOnnOr edition

Late August means tomatoes and peaches are coming in, and it means the start of the school year is just around the corner.  And for these reasons and more, life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Family household.

Last year, what with moving and settling in and all, I skipped canning tomatoes, but then, all winter long, I missed having tomatoes in my basement.  So this year, I resolved not to make the same mistake.   Three bushels of tomatoes later (which translates into 21 quarts of tomatoes and 24 quarts of tomato juice), my basement shelves are full to the point of me wanting make more shelves. 

I said peaches are in, but they're "in" just barely: a spring warm snap followed by hail cut the peach output in our state way back.  So I canned a "mere" 12 quarts of peaches (and 4.5 quarts of juice) this year.  

And with all these jars full, I remove the rings . . . 

 . . . giving me a perfect segue into this week's Family Fun Foto theme:  the dOnnOr!

The dOnnOr began a decade or so ago as an "O" themed dinner.  In 2014, we added a philanthropic component.   I cull all the charity envelopes we've received that year, sort through them, and then my family and I work together to write checks to these places.   This year, we don't have the food, and we don't write checks together, but we got to share images related to some of the places we support.  Behold.

Clockwise:

• My sister-in-law nailed the theme with her hula-hooped photo of tOys-fOr-tOts purchases.
• L2 shared a pic of her  first day volunteering at Gilda's Club, a free cancer community/fellowship center.
• My guy comes full circle: Born Jewish, converting to Christianity in his early 20's, and finding new refuge in the synagogue after the 2016 election and particularly after the Charlottesville 2017 rally horrors, he's happy to be supporting a synagogue again.
• Y says she's "Been regularly "donating" (sharing?) my herbs w/ the housemates and neighborhood thru my local BuyNothing :) https://buynothingproject.org/about/".  The herbs include lavender, Thai basil, Italian basil, "I've got lots of thyme", and OreganO.
• N-son and I haven't gotten to volunteer at our local soup kitchen for a while because [pandemic], but we're sending them money and prayers.
• K-daughter says, "D and I support to his cousins missionary project in England. :) I don't have a picture.... But here's a cute picture of B-child"
• I-daughter says, "There are a bunch of charities close to my heart (too many to choose from, and hard to photograph) so I'm highlighting the two closest to my home".   prOps to the lOcal library and to musicfOreveryOne.Org!
• L2, but of course, supports Lu's Labs, the rescue agency she helps foster dogs for.  

You might notice I very rarely mention J-son these days.  That's partly because I can't figure out how to have GoogleVoice create a text chat with more than 8 people, so I have to leave *someone* from the family out of the chats, and partly because when I do include him as one of the 8, he doesn't exactly . . . respond.  Which is not fair; I'm his mom.  (Or I'm 1/3 of his moms, but still).  

However, he does seem to be happy and healthy, creatively figuring out how to live life on his own as a young (handsome) man.  This past week, my guy drove N-son up to see J-son, and snapped these photos, to prove that both of my sons exist and are still buds.

And that's the news from our family, which continues to be rich enough in our adventures that we have extra to share with others.  May you and yours be similarly prOsperOus.