Frigidaire window air conditioner.
Energy Star Rated.
8000 Cooling BTUs.
Clean. Very lightly used. Used to cool a room during a hot spell that lasted a maybe couple of weeks about five years ago. Since then, it has been stored covered in our garage.
Brian doesn’t get it. “He’s fully dressed! He’s eating a taco! Your daughter is fine!” I don’t get the music. Are they appealing to stoners or… oh…okay. Still.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y61fLD0NWAA
Just when it seems like the Wolves have turned a corner, they suffer a heartbreaking loss. It reminds me of teaching Jan how to drive.
When Ying asked me to teach her sister how to drive, I countered that her husband should do the honor. But putting a man in the uneasy position of critiquing his wife’s driving was ill-advised, as opposed to the much easier task of overcoming a language barrier while explaining the importance of checking your blind spot. I didn’t speak a word of Chinese and Jan was still learning body parts. “I have two feet. I have two hands. I have a head.”
We started in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn on the north end of Mt. Rushmore Road or Eighth Street depending on whether you are a tourist or a cruiser, generally high school kids mixed with the occasional GI who is too young for nightclubs. With the side mirror angled toward the road so she could see the stripes in relationship to the car (a trick borrowed from my dad who taught me how to drive and the extent of my bag of tricks as a driving instructor), for more than two hours Jan drove a rusty Volare Station Wagon from one end of the lot to the other. No one got hurt. It was a good day.
Jan steadily improved as we ditched her regular English workbooks for the South Dakota driver’s manual. Eventually we progressed to traffic while I gradually made my way out of Jan’s lap and firmly into the passenger’s seat where I could not reach the brakes. When it came time, Jan handled the freeway just fine and the practice runs to the DMV were becoming tedious; she had turned a corner and was ready for the road test. Great. Ying’s husband could stop with his daily harangues and I could stop imagining my bloody demise; it would have been an ironic fate after having survived my senior year of high school screwing off in that beloved heap.
The night before Jan was to take her test we took the wagon for a final run. What happened next is difficult to describe. Just as Jan’s driving was becoming effortless, she had suddenly and completely lost her sense of the car. She was clipping curbs and swinging into wild and overly broad turns that scared the hell out of me. In what I recognized to be a game of chicken, we hiccupped down the road in herky-jerky spurts, barely stopping in time to avoid collisions and pissing off everyone in our path, teenagers, GIs, old ladies. Everyone.
Jan would certainly face another berating from her brother-in-law who apparently learned how to drive on his lunch break while blindfolded and handcuffed to a monkey, and I was doomed to a career as a driving instructor, the end of which could only be marked by a license with Jan’s picture on it. Defeated and at a loss for what to do next, we had no words sitting in the parking lot of the Colonial House, the last restaurant heading south out of town before everything becomes a tourist attraction or a billboard for one. From a distance, I might have been ten playing Charlie’s Angels with my sister Amy. There we are in the driveway under the basketball hoop where we live in Shell housing that’s just inside the main gate at Ellsworth Air Force Base. The side-by-side duplexes of Shell have long been dozed. This time, this time a heated chase will not bring to the morning a blaring radio, the swishing of wipers nor blinking lights that will startle our dad as he sets off to work. This time it’s just Jan and me.
I’d look at Jan. She’d look at me. We’d both look straight ahead reaching eons beyond the windshield as if the answer might have wandered off into the ponderosa pines. I couldn’t figure it out. I’d look at Jan and she’d look at me. We’d both looked straight ahead… An eternity ticked by before a hint of inspiration rose up from deep inside her gut, filled her chest, and washed the residue of a bad day from Jan’s face.
“You change the seat?” She said.
The seat?
I don’t know why or how or why I didn’t notice it, but the seat was moved all the way back. Jan could barely reach the pedals! She could barely see over the dashboard!
The next day Jan took my car for her road test while I stayed behind to pray in the waiting room of the DMV. Jan returned a short while later to tell me that my prayers had been answered.
Coach Rambis, you change the seat?
When I was a young adult, I had friends who were devout Amway distributers. My former church youth counselors, Frank and Mary Ellen, took the vitamins, used the laundry soap and personal care products and they aspired to become Amway Diamonds, which meant a lifetime of financial security. They could retire early.
So it was Mary Ellen who first gave me an education on laundry detergent “filler”. Amway’s product didn’t have it. While somewhat ironic and perhaps true, Mary Ellen the Amway dealer considered commercial laundry soaps to be a total scam where a pound of sawdust was sold with every pound of soap. Since then I have watched boxes of Tide and other brand-name laundry detergents mysteriously shrink by about two thirds.
A Sample of non-toxic laundry soap from a Community POWER recipient
Recipe: Non-Toxic Laundry Soap
Flash forward to a presentation of the 2011 Community POWER grant recipients where I was giving a report on a residential composting initiative I coordinated. There I heard about one project that set out to debunk the more-toxic-more-suds-the-cleaner hoax and taught residents how to economize while reducing their environmental impact by – for one thing – making their own laundry detergent. I went home with a sample of the detergent and I tried it for the first time last week.
This cheese grater did not work very well for cheese. But it worked great for soap.
In the load that I did using the sample, there were a few soap flakes that did not dissolve. It wasn’t the end of the world, but certainly not something you can expect the average person to accept. I’m wondering if this can be resolved when I make a new batch of detergent with more finely grated soap. As I recall from the presentation, any bar of soap will do. However, I’ve noticed that other recipes favor Fels-Naptha soap. I’m going to use what I have.
Here are other recipes for laundry detergent you could try:
Less soap. Less Money. Less Space.
3 TBLS is enough for a large load. Normally I would have used 1 scoop. Either way, if you’re not reading the directions and measuring the soap, you are most likely wasting money.
As a bonus, in addition to using less product (1-3 TBS), the powder fits in less space.
One blogger assures us that the lack of suds you’ll notice when using your homebrew is not a problem. She’s right. In the 1960’s marketers pushed suds as a way to tell that the soap was working. Today, we’re warned that too many suds indicate overuse. In addition, high efficiency washers have created a demand for low-suds products again. Marketing fads can be confusing.
Writer Michael Pollan says “Don’t eat what you see on television.” Given the detergent filler Mary Ellen warned me about 20+ years ago and a deceptive suds campaign that added no value but only aimed to distinguish one product from another one just like it, and given the overall advertising tactics that are turning us into neurotic Lysol junkies, I wonder if we shouldn’t apply that rule to all products advertised on television: Don’t buy them.
I think I’ll try it. 2014. Resolve to be Clean.
Links
The Soap Conflict, Thomas WhiteSide, The New Yorker, 1964.
“As the level of detergent suds in the American kitchen approached the stifling point a counter-movement set in. It started with a detergent called All; Procter & Gamble then put out Dash, with ‘low suds’ & ‘safe suds.’ Were suds good or bad?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1YTHr4mTQA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl7V8DGfGpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWgIyywz4cg
BJH: I didn’t fall asleep. See It.
RJS: I didn’t wake up mad. Skip it.
RJS: While there are reasons to recommend this movie, I suspect I’m just hoping that the words of the coke-snorting Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey) might penetrate our collective psyche. Hanna deflowers Wall Street neophyte, Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), with the truth about legalized gambling, as he describes an unsustainable game of musical chairs where there are a few winners and a lot of losers, and where no goods are produced and trillions of dollars of wealth is “all on paper.” It sounded pretty accurate to me and it’s better entertainment than The Crash Course.
Another scene that should have been required viewing for Mr. Randall’s high school Family Economics class where I learned how to balance an imaginary checkbook is where Belfort sells four thousand dollars of penny stocks to some schmuck over the telephone. As he reels in fish bait, Belfort and his sleazy crew of rehabilitated losers pantomime their valued customer – a family man who’s finally asserting some independence from his more cautious ball and chain – literally taking it up the ass.
From the beginning, we know that we’re in for a stomach-turning, eye-averting ride when for $10,000 an employee at a brokerage firm entertains her co-workers by shaving her head. Apparently abusing midgets and lining up to gangbang skanky whores at the office in the middle of a workday didn’t cut it for these assholes. While she quickly loses her idolatrous audience to more seductive pleasures before the deed is done – imagine a toddler casually setting aside a shiny new toy as he wanders off for a television fix – the mangy woman is not humiliated in vain. Ten grand will pay for a boob job.
The degradation of every single woman in this movie was very, very upsetting and leaves nothing about the lifestyle of the superrich – as it is depicted here – to be envied. And where I might suspect some movies of hiding behind “telling it like it is” as an excuse to flirt with gratuitous violence and misogynistic fantasies where a man can whack off to a bombshell at a party in front of his wife without the threat of consequences. I can’t make that case here no more than it’s justified to be upset with a war journalist for taking pictures of dead children.
With frame-by-frame disturbing images, I wondered if the movie could have been an effective art exhibit to be absorbed on the viewer’s own terms. As it is, I felt assaulted and maybe that’s the point. We would have missed out on some physically comical scenes, like when a paralyzed luded-up Belfort has to get himself behind the wheel of his car to stop the Feds from ruining his ill-gotten life. But there are other scenes that would have translated to paint quite well. For example, there’s the brief moment when we see The Wolf carrying a monkey through a sea of cubicles full of bottom feeders who will say anything to close a deal because they’ve bought into a system where they matter and you don’t.
On second thoughts, maybe The Wolf of Wall Street is worth seeing.
Plastic bags with the morning paper are optional.
To avoid the plastic bags that come with our newspaper subscription, we are getting a Star Tribune newspaper tube. It’s such an easy solution for something that has been bugging me a long time. It just took a phone call to the Strib (612) 673-4343.
We went to Rapid City for Christmas and, motivated by a book I found while there, I returned ready to take a closer look at our home to see what might be encroaching on our corner of paradise.
Peter Walsh’s workbook, “It’s All Too Much”, begins with an assessment that would suggest that a family intervention isn’t imminent.
“Do you need to clear off the kitchen counter to prepare a meal?”
No.
“Do you regularly misplace your car keys or checkbook?”
No.
“Do you have to remove laundry… to get to your bed?”
Not usually.
Yet there’s a reason why I walked out of Books-A-Million with a receipt. We have kitchen gadgets that we do not use. I couldn’t do my taxes tomorrow without taking a day to gather the necessary papers and I feel daunted by a stash of plastic bags that is ever growing thanks to our newspaper subscription.
I was also drawn to some of the exercises in the book. The “I might need it one day” and the “It’s worth a lot of money” excuses for hanging on to stuff are quickly neutralized. Not being a huge hoarder myself, I was surprised to notice that I relied on some of them. It was liberating to be ready with a sensible response:
“If I can’t use it today, right now, for who I am in the life I am living, I don’t need it.”
As clutter piles up over time it becomes invisible. So, in the “What I see – What I’d like to see” exercise where you note in detail what is in each room, you learn to see again.
The “Room Function Chart” was another eye-opening exercise. Room by room you are to note the current and ideal function of a space. Based on that, you can determine what is needed and what must go. Doing this exercise, I discovered that our office was serving too many functions. I had been struggling to find a credenza/armoire/cabinet with very specific dimensions and features so that we could reduce the footprint of stereo cabinets and whatnot on the crowded floor. But then I realized that if we quit using the office/video-audio studio/guestroom for overflow clothing, there would be ample room to serve these other purposes. As a bonus, the search for furniture that doesn’t exist could finally stop.
We need to live within the space that we have. I have always believed in Rule #1 and for the most part we do okay. We certainly aren’t paying for storage, which was the subject of a sermon at my parents’ church back in Rapid. The preacher said, “We fill our houses to the brim, packing every closet until we can’t get into them anymore. We stuff the attic with things we will soon forget. When that’s full, we move boxes we never unpacked from our last move into the garage. Then we rent climate-controlled storage space. If it weren’t for the bill, we would forget about that too. Why do we need so much stuff?”
Rule #2 prioritizes the use of space. So, not only do we have to live within the space that we have, the space must make it possible to easily do what we want to do. Keeping this in mind, it is suddenly much easier to choose between a few jackets that I never wear and having easy access to my collection of taped interviews.
I don’t wear them. They’re out.
While difficult to overcome the temptation to move clutter from one spot to another, I won’t be able to do that now without remembering Rule #3: “One room’s clutter is still another room’s clutter.” So, I have a nice little pile of stuff accumulating for the Goodwill, the used bookstore, and Craig’s List.
As I worked through some very tiring exercises, I thought of friends for whom clutter is a constant issue and considered whether this book might be a nice centerpiece to a support group. It might be. I thought of people who are relocating to warmer climates or with a job and who have no choice but to look at and handle absolutely everything they own. Whether they decide to pack it all up or dispose of certain things in one way or another before loading the truck and moving on to the next chapter, they’ll have to make a lot of decisions. I wonder what I would decide about the shoebox full of dried out pens that occupy prime real estate in my closet.
This is a six-piece Bauer canister set (flour, sugar, coffee, tea, salt and one blank one) in good used condition. The coffee canister does have some darker areas that look like coffee stains (see photo). Some lids look brand new, while others show wear from use.
To inquire about this item, please contact us here.
Bauer 6-Piece Canister Set – Flour, Sugar, Coffee, Tea, Salt, and Blank
Bauer Canister – Blank (front)
Bauer Canister – Blank (back)
Bauer Canister – Blank (bottom)
Bauer Canister – Coffee (front)
Bauer Canister – Coffee (front, close)
Bauer Canister – Coffee (back)
Bauer Canister – Coffee (bottom)
Bauer Canister – Flour (front)
Bauer Canister – Flour (back)
Bauer Canister – Flour (bottom)
Bauer Canister – Tea (front)
–
Bauer Canister – Tea (back)
Bauer Canister – Tea (bottom)
Bauer Canister – Salt (front)
Bauer Canister – Salt (back)
Bauer Canister – Salt (bottom)
Bauer Canister – Sugar (front)
Bauer Canister – Sugar (back)
Bauer Canister – Salt (bottom)
Bauer Canister Lid
Bauer Canister Lid
Bauer Canister Lid
Bauer Canister Lid
Bauer Canister Lid
Bauer Canister Lid
Pulling out the 1970s fireplace insert a few inches would have been an easy way to expose the crumbling tile and mortar from inside the chimney. The requisite inspection before we closed on the house almost six years ago missed it. The repair estimate would have made Mr. Rogers kick himself.
It was Al who would finally dislodge the feelings of regret that could be triggered by something as mundane as a commercial for cat litter.
“Seven thousand dollars! We were screwed!”
“It happens.” Al said.
“Yeah, but…”
“It happens.”
“Our realtor should have…”
“It happens.” He said.
“Shouldn’t the inspector known to have…”
“You buy a house and the boiler goes out. Cha-ching! You discover that every window sash in the place is completely shot. Cha-ching. The carpet is hiding blemished floors. Cha ching. Welcome to home ownership. Did the inspector do his job? It’s hard to say. Do these things get missed? All of the time. Would it have changed your decision? I doubt it. Did you overpay? Maybe, but probably not by much. Do you love your house? Forget about the rest of it.”
Letting that sink in, while counter to my appetite for impossible justice that can turn back clocks, was a tremendous relief.
While other priorities would compete with it and while Brian never shared my enthusiasm for fixing it nor my feeling that a fireplace you couldn’t use could fill a room with a certain kind of emptiness, this particular restoration project was never a serious point of contention. And yet I had the feeling that when I did finally turn my attention to it, I would need to convince him that the time had come for this investment. I would bring it up and he would make that face.
Convincing anyone of anything can be tricky. It would be better if the worthiness of a good idea were self-evident. It’s particularly tricky for me because giving up persuasion was a deliberate choice prompted by a letter I received out of the blue a long time ago.
An old friend from the Minnesota for Dennis Kucinich campaign wrote to me – one progressive to another – to ask that I join her in supporting Al Franken for the U.S. Senate. She assumed that I would agree that Franken was the real deal while I couldn’t believe that a real Liberal would ever be taken by him. In response I would make the case for a better candidate, one who was actually worthy of the support of anyone who had ever believed that holding rush hour vigils on a bridge in sub-zero weather could transform the bleary-eyed commuters who chugged along on the freeway below.
Hearing the clacking of the keyboard (in these moments I miss the zing of the old fashioned typewriter), Brian quickly sized up the situation and accused me of “bickering on the listserv.” Stretched out on top of the desk in front of me, even the cat paused to question whether this was really a good use of my time, but then quickly dropped it and went back to angling for tummy rubs. So while Brian fried eggs and Lester Young set a mood suitable for dozing tabbies and giant snowflakes drifting to the ground outside the window behind me, I continued to fake my way through a second and third draft of my counter.
My arguments fell flat. Trying to convince someone to see things as I saw them, especially where it came to politicians and the abstractions they espouse, made me feel tired. So I quit. I had a nice breakfast and never thought about it again.
It never came to arm-twisting. One Saturday morning I asked Brian to help me measure the fireplace, which he happily did. I suspect he knew what I had in mind, but I could not detect the dread I had anticipated. Instead of hashing it out, he set to carefully noting the measurements in his famously perfect printing and within an hour we were on Franklin and 29th looking at wood burning stoves.
Recognizing my debilitating hatred for shopping and making purchasing decisions, Brian quietly filled in the gaps so that we might enjoy a fire before the summer rolled around again.
I’m still letting that sink in.
So, we’ve narrowed down our search for a fireplace to two options. Choosing one has been difficult because I like each for different reasons. Feel free to weigh in.