CJC
By admin | February 8, 2010
The sixteen year-old boy across the table from us was wearing an insulated plaid jacket over a t-shirt and had brown hair to his shoulders. The hair was a fashion statement something like “I don’t believe in fashion”. It was long because it hadn’t been cut in quite awhile. He could also use it to hide from those around him. His mom sat at the same table as he, but there was an empty chair between them.
Hezekiah (not his name, but also a character in the Bible) had already told us about the episode at a local Wal-Mart where he’d taken a carton of Newport cigarettes and tried to leave the store. When store security called to him to stop, he began to run, which resulted in his being tackled. Being tackled in the parking lot on the tarmac sounds painful to me.
“Us” included the Probation Officer and three volunteer Community Justice Committee (CJC) members. Of the four, three are female, one male. Ages range from 32 to mid-60’s. We are all Caucasian. It is the job of the CJC to meet with juvenile offenders from the nearby community, listen to their stories and provide them with a consequence suitable to what they’ve done. Most of our clients are shoplifters who have taken smallish items from a store and been caught. The Probation Officer (PO) has a spiel she runs on kids which is quite true. She tells them that we know they’re not the bad guy; they just made a bad choice of behavior. Because of that bad choice of behavior, though, a cop had to take two hours away from looking for the real bad guy to process them.
The advantage to the juvenile of appearing before a CJC is that he/she doesn’t have to expose his/her life in a courtroom, and gets done with the results of his/her dumb behavior within sixty days. It’s a good deal: not so many people involved in your life, a one-shot consequence and you’re out of there.
One in five of the kids we see, though, is like Hezekiah. We don’t have a consequence that will help him enough. Hezekiah not only smokes tobacco, but according to his mother and himself, he also smokes marijuana. He’s now smoking marijuana two or three times a week. According to him, this is the result of his decision that everyday was excessive, so he cut back.
In addition to abusing his body with substances, Hezekiah has family dysfunction. To get back at his mother for her prolonged statements about his behavior from the time he was three years-old, he indicated that his parents get two cases of beer on Fridays which they proceed to drink right away (His mother told us that she only buys what they will drink right away as Hezekiah takes booze that they don’t drink.) Hezekiah’s mother denies that they drink…that much. I say de-Nile is the longest river in Africa. His parents’ behavior isn’t an excuse for Hezekiah’s behavior of course. They’re adults and if they choose weekend binging as a lifestyle, their actions are legal, while he is a juvenile and his are not. Still, it’s somewhat explanatory.
In his case, Hezekiah needs support. He needs an understanding adult who will help him or urge him, or force him to get the help he so badly needs. He has multiple psychiatric diagnoses from depression to bi-polar disorder to ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) His use of marijuana (another psychiatric diagnosis, by the way) complicates treatment as marijuana works on the same chemicals in the brain that therapeutic drugs do.
Years ago, when he was eleven, Hezekiah’s mom had him in a clinical study of a therapeutic drug. Since he was being paid for his participation, he took the medication and seemed to benefit for awhile. Toward the end of the study, however, he started use of marijuana. I asked him if the marijuana was working for him as it was clear that he was self-medicating. He knew what this meant, and agreed that was his goal. He indicated that the marijuana didn’t work well, but it seemed to work almost as well as the prescribed meds. He did not mention that the marijuana also pisses off his parents; which is not a side effect of the other drugs.
So Hezekiah needs support. He needs support to get a therapeutic level of medication into his body without THC. He needs support to convince his parents that medication requires adjunctive therapy, i.e. he needs an adult to talk to him and talk to his parents. He’s going to have to find a lifestyle that will allow him to live with his parents for a few years and then live with himself for the rest of his life without killing himself with chemicals or otherwise.
Our hope is that a PO, a Judge, a couple of attorneys, a counselor, his parents, and he can conspire together to help him get to that lifestyle. That’s a delicate balance for that many people to strike. Good luck.
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Christmas Message 2009
By admin | December 31, 2009
Our summer cabin in the woods has turned out to be a house in a sub-division in a cooler town. Still, it’s nice and very different from the house we live in most of the year. Although it’s winter right now, we’re in the summer house. There’s snow on the deck and at night drippage from the room forms ice on the walkway to the front door. Since we live most of the year in Phoenix, this is pretty exotic.
Christmas just past, snow, ice and cold all bring to mind Santa Claus. Our Grandson, eight-nearly-nine, was told recently that Santa isn’t a real person. His parents weren’t being mean, he was just starting to have some of the real questions that some people have about Santa covering so many homes and so many children in just one night whether by reindeer sleigh or otherwise.
Many of us adults know that Santa, Sinter Klaus, Saiont Nicholas, Father Chriustmas, etc, is a visible, tangible symbol for the spirit of giving that began when Jesus Christ was born and brought us the gifts of life and of release from rigid, unthinkjing law. Greek Saint, Bishop Nicholas of Myra, may have been one of the first to imbue this spirit at this time of the year when the birth is celebrated.
That level of abstraction is as tough for a young boy as it is for many adults, so he’s just feeling sad about the loss. I hope it helps him to know that he can now be part of the unendiung gift. Maybe that’s too abstract also…for this year.
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VACUUMING
By admin | December 19, 2009
The carpet is the same gray as a gym shirt. I was running the upright industrial vacuum that the church has donated to Family Promise to and fro starting with the right hand wall of The Room, as the Senior High group has christened their space. Most of the furniture had been taken out so I could just go across the room from right to left then move down and go from left to right. Furniture is always a problem in vacuuming because it breaks up your pattern.
If you’re living alone or if you’re the one who takes care of cleaning the house, vacuuming is one of the chores. Some people love to vacuum, some people hate it. I fit into the latter group. People who love to vacuum seem to get something akin to a runner’s high from it. They just run the machine back and forth and later exult in the freshened carpeting.
There are some dos and don’ts. Do, for example, ensure that you have a clean bag in the vacuum. Most vacuums have a paper dust bag which needs to be changed regularly. If you don’t change it, pretty soon the dust that you suck up just comes back out through the sides of the bag.
If it’s an upright (long handle usually with a canvas-looking bag hanging from it) the paper dust bag is inside the canvas bag and you’ll have to unzip it. Don’t allow the dirt in the bag to spill as you’re removing it. Fold it carefully over the hole and take it to the trash Replace the bag with a clean one which you buy either at the grocery store or at the store where you bought the vacuum…depends on the brand.
If your vacuum is a canister (low machinery with a hose coming out of it) the bag is inside the canister. There will be a hinged section which you must open to get at the paper bag. Once you do this, again, handle the bag carefully and replace it with a clean one.
Some vacuums are uprights and are bag less…cyclonic action or something like that. Presumably they had a hinged section and a removable canister…I really don’t know because I don’t have one. Check the owner’s manual if you have difficulty.
Most vacuums have brushes which turn inside the “head”. The head is the part that goes against the floor. It’s important that those brushes spin so you might want to check them occasionally. Turn the head over so that it isn’t against the floor and turn the machine on. You’ll be able to see if the brushes are spinning. If they are, good. If not, check to make sure that everything that’s supposed to be plugged in is. My canister vacuum, for example has a cord that has to plug into the head to connect it to the switch, which is in the handle.
If everything is plugged in and it still doesn’t work, UNPLUG IT FROM THE WALL. (Letting the brushes chew up your fingers by accident is another don’t) Once it’s unplugged, check to see if hair or other fibers stuck in the mechanism are preventing it from turning. Usually there’s some way to take the brushes out to clean them. If you’ve done that and it still doesn’t work, take it to the vacuum repair shop or to the guy who sold it to you.
Presuming everything is operational, turn the machine on “high” and start running the head over the carpet. (Most machines have a low setting for hard floors and a high setting for carpets). It’s important to be systematic in cleaning the floor. Start in one place and systematically vacuum that whole area before moving to the next. Being systematic lets you make sure you don’t miss any areas. It’s an onerous enough task without discovering later that you missed part of the floor.
Furniture is a problem. If it’s easy to move, which is usually isn’t, move it and vacuum where it was. If it’s hard to move…well, you’ll have to decide how often you want to struggle with it. I’d say once a quarter is often enough to suck up those dust bunnies.
Once you have the area cleaned, gather up the electric cord and put it away. I have one machine that has a spring loaded roller, you just step on a lever and the machine sucks up the cord. I have another which is slightly broken and I have to coil the cord in my hand and then hang it from the one remaining hook on the machine. Put the doggone thing out of the way and forget it until next time. How often you drag it out depends on whether you have pets, whether they shed, how much dust gets into your house and whether you have allergies.
You can also vacuum furniture…but that’s another story.
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TRASH…GARBAGE…RUBBISH…COMPOST…REFUSE
By admin | October 13, 2009
There was a time when it was important to separate your garbage from your rubbish. Wha?! What the heck does that mean? According to my dictionary (Webster’s New World Dictionary: Third College Edition) garbage is waste foods: “Spoiled or waste food as from a kitchen or market that is thrown away.” Trash, on the other hand, seems to be drier: “Broken, discarded or worthless things…” Rubbish is apparently about the same as trash: “Any material rejected or thrown away as worthless…” Both “rubbish” and “trash” include the other word as part of the definition, i.e. trash is rubbish and rubbish is trash, according to the dictionary.
All of that was before my time. I think it had to do with the necessity of collecting potentially useful material, like metals, for the war effort during WWII. I could be wrong, of course.
In my home we pretty much split our trash/garbage/rubbish three ways. Phoenix, our city, recycles some products, including some plastics, metals and paper. We think that’s a good thing so we participate in that.
Our son and his family have garden spaces in their suburban yard. They grow tomatoes, squash, and lots of other things. They like to enrich the soil with compost. In case you didn’t notice, compost was a term in the title that I didn’t define. We put much of our food waste into a compost container, which we periodically send or take to their home for their use. Mostly we don’t put animal wastes such as bones and leftover meat in the compost because they have a large dog who shouldn’t be allowed to tear up the garden. There may be other reasons as well…I don’t know…I don’t garden unless circumstances force me to. I know that eggshells go in there, though.
Whatever doesn’t compost or recycle goes in our covered trash container in the kitchen. That includes plastic film, paper towels (which the city won’t recycle) and plastic-coated paper. It’s a good thing, I suppose, that we don’t have much garbage to set out for the city. If it weren’t for odor, we could easily wait three weeks before putting our trash out on the curb.
“Out on the curb” is the next step for our refuse. (“Anything thrown away or rejected as worthless or useless; waste; trash; rubbish” per my Webster’s. It’s an all-purpose term.) We separate the materials into the categories I’ve mentioned above. When, for example, the non-recycle can in the kitchen is either full or smelly, we bundle it up and take it to “the green bin”. This large, green plastic, wheeled bin with a lid is supplied by the city. Once a week we put this green bin at the curb and a city truck with robot arms picks up the whole big bin and upends it into the top of the truck. I imagine they take that stuff to the landfill.
The recycle goes from our kitchen to “the blue bin”. This bin is like the other except that it is sky blue. It’s also picked up by the city once a week, on a different day, by the robotic arm on a city truck. It’s typically much fuller and it’s a problem if we forget to put the blue bin out on pick-up day. The stuff in that truck is taken to recycle centers. I’ve talked to friends who’ve visited these centers and who indicate that the centers are both labor intensive and machinery intensive since all the material mixed in my blue bin must be re-separated into aluminum, ferrous metal, paper, etc.
Finally, my son puts the compost, which we keep in heavy plastic bags, into the back of his pick-up truck for transport and eventual use in his garden.
Wow! Who knew that getting rid of stuff was so complicated? Don’t even get me started on stuff I want to get rid of that Wife wants to keep. Or vice versa, I suppose. There’s also the issue of whether or not to shred mail that goes in recycle (I shred some, some I don’t shred; you’ll have to protect your own identity that way.) That’s also an issue because the city won’t take shredded paper. Apparently it makes a mess and is hard to recycle on the other end. Generally though, once you’ve figured it out, it isn’t difficult or even time consuming. Try it.
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By admin | September 27, 2009
When I stopped at the intersection of Lincoln Drive and Tatum, there were three Porsche automobiles in the right turn lane, one behind the other. Behind me a person was driving a Dodge Viper. Each of the vehicles costs about as much money as I’ve paid for vehicles in my life time. Some a little less, some a little more.
Still, here we all were at the same intersection in Paradise Valley, Arizona. That probably says something, but I’m not sure what. Perhaps it’s that how much you pay for your tools is not a good measure of how well the tools work. I could have been at that intersection in a crappier car, but then my tool might have been inferior and not one that I could rely on.
It’s important that you be able to rely on your tools, since they are what allow you to operate in the world. For example a past blog entry has spoken of knives. I talked about how forged knives with a full tang and high carbon stainless steel work the best. They hold a sharp edge, balance well in your hand and cut your food well. You can get by with supermarket knives but over time they will prove inferior and unreliable.
It’s also possible to pay too much for a tool. Cast stainless steel pans are an example. Wife has three of these, various sizes of frying pans…I think she might call them “sauté pans”. Most of the time, those pans remain parked and she uses regular stainless for her day to day work. I don’t know how much she paid for those pans because I was afraid to ask. They’re the Porsche of pans but I don’t think they’ll get you to an omelette any better than the Toyota’s in the drawer.
Many of us use the tools that are in our kitchens when we arrive. I am one of those people. Wife does most of the cooking and I try to stay out of her way, literally and figuratively.
If you’re alone or building your own kitchen, though, I can tell you what you need in order to get the dishes done. I can tell you and have told you what you need to keep your floors clean. Laundry? I’ve covered how to, though not so much whether or not any tools are needed.
For doing the laundry, in addition to laundry detergent, one needs baskets. You’ll sort the dirty clothes and towels into the baskets so you’ll need several. These days the baskets are made of plastic that appears woven. They look that way because baskets originally were woven of palm leaves or willow or something else and tradition can be nice. “Woven” also provides light weight and allows air to pass through.
The baskets should be bushel sized. That’s four pecks. Uh, what’s a peck? Eight quarts. So a bushel is 32 quarts or 35 ¼ liters. If you loaded up thirty two quarts worth of liquid into a bushel basket, it’d weigh 65 pounds or so plus the weight of the containers. Too heavy. As a laundry basket, though, it holds a lot of laundry but you can still lift it. It just fills my heavy-duty washer, and that’s good. You can get the baskets at the grocery store, Wal-mart, or the Dollar Store. Be careful, though, I think, like so many things, the manufacturers are making the baskets smaller. Get a big one or it might only hold three pecks….
In addition to baskets, you need a toothbrush or two. This is for scrubbing spots with whatever you scrub spots with. You can use water and laundry detergent, 409 or the grease and dirt detergent you buy for floors, cut with water. I talked about that in another entry. I use chlorine bleach for white clothes. Half a cup in a load of laundry gets out stains and kills germs. If you think it’s bad for the environment, don’t use it.
Finally, a wide, flat surface for laying out stuff to be folded is nice. I use the ironing board. Sometimes I just sit on the couch and fold on my lap, but things come out nicer on the board. I’ll talk about the other use for the ironing board in another blog. Yes, I mean ironing, something I love to do.
Oh, I didn’t mention drying. I use a clothes dryer machine. Some people stretch rope across their back yard and hang the clothes out. If you’re going to hang the clothes you’ll need clothes pins or pegs. (To me, clothes pins are the ones with springs and clothes pegs are the rounded ones you push on from above.) You get them at the same place you get the laundry baskets. Clothes pins, by the way, are also handy for closing up bags of potato chips, etc to keep them fresh longer.
Topics: household, musing | No Comments »
THE SHACK
By admin | September 20, 2009
William Paul Young wrote a book called The Shack. The book has many of the aspects of literature I appreciate. It includes a gun, a car crash, a dangerous chase through mountains and some stuff which appears magical. At the end of the book, the author suggests that bloggers write a review of the book or put down how it has affected their lives. This sharing is part of the Missy Project about which you can learn more at www.theshackbook.com.
Normally, I don’t do stuff like that. I don’t pass on e-mails whether they promise blessings or whether they promise riches. There’s enough stuff swirling around the web without me adding to it. In this case, however, I’m going to give you a review of The Shack just because it has had an impact on me. I would suggest that you obtain a copy of the book from you library, book store, or Amazon and read it all the way to the end. It’s a good story if nothing else.
A WARNING: From my point of view, this is a Christian book. There’s good stuff in it that anyone can apply to his/her own life if he/she parses it carefully. Much of it has a Christian overlay, though. Anyone who reads this blog knows that I am immersed in a church and it is a Christian church (albeit a progressive one), so I don’t have much of a bias against Christianity. I just think that it is important, for the sake of perspective, to understand where the book is coming from
Based on what I’ve been told, there are websites opposing the book and websites supporting the book. I haven’t looked for them, so I can’t say first hand, but I would guess that Christians write from both sides of this argument. I’ve heard it said that “You either love it or you hate it…there’s no in between.” We’ll see.
Overall, the book involves a man, Mack, who has had sorrow and loss in his life and is learning to deal with it. He is also learning how his reaction to sorrow and loss affects other people and how it affects him. Mack, you see, has hidden much of his reaction from others, and in so doing has hidden it from himself.
God, Mack learns, is different from us. (That should rate a “duh” but it doesn’t actually.) By learning to look at his own life from another perspective Mack can begin to understand a little of what God knows and does. I part ways, a bit, with Young here. Understanding God’s perspective and being able to act from that perspective are markedly different things. I understand, for example, that God wants me to be forgiving and to love those who hate me. I also know that I have been known to say to or about, people “God will forgive you for this…but I’m not God.” I’m a complex guy.
Still, I can see that if I’m in relationship with people and if I try to understand the world from their viewpoint, I have a lot less anger and a lot less stress in my life. If I can be in relationship with God at the same time, it eases the difficulty of trying other perspectives. I think, as Young suggests, that God is Love. He says it is our nature to be loved by God as it is the nature of a bird to fly. We can choose to ignore that love and if we do that long enough we can forget that it’s possible to be loved by God, just as a grounded bird might forget that it’s possible for it to fly.
Here’s a quote from the book that I appreciate:
A representation of God invented by Young is speaking “The problem is that many folks try to grasp some sense of who I am by taking the best version of themselves, projecting that to the nth degree, factoring in all the goodness they can perceive, which often isn’t much, and then call that God. And while it may seem like a noble effort, the truth is that it falls pitifully short of who I really am….I am far more than that, above and beyond all that you can ask or think.”
I don’t intend to add any comment to the quote, I just appreciated it.
Having said that this is a Christian book, it seems strange to point out that it is also somewhat anti-religious. I think that the beings discussed in the book see religion as too confining both to themselves and to the humans who create and populate the religions. I think William Young sees religions as being rule-based and human-based, and therefore falling “pitifully short” of having the ability to truly worship God. I’m not clear, however, how to worship, in community with others, without some sort of organizing principle to keep it going. Call me naïve. (And that deserves a “duh”)
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DRIVING TO THE NAVAL STATION
By admin | September 10, 2009
There was a time, I suppose when I really enjoyed driving. I remember a time driving from Las Vegas, Nevada, where my wife lived, to San Diego, California where I was stationed aboard USS Jason (AR8). I left Vegas about 11:00 PM and arrived at the Naval Station about 7:00 AM, just in time to report on board at 8:00 AM. I seem to remember enjoying that drive. At the very least it was an adventure. I’d overstayed my liberty by missing the last airplane from Las Vegas to San Diego so Carole and I decided that I could stay a few hours and drive down. I don‘t recall what we were going to do about getting the car back to her.
Probably about 1:00 or 2:00 AM, I stopped at the Bun Boy restaurant in Victorville, California for coffee. It was cool outside, so it must have been wintertime. The plate glass window of the Bun Boy was completely fogged on the inside. I got my coffee and got back on the road. In those days we didn’t have cup holders so I don’t imagine I got a to-go cup. I was driving our new car, a 1966 Chevy II, the predecessor to the Chevy Nova. Carole had won this car in a contest held when a new dealership was being opened. It had 6 cylinders and a three speed manual transmission with the shifter mounted on the steering column.
Interstate 15 was open at that time and I followed it across the Nevada and California desert as far as I could. Eventually, though, I turned off to the south because I was going to San Diego and not to Los Angeles. The old road wound through farm fields and pastures and was lined on both sides with Eucalyptus. With the headlights illuminating ahead and the full moon shining through the trees to the side, it should have been a beautiful drive, but I was simply hurrying to be back in time to avoid being AWOL (Absent WithOut Leave).
Yesterday I drove from Phoenix to Prescott and returned. The vehicle I was driving is larger and more comfortable than the old Chevy II. It is still 6 cylinders, but has an automatic transmission with the shifter mounted on the console. Shoot, the Chevy II didn’t even have a console. I didn’t hate driving that far and, on occasion, I’ve driven from Phoenix to San Diego, a distance comparable to the Las Vegas trip. I don’t hate making that drive, either. Still, the joy has gone out of driving for me. It has become a chore, like doing the dishes or washing the bathroom. It has to be done and I appreciate the result, but I would enjoy it just as much if someone else would do it for me.
In my family, driving is my job. Wife (a different one now) drives herself to work or to shopping or meetings in town she needs to attend. If there’s reason for her to go out of town, she makes those drives as well. When we get into the car together, however; I’m behind the wheel. What’s up with that? I’m not sure. Sometimes, like now, Wife has a good excuse…it’s hard for her to drive because she’s got a bum arm. Sometimes the excuse is as lame as her arm is. “I don’t like driving in traffic.” “I don’t like driving mountain roads.” “The big trucks scare me.” I, on the other hand, love all that. It feels so good when I stop.
I think it’s a male/female, husband/wife thing; a control issue. She’s letting me have control of the vehicle. Hmmmm, “…letting me have control…” implies that the control lies with her, doesn’t it? It couldn’t be that I’m the one who needs to be in control and that Wife recognizes this. Nah….
Living in the West, driving is necessary. One must be able to drive in order to get from place to place efficiently. Mass transit is here and it’s getting more available, but driving can cut hours off travel time right here in the Metro Area. For example, before I retired, I worked in Mesa, Arizona, a bedroom community for Phoenix. The drive to my office took about 40 minutes, each way. To go by bus would have meant changing busses in Downtown Phoenix, and again in Downtown Mesa. I figured it out on the bus chart one day and could see that it would take about two and one half hours, each way, if I made all the connections.
The time is coming, not quite in sight but coming, when I might not be able to drive myself. I may get old enough and forgetful enough that I’ll need others to help me get from one place to another. No matter how much I want control and/or no matter how much Wife wants to give me control, I might not be able to take it. Do you suppose that part of the “second childhood” we hear about has anything to do with enjoying driving again? I sincerely hope so.
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EATING CLUB
By admin | August 28, 2009
An issue for guys who stay home is “How the heck do I get outta this place?” or, in other words, cabin fever. In prior posts I’ve talked about joining a church, volunteering for stuff and using the gym. Joining a club is another way to connect with people, structure your life so that you will engage in something you enjoy and get out of the house.
I explored a Practical Pistol Shooting Club, but I decided I’m not competitive in that way and I’m not that good with a gun. Cowboy Action Shooting clubs offer me the same problem plus the expense of buying cowboy guns and gear. Actually the club I belong to is one I’ve been a member of for many years, but I hope it can be instructive here.
Our Gourmet Club recently broke in half. The founders aged out and some other couples just decided not to come anymore. We ended up with an odd numbered, not to say odd acting, group of gourmands. Here is how we set ourselves up: After an organizational meeting (usually in August) we know what sort of meals we’ll be cooking and when. Since we have five couples now, one couple fixes appetizers, one does main dish and alcohol, one cooks side dishes and one couple prepares dessert. Couple number five gets a freebee, a bye, and each couple gets that slot once a year. We meet at the home of the “Main Dish/alcoholic beverages” person and, if you’ve done your math right, you can see we meet four times during a school year. (Here in the desert people tend to disappear from June through August.)
At our organizational meeting we decide on countries that will form the theme of each meal. We might have French fare one month, a Turkish meal another and so on. The internet is the basis of most of our culinary research, although cookbook collections and the library are also useful. Finally, in May of each year, our group meets at a café so that no one needs to clean house, cook or do dishes. Usually we meet at a restaurant that is more expensive than we’d typically frequent. That’s just our tradition and I can explain the basis of it if you ask me to.
Our club members are married, male/female couples. A club could as easily have members who were individuals, same sex couples or some conglomeration of those choices. I think it is pretty important for couples to have some sort of continuing relationship for the stability of the club, but otherwise, the sky’s the limit. Our themes are based on national or regional cuisine, but yours could use other themes such as “bread and soup” or “seafood” or some other format. Three to five couples can be accommodated in a middle class home. If you have more than five couples or individuals you may want to make two or more groups and figure out how to mix the groups so that each person can see each other person during the year. If, like us, you’re going to go out for one meal, that would be the one for everyone in the club to attend. Let the chef of some nice restaurant worry about the boisterous group of 18.
I’m OK, of course, if you want to join a bowling league or a slow pitch softball team instead of what I suggested. If you love to eat and drink with friends, though, an eating club is hard to beat.
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Clean the Bathroom!
By admin | August 20, 2009
Getting out of the 1948 Oldsmobile I go into a restroom in the middle of Colorado. I don’t know what brand the oil company is, but the buildings are yellow, the restroom is supposed to be white. Although it has running water and electricity, the restroom smells of stale urine and of the last guy who was in and had beans for lunch. I do my business at the urinal and, knowing that my mom will ask, I go to the sink to wash my hands. The sink is grimy, but the water from the tap is acceptably clean. I wash and then turn to the towel. Oh-oh, it’s one of those cloth roller towels with about two yards of cloth wound around a roller. It’s damp. I wipe my hands on my jeans and return to the car.
So, Doctor, my desire to have a clean bathroom in my home seems to go all the way back to my middle-class summer vacations. What? Oh, that’s not the question you were asking? You totally understand why a person would want a clean bathroom and pristine towels? Oh, OK.
Here’s how to get that sparkling bathroom. I’ve discussed the pristine towels before.
I have two bathrooms in my home, one called the “guest bathroom” and one called “our bathroom” This seems to be mainly a matter of convenience now since Wife and I both use both bathrooms.
The guest bathroom is easiest to clean so I’ll describe that first:
- Gather cleaning supplies. At least one clean rag, a spray bottle of cleaner (I use an industrial cleaner/degreaser cut with water), a spray bottle of window cleaner (I use Windex although white vinegar cut with water is just as good) and a couple of paper towels.
- Enter the room and think about it. Has anyone used the shower or tub since you last cleaned it? When was the last time you mopped the floor?
- Use the spray bottle of cleaner to spray the inside of the toilet. (Flush the toilet first). Brush the toilet with whatever toilet brush you have and set that aside. Allow the cleaner to soak in the toilet bowl.
- Spray cleaner on the counter top and into the sink. I use the clean dry rag to wipe all of this area. Wipe down the faucet and handles also. Mine are chromed so they shine after they’re cleaned. I like that. Inspect the whole area to make sure there is no stray hair or other detritus left around.
- Spray the mirror(s) with window cleaner and wipe with a paper towel. Wipe until there are no streaks and no spots from someone flossing enthusiastically. Use the paper towel because it is lint free and will leave no marks of its own.
- If you’ve decided to clean the tub/shower, use the same cleaner there as on the counter top. I spray the area to be cleaned (tub and tile surround as well as the chromed fixtures) and then wipe them down with the cloth. This is an exercise, since I have to reach over the tub to get at the surround. In the tub, I wet the cloth and leave a little water running while I wipe down the already sprayed area. When I’m done, I rub my bare hand over the porcelain of the tub to insure that it feels smooth and slick. Any “bathtub ring” material which might be left will cause friction and I’ll clean it again. Finally, wipe down the fixtures so they don’t have water marks on them.
- Finish cleaning the toilet. Spray the seat and cover on both sides and use the damp cloth from the bathtub to wipe everything down. Use your toilet brush to swish the bowl again, now that it’s had a chance to soak with the cleaner. Wipe down the toilet rim, where you may have splashed pee, last so that you’re not carrying that soil onto anything else. Flush.
Some notes:
- In “our bathroom” I always clean the shower/tub since someone has definitely used it since the last time.
- Whatever you and/or your partner keep on the counter top or tub surround will need to be dusted, at least. Do that fairly early in the process, probably when you’re washing the sinks. In my house, this is a pain in the ass since my partner thinks she needs products to keep her looking lovely. I don’t agree, but she still has 22 bottles (I counted) around her sink and a similar number on the tub surround. Since she IS lovely, I clean these bottles anyway.
- It’ll be a big help if you keep up with the water spots in the bath as you go through the week. Each time I shower, I dry myself and then use my towel to wipe down the shower walls and fixtures so they don’t get spotted. I also wipe down the glass shower doors. (Did I mention that I shower at the gym as often as possible?)
- I mop the bathroom floors when I’m mopping the rest of the house. You can also do it at the end of your bathroom cleaning routine. I’d either use a mop or a separate rag so you’re not carrying pee from the toilet rim onto the floor.
Topics: household | No Comments »
Dentists
By admin | August 8, 2009
I may have fallen afoul of a cabal of angry dentists. As I write, the right side of my jaw is swollen by a third and as unpleasant as is to look at it is still more unpleasant to feel. Here’s how it happened:
I felt the rough edge of a broken molar on the top left side of my mouth, so I called Dr. L. for an appointment. That Dr. L. was recommended by my wife should have been further evidence of evil intent, but I failed to notice that. Before Dr. L. would deign to examine my dentition, they (the office staff) demanded X-rays. Old fashioned bite-wing X-ray film was used. This is the type which first makes you gag when it touches your palate and later digs painfully into your gums, while the tech says loudly “hold very still”. The tech says this loudly because she is in another room, probably lead lined, to avoid the ill effects of whatever it is she’s doing to you.
It turned out that the broken molar on the top left was pretty much a non-issue. It would be ground down and filled with a pasty, white substance that would harden into a pasty-white filling. HOWEVER, Dr. L. and the staff showed me X-rays, which I now realize I have no reason to believe, which showed a large cavity on the right-bottom of my mouth accompanied by a less large cavity in an abutting tooth. This would require attention from “a specialist”.
Again, before Dr. L. would be allowed to drill, I had to have a cleaning. That my teeth were so hideous as to need cleaning by a professional prior to being repaired by a second professional was bad enough. The welding masks and rubber gloves everyone used when approaching my mouth were a final indication of my unfitness as a patient. By the end of the X-raying, discussion, and cleaning I was exhausted and decided to put off the repair of the top left molar until a second visit.
Between the first and second visits to Dr. L. I made an appointment with Dr. K, the dreaded “specialist”. This fourteen-year-old looked at the X-ray I had brought of the suspicious tooth and told me I had three choices, two of which involved extraction of the tooth and one of which involved scalpels and is too horrible to describe here. Leaving aside the cut-down option, then, I could either have him pull the tooth and build a bridge based on the two abutting teeth, OR I could have him pull the tooth and sink a titanium screw into the bone beneath. A bridge would make it difficult to floss which was not a problem since I was only flossing long enough to get me through Dr. L.’s treatment. Still, the idea of the Golden Gate swinging between two of my teeth was unappealing.
I chose option number three, pulling the tooth and eventually sinking a screw to which an implant could be attached. Dr. K. claimed that this would be permanent. Now that the tooth has been extracted and bovine bone paste put in the resulting hole in my mouth, I realize that the fix is “permanent” because Dr. K. intends to cause my early demise probably just after getting paid for his work. While drugs helped me through the first iteration of Dr. K.’s labors, I am now left with a swollen jaw, pain, and the lingering sense that I’ve got to go again…to be screwed.
Topics: musing | 1 Comment »
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