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Common sense

DIY Window Cleaner: Pro and con

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The budget’s a little low after Christmas. I need glass cleaner, but tours of Costco, Safeway, and Target in search of Windex and its knockoffs yield the same result: the stuff costs a great deal more than it’s worth. With $64 left to last till next Tuesday and gasoline and several key food items remaining to purchase, I can’t afford it.Vinegar works well for most glass-cleaning purposes, but it doesn’t cut grease very well—for that, you need something stronger.

The classic old-time formula for household window cleaner combines ammonia, alcohol, and water in equal quantities. So, to make a little less than a quart, you’d mix 1 cup of ammonia, one cup of rubbing alcohol, and one cup of water. Use the clear, nonsudsing variety of ammonia.

I suspect you don’t need that much ammonia. And in fact, a newer version shows 1 cup rubbing alcohol, 1 cup water, 1 Tbsp nonsudsing ammonia. An ammonia-free variant contains1 cup water, 1 cup rubbing alcohol, and 1 Tbsp vinegar. Having used the mostly alcohol variant, I’d make the formula with a little less alcohol—maybe a half to three-quarters cup to one cup of water—and add a very small amount of ammonia. And be careful not to get it on the woodwork!

So…are these home-made concoctions greener or more user-friendly than the commercial cleansers? Let’s investigate:

Windex contains butoxyethanol, which the State of California lists as a hazardous substance; it has been shown to cause reduced fertility, birth defects, and embryo death in animals. Windex-type cleaners also contain isopropanol, a type of alcohol that, like any alcohol, is flammable; exposure causes flushing, headache, dizziness, central nervous system depression, nausea, vomiting, anaesthesia, and coma; inhaling it or absorbing it through your skin can cause toxic effects. Always use it in a well-ventilated place. And Windex contains ethylene, a solvent that in small quantities is relatively benign.

But just because you’re making your own doesn’t mean it’s green or safe. Ordinary household chemicals such as ammonia and rubbing alcohol also have dangerous characteristics. By comparison, your home-made glass cleaner isn’t a big improvement, in the green department, over the expensive blue stuff.

In the U.S., rubbing alcohol is usually isopropyl alcohol but it may also be a mix of ethanol and water. It is toxic and can be fatal if ingested. Do not drink or breathe it, and keep it away from any products containing chlorine. Keep it way out of reach of children and alcoholics.

Ammonia functions as a solvent. It is irritating to the eyes, mucous membranes, and skin. Limit your exposure to it, and use rubber gloves when using it as a cleaning compound. Do not mix it with chlorine in any form: this means household products such as scouring powder and toilet cleaners that contain chlorine. The resulting gas is extremely poisonous.

Making your own glass cleaner is cheaper than buying a commercial product, but unless all you’re using is vinegar and water, don’t imagine it’s safer or greener than Windex-y products.

Privacy: It’s none of their business

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Peter at Bible Money Matters reports that when he called American Express to cancel an old credit card account that hadn’t been used in years, he was blitzed with a high-pressure pitch to keep the card. Among other things, the person who answered his phone call asked him why he would want to cancel a perfectly fine credit card. One of Peter’s readers also reported having been asked a similar question and then pursuedwith attempts to discuss balances on other cards and her arrangements for emergency funds. Wow! All of these matters come under the heading of nobody’s business but yours. Stand in front of the mirror and practice uttering these phrases:
That’s none of your business.
Why do you want to know?
I don’t share that kind of information with strangers.

Be prepared to use them at the drop of a hat.

The psychology of phone interactions between companies and consumers is fascinating. Decades ago, my mother worked for the phone company in California. Part of her job was to check up on fraudulent long-distance calls, which in those days were pretty easy to make. When a customer called in and said a call to thus-&-such a number was incorrectly billed to him, she would telephone the number and ask whoever answered who had called them at the time and date shown on the bill. Amazingly, when asked point-blank most people would blurt out the perp’s name without thinking.

She said she’d been taught during the phone company’s training sessions that when confronted with an unexpected personal question, most people will answer honestly before they think about it. A lot of the conversation that Peter and his readers report entails having some minimum wage employee at a phone bank—possibly in some other country—engage the mark in a conversation about matters that are none of his or her business, solely for the purpose of manipulation.

It’s another reason we should protect our privacy and draw a line where information that belongs to us is concerned.

Remember: Just say no!

Yard sale adventures

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It’s twenty after five and I’m done in…and I didn’t do much of the work.

VickyC is still trying to shovel out the mountains of clothing and other personal effects left after her mom passed last April. She’s already sold over $1,500 worth of clothing on consignment. But bags and bags of perfectly fine clothing—some of it very attractive—were rejected by the consigner. So, she decided to throw a yard sale. Another of her friends and I offered to help out and to bring some of our own yard-salable stuff to the big event.

And what a yard sale she’s got going! We convened at her central-city home right at 7:00 a.m. One of her house-mates put up the yard sale signs on his way to work, and shortly customers started to show up.

In addition to hundreds of clothing items and mountains of towels, sheets, and bedding, she offered several pieces of furniture, including a Thomasville coffee table and a handsome red upholstered love seat. I brought the security cameras M’hijito had installed to record activity in the backyard during the late great swimming pool vandalism adventures, plus some old stereo components and a few pieces of kitsch. A male friend contributed two electric guitars and an amplifier.

People will buy the darnedest things…and not buy the darnedest things. The clothing, as expected, sold well, even though there was so much of it we had no hope of hanging it up or even of spreading it out in any way to display it effectively. Buyers just pawed through stacks and bags of stuff, apparently undisturbed by the absence of merchandising flare. Someone paid $100 for one of the guitars, but no one would pay $75 for the love seat, which was clean and in nearly new condition. It took all day to unload the coffee table. Someone bought two of the stereo components, neither of which was the receiver. The cameras, hard disk, and electronic stuff to connect them to a TV set were stolen.

VickyC collected over $300 today and probably will sell more tomorrow, provided it’s not raining. Rain wasn’t predicted until Sunday, but gray clouds lowered overhead all day and it wouldn’t be surprising if we got rain by tomorrow.I collected $21 and change, and VickyC gave me a lamp that I coveted for M’hijito’s house as consolation for the theft of the electronic goods.

Staging this yard sale was an enormous amount of work, especially for the proprietor. We hangers-on didn’t do much, other than help drag a few tables around and spread out the loot, and then drag it all back into a secure area when VickyC was ready to close for the afternoon. Was it worth it?

Really: is a yard sale worth the amount of work it requires?

Only, IMHO, if you have a lot of stuff to get rid of and you can be pretty certain it’s the sort of stuff that will sell. Around here, that means clothing, children’s toys, tools, low-end cookware, and (sometimes) small household items. And by a lot, I mean a lot:a houseful of stuff left by a deceased relative, or everything you own when you decide to not to rent a truck or pay a moving company to decamp to another state.

Given the time and effort it takes to put together even a fairly small yard sale, I don’t think it’s worth the effort unless you can make at least $300. We held the sale open from 7 in the morning till around 2:00 p.m.—seven hours—and VickyC had put in many, many hours more than that. I’d estimate she put in at least 20 hours, bare minimum. That meant she earned about $15 an hour, not a bad wage.

In my case, however, if you count VickyC’s $15 asking price for the lamp as a fair trade for the $800 worth of security camera equipment that was ripped off (I hoped to get about $30 for the stuff, at yard-sale rates), then I came away with $36 for the seven hours of my time at the sale plus another hour spent gathering my junk, cleaning it up, tagging it, and hauling it downtown. That’s $4.50 an hour…a far cry from the $60 an hour my time commands on the freelance market.

So, no: in ordinary circumstances, I doubt if yard-saling is worth your time. Financially, I would have been better off to have spent today marketing The Copyeditor’s Desk or writing the proposed CE Desk book. Had I donated my junk to Goodwill, the deduction from my income taxes would have been worth more than my yard-sale proceeds. It was a choice people-watching opportunity, and I enjoyed spending the time with my friend. But beyond that, I don’t see it as a particularly efficient way to generate sidestream income.

Inexcusable! FDA betrays public trust

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Have you seen this little gem?The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has decided to set a safety threshhold for melamine…in baby formula!

Folks. This is the stuff they use to make ugly plastic dishes and cheesy plastic tabletops. Used as a cheap imitation of protein in food, it poisons dogs, cats, and babies.There is no safe level for a toxic substance in baby formula!

Well, now you’ve got it: this is what happens when wacko ideologues take control of a government with the purpose of decommissioning that government. When you kill the beast, you kill the babies.

There is just flat out no excuse for that.

Is that bargain food safe to eat?

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You find a gallon of juice at the grocery on megasale. Only problem is, the “sell by” date is the day after tomorrow; the stuff that’s not on sale has a sell-by date sometime in the middle of next week. Will you have to throw out whatever juice you can’t gulp down in a day and a half? Over at Scribbit, a lively discussion of the pros and cons of Costco is going on; blog proprietor Michelle observes that Costco’s milk often has an expiration date so close to the purchase date she ends up throwing sketchy stuff away.

Depends on what the date actually is. Take a close look at it: does it say “sell by,” “use by,” or “expiration”? Or something else?

Food is not slated to spoil by its “sell by” or “use by” date. Truth to tell, if it’s been stored properly it may be OK even after its “expiration” date, though you might not want to give it to infants or folks with serious health problems. According to Consumer Reports, here’s what those dates mean:

Use by, best if used by, or quality assurance: These estimate the period in which a product is at the height of its delectability. After the date given, it may be less flavorful, but it’s still safe to eat.

Sell by or pull: This tells the retailer when the product should be taken off the shelf. But it’s still safe to eat by the “sell by” date. This date figures in the amount of time most people might be expected to store the product at home. According to CR, milk is usable for a good seven days after the sell-by date.

Package or pack date: The date the product was packaged. It has no direct relationship to the date the product is likely to spoil. Comparing package dates of products on the shelf may allow you to buy the most recently processed item, which is nice, but the older one is not necessarily about to spoil.

Expiration date: For food, this is the term that indicates food may be spoiled. CR says an exception is eggs, which can be used three to five weeks after the stamped-on expiration date. Remember, too, that for other products the “expiration date” is often just a marketing gimmick to induce you to buy new packages of perfectly OK products (such as sunscreen) at regular intervals.

The way a food is stored is crucially important to how long it stays edible. And you may not know. For example, last summer I made an emergency run to the nearby Albertson’s to buy some butter. What should I find but that the cooler where the butter and margarine were stored was out of order! It clearly had been out of order for quite some time: the room-temperature butter was soft, and the other dairy products in the case were warm and kept that way under the display case’s lights.

I didn’t buy it, and on the way out (annoyed that now I would have to burn gas to make a six-mile round-trip traipse to buy a single package of butter) I mentioned the broken case and room-temperature dairy products to the store manager. She just shrugged and said a repairman was supposed to show up that day. It was clear she had no intention of removing the products—as soon as the cooler was repaired, shoppers would have no idea the butter, margarine, sour cream, cream cheese and other products had been sitting at 80 degrees for many hours.

So, as in most cases, we’re reduced to having to use common sense. Give any food item the sniff test, no matter when it’s dated. Does it smell fresh? Any whiff of the rancid about it? And do you see any sign of mildew or dried-up spots? Does the can bulge? Is the can dented? If so, out it goes.

Don’t assume the dates on a product necessarily mean you have to consume it by that date, or that it’s still safe by that date, either. When in doubt, throw it out.

Multitasking: A young person’s game?

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This morning NPR ran a feature about a neuroscientist whose research shows that people reach their peak ability to multitask—defined as doing more than one thing at once—in their twenties, that young children are incapable of multitasking, and that as we age we lose the knack of handling several trains of thought or attention at the same time.

It’s an interesting proposition. One thing is for sure: it goes a long way toward explaining why I feel more and more hostile toward conflicting demands on my attention, and why contemporaries often say the same thing. Two things happen as you age, of which either or both may be related to this issue:

  1. When you put something down to attend to something else, you tend to forget the first task and wander off into new realms.
  2. When you are trying to perform a given task, it begins to look to you as not one task but a whole series of tasks. For example, doing the laundry = a) gathering clothes and toweling, b) hauling laundry to the washer, c) treating stains, d) setting the washer to soak, e) adding soap and bleach, f) going back out to the washer to run the rest of the cycle, g) going back out to put the wet clothes in the dryer or hang them on the line, h) going back out to haul the clothes out of the dryer or off the line, i) hanging and folding clothes, k) putting the clothes away. “One” task is actually eleven tasks!

Each of these eleven tasks interrupts something else that you’re doing: housecleaning, yardwork, blogging, child care, paying work, whatever. Even if the subtasks of a given activity happen all in one chunk of time, rather than spreading out over minutes or hours as the laundry chore does, as you get older you still see X job not as X but as a + b + c + d . . . and so on to infinity.

The point I’m trying to make (I think) is that “multitasking” is not doing several things at once. It’s actually a conflicting tangle of interruptions. It may be, in fact, that at times in your life you’re better equipped to stay focused during a series of interruptions: your attention wanders less, or you’re less conscious of the annoyance factor inflicted by gestalt activities. But I would argue that proceeding forward by interruption is not an efficient or effective way to function. Certainly there’s nothing new about that thought: researchers have known this for years.

So What Can We Do about It?

Plenty. First off, we can recognize that as 21st-century Americans we’re subjected to far more concurrent demands on our attention than humans are evolved to cope with. Knowing that, we can consciously engineer our activities to enhance focus and cut out distractions.

For example: Working on your computer? Turn off the e-mail programs. If there’s no burning need to know when every minuscule, generally meaningless message comes in, then you’re justified in checking your e-mail three times a day, two times…or even less than that!

Oh, revolutionary!

Extending the rebellion: Get rid of telephone features that distract your attention or interrupt a phone conversation. Do you really need call-waiting? Can anything be ruder than interrupting a phone conversation with the remark that you’ve got to put the person on hold to answer an incoming call (probably from someone sooooo much more important than the person you’re speaking with)? Give each telephone call your undivided attention, and don’t brook any electronic interruptions. Do you really need caller ID, for that matter? Why do you need to interrupt what you’re doing check the identity of every caller and make a decision as to whether to answer the phone? Just let the call go through to your voicemail and decide, at your convenience, which caller you will talk to, and when.

Turn off the television if it’s just running as background noise to an intellectual activity. You’re not really listening to it as you do your homework or office work—you’re interrupting your train of thought to pick up on something that attracts your attention. Switching back and forth, even at a subliminal level, is inefficient, time-consuming, and stressful.

Make a conscious decision to focus on one thing at a time. Recently, for example, I realized that I tend to start things, drop them to do something else, and then delay or never finish the them, especially in the morning. I get up, wash my face, and brush my teeth. While I’m brushing my teeth I turn on the e-mail or the blog program. Then I stumble out and feed the dog. I throw on some clothes and race out to meet La Maya for a morning walk. Then I fix and eat breakfast, trying to read the paper while eating, without much luck. Maybe I water the garden or add water or chemicals to the pool. Then I’m back at the computer. Then I realize I’m late for work. I bathe, wash my hair, throw on some presentable-in-public clothes, bolt toward the door and realize…
…I haven’t put my makeup on;
…I haven’t made the bed;
…I haven’t put the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher, possibly because
…I haven’t unloaded the clean dishes;
…I haven’t put together the paperwork I need to carry to the credit union today;
…I haven’t put the work I needed to return to the office back in the car;
…I haven’t turned off the water on some plant;
…I haven’t put water or iced leftover coffee in the car for the long drive across the city;
…DAMMIT, I’m not ready to go!!!!!

So as I’m trying to get out the door, I’m racing around tying up a great frayed fringe of loose ends.

There’s a way around this, and it’s simple: Finish every action that gets started before starting a new action. That means finish the WHOLE action. Recognize the entire series of subtasks that constitute an action and get them all done at once. This morning after I washed my face, I put on the light make-up I need to appear more or less alive at the office (i.e., brushing-teeth-and-washing-face also includes painting face). Before leaving the bedroom, I made the bed (getting out of bed entails making the bed). Before wandering out of the kitchen after breakfast, I put the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher (preparing and eating a meal includes putting the dishes away).

The gestalt atmosphere that we live in today tends to unlink a given activity’s subactions, so that we leave things undone or get distracted in the middle of a series of actions that really should be regarded as one action. We need to relink the parts of each activity, so we can resist the blandishments of “multitasking” and live our lives in a more coherent, efficient—and dare one say it? meaningful—way.

The Strategy

  1. Dispense with as many distractions as possible.
  2. Be conscious of all the activities an action entails, link them together, and think of them as a single action.
  3. Try to complete each whole action before moving on to something else.

Of course, if you’re a young parent, this is easier said than done: children require attention, and they generally require it sooner than later. Maybe that’s why, so the scientists say, young adults are better able to “multitask” than the rest of us. But maybe what we should do is simply pay full attention to the children. I suspect that at any time of life, we’re likely to be happier and less stressed if we make it a habit to do one thing—one whole thing—at a time.