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Household hints

Fleas?????? Is there ever a break from the timesuck?

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So I wake up this morning with a nice little pattern of bug bites on one arm. Now, there’s nothing unusual about the occasional solitary bug bite around this place. Arizona, as the local climate has warmed and the feckless humans have flooded in and tried to clone the upper Midwest wherever they come to light, has been overrun with mosquitoes.

You never used to see a mosquito here. Now they fill your house every spring and hang around until December, when the weather chills down a bit. One day a couple of years ago, I killed a dozen of the little monsters inside the house!

We haven’t had so many this year. I don’t know why. Haven’t had many flies, either.

WhatEVER. All that notwithstanding, I happen to know what a mosquito bite looks like. Having grown up in the Middle East, I also happen to know what flea bites look like.

Mosquitoes are not piggish eaters. They sit down to dinner once and then get up and fly away. Fleas, on the other hand, have never met a blood meal that they didn’t want more of. Right away, please.

So three or four really itchy bites clustered within a radius of an inch or two or three usually means a flea has come visiting.

And you know what that means?

Oh yes.

TIME SUCK!

Time suck of the first water.

You need to get on the job of flea-whacking instantaneously if you’re to have any hope whatsoever that your DIY efforts will work.

So. First thing after the requisite doggy-walk (we do the doggy walk at 5 a.m. because i wish to live and because one corgi will boss a human around but two corgis will reduce the human to full obedience at all times), it was into the bathtub with the hounds.

Actually, before we left, I inspected both pooches for fleas and didn’t find any signs that I recognize. It’s pretty easy to tell if the animal is heavily infested. My mother once brought a badly infested cat home from a pet store…the vet taught us how to recognize flea eggs and flea debris. They don’t seem to have any eggs in their fur, nor did I see any flea sh!t. However, both dogs had a strange dark deposit around their hindmost titties. I think this was dirt — probably congealed urine, since a female dog can spray her belly by accident, especially when it assumes as deep a squat as a corgi does. So I smeared these areas with olive oil, figuring some oil would loosen whatever that was.

Olive oil will not harm your dog, BTW. Baby oil and bath oil may, since they consist mostly of mineral oil. That’s antithetical to an animal that can be guaranteed to lick the stuff off.

So by the time we got home from a mile’s stroll, the dogs had been marinating in olive oil for twenty or thirty minutes.

Into the bathtub.

You do not want to know what a circus it is to launder a corgi. When they say a corgi is “a big dog in a small dog’s body,” that’s not quite spot on. The fact is, under certain circumstances, a corgi IS a big dog.

Two wrestling matches later, the dogs were clean and the bathtub was filthy.

Scrub bathtub out.

Now it was time to gather ALL the bedding, including the bedpad, all the mats the dogs lay on, all the area rugs in the house, all the clothing I’ve worn lately all the towels I’ve used, all the…whatever. These all needed be washed in HOT hot water and then dried on the dryer’s hottest cycle.

Six loads of laundry got stacked in the garage next to the washer.

The ACCURSED GODDAMN SAMSUNG WASHER!

That thing takes about an hour for every load. So we’re looking at SIX HOURS OF LAUNDRY out there!!!!!!!!!

One of the damn thing’s many charms is that you can’t select “hot” water on most of the cycles. There’s actually only one cycle that lets you select very hot water: the one that’s intended to “sanitize” the inside of the thing, since as we know these so-called “high-efficiency” washers tend to grow mold and stink to high heaven.

“High efficiency.” SNORT!!!!!! How exactly is having to run the electric for SIX HOURS to do a three-hour (or less) job “efficient”?

Then it was time to drag out the vacuum. Vacuum every nook and every cranny in the bedroom. Vacuum every square inch of the mattress and bed springs. This is complicated by  the fact that it’s one of those “pillow top” monsters that were in style at the time I bought the thing. “Pillow tops” are held in place by stitched-down patterns, which collect…yes…dirt and debris. Had to get an orange stick and a stiff brush to dig that stuff out of the stupid stitch thingies and THEN vacuum all that up. Endless.

Then climb under the bed (which weighs too much for me to budge) and vacuum every square inch under there. And vacuum every square inch under the dressers. And in the closet. And up the hall. And in the other rooms. Ugh.

Thank god for tile floors.

It’s almost 10 a.m. Good thing the dogs rousted me out at 5, otherwise I’d still be doing all that. Well, I am still doing all that: the accursed goddamn Samsung washer is grinding away out there.

It’s 10:03 a.m. and I have done no work. I mean, real work on the writing empire. Well. I uploaded an image to the Camptown Races blog, which will be called “Camptown Ladies Talk.” The images I wanted to use turned out to be a) too large and b) too difficult to fit into the header image space without some serious Photoshopping. But I found some images in the public domain that simply defy belief.

If you’d like a preview, you can peek at her here. But IF YOU ARE WITH THE CHURCH, DO NOT GO THERE, DEAR FELLOW CHOIR MEMBERS, CLERGY, AND HANGERS-ON because that will pop your eye out. That site is strictly adults only. Racy adults.

Yesterday I finished what I hoped would be the last chapter of the current Bobbi and the Biker bookoid, but as it fell together, I found Bobbi and Billy demanded at least one more chapter. This is alarming, because we’re already over 7,000 words. Whatever wraps this episode up is gonna have to be succinct.

This weekend I also posted book III of Fire-Rider. The marauding war bands get back on the road, after having flattened a major enemy stronghold, and the journey begins…

And now, speaking of metaphorical journeys, I must away!

Cat Wars: Reinforcing the Battlements

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tabbycatSo the carpet-tack strips I zip-tied along the tops of the cinderblock walls by way of discouraging Other Daughter’s nuisance cat from jumping into the yard, predating on the birds and geckos, and using my desert landscaping as a giant litterbox have worked middling well. I haven’t seen her atop the wall for a long time, nor have I found any of her parasite-laden little doggy treats laying around the backyard.

And so, as crackpot as this particular decorative element appears, it seems to be working to keep the damn cat out.

A year and a half later, the strips have buckled and warped under the onslaught of rain and sun. Fortunately, this was easily fixed simply by adding a another half-dozen plastic zip-ties. They’ll last a few more months before I have to take them down and replace them.

But the problem of the caps atop the cinderblock support columns remains. They present no practical way to tie down pieces of carpet-tack strips. Aluminum pans full of water, besides looking even crazier than the tack strips, breed mosquitoes and get tipped over by mockingbirds using them as watering holes.

I ended up jury-rigging some little squares of carpet tacks, which provided a couple of crossbars that could be tied to the decorative blocks abutting some, but not all of the columns. These worked to keep the cat from perching on the columns, but they can’t be tied down firmly — or, in one corner, at all — and so the buckling renders them even more bizarre-looking than the straight pieces and, where no tiedown is reasonable, essentially nonfunctional.

What to do?

Several folk sites on the Internet claim that cats dislike tinfoil. With a lifetime supply of Costco aluminum foil residing in the pantry, this would be an easy and cheap fix.

However, one crass skeptic has mounted a video in which he tests this theory. He tapes lengths of tinfoil down a short, hardwood-floored hallway and lets the camera run.

Kitty approaches the new carpeting with suspicion. She sniffs. She tests it tentatively with a paw. Then she strides over it, marches up to the camera, and rubs her furry flank across its lens.

😆 Yay, crass skeptics!

More believable is the claim that cats don’t like sticky stuff under their feet. We’re told that double-sided tape stuck atop a counter or on furniture you would like to remain un-clawed will discourage counter-roaming and sofa-ripping.

Possibly. At Amazon, reviewers of an anti-cat product designed to stick on upholstered furniture report that the cat simply removes the tape and then proceeds with its project of shredding the sofa.

However. Perching on top of something is different from clawing fabric. There actually IS a good chance that sticky stuff could repel Other Daughter’s cat from the cinderblock column caps.

However1. Sticky stuff will stay sticky about 48 hours out there. So much crap drops out of the Devil-Pod Tree and also, at this time of year, out of the paloverde tree that a sticky surface would soon be rendered nonfunctional.

This returns us to the question of how to affix tack strips to the column caps, even if temporarily.

How about using double-sided tape to hold them down? Scotch sells an exterior mounting tape that is beloved by a huge majority of Amazon reviewers. The minority who whinge about it complain that it doesn’t hold up certain objects. But as a weapon in the Cat Wars, the stuff would lay flat — it wouldn’t be called upon to stick anything to the side of a wall. Some of the product’s admirers claim that heat only makes it work better; it seems to lose effectiveness in sub-freezing temps. Those do not occur around here, at least not often.

This could be the answer. Four hundred and fifty feet of heavy-duty double-sided tape would hold down a lot 18-inch strips of cat-repellent tack sticks.

House_gecko_with_spiderIn the absence of Other Daughter’s accursed cat, life has begun to return to the backyard. The gecko population is slowly recovering.

And in the presence of geckos, the mosquito population has declined.

We still have some, but nothing like the swarms that normally harass the Funny Farm’s warm-blooded denizens at this time of  year.

The flies also seem to have declined a little. Still enough to be a nuisance, but not six or eight in the house at a time.

And I believe there are more birds out there than before.

And there’s a duck.

Yes. DUCK. A little research reveals that it takes baby ducks about 60 days to fledge. So if they hatch and if they survive, they’ll be around for most of the summer.

DUCK is not disturbed by the presence of the human in the pool. Today I do have to shock-treat, since we’re starting to get some algae. But the only time she leaves the nest to forage is around 3 to 4 in the afternoon. So I figure if I slip some chlorine into the drink early in the morning, by mid-afternoon the water should be safe for her even if she happens to go into the pool. Which she doesn’t. Not often, anyway.

M’hijto remarked that the ducklings are likely to be picked off by the neighbor’s damned cat, if not by the coyotes, the raccoons, and the resident red-tail.

Hence the project to shore up the battlements. Quack!

YoungDucksminimized

How to Get Sand Out of a Top-Loading HE Washer

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Here in urban Arizona, we homeowners have something called “desert landscaping.” This is some Easterner’s idea of an approximation of what the Sonoran Desert looks like: a load of gravel spread over the yard and punctuated with a few cacti, a palm tree or two, and an ocotillo. Since the cost of watering a lawn easily exceeds a summer air-conditioning bill (which can be whopping!), this type of xeriscaping is cost-effective, if not what you’d call aesthetically awe-inspiring.

Quarter-Inch-Minus-Sand-150x150An alternative to the ugly, footpad-piercing gravel is a product called “quarter-minus.” This stuff appears to be a by-product of sand-and-gravel operations: it’s a blend of finely crushed granite and gritty stuff that looks a lot like sand. Quarter-minus has three advantages: piled on deep enough, it inhibits weed growth; it vaguely resembles the desert floor (sure does that better than gravel, anyway); and after it’s been watered or rained on a few times, it packs down into a hard surface that your dogs can walk around on. This latter obviates their getting mud all over their feet and tracking it into the house.

“Mud” in Arizona is not your ordinary East-Coast mud. The soil here has a lot of clay — in its extreme form, it creates a kind of hardpan called caliche. This stuff is sticky. When the dog tracks regular wet dirt into the kitchen, the stuff adheres to the tile flooring like paint. You literally have to get down on hands and knees and scour it off. It will not wipe up with a rag or paper towel — you have to use a scrub brush or one of those sponges with a scouring pad on the back.

This is a good reason to put quarter-minus in the back yard. If you’re a dog owner, that is. And if your dog is, say, NOT a corgi puppy.

Ruby the Corgi Puppy, being a high-energy sort of soul, is given to chasing around the yard like a rocket with Cassie. And Cassie, being a corgi herself, is also a bit of a rocket. They’ve built a race track around one of the orange trees. Where they’ve established their route, the quarter-minus is churned up and loose. And that means whenever it gets wet, they track a film of fine sand into the kitchen.

This vacuums up, but it’s a nuisance. So I put a little bathroom rug in front of the kitchen door, which works well to shake off and collect the sand.

The other day one of the dogs wuffed on the rug, so I put it in the accursed Samsung washer. And it came out just fine, since it’s flat. Flat things are the only things the Samsung will run through an entire wash cycle without disgorging them in the form of braids.

A few days later, I decided to toss a pair of jeans that I’d worn just a couple of hours into the rinse-&-spin cycle, knowing this would shake out the wrinkles and give me another wearing before I actually had to wash the things by hand, as I now have to wash everything that’s not flat by hand. Twenty minutes later, I come back to retrieve the pants and…WH-A-A-A?????

They’re covered in mud.

Not mud, exactly: SAND.

Sand has run out into the utility sink, into which the used washer water drains, and left a structure that looks like a sand bar on the bottom of it.

Lovely.

Not only that, but the entire inside of the washer is full of sand.

I get out the shop vac and vacuum out the sand, running the nozzle not only over the bottom but all over the tub’s walls, hoping to suck out whatever sand is caught in the little holes that perforate the tub’s side from top to bottom. I fill a scrub bucket with cold water and attempt to rinse the sand out of my jeans.

Then I run the pants through the washer again, only on a full “Quick Wash” cycle. In the wondrous world of HE washers, “quick” means 45 minutes. I figure an endless slosh like this should knock the remaining sand out of the jeans and rinse it out of the washer.

Three-quarters of an hour later…

The jeans are still full of sand, and so is the washer.

Now what?

I wipe out the washer with a microfiber rag, put the jeans to soak with some detergent in a bucketful of water and run the “Bedding” cycle with the machine empty. “Bedding” is the only cycle that causes the Samsung to dispense enough water to actually clean a load of wash, more or less. The “Bedding” cycle takes an hour and ten minutes to run. Maybe, I hope, that much water slopping around that long will be enough to wash the sand out.

Well. No.

I wipe down the inside of the washer tub again, rinse out the soapy jeans in the sink, drop them back into the washer, and run “Bedding” again.

Have you counted up the amount of time we’re at now? One rinse, two “quick” washes, two bedding cycles: that adds up to 4.17 hours of run time. That doesn’t count the time spent vacuuming and wiping down the washer and manually rinsing sand out of the clothing.

The jeans come out again with sand in them, but less of it: I’m able to shake most of it out in the backyard.

The inside of the washer is still coated with sand. YouTube’s repair dudes and DIY mavens suggest this is not a good state of affairs: sand in the pump will, of course, grind up its innards.

Apparently I’m going to be  buying another new washer sooner than expected. Hope I can find a cheaper one with a rinse-only cycle…

How to get this stuff out?

Now I raid the linen closet and haul out four large towels, one of them a gigantic Costco beach towel. These I dump into the washer with a generous slug of home-made fabric softener (hair conditioner diluted with water works as well as fabric softener and it doesn’t stink). Run it all through on “Bedding” again, the second-longest cycle the Samsung provides.

This seems to work. There’s still some sand in the washer, but a lot less. I shake out the towels in the backyard, attempting to dislodge as much sand as possible. Wipe out the inside of the washer again. Toss them back into the washer. Run the washer again.

By the time the mountain of towels came out the second time, most of the sand was out of the washer. Not all of it, by any means. But most of it.

That’s 6.51 hours — almost seven hours of running the washer trying to get the sand out of it!

Holy mackerel! What would you do if you lived near a beach? Just keep buying new $1500 washers every six months or so? Learn to replace the pump yourself and keep a lifetime supply of the things in the garage?

Ain’t life grand in the highly efficient 21st century ?

 

Tang Me! Tang Me! Yuh oughta take a rope an’…

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…hang the dishwasher? 🙂 Remember the rage, a few years back, for cleaning out the dishwasher with Tang, the fake-food sugared orange drink mix? Ever wondered how that worked?

Welp, after much scrubbing and cleaning and vinegaring of the stinky freakingbrandnewDishwasher, I got the weird smell out. For awhile. But within a week or so, it was back.

The machine doesn’t seem to be dirty. In fact, I began to wonder if it was the water — the city adds some very strange chemicals to the water as the weather starts to warm. This is a new odor, but every now and again we do get a new odor. Sometimes even the dogs won’t drink the water. Then I have to fill their dish with filtered water for days on end. But after much sniffing around, I decided that probably wasn’t the issue.

In a moment of desperation, I decided to try this folk remedy. Looked it up on the Web; found a few handymen holding forth on YouTube, explaining how much to dump in. Took a drive to the Safeway, which carried the stuff, oddly enough, down at the end of the aisle full of fake drinks.

A small plastic bottle of ominous-looking orange powder costs about three bucks.

You empty the dishwasher, and then you sprinkle about a cup of the stuff — about half the small Tang container — around the floor of the washer. Turn the kitchen faucet to hot and run it till the water coming out is is hot as it’s going to get. Set the dishwasher on the sani-cycle. Then turn it on and let ’er rip!

After a couple of hours of this, the Bosch came to the end of its cycle and sat there in dignfied silence.

Opened the door, stuck my head in, and took a whiff.

It smelled very much like…well, orange Kool-Aid.

Better than how it smelled before, anyway.

After the first washing of dirty dishes, the machine still smelled a little of artificial orange flavoring. (Do astronauts really drink this stuff? REALLY???? And it takes a research grant to figure out why they’re ailing when they come out of orbit?) But that scent dissipated within a day, and we went along for several days absent the weird odor.

By  now — about three weeks later — the odor seems to be coming back slightly, but not bad.

You’d expect to clean out the filter thingie in the bottom of the washer about once a month, if not more often. It does collect a little grease, which may be the source of the smell, although…I’ve never had any other washer create a smell from its filter, and I’ve had a few dishwashers in my life, including an earlier model of the Bosch. Nothing like a little upgrade to make your life more pleasant, eh?

So if you dumped in a cup of Tang each time you washed the filter (I soak mine in hot detergent water laced with about 1/3 cup baking soda), you’d use one package of the stuff a month, adding an extra $3.00 to your monthly housekeeping bill.

No doubt you can get the stuff cheaper if you shop in venues other than Safeway. Plus it’s the sort of stuff that coupons are made for — I’ll bet you can get the small size for two bucks, if you look around.

How to Foil Child-proof Caps

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 Hammer_ball_paneAmong the many annoying variants of consumer-proof packaging is the ubiquitous, infuriating child-proof cap, a nuisance that appears on everything from over-the-counter cough medicine to household cleansers to mouthwash. If you don’t have a kid, you do not need to be protected from yourself. If you do have a kid or three and are smart enough to stow toxic chemicals out of their reach, you and your kids do not need to be protected from yourself. And if you have arthritis, these things make it almost impossible to open your meds or any other product that you need in your day-to-day life.

Interestingly, there are simple ways to foil the damn things. Several years ago, Instructables posted a multi-pronged set of how-to’s covering the several varieties of adult-proof caps.

The first one — how to foil the accursed push-and-turn things by securing the spinning outer cap to the inside cap with a thumbtack — didn’t work for the simple reason that on all my bottles, the outer cap is too brittle to allow you to push a tack through the plastic. However, what you can do is take a hammer to the damned outer cap and SMASH IT TO BITS. This will leave you with an intact inner cap, which is made of a softer, more pliable plastic, and which, freed of the exterior spinner, functions as a normal cap.

Most of the caps that you squeeze and rotate have a small flange on the inside of the rim that you can nip off with a pair of wire-cutters or even a pair of nail clippers.

Line-up-the-arrows nuisances require you to risk life and limb to shave off the little tab that appears opposite the arrow.

Of course, the simplest and fastest way to get one of the things open is simply to hand it to small child, who will pop the lid off for you in about three seconds flat.

God, how I hate those things. There’s even a word for the hatred of overpackaging and stupid packaging. Did you realize that the Brits estimate some 60,000 of their people have to get hospital treatment for packaging injuries per year?

And I especially hate those damnable bubble-packed pills. In our parts, you no longer can get pseudoephedrine — generic-talk for the decongestant marketed at an inflated price under the name Sudafed — in a bottle full of loose pills, thanks to  our collective fear of the meth manufacturers. In addition to having to register yourself at the pharmacy counter and expect your purchase to be reported to the authorities, you have to take a pair of scissors to the damn packaging to get the pills out. I always cut the entire bunch out and drop them into an old spice jar.

One woman accidentally dropped a package of them into a dishwasher and discovered that if you get the backing wet, it will lift off easily. Who knows what water — or better yet, dishwasher detergent — will do to your allergy pills, though! 😆

Alternatives to trying to jimmy the caps or having to shatter plastic lids:

• Save spice jars (or buy new ones at Penzeys, which sells them for a modest price , as do Amazon and Cost Plus) and, after you’ve broken into a pill bottle or hacked apart a sheet of finger-slashing plastic & cardboard, transfer the pills.

• Leave the lids off, if and when you get them off the first time. This, of course, means that if a jar tips over, the meds will spill all over the place, especially annoying if the stuff is a liquid. Oh well.

• Use wine corks on glass liquid bottles, such as the ones that hold cough medicine.

• Save and reuse any inside caps that you do manage to break free from the whirling outer cap . Most of these are fungible — the seem to fit most bottles.

• Use a channel wrench to squish open the accursed squeeze-and-turn type. Keep a channel wrench in or near your medicine cabinet.

• Keep a pair of tin snips in or near your medicine cabinet, for hacking open bubble packs.

• Try to get the pharmacist to give you adult-friendly bottle caps (and good luck with that!)

channellock wrench

The Latest Invention: Frost Tent!

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Ah, once again I get in touch with my WT self. Last summer’s back-porch privacy draperies have morphed into something new for winter: tents to protect the tender potted plants from this winter’s frost.

We haven’t had a freeze yet — it’s still early. But we will, come December or January. Last winter a bunch of the plants were damaged or killed, despite much thrashing around with old sheets and old curtains. The other day, an easier way dawned on me: attach clip-rings to the things and drape them around the plants by hanging them on hooks from the rafters. Hence:

P1020711

This one will protect a ficus and a few other smaller plants.

P1020714

THIS is gonna WORK!

I built two others on the westside deck. These three tents should be enough to cover all the frost-sensitive potted plants, relieving me of having to drag them inside or wrap sheets around them in the cold and damp. In theory I could even hang shop lights inside them to keep them warm, if we get a true hard frost.

These three little projects only required five cloths, so I have a ton of other sheets and rags that can be tossed down, as needed. But I don’t think they will be needed — just about everything else is either frost-resistant or will recover from being frozen back to the ground.

No more icy fingers and late-night frenzies trying to cover and wrap and tie down plants. Hanging these things from the rafters is easy and fast. It shelters the plants mostly without coming into contact with them.

Half the time our frosts come after rainstorms. As soon as the clouds blow off, the night skies open to the frigidity of the cosmos and everything outdoors freezes. And usually “blow” is one of several operative terms: the wind blows and lifts the accursed wet cloths off the plants, which doesn’t matter much, since the damp cloth in contact with the plants leaves pretty much guarantees they’ll freeze, covered or no. All of which makes protecting the plants an annoying, uncomfortable job.

Once these tents are up, they’re up and they won’t have to be dragged around. Right now the cloths are clipped and packaged in bags labeled with where they go. Come the next cold snap, it’ll be simple to find them, hang them, and stash the plants in them.

This is going to make life a lot easier. 😀