Coffee heat rising

Update: Vacuum cleaner adventures

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You may recall that not so long ago I was agonizing over whether to buy a little Shark upright bagless vacuum cleaner, shortly after having bought a Eureka model that I grew to loathe more with each use. Well, I finally capitulated and bought the thing at Costco, where I paid about $20 more than Amazon is now charging (at the time of the purchase, Costco was underpricing Amazon).

Mwa ha! Click for link to Amazon!

This is a terrific gadget! I love this machine!!! Best vacuum cleaner I’ve ever owned, and by golly, when you’re a survivor of the Pleistocene you can remember dragging a leaden Electrolux on sled runners around the house. You can, that is to say, remember owning a lot of vacuum cleaners.

What I like about it:

• It’s wonderfully lightweight. Easy to push around and easy to maneuver.

• The brush head thingie on the bottom is narrow enough to get between the bathtub and the toilet and to weasel in between furniture legs.

• The suction defies belief! This thing is astonishing. And when you run it along the baseboard, it picks up bits of debris and dog hair all the way right up to the wall. The hose is as effective as the floor vacuum part. If it gets ahold of your leg or your hand, it gloms on like a lamprey eel. Check out how much dog hair it sucked up in just one vacuuming adventure:

Dog-hair-in-vacuum
Cleaned this out before starting to vacuum!

And Cassie isn’t even shedding much—there were no major dog dunes on the floor when this housecleaning episode started.

• It does not blow dog hair up into the air as you’re moving around the tiled floor. A miracle!

• It has a generously long attachment hose to begin with, and it comes with an extra length of hose.

• Its attachments are sturdy and intelligently designed. The crevice tool is very long and slender, letting you get deep into narrow spots.

• It has a good long cord.

• It runs pretty quietly, especially in the “bare floors” mode.

Possible drawbacks:

◊ I thought I’d prefer a model that uses bags, having emptied the dirt out of altogether too many old-fashioned vacuum cleaners. The Shark, however, is easy to open and clean out, and so far I haven’t ended up with the dirt all over me instead of inside the trash can.

◊ The cylindrical canister that houses the dustbin and motor is bulky, obviating rolling the vacuum under the bed or other furniture.

◊ It doesn’t have a lot of space for onboard attachments. IMHO, that’s a good thing: I’ve always hated having to haul all that junk around the house willy-nilly.

On reflection, I realized I seem to have accumulated quite a few Shark gadgets. When my ancient Rowenta warhorse iron finally wore out, I bought a cheapo Sunbeam, which worked fine but got way too hot around the grip. After burning my fingers on the thing, I picked up a Shark steam iron. The price assuredly was nothing like what a Rowenta costs, and yet it works just about as well. The stainless-steel is good and tough—so far it hasn’t scratched up at all—and you get a lot of control over the amount of steam emitted and the heat levels. I would call it very comparable to the Rowenta at a far more reasonable cost.

Then there’s the Shark floor steamer that I finally found to replace the beloved old Bissell steamer, a gadget that could not be beat—never has been, never will be. Shark’s steam mop comes pretty close, though. If you have a lot of tile flooring, this is the contraption to own. With no stinky, toxic chemicals, it steams the dirt and grease right up. You end up with your floors clean, with no eau de dirty mop perfume in the air after you’ve finished the job.

Its only drawback is that the pad that comes with is almost useless. It’s too thick, and it doesn’t stay attached. And they only give you one. I’ve solved that problem, however, with those microfiber rags you can buy in the automotive department at Costco and, presumably, at auto parts stores like Checker and Auto Zone. I just clip one on neatly, using a couple of clothes pins. These things are highly washable, and because you can buy a great stack of them, you can switch them out as you move from room to room (my entire house is tiled), giving yourself a clean mop head at all times.

I was mildly surprised when I realized my house had been invaded by a school of sharks. Since I’m kind of picky about the gadgetry I use for cleaning, it must mean the Shark products are OK. Maybe even a little better than OK.

🙂

Happy Hoarder’s Handyman Hint! Frugal Junk Use

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Make that “handyperson hint.” 😉 For the first time in recorded history, a piece of the junk that’s hoarded in the garage actually came in handy! It just became part of a hand-crafted fancy-Dan paper towel holder. A frugal fancy-Dan paper towel holder: today’s out-of-pocket was nothing.

Trying to find places to stash the Lifetime Supply of Costco Paper Towels, I had one roll left over and realized the hated plastic paper-towel holder over the washer area, installed and abandoned by Satan and Proserpine, was empty. Problem is, like all cheapie grocery-store plastic paper-towel holders, the thing won’t hold a roll of paper towels, especially if you have the temerity to try to tear a towel off the roll. Every time a roll of paper towels falls off, it tumbles into the utility sink below, which is often full of water. That’s why the thing has been empty for a long time.

OldPaperTowelHolder
True Junk

Out of the blue, a lightning bolt of inspiration: if a person had a pair of those wooden curtain rod hangers, the kind that come with 1970s- and 80s-style wooden dowel curtain rods, said person could attach them to the wall, cut a piece of curtain-rod doweling to fit, scoot it through the towels’ cardboard tube, and…well. You get the idea. Not to say voilà!

Interestingly, I happened to have a pair of pretty ugly wooden curtain rod holders, stashed inside a dusty shoebox under a hoard of old wooden curtain rings that somehow just never quite worked out.

Not only that, but an old wood-dowel curtain rod, part of the didn’t-work-out project, was collecting dust atop the garage cabinets. And I also happened to have a saw…

DustyCurtainRod

The holes that Satan drilled and countersank in the drywall were not far enough apart to accommodate a paper-towel roll between the inch-wide curtain rod holders. But there’s a lot of electric and plumbing where the plastic thing is hanging. So I decided to use the screw hole he’d put on the right side, which really is dangerously close to the pipes that go to the sink, and then drill new holes on the left, where I think (hope) there are fewer obstructions.

Attached the wooden hanger things to the wall, leaving plenty of room to hang the roll of paper towels.

Sawed off 20 inches of the doweling (could’ve made it shorter but am not going to do it over again right this minute). Drilled a hole in the center of the newly cut-off end. Removed the finial from rod’s long remainder and screwed it into the new hole. And…

WoodenPaperTowelRod

It works! The paper towel roll fits, exactly as promised, over the dowel. To reload, all you have to do is unscrew one of the finials, take off the empty cardboard tube, slide a new roll onto the dowel, and reattach the finial. Not bad for a garage, eh?

FinishedPaperTowelRod

Don’t ask about the wiring draped over the washer faucets! It’s better than the Romex Satan had draped back and forth across the garage door opener chain!

This was strictly a spur-of-the-moment job. If I were going to make a paper towel holder for the kitchen, I’d set the curtain-rod hangers closer together, so they’d just clear a standard roll. And then I’d cut the rod so that it would fit more snugly.

Sometimes I’ve wished I had a paper towel holder in the bathroom. It occurs to me that you could replace the metal hardware-store towel rods with lash-ups like this for your bath towels, and then add a matching paper towel holder. Depending on your decor, of course. And your ambition.

Yakezie Roundup

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So, what are those Yakezie folks up to? Thought I’d take a little stroll through that country, and here’s what I came upon:

A lot of stuff is going on over at My Journey to Millions. Evan and Mrs. E are expecting(!), which inspires some existential thinking about wealth, spending, and one’s tastes and character. He also  has an interesting post on defining the client relationship in your side job—or, we might add, in any profession where what you’re selling to a client is essentially your time.

Consumer Boomer has an article of interest to everyone, even those who aren’t yet in the pre-retirement set: Boosting Your Mutual Fund Performance.

With a whole lot of tap-dancing, Little House in the Valley and her DH managed to knock $63 off the monthly recurring bills. w00t!

Over at Out of Debt Again, the incredibly green-thumbed Mrs. Accountability has posted another of her mouth-watering photos of her garden produce. You have to live through a string of 110-degree days to realize what an accomplishment this is. My tomatoes are invariably fried by this time of year. Mrs. A has also begun a series on using Quicken, which starts off with an introduction to the program’s sophisticated ability to download transactions from a bank account.

Frugal Zeitgeist has got a good conversation going with readers over the question of whether we should care where a given consumer product comes from. An expat living in Egypt, FZ has been contemplating cheap places to live, most recently 2010’s cheapest countries.

BTW, Frugal Z— Any way you could shuck the program that sends commenters an e-mail asking them to accept “information” from your mailing list? It’s frustrating to take time to write a comment and then get a “request for information from the [the blogger’s] mailing list,” which apparently will automatically create a subscription.

Miss Thrifty, a lively Brit, has a highly entertaining piece titled “A Week in the Life of Austerity Britain.” Things are rough over there, but maybe not so rough as to keep one from purchasing…what else? The new iPhone. Nevvermind that you may have to patch it with the Home Handyman’s Secret Weapon.

At Cool to Be Frugal, a new baby has arrived. Mwa ha hah! There’ll be some changes made…

My Money Minute gets a conversation going about the scheme to charge shoppers for bags (in D.C., he was charged for a paper bag!). More behavioral legislation, comin’ your way!

Ten p.m. and neither the pooch nor I have had dinner. Time to pack it in, ladies and gents!

Update: Shoulder fiasco

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Okay, so on Friday I get hailed in to the Mayo for an MRI. Dutifully show up at 12:30, as requested, bearing an author’s review copy of a novel I’m supposed to be copyediting (don’t ask how copyedits happen at the ARC stage; just be thankful this one is very clean).

Almost two hours later they call me in for the test. I’ve spent this entire time, undressed, in a small waiting room with a damnable television nattering away, rerunning the local morning show, over and over and over and over, telling us all about the weather and the traffic conditions and the six-hour-old news. Focusing on my work over the yammering voice of the woman DJ or whatever the hell she’s supposed to be is passing difficult.

This gives me lots of time to get tensed up.

By the time they finally get around to calling me in for the MRI, this fat lady is ready to go home. I’m hungry, irritated, and would like never, ever, ever to have to hear the inane chattering of some inane blonde talking head on the television again. Or, come to think of it, of anyone. What I would like is silence.

The MRI machine is one creepy-looking gadget, a huge donut-shaped affair reminiscent of a flying saucer stood on edge. It’s confined to a large room roped off with yellow “danger” tape, not very inviting. While it sits there waiting for you, it makes a weird otherworldly tweeting noise, like some sort of manic canary on meth.

The MRI techs pack me onto a kind of cot that can elevate the victpatient into the contraption. They tell me I can’t move—as in not budge and try not to breathe deeply—during the time the images are being taken, which will take about 20 minutes. I’m told this is a relatively brief exposure to the thing. Then they stuff cotton in my ears, which does nothing to dampen the sound of their voices, wrap my head with earphones through which some sort of treacly Muzak is pumped, cover my eyes with gauze, and tell me (only after I ask) that I can expect to be bombarded with a noise that sounds like a jackhammer.

holy. mackerel.

Well, I lasted about 30 seconds in there. They didn’t even get the thing turned on before I was asking to get out.

Creepy. Absolutely, indescribably creepy.

I didn’t feel afraid. I just felt so uncomfortable and so creeped out…sort of like having to pay an extended visit to a cockroach nest under the refrigerator…that I knew I was not going to be able to stand to stay in that thing for 20 minutes.

More to the point, a single cogent thought entered my mind: All these “stress attacks” I’ve been having—and there have been many, many more than the good Dr. Daley knows about—have never been satisfactorily diagnosed. There is some chance that those episodes could be minor cardiac events. If that is the case, then twenty minutes of uninterrupted, rather extreme stress could cause a heart attack.

Eff that, say I, only more explicitly.

Now they want me to consent to going back and letting them drug me with Valium or an intravenous sedative.

i. don’t. think. so.

The techs adjudged me “severely claustrophobic.” Not to be repetitious, but I don’t think so. Though it’s true that one reason I dislike flying in commercial jets is being jammed elbow-to-elbow with strangers (yech!); and it is true that I truly, truly hate the Flagstaff Ice Cave because it’s totally dark, totally devoid of light in there and you can’t find your way out without a flashlight or a lighter and we got in there one time without either of those and I was, yes, freaking scared; and no, I don’t like elevators, “severe” as in “disabling” is not the term I’d use.

Besides, I have a good reason to prefer stairs to elevators. I was once in an elevator that fell 11 stories before we could stop it. That’s 11 out of 13 possible stories…

Since then, if the climb is less than six floors, I’ll take the fire escape, thank you.

The inside of an MRI machine is not dark. It does not go up and down. It does not make you sit next to some odoriferous stranger with a screamy child. And it apparently poses little risk. It’s just creepy. Very creepy.

The fact of the matter is, the shoulder is on the mend. When I called the P.A. yesterday and reported that since the last time I saw him—quite recently—two days passed with almost no pain except for one out-of-the-ordinary position, and that I now can do the hold-your-hand-out-at-shoulder-height-and-pour-the-pop-out-of-a-soda-can maneuver with no pain at all, he remarked that it takes about three months “for the dust to settle.” It may be that given my age and the fact that I can’t take any over-the-counter anti-inflammatories, it simply has taken a long time to heal.

Yesterday after I got home from this entertaining experience, the kitchen sink clogged. To clean that out, I had to hold the plug down tight in the righthand sink and, with the injured left arm, pump a plumber’s helper vigorously in the lefthand sink. This caused exactly zero pain. It’s hard to imagine that if any very serious damage were lurking inside the shoulder, I could pull that stunt without repercussion.

At the moment it feels somewhat like a typhoid or cholera shot, only most of the time slightly less painful.

And frankly…some things are worse than chronic mild pain.

Images: MRI, shamelessly ripped off from a website now disappeared from my computer’s memory.
Elevators at 240 Sparks, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. GNU Free Documentation License.

Arboricide Update

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At 9:00 p.m. sharp, the sound of rockets flying and grenades exploding brought a cop helicopter overhead with its searchlight a-glare.

Around this time of year, the ghost shopping center at Dunlap and the I-17 puts on a fireworks show on Friday nights. They used to do it every Friday night, all summer long, but now that there are hardly any stores left for people to shop in, they limit the gala celebrations to a couple weeks on either side of July 4.

With Sally’s tree gone, I had a great view from my backyard! They shot off some spectacular colored showers of pyrotechnic stars, skyrockets, fountains…it was quite a display.

My old house was practically underneath the fireworks show. But now, deeper in the neighborhood and further away from the hectic intersections of Dunlap and the freeway, the view is often obscured by the neighbors’ foliage. Before Sally cut the big Aleppo pine out of her front yard, it fully blocked any sight of the mall’s fireworks extravaganza.

LOL! They always kick off with some loud firecracker-like things that sound for all the world like gunfire. And invariably, the first night of the season that the fireworks start, some newbie resident calls the cops and reports shots fired. Hence, a cop copter fly-by.

Well, I’d rather have the tree all summer (and winter) than one or two, or even several, fireworks displays. But it was fun to see the show.

Image: San Diego Fireworks. PD Photo.org. Public domain.

Learn a Skill—ONLINE—and Build a New Income Stream

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This fall I’m teaching a fully online college course that will improve your skills as a blog writer and show you how to write winning articles for magazines and newspapers. Many people use professional-level writing skills to generate the sidestream income that we’ve seen is so important to paying off debt and building savings. And some have parlayed freelance writing experience into full-time jobs as magazine or newspaper editors.

In just eight weeks—October 18 through December 10—the course will explain how to structure, write, and market salable copy for commercial venues.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Types of feature articles
• How to structure an effective article
• Generating story ideas
• Finding markets that will buy from you
• Selling to magazines and newspapers
• Finding sources
• How to interview
• Checking facts
• The language and style of popular media
• How to edit your own writing
• Working with editors
• Legal and business aspects of writing for pay

When you write a blog post, you’re often writing one of the several types of the feature article. This is why some of the most engaging bloggers around are former or continuing magazine or newspaper writers and editors, such as this one and this one. If content is king, writing skill is the prime minister.

The course is offered for three credits through Paradise Valley Community College, in Phoenix, Arizona. PVCC is a fully accredited campus of the Maricopa County Community College District, and the course, which comes out of the English department, should transfer to many university English, creative writing, and journalism programs.

So, I invite you to join me in this little adventure. It should be a lot of fun, and it’s a great way to learn more about the craft of writing. If your blog is monetized or you use writing in other aspects of employment, the cost should be deductible.

The easiest way to sign up is over the telephone. Dial 602-787-7000 and register for English 235, Magazine Article Writing, Section 58235. The class runs from October 18 through December 10, 2010.

Because of state and county budget cutbacks, the Registrar’s office is open during the summer from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and from 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. PDT, Monday through Thursday; it’s closed on Fridays. Sometimes there’s a wait to get through to a registration worker, but eventually you will reach a human being.

Tuition: A reader asks how much the course costs. According to the registrar’s office, for nonresidents it’s $147/credit hour; for those living in Arizona except for Apache, Santa Cruz, and Greenlee counties, it’s $71/credit hour; for those in Apache, Santa Cruz, and Greenlee counties, it’s $96/credit hour. The cost of tuition and materials may be tax deductible: Check this discussion and this site.

The course materials specify that you must have a computer and high-speed Internet connection, and so these costs may also be to some extent deductible; check with your tax advisor about that.

Images: Vogue Magazine, February 15, 1917. Public Domain. Sunset Magazine, February 1911. Public Domain.