Darkoshi

Last night I cooked yellow squash. I finished late, and it was still warm outside so I couldn't open the windows to air out the cooking smells from the house.

Today I opened all the windows to air it out. With the A/C off, the temperature got up to 88 inside, but felt nice to me with the fans on. So I left the windows open all day.

As the windows were open, I washed a load of items with mildew and other stains along with 2 bleach tablets in the washer. (My use of chlorine bleach is seldom enough that liquid bleach usually degrades before I can use the bottle up. Tablets don't have that problem.) The windows being open prevents the bleach smell from bothering me.

As the windows were open, I also baked some things from the freezer in the oven. It seemed a good idea as the heat and baking smells could dissipate out through the windows, without making the A/C use more energy (since it wasn't on).

Coincidentally, part of the reason I wanted to use up some of the things in the freezer is because there's always the slight worry that if the power goes out for a long time, the food will melt and go bad. The strong storm we had on June 25 only made my power flicker a few times (although it ripped some siding off my soffits), but my mom's power was out for 11 hours. Before that, my power was out for 2 hours from a storm on June 14.

This evening, several hours after the baking, my refrigerator started beeping and showing the Too-High-Temperature warning icon. Uh-oh. I hadn't had the door open more than usual, and I hadn't put any hot food inside it. I wasn't sure if it could be due to the house temperature being higher than usual. This isn't the first time I've had the windows open in warm weather, but it's the first time the refrigerator had a problem with it. I closed the windows and turned the A/C back on. I took the grate off the bottom of the fridge and checked the coils. I vacuumed some dust out, but they didn't look too bad. I took the back panel off the fridge to check back there. The fan was still running. The compressor was very hot. The finger I touched it with didn't get burned, but it was hot enough to make me jerk my finger back.

The fridge kept giving the high temp warning for over an hour, but then it finally stopped. That's a relief.

I wonder if that was a sign of the refrigerator being too old to handle a warm house, or if new refrigerators would have the same problem. The fridge is 41 years old. 88 degrees inside really doesn't seem that high to me. I suspect that in the old days, people got refrigerators before they got air conditioners.

To reduce my plastic usage, I also wanted to stop buying dish washing liquid in plastic bottles.

To make my own, first I tried dissolving grated bar soap in water. I used Kirk's unscented soap. It dissolved but the resulting liquid didn't foam much when used on dishes, and I had to use a lot of the liquid. When there is no foam, I can't tell if the dishes are getting cleaned or not. Foam is important for that reason if for nothing else.

The next time, I tried the same thing with a different kind of soap. It never dissolved completely and the resulting liquid wasn't very soapy either.

There was a good article I read about how SLS (Sodium Lauryl Sulfate) is used in many liquid soaps for creating foam. It or another article also explained why dissolving bar soap in water doesn't work to make liquid soap. I can't find the link(s) right now. If I do, I'll post them.

Many of the recipes I found for making your own liquid dish soap required various liquid ingredients which themselves come in plastic bottles. This recipe didn't have that problem (it includes vinegar, but vinegar can be obtained in glass bottles):
Homemade Liquid Dish Soap

That recipe and the few others I found all required "washing soda" (sodium carbonate). Arm & Hammer sells it in a box. At Walmart I found the shelf where it should be, but it was sold out. Food Lion had it available for $4.79, 59 cents cheaper than Walmart.

I made the recipe but it didn't turn out well. (I wondered if the vinegar and washing soda cancelled each other out, like happens with baking soda.) It was thin and watery, not soapy. After a couple of days it started gelling into a thick liquid, which was interesting. The soap shreds never completely dissolved. When I shook the liquid to help dissolve the soap better, that made it un-gell and get thin again. Over the next days, the same thing kept happening - it gelled; I shook it; it un-gelled.

The liquid sudsed ok both when gelled and thin, but not as good as regular liquid dish soap. It also had a strong scent similar to laundry detergent powder, which seemed out of place for washing dishes. I felt like I had to rinse the dishes extra well to get all the laundry detergent off them. I added essential oil to the mixture, which helped but never completely masked the detergent scent.

After that failure, I tried using bar soap for washing dishes - simply rubbing my dish sponge over the soap bar to lather it up. First, I used Kirk's "Fresh Scent" soap, which didn't smell right for dishes. Then I tried the unscented version, which still didn't smell right. But at least it lathered well and worked well on grease.

Meliora makes a lemon-scented dish soap bar. I considered buying it to try out, but haven't yet done so. It seems expensive. And has to be bought online.

I ended up using another soap I had, orange-scented. It works well on the dishes and smells fine.

At Qiao's house, I'm using a patchouli scented bar soap. I wasn't sure I'd like its scent for dishes, but was pleasantly surprised that I do. This soap is one of a few I bought from an artisan at a Celtic fest in early 2023. When I first removed its wrapper back then, its scent had an unpleasant component to it which I didn't like at all. I left it to air out in the garage for a long long time. I may have even thrown one or two of the soaps out; the scent seemed that bad to me. But now a year and a half later, it smells nice and works great on dishes.

At my house, the soap is sitting on top of a "Scrub Daddy" sponge on the kitchen counter by the sink. At Qiao's, the soap is on the scrubber side of a scrubber sponge (not the same sponge I use for washing dishes). Both work well to keep the soap dry when I'm not using it.

[From last week]

It keeps occurring to me that I have a problem with scope creep in my daily life, along with self control. When I start working on something, it's very hard to convince myself to stop, even when I didn't intend to spend a long time at it and have many other things that I wanted to do. (Not enjoying the work doesn't make a difference, as I like to get unpleasant tasks finished and done with as much or even more so than pleasant tasks.)

One example: I turn off the A/C and open the windows to let some fresh air in the house. It's been hot outside, so they haven't been open in weeks. Now's a good time to do it as no one else is here to be bothered by the heat. One of the windows I open is hard to push up, so it hasn't been open in a much longer time. Its sill is caked in dirt and dust, so I decide to quickly wipe it clean.
Then I decide I may as well clean off the sills of all the other windows too while they are open, even though they aren't as dirty.
Then I decide to vacuum the rug which is full of dog hair, since using the vacuum cleaner makes the air smell unpleasant, so it's good to do it while the windows are open.


Another example: I wanted to do some work in the yard. Around 3pm I heard thunder; rain looked imminent. I quickly went outside to get at least a little bit of work done before it rained. It ended up not raining. I ended up working in the yard for the next 6 hours until it was dark.

Metal tongs are also good for cleaning out gutters!

(They allowed me to finish the task even after being horrified to find tons of ants running around in the gutters after I'd pulled out a few handfuls of leaves. They must have built a nest within the decaying leaves and gunk in there. But the tongs would work well on ant-free gutters too. )

The tongs are narrow enough to easily pull crud out of the gutters with them, and they avoid me getting my hands/gloves dirty while doing it.

Those rare times while picking up trash from the street, when I luck out by finding a large empty plastic shopping bag which I can use for picking up more trash, even the bigger more awkward items that don't fit well in the regular plastic grocery bags which I normally (re-)use for picking up trash. (It's so much easier when you have a *big* bag to put things in!)

Yesterday I found an unblemished metal spring in the shape of a sphere, tennis-ball sized. I wonder if it was an ornament, or what it came from.

The last few times I used the hand sanitizer that I keep in the car for when I go shopping, it has taken longer to evaporate while rubbing my hands, and it feels tackier while doing so.

Enough of the alcohol in it may have evaporated, that it is no longer very effective. I should replace it. Luckily, hand sanitizer is no longer difficult to come by.

I had bought a non-alcohol one to try out last week. It contains 0.13% benzalkonium chloride as the active ingredient. It smells very similar to an unscented non-toxic cleaner that I use for scrubbing the tub. I always wear rubber gloves when using that tub cleaner. When I smell this scent on my bare hands, I think that my hands aren't supposed to smell like that; that I shouldn't have that chemical on them as it is a strong cleaner. It makes me want to wash my hands to get it off.

The old alcohol one had a very faint pleasant lemony scent. I prefer that.

I figured something out today which I had noticed a few times before, but didn't understand.

The little dog doesn't like the vacuum cleaner. When I start vacuuming in a room she is in, she runs out of the room if she can. The big dog, Zorro, doesn't usually seem very bothered. She only moves away when I come very near. But a few times, she has started following me around.

Today as I vacuumed the den, she was in one corner between the sofas. Rather than turning the vacuum off to let her get up and walk past me so I could do that corner, I went the other way to vacuum another room first.

As I was vacuuming that room, she walked in and lay down on the side I hadn't done yet. I had to tell her to move so I could vacuum there. Then as I continued on into the other rooms, she kept following me. Not directly by my side, but keeping a bit of distance.

On days like today, I can tell that she doesn't really like the vacuum cleaner noise - by the way she holds her head and ears and by how tentatively she moves. So why does she follow the vacuum cleaner around instead of staying away? I think she must have been in her "I'm afraid of that noise, let me get close to the humans so they can protect me" mode. Even though the human in this case is the source of the bad noise!

Whenever I change the bag on the vacuum cleaner at Q's house, I wish I had another vacuum cleaner to clean out all the dust from inside it. Shaking it out only helps a little. Today I had the idea of taking it outside and using the leafblower on it. That worked.

Note to self: Do not wash the purple knit sweater with any light-colored clothes, as it bleeds, a lot.

Struggled with washing machine. Finally got clothes successfully rinsed and spun dry around 2:15am. Hung them up to dry. Decided I need to buy a new washing machine. Went to bed at 2:30am. Had a hard time falling asleep, even though I had been very tired around midnight.

I set my alarm for 9am, but woke up before 8 and couldn't fall back asleep. Got up, washed, dressed.
Dialed in to 2 Skype meetings for work, then drove to work. Uneventful day at the office.
Around 4:30pm, Qiao called to say the dogs had both gotten out of the yard, and he was walking around looking, but couldn't find them. That was unusual, because all the other times they've gotten out, we've found them right away.
So I left work early to help him look. As I was driving up his driveway, Zorro came ambling out of the bushes from the neighbor's yard. Shortly thereafter, Serena was found a few houses away - a kind neighbor had found them both sitting in the street, but had only managed to coax Serena into her yard, for safety.

Then I found the spot were Serena had dug out under the fence, and reinforced it. (Even though there are still many other spots that need reinforcing, which will require at least a couple more boxes of 12" metal stakes (and hopefully not more fine-mesh fencing too)).

Then I found out that Zorro had gotten herself all muddy. So we drove them to my house so I could give them both a "bath" (with hose and bucket of soapy water) quickly before it got dark.

Now it's 8pm, and I shall do 2 more hours of work from home, to make up for leaving work early.