Walnuts On My Windshield, #22

January 14, 2005

The girls have been after me to "write a Walnuts" for a couple weeks. Actually, if it goes more than a week, they mention it politely. Then a couple weeks later, they really come down heavy on me. I told them that they were welcome to write a weekly column for the website, but neither of them thought too much of that idea.

Scott is abroad and things are going well there and well here. Actually, don't tell him this, but his trips are somewhat like vacations for the kids and me. By that, I mean that, although the spiritual and email pressures kick into overdrive when he leaves, the physical pressures of the daily grind are much less. Interpretation: we live a (comparatively) reckless and carefree existence when Scott's gone!

For example, today is Friday, which is off day. I confess that I have not been regular in my walking since Christmas, but I gave myself a day off from walking today, just because that's what I always do on Fridays. It's supposed to be my one day off walking out of seven, but this week, it was actually my fifth day off walking out of seven. . . There's always tomorrow!

Also, Friday is the day that the females in the family sleep in. It is an art form we are ever striving to perfect. Last night, I treated myself to a hot bath from 11:30 PM till midnight - just because I could. And then, I intended to sleep many, many hours, uninterrupted. At 9:00 AM, Jessica knocked, waking me out of a very sound sleep. Scott had called and wanted me to call him back. That was great news! Also, a friend of ours who really likes Andrew wanted to come pick him up and spend a couple hours running errands with him. What a blessing! I decided these two items were worth my becoming vertical, at least temporarily.

I brushed my teeth, tried to wake up, and stumbled to the office to look up the number for Scott's foreign cell phone. It rang and rang, and a sleepy voice finally answered. He asked if his call had woken me. Yes. I asked if my call had woken him. Yes. He and his teammates were in an airport awaiting a flight, and he had actually been sleeping on his bags. We were both still too groggy to make deep intellectual conversation. He said he had only called to tell me he loved me, and he would email more details in the next few days.

It was very good to hear his voice, particularly since there is some risk where he is traveling. However, I really wanted to get back under the electric blanket, turn on a fan for white noise, and snooze! Alas, with Eva coming soon for Andrew, I couldn't very well do that, so I stayed enrobed in our office, puttering around and cleaning up my ever-accumulating mess. I finally hit the shower at 12:30. Yes, that would be 30 minutes past noon! It was a very long, very hot shower. Ahhhhhhhhh.

In our house, we have to plan hot showers and baths carefully. The girls don't, because they use the third floor shower, which has its own water heater. But the rest of us, using the second floor bathrooms, have to take into account Andrew's use of the first floor tub, the doing of laundry, and the running of the dishwasher. We haven't had to worry about the dishwasher since Scott left, though, because the day before he left, it just quit working. It was running, or so I thought, but when I listened closely, instead of hearing the expected swish and slosh of water within, I heard only a soft hum. Something was definitely wrong.

I sighed, showed the kids how to wash everything by hand (they were less than thrilled at this great training opportunity), set up a schedule of who had to help whom dry and put away when, and called our good friend, Mr. Bolend at ASAP Service. It then being a Friday, he came Monday evening and gave us both the good and bad news. The bad news - the dishwasher was not working at all. The good news - it could easily be fixed with a gallon of vinegar.

It seems that Maytags, of which ours is one (we bought it because that guy on TV in the goofy hat says they never need repairs), being of higher quality than your run-of-the-mill dishwashers, have deep in their bowels an extremely fine mesh screen to filter out the food and junk. If one's house has hard water, as ours does (think rocks coming out of your faucets), the filter soon becomes clogged. This means that no water can pass through it. No water through the filter means no water pressure to the arm. No water pressure to the arm means the arm does not turn. A stationary arm means that everything stays right where it is, food and junk included. Later in the cycle, when the heat coil is activated, all the food and junk bakes back onto the plates such that it can only be removed with a putty knife.

This means that all my hollering at the kids that they don't rinse their dishes well enough for the dishwasher to get them clean - well, the boys really don't rinse them very well a good portion of the time - was actually unfair. I had to repent, which I did. We then poured a half gallon of vinegar down the victim's throat, left it alone for 24 hours, and let her rip. After one more repeat performance, the dishwasher now seems to be fine.

Mr. Bolend did comment on the fact that if you open the door of our trusty Maytag during its cycle, the machine doesn't shut off. Of course, when he was here, that wasn't a problem. There was no water spraying around, and no mess was made. However, if the filter had been clean and the water had been swishing merrily about, an open door would have meant a face-ful of hot water. We knew about the door problem. A few years ago, someone must have slammed the dishwasher door shut with a bit too much force, causing a switch in the door panel to break. Mr. B. has ordered a replacement switch, which he will later come install for us. He didn't charge us for a service call that day, and he said he'll just charge us for the switch when he brings it. Nice guy.

The whole dishwasher experience did bring up the hard water issue, though. We have a private well, and we like it that way. We also have to buy lots of vinegar. In the winter, when we may have to run vaporizers at night, they become well-encrusted in just a few days and have to be disassembled and vinegar soaked at least once a week. Our faucet heads clog to the point of only emitting dribbles and have to be vinegar soaked. When the showerhead no longer allows you to remove the shampoo from your hair, it's time to vinegar soak it.

We had our friendly plumber/Cub Scout leader out a few weeks ago to look at the now-infamous washing machine drain situation. [A brief update on that: We now know that there are officially two problems. One is that our laundry room drainpipe is only 1.5 inches in diameter, instead of the current plumbing specification of 2.0 inches in diameter. It needs to be replaced, but doing that will require Scott to dig up about fifteen feet of the back yard to an unknown depth, for whatever distance is required to unearth the connection of the 1.5 inch pipe with the larger graywater leech (or is that leach?) line. The plumber knows Scott and for some reason found this image of Scott humorous. The other problem is that there is a vent pipe that runs from the point where the drainpipe exits the house all the way up to the roof and, indeed through the overhang of, the roof. It sticks up above the roof for maybe a foot. This pipe results in a column of air that presses down on the drain system to help push water down and out - or actually down and into - the graywater line. Now, we have lived in this 91-year-old house for nine years, and I truly never noticed until the plumber pointed it out, that some historical character saw fit to shove a TV antenna into the top of that pipe. Not only that, but the TV antenna that is shoved into the vent pipe isn't even connected to anything. We have a NOTHER TV antenna mounted on the smokehouse roof, and it is the one that affects our reception. Well, reception is a relative term. We do get two or three channels most of the time. The extraneous antenna will need to be removed in order to assist in the washing machine drainage situation. So basically, the plumber advised having Scott climb on the roof, dig a ditch, and call him back; he'd then gladly install a larger drainpipe. Until then - and I have a feeling the term "indefinitely" might be appropriate - he wrapped it really well with duct tape and advised me to change the duct tape periodically, because it isn't watertight.] Anyway, while the plumber was here, I asked him to look at our leaky tub/shower in the master bath.

This leak is a real mystery. We have had it looked at before; more than once by more than one person. We have applied enough caulk to make the ark watertight. Scott has disassembled and replaced the guts of the lower faucet. We have removed and re-installed the sliding glass doors, and, yes, it still leaks. The water trickles down the outside of the tub at the faucet end most, but not all, of the time. Sometimes it happens when one is showering; water perhaps ricocheting off one's body, the wall, the ceiling, and so on to points exterior. It can also happen when one takes a bath and no water is splashed at all. I didn't actually have any real hope of getting the problem fixed, but I thought I'd at least ask the plumber. After all, he had plumbed the third floor bathroom for us, and in so doing, he had removed a significant portion of the wall along our staircase to gain access to the back of that very water pipe, to tie in one for the attic. It would be fair to say that he is intimately acquainted with that particular part of our house's anatomy.

Well unfortunately, he didn't have any brilliant insights about that leak, but as he poked around and scraped around in the faucet end of the tub and surround, he asked me what all that white build-up was. I feigned innocence and said something like, "hmmmm. . . ummmmm. . . er. . . ahhh . . . dunno. . ." He then said it looked like hard water deposits, and that obviously our kids needed to do a better job of cleaning the shower! I did have enough integrity to admit that the kids cleaned all the other bathrooms in the house, but that I cleaned mine. He gave me a funny look, but was gracious enough to let it drop.

You see, I have a theory on hard water deposits. If they are visible or if they are problematic, then you need to vinegar soak them. But if not. . . hey; what you can't see surely can't be too much of a problem! You must understand that our bathtub surround is tiled with these really interesting ancient of days tiles. They are tall, narrow, and have some kind of Victorian (?) squiggly design on them. I'm sure the grout was originally pure white. Of course, it's not any more. It would better be described as a lovely shade of tan. Now, we all know that as water splashes against the surround during one's shower, it congregates in the grout. (In fact, I strongly suspect that the tile and/or grout has become porous with age and that that fact is the cause the leak in both the master tub/shower and the boys' shower - which has the self-same tile and grout.) Then the actual water runs down and/or evaporates, leaving behind a unique chalky, white, hard water residue. As far as I am concerned, this is simply Mother Nature's way of assisting me in keeping my grout white, and my job is not to interfere with her, but to say, "Thank you very much!" Of course, I do de-lime the glass doors and the metal fixtures, where white drop-spots are not so aesthetically pleasing.

As you can see, hard water is quite a problem for us, and I have recently wondered how many gallons of vinegar plus mom-hours of vinegar soaking and de-liming it would take to equal the cost of a water softener. I forgot to mention that our bright, dark clothes, sheets, and towels tend to fade rapidly, as well. Again, that doesn't bother me a lot, but it does bother Scott. For some reason he expects deep, dark blue to be, well, deep, dark, blue, and he has the audacity to enjoy wearing bright, dark colors. I have actually thought about water softeners, but I have not researched them yet, for one simple reason: taste. We all like the taste of our funky, hard water. The kids can't stand what they call "city water," complaining that it tastes either like bleach and/or soap. Besides, with our well water's obvious calcium content, it should effectively prevent osteoporosis! So, for now, I will add vinegar to the Country Mart list and take pride in my pure white grout.

Until next time,
Patty

From my bookshelf:

Microbe Hunters by Paul De Kruif, rank 7. A fascinating history of microbiology from Leeuwenhoek in the 1600s all the way up to De Kruif's "present" of 1926! Looking back from the lofty height of scientific knowledge in the 2000s, it was remarkable to learn the details of the struggles these various people endured in trying to cure and/or prevent diseases like tuberculosis, yellow fever, syphilis, etc. The author's writing style is difficult to follow, but the content is outstanding.

Living with Books by Alan Powers, rank 6. Though I have not a creative bone in my body, I am finally willing to admit that we MUST do some upgrading to the interior of our home. We bought it nine years ago, and it looks exactly as it did the day we moved in; except that everything is older, dingier, faded, and generally worn out. The floral carpet in the living room and dining room has no visible flowers in the high-traffic paths (as in nature, I suppose), and the dining room walls have been autographed in several locations with black Sharpie marker, at four-year-old hand height. Since neither Scott nor I has the time, inclination, or wherewithal to actually DO anything about the house, I have decided that I will at least begin by educating myself and trying to get ideas of what I think I might like. That is why I ventured into that intimidating section of the public library called "Interior Decorating." This book is the first that grabbed my attention - obviously - and it ended up being a series of photographs and little blurbs about very resourceful ways to display books in every room, nook, and cranny of a house. Considering the 2000+ documented volumes in the third floor alone, I clearly need to know what Mr. Powers knows!

Color in Your Home by Tessa Evelegh, rank 5. It's pretty hard for me to rank an interior decorating book very highly, simply because I so dread the topic. However, this book explained (sort of ) things like hue, tone, accent, and saturation. I think I'm supposed to remember that tone is most important and that you want to use colors of the same or very similar tone. I'm still not exactly sure what tone is. . . maybe I'd better re-read parts of it. Our living room and dining room are painted orange (actually probably more like canteloupe) with lots and lots and LOTS of wide glossy olive green trim. I've never cared for it, but procrastination is one of my challenges. In addition, I've never painted in my life [correction: in a former life, I did help paint the outside of a house I was renting] and I really don't want to start now. I'm hoping we can hire someone who knows what he is doing to paint those two rooms, but I think we have to first pick a color, or colors. Neither of us even has a clue what general color scheme we'd like, so I checked out this book to try to get ideas. I saw a lot of schemes I don't like. Maybe that's the first step.

Enjoyed Walnuts on My Windshield? Want more? Check out the Walnuts on My Windshield archive!