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home : sewing machine

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In addition to all the other things that happened the first weekend of June, I scored a sewing machine at a yard sale in Takoma Park. The machine is five years old, but unused: the cord was still secured with a twist-tie and little plastic cover on the plug, and the accessories were still sealed in a plastic bag. While Singer doesn’t make this model anymore, it appears to have been replaced with several in the $200 range; I bought mine for $70! I say this not to gloat, but because this is the kind of thing that never happens to me, the finding of something I’ve been waffling over getting because of the cost for a totally affordable price at a yard sale that I wasn’t even planning to visit (my partner saw the machine when he passed the sale to go to an appointment, and alerted me to it when I arrived to pick him up). I hope that the person who sold it to me is as happy to have the $70 as I am to have the machine!

Following this exciting development, I was able to return the loaner machine to my neighbor across the street (just in time for her grandchildren to insist on using it when they visit this summer). I now have all the quilt blocks squared up, and just need to cut the on-point triangles and then the top will be ready to be assembled. I have several ideas for the next quilts I want to make; first, however, I need to come up with a plan for the back and decide whether I want to try actually quilting it myself. Having a machine that I’m not concerned about breaking that comes with the necessary accessories goes a long way toward that option being an actual possibility.

home : sewing machine

home : faucet-mounted water filter

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Just a month after starting to regularly use the Brita pitcher again, I dropped it and it broke. Which is a shame, because it was over ten years old and they just don’t make them as streamlined or user-friendly anymore. In the course of trying to choose which new pitcher to invest in—larger with unnecessary trimmings or too small to be of any use seemed to be our two main options—we decided to try a faucet-mounted filter. Most of our friends with small kids have one of these, and they seem to work relatively well. Online research (e.g. reading the reviews on Amazon) indicated that a system with metal threads on the connection was really the best way to go to avoid pressure-induced cracks. Target, of course, is still the go-to place for small home appliances such as these.

In the water filter aisle, the only option with metal threads was the Pur system, which has the added benefit of a higher NSF-rated filter option. Living in the DC area where toluene and atrazine are actually present in the water—albeit in amounts that have not yet been determined to be detrimental to our health a la the poison-prevention model of public safety regulations we apply in the United States—I wanted a filter that would take them out. We’ll see if the system lasts longer than a few months without springing a leak in the housing, something Amazon reviewers assure us is inevitable. The reviews also assure us, however, that Proctor & Gamble will feign surprise and replace the unit when that happens, so it appears that we’ll have options.

In the meantime, I’m drinking more water and happy to have had the opportunity to replace the o-ring at the bottom of the faucet stem, taking care of a leak that had appeared some months ago.

home : faucet-mounted water filter

Roomba bites the dust 6 months post-warranty

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One of the many ways in which last week did not go exactly as planned involved the robot giving up the ghost and refusing to drive forward when I set it up to clean the living room. The robot was a gift from my parents, on which we’ve become quite dependent over the past 18 months. Both psychologically and physically: we no longer have a regular vacuum, as it developed nasty vacuum smell last year after 8 years of service and was summarily banished. We’d been dithering about replacing it, making do with the robot and the dustbuster. And then the robot died and we had to assess our vacuuming needs and make a couple of decisions.

Let me just say that it’s still not clear what exactly happened to the robot. The bumper became jammed, and there was schmutz inside the bumper and around the little front wheel that rotates. We were told by customer service to clean all that out and reset it, which we did. The bumper was still jammed, and the robot still wouldn’t go forward. We were then told by customer service that the robot was fried and we needed to buy a new chassis. Fried how, and why it couldn’t be repaired, was never made clear. No one ever requested to actually see the robot, or to have it sent it, which was a little odd. Apparently the skills required to fix the robot are more pricey than those required to build a new robot, so we’re offered only the replacement option.

In the end, we went ahead and ordered both the replacement chassis with a new 1 year warranty (for about 1/3 of what a new robot would cost) and the canister vacuum that I’d picked out back when our old one died. In a surprising turn of events, the canister vacuum arrived one day after I ordered it (from a local company, which no doubt helped), which allowed us to thoroughly vacuum the living room as part of the preparations for painting. As promised, the vacuum is the smallest vacuum ever and is easily stored in our hall closet-turned-pantry, even with the shelves we installed last summer. Since the floor tool is not motorized, it’s a bit tiring to vacuum an entire room with it, but it’s a very effective and well-designed machine. I was happy enough to be able to again vacuum the cobwebs at the ceiling that I didn’t mind the work involved in getting the floor clean. In combination with the robot, we should soon have a much less dusty abode.

Roomba bites the dust 6 months post-warranty

garden : mystery flowers, lily refugees, and stumps

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White mystery flowers.

There are these little white flowers that spring up all over our neighborhood in late spring. For a long time I thought they were spring star flower; now that I’ve received some ipheion from a neighbor I can see they’re different. I now believe they are zephyr lilies, however the most commonly described variety appears to be only one flower per bulb without branching stems and are listed as blooming in autumn. They could be a native regional variety in the same family; I haven’t been able to tell from photos whether this variety has a branching stem, although the habitat description certainly fits with our town. At any rate, I moved several clumps of them out of the lawn last year and into the small bed with the daffodils, on the right side of the porch steps. Only two bulbs sent up flowers but the greenery did quite well; as with the crocuses, I’m hoping to get many more flowers next year.

In addition to puzzling over these little white flowers, I spent some time this weekend transplanting perennial lilies from my neighbor’s front foundation beds. The folks who owned the house before her planted hundreds of spring bulbs through their flower beds a couple of years ago, and the lilies in particular are now coming up everywhere. True lilies are not my favorite flower—I find the scent overpowering—however, in the spirit of providing a refuge for the neighbors’ flowers, I took some and planted them along the back fence behind the peonies. Of course, as soon as I had them in the ground I became paranoid that they would bring black mold with them that would destroy the carefully nurtured peonies just as they’re ready to flower for the first time. This is the life of a novice gardener; never being quite sure that what you’re doing is really the best thing for the plants, always fearing that you’ve missed some crucial piece of information in the one gardening book you chose not to consult. In this case, nurturing the peonies has meant weeding around them, clearing the mulch off the crowns in early spring, and otherwise leaving them completely to their own devices. I’m sure it will be fine, and I can always resort to spraying toxins if things get completely out of hand. Not that I’m likely to go that route, but it sometimes helps to remind myself that the nuclear option is there, anchoring the other end of the continuum.

While I was busy moving lilies, my partner was hard at work removing stumps. You may remember that we are still in pioneer mode when it comes to the beds in the backyard, dedicating enormous amounts of time, energy, and sweat to clearing the various sapling stumps, pricker bushes, grapevines, English ivy, liriope, violets, Virginia creeper, and last but certainly not least, poison ivy. The way that works is that we work together with the spade to clear several yards of ground of anything that can be easily dug out, and then my partner spends hours toiling alone with the landscape bar and the tree saw to uproot the pricker bushes and tree stumps. Sometimes we invite friends over for this process, have a beer afterwards, and call it a party. Last weekend it was just us, and it was only the two stumps; nothing like two years ago when we did battle with the pokeweeds for what seemed like months and was really just days. As it has been every year, my goal is to have the side beds cleared of weeds and under mulch by the first frost. Why give it up? It’s a good goal!

We all have to have something to strive for, and my something is a yard bordered by flat brown stretches of bark chips. When that day finally arrives, I’ll be glad to move on to a goal involving actual plants. For now, the front yard is where I am able to fulfill my desire to have living, growing, flowering plants, and I let the backyard be where the killing happens.

garden : mystery flowers, lily refugees, and stumps

garden : I fought the lawn and the lawn won

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Our timing could not have been better in terms of maximizing the growth of the lawn during a one week vacation. The entire week prior to our vacation, it poured rain, ensuring that I could not top up the lawn mowing (so to speak) before leaving. The first weekend we were away, it was dry and there was a heat wave. Nothing grass loves more than nice hot sun after being soaked for days; I say ‘grass’ here when I really mean clover, violets, catmint, et cetera. When we returned not only was the crabgrass tall enough for Jack to scurry up it, all the regular grass had also gone to seed. Great for reseeding the lawn and attracting pollinators, not so great for mowing. And, of course, it was still raining.

Normally I’m not that fussy about the lawn and relatively impervious to the fear that the neighbors will judge us on the basis of the state of the grass. Still, this was a little much, and it drove me to use the hour by hour weather prediction feature on my preferred weather website to find the earliest time this week that would have the maximum drying time prior to mowing and enough time prior to more rain to get the whole lawn cut; that time was 12pm yesterday. Thankfully, it was still cool, as 12pm is not typically my first choice for lawn mowing. I hauled the electric mower out of the garage and went to it. The mower performed valiantly—I only had to stop twice to clear the blocked chute thingy through which the cut grass gets thrown out onto the lawn—but it really was no match for the situation, what with having to avoid running over the cord and the one wheel that likes to reset its height as you go and the screws on the handle that like to rattle themselves loose. The mower itself is a tank, a Black and Decker that was given to us by my friend’s mother when we moved in, so in terms of plowing through a meadow it’s a good choice. For regular everyday use, I’m looking forward to the time I can get a zippy new generation Neuton. I’ve been informed in no uncertain terms that time will be when the current mower is dead, a category for which one gimpy wheel, some loose screws, and a missing rubber flap does not yet qualify it.

The nature of the lawn, as I’m sure you know, is that it grows. The nature of my mowing of the lawn is that I invariably omit to mow one of the tucked away parts of the lawn. This time I remembered the bit up by the stairs to the basement around the side of the house—which was, as the kids say, out of control as I’d forgotten it the last two times—and forgot the section outside the back gate along the alley and the bit by the garage on the other side of the walk. I’ll get back to them when it stops raining.

garden : I fought the lawn and the lawn won