Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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The Mopping Fool

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I am not what you would call an active “cleaner.”

I’m a tidier. I’m an organizer. But, it takes a lot to move me into cleaning mode.

In my head I always look this adorable while I am cleaning. I may or may not also always wear that hat.

I have a certain fear of activating that particular urge, possibly because I come from a line of hard-core OCD scrubbers.  Much as Bruce Banner turns from nerd to Hulk, when my inner-cleaner is invoked I go from laid back dude to my grandmother. I become intent on vacuuming the floor every time someone leaves the room to get a drink – vacuuming it until it is safe to eat mashed potatoes right off that rug.

E has learned to let that particular sleeping OCD monster lie on most occasions, because getting me involved in day-to-day cleaning is the nuclear option. The one time I have been entrusted with cleaning a bathroom the result resembled a demolition project.

The one area where E is willing to deploy the nuclear strike that is my genetic heritage of clean-freak-ness is mopping. I like a floor to be so well-mopped, so gleaming with elbow-greased shine, that you dare not mar the surface with your shadow after the mopping is done. I don’t trust other people to mop for me, because they don’t employ the five key phases of mopping required for a truly gleaming floor.

To say that I was invested in our mop purchase for the new house would be an understatement. “Invested” implies a degree of detached evaluation. No, our mop purchase was a matter of life or death – life with gleaming floors, or the relative half-life of dull ones.

At one point I was reduced to near tears in the middle of an aisle in Home Depot, wracked with indecision and guilt. Couldn’t we buy a sampling of four or five mops to do our own comparative test across multiple surfaces?

The Rubbermaid Wavebrake® Dual-Water Combo with Sideward Pressure Wringer. Wavebreak? For real? It's a fucking mop cart, not a jet ski.

A test should not have been required. What I wanted was a rag mop with a solid wooden handle, and a bucket to wring it with and in. Rubbermaid G780-04 Pva Roller Mop was the ultimate mop because of its heavy metal handle, thick sponge, and heavy-duty wringer. Then I discovered that tiny screws hold said sponge onto the mop, and they get pretty rusty – to the tune of an hour or two to change the head. That was the end of that particular love affair.) –>

Home Depot has a wide, pleasing selection of wooden handled mops. What they had zero of were wringing buckets. They had one massive $100+ dollar custodian cart that came with its own “Caution: Wet Floors” sign in dual languages. I am a serious mopper, so the concept intrigued me, but I didn’t think the cart cornered well enough to get around the island in our kitchen.

Is it just me, or could this easily double as some sort of implement of torture?

Apparently wringing buckets are a rare item, which puzzles me seeing as non-wringing mops are pretty damned common. How do they get dry? Some Amazon shopping yielded the Behrens 412W Galvanized Mop Wringer Pail, but with shipping it totaled almost $40. Seriously? For a mop bucket?

As a result, I committed the cardinal sin of a committed mopper – I bought a plastic handled mop with a built-in wringer. I figured it could last me through three or four moppings – long enough to find a permanent solution.

This is the Quickie Home-Pro Twist Mop with Spot Scrubber. It is the devil.

I was wrong. Super wrong. I popped the wringer out of its plastic threading on my first wring. I began to wring six or seven times to get it dry during phases two and four, which caused the mop head to age six or seven times as fast, which resulted in a busted mop head on its second outing.

$20 dollars for two moppings. I know MY mopping skills are worth $10 a go (hello – I have FIVE PHASES), but I don’t know if the mop quality was equally as worthy.

This all came to a head on Sunday night. I had avoided mopping our kitchen since the mop gave up the ghost, but I caused a bottle of ginger salad dressing to explode across our entire kitchen. Spot-cleaning was not an option – this required mopping.

I dealt with the frustration of my devil mop for all of five minutes. So do you know what I did? Scrubbed the damn floor on my hands and knees. And dried it that way too.

I know I’m my grandmother’s child when I comes to clean floors, but is scrubbing by hand seriously my best recourse with all of the cleaning products in a Home Depot and across the internet at my disposal?

Should I really be having in-store panic attacks and 1000-word blog posts both on the topic of mops?

Am I missing some incredibly simple explanation about how mops get wrung? Do people wring with their bare hands (eewwwww)?

More importantly, what simple home cleaning or repair task drives you similarly up a wall? Please tell me I’m not alone in my insanity.

I just want to understand

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At the bottom of my basement stairs, I realized I was defeated. Or, at least, foiled in this particular instance.

The floor of our basement was covered with water two inches thick, and our water heater was hissing and spewing a fountain of water from its top.

I had an idea how to turn off the water. I had a plan to pump out the water. But I had no idea what was wrong with the water heater, or how to fix it.

Defeated.

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If we wrote out a list of my fundamental character traits, one is that I have to understand how things work.

I don’t have to fix every problem myself. I can delegate and rely on help from other people. But, bottom line, I have to understand what the problem is, why it’s happening, and what’s being done so that it doesn’t happen again.

I’m discovering that this is going to be one of my major challenges as a homeowner. When something breaks or explodes or just mysteriously stops functioning, people expect you to step back, call a contractor, and repeat the serenity prayer under your breath.

Yeah, I just don’t roll like that.

If the primary three letters in my life are frequently OCD, the next trio are DIY. Do It Yourself. DIY is why I know how to do almost everything I know how to do.

When Blogger wouldn’t republish archive pages in 2000 I taught myself how to code PHP. When i wanted to record a studio album I minored in music. Last night I completed disassembled a backup drive with a blown power supply down to the last screw and installed it into another computer, rather than contemplate sending it away for repair.

All that said, I’m still a little intimidated by DIYing the house. It’s one thing to take apart a hundred dollar hard drive, and another to conduct demolition on a multi-hundred thousand dollar house.

So, when we bought the house it was a special challenge to find the right sorts of inspectors and contractors and insurers that could satisfy my need to understand.

We took our best shot. The Great Water Heater Explosion of 2010 tested both our vendor-selection and the limits of my understanding and my serenity.

Our Home Warranty company suddenly had clauses that were nowhere in our contract, and when I called to understand where they explain their coverage, their answer was basically “we don’t; no one has ever cared.”

They were dismissed.

Then we had a plumber quote twice as much as we thought it would be to replace the water heater, without really breaking down how he arrived at that number.

He never got a call back.

Basically, until I’m comfortable with in-home DIY, “understanding” has becoming my homeowner’s litmus test. If someone is afraid to make me understand – because they don’t want to be questioned, or they don’t want to empower me, or they want to charge me too much money – then they aren’t going to touch our house.

In the end we replaced the water heater for HALF of that initial quote in a single day.

Next challenge? The electrician whose lack of attention fried the aforementioned hard drive, to which his solution was to bill us another $1,200 for a dubiously defined solution he couldn’t help me to understand.

I understand that I can’t fix everything and I can’t know everything. But, at the very least, I can understand everything.

That’s all I ask.

Blackouts

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Today I woke up at six.

Yesterday and the day before I woke up at six. On Saturday it was close to seven. Friday, six fifteen.

Do you sense a trend?

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In our old house sleep was a black box.

I remember the conversation we had when we first moved in. Three bedrooms, and only the front and back ones were big enough to hold E’s queen-sized bed.

“Well, the front is bigger – more room around the bed, and for beaureaus and things. But it’s at the front of the house – streelights, cars passing, people talking, kids playing – it will all be in the bedroom with us.”

We wound up in the back. Smaller, cozier, and immune to all that street noise. Except, the backyard world of our home had its own noise – yapping dogs and yellow security lights, always on watch.

We adapted. I slept some nights with headphones, or earplugs. Our curtains were blackouts, thick and inpenetrable. Eventually E bought me a sunrise clock complete with chirping birds, so I could still wake up with some semblance of morning in my life – even in the black box.

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People joked that I would be freaked out by the quiet at our new house. They weren’t wrong. Everything is silent at night (save for crickets), with everyone tucked into their discrete living rooms hundreds of feet from our door.

Sometimes I feel sheepish even playing guitar, before Elise reminds me that they could easily be doing that (or louder!) in their own homes. Such as is the silent expanse of our street.

Our bedroom is in the front of the house. No earplugs. Yes, blackout curtains, but not drawn carefully across every inch of every window from frame to frame. It’s just out of habit – to make sure no moonlight falls across my body as I drift to sleep.

The difference is the morning. Still quiet. Still no traffic. Yet in place of the sunrise clock I have … sunrise.

It turns out, I’m a morning person. For five years I had fooled myself, because my tiny electric sun was no replacement for an entire world of delicately spun light.

Tomorrow I will probably wake up at six.

man (just me, actually) vs. nature (mostly this one bird)

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I have been waking up early almost every day at the new blue house.

Some of that awakening has been of my own volition. Other of it is due to an east-facing window.

However, largely the inspiration is avian in nature.

When we talked about owning a house in a speculative fashion, people would say the same sorts of things. “You’ll always have projects,” was a common response, and I’d never dispute it. Another common one was, “Oh, you’ll have a yard! There will be birds singing.”

No, really, people say that.

I would consistently respond, “Yes, I need to figure out how to poison them all.”

It’s not anything I have against birds, per se. I have a friend who disputes the very nature of birds. Like, “feathers, hollow bones – that shit is just unnatural.” She regards each sample of the class with guarded skepticism, as if it could be a carrier of bubonic plague or infectiously bad credit scores.

That’s not the nature of my problem. Birds are fine as a concept. I just don’t like things that make uninvited noise (other than, obviously, me). Birds fall into the same offensive category as small dogs, train tracks, and babies.

Which is an entirely other topic.

Birds know no reason. At least trains pass and babies are usually hungry or tired or want to chew on your remote control.

Why is the bird chirping? Like, this morning at 4am when the species of bird I refer to as “Digitalis Clockus” – which earned its name because its brief, repetitive, perfectly-pitched warble is louder than my digital clock, even when it is positioned across the street in a neighbor’s yard where it would be technically trespassing for me to poison it or beat it to death with a wok – began chirping, why was it chirping?

Why, gentle readers, must it not only begin to chirp, but chip that piercing, non-snoozeable-but-very-alarming chirp every morning between 4:07 am and 5:15 am? Why must its circuit carry it from our neighbor’s broad yard across the street to the towering dogwood beside my window?

I have encountered it once in close quarters, in the lower boughs of said tree. I assumed my avian foe would be approximately the size and shape of one of those totally over-the-top Hammacher Schlemmer alarm clocks that light up and vibrate and make bagels, but with wings.

Nay. It is a tiny, mottled, gray thing that I could probably fit whole in my mouth.

If I thought that it wanted to fly into my mouth I would put the poison right on my tongue, like a tiny, toxic hit of LSD, and wait patiently for my avian friend to swoop into my maw.

That would be better than waking up every day at an average time of five forty-one in the morning.

Disaster is Natural

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I have this theory about how Philadelphia is immune to disaster.

Stick with me for a minute.

No seismic activity. Relatively far away from potential tidal waves and protected from hurricanes. We’re not known for forest fires or mudslides, and despite our utter flatness occasional floods are minor. It doesn’t get too oppressively hot and the biggest challenge in our snow storms is waiting for the city to send plows. We’re relatively drought- and famine-proof, as modernized cities go, and NYC and DC are preferable targets for terrorists and rogue nuclear missiles.

Really, the closest we come to city-wide disaster is one of our sports teams winning a championship. Otherwise, short of OCD Godzilla bursting free from my chest to tramp around Center City, it’s a pretty safe place to live.

So, of course we move out of the center of the city to the fringes and within the first week there’s a tornado on our block.

Yes, day six as homeowners, tornado.

That is only vaguely an exaggeration. It wasn’t officially a tornado, and it was actually on pretty much every block adjacent to our new one while leaving us untouched.

I witnessed a portion of the storm from my office window, and it looked sufficiently deadly – I saw it blowing things clear off the gated roof of an adjacent building before my view was reduced to a foggy blackout. However, when I left, Center City looked no worse for the wear.

A huge tree on the next block, completely uprooted.

My new neighborhood was a different story. My bus stopped a mile short of our house in traffic snarled by dark traffic lights.

I disembarked and began a muggy hike back to my home. About a mile out from our house I started to see down tree branches. Then it was downed tree limbs, taking some power lines with them.

By the time I was a block away it was entire trees – trunk, roots, and all, upended ass over end to be splayed rudely across well-groomed lawns. Entire blocks of entire trees, the entire landscape denuded by mother nature.

To say I was nervous when I approached our house would be an understatement. I was obsessing over the huge tri-trunked tree that shades our patio, and how any of its trio of arms could go crashing through the roof to destroy my collection of guitars and recording equipment, now located in one conveniently destructible place.

My heart sank when I turned onto my street a block below our house, only to find it completely blocked off by the arboreal carnage.

A barricade of branches and power lines.

Having lived in the absence of disaster for nearly three decades, to me the sight was fantastical – as if my block had experienced some sort of wizarding dual, the debris glinting with hints of magic in the afternoon sun.

I navigated around it with great care, emerging on the other side to regard a pristine, untouched block stretching beyond the mess.

I raced the remaining distance to my house but, like the rest of our block, it was unmolested – no downed trees, no holes in our windows from golf-ball-sized hail. The only evidence of a storm my neighbor described as sounding “like a freight train passing by” was a dusting of shredded leaves on our lawn and our power, out.

We dodged a bullet – a house on the next block had its gutters shredded by downed trees, while a few streets over a massive branch decimated the windows of an SUV. A co-worker lost all of the power lines to his house to trees.

Us, we just lost our innocence – no longer protected from disaster by Philly’s impregnable grid of row homes, and now inclined to worry about the state of our house after every storm.