housework – dangermouse.net

A big spring clean chore done

Tuesday mornings are when I work on my lesson plan for the new week’s ethics class. This week we’re talking about Robots. Some questions:

How would you feel if your teacher or sports coach was a robot?
Are there any jobs that should never be done by robots?
If robots start doing lots of work, what will humans do?
Should we program robots to have feelings, or would it be better to keep them as emotionless machines?
If robots become as smart as people, should they ever be given rights such as voting or freedom to do what they want?
If we didn’t give smart robots rights to freedom and voting, would that be slavery?

After completing the lesson plan, I made a new Darths & Droids comic. Then took Scully out for a walk. The day was surprisingly cold up to that point. A chilly southerly breeze actually made things colder at midday than it was at 6:30 in the morning. But the sun came out around lunch time and warmed things up.

This afternoon I tackled a major spring cleaning chore. I removed all the sliding window panes (sequentially) and washed them in the bathroom. Then removed the flyscreens and washed those. Then washed the fixed panes, then replaced the screens and sliding panes. We have laminated glass in most of the windows so the panes are very heavy and it’s tricky getting them in and out and carrying them through to the bathroom. I also had to brush away a lot of spiderwebs from the outsides of the windows. And washing the exteriors of the fixed panes is tricky because we’re above ground level and I have to lean out with a long-handled squeegee. Then I also cleaned the flyscreen door and glass of the balcony doors. All this took a few hours, but now we have sparkly clean windows that look like they’re almost not there at all.

Doing that, somewhere along the way I gave myself a nasty bruise on the sole of my left foot, up near the middle toe. I probably stood on something hard while trying to heft a heavy window pane in or out. I noticed while walking around afterwards and it’s quite sore.

Tonight I had the first Robots class. I think this is going to be a fun one this week!

Oh, I think I mentioned a few days ago that we had our dining chairs reupholstered. Here are before and after photos, to show what they looked like, and how they are now.

New content today:

Arcs has arrived!

Friday was online board games night, and also I received delivery of my preordered copy of Arcs, a new board game that is all the rage at the moment. Naturally I opened the box and flipped through the rules quickly, but it was left for today to read the rules thoroughly and punch out the cardboard tokens and stuff. It looks very interesting, and hopefully I’ll get a chance to try it out with my friends at our next in-person games night next Friday.

For the online games we played a bunch of the usual suspects. Earlier on Friday I taught my 4 ethics classes. I also picked up the groceries from the supermarket.

In the evening my wife messaged that she had gone somewhere after work and was on her way home on the train, and asked if I wanted to meet at the station and go straight from there to dinner. I grabbed Scully and walked straight up, arriving right at the same time that she emerged from the station entrance. We went to Xenos, a Greek place that’s been in the neighbourhood forever. I had a veal schnitzel, with vegetables and mash and mushroom gravy. Not especially Greek, but still pretty good.

This morning we dropped Scully off at grooming. I went for a 5k run, managing a much better time than my last one in the cooler weather. I’ll have to see if my times get generally worse in the warmer weather over summer.

I also did a big clean, vacuuming everything, cleaning the bathroom, washing out the shower cubicle. I had a bit of an accident with the vacuum cleaner. The dust collector cylinder was full after the last three or or so cleans, so I detached it to empty it into a bag… and the latch opened and the whole contents spilled out onto the carpet… and onto the vacuum cleaner, including into all the nooks and crannies that are normally covered when the dust collector is attached. So I couldn’t put the dust collector back on and vacuum up the dust now inside the cleaner… So I had to wipe it all down with a damp cloth. And then reassemble and clean up the mess on the carpet.

Finally, a couple of photos I took on Thursday in the rain, while crossing the Harbour Bridge on the train:

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Random blinds cleaning

Today I suddenly decided that I wanted to clean the vertical blinds that we have on the windows in the living room. Unfortunately with the humid weather we’ve been having the past few years they’ve developed mould spots on them, which I attempt to clean occasionally with mould remover, but they keep coming back. So I decided to take the blinds down completely and wash them in bleach solution to totally kill the mould and clean the spots off.

This was far easier said than done. The blinds are fiddly once removed from the wall mounts, and the long vertical blades are all connected by strings which can get tangled. I washed them, but then had trouble laying them out to dry. Eventually I decided I had to rehang them as sunset was approaching and I didn’t want our windows to be uncovered at night, and they were still a bit wet between some of the blades.

The result was not great and some of the blades got wrinkled in the washing process. And some of the connecting string bits that keep the blades parallel broke. The blinds are pretty old and I’m thinking it’s time to replace them with brand new ones. So probably some time during the week I’ll call a blinds company and have them come measure up the windows for new ones.

In other news, I got an email today from a Kickstarter campaign that I backed in 2017 that never delivered any rewards. It says to contact them and they’ll arrange a refund! Wow… I’d given up on getting anything from this Kickstarter about 4 or 5 years ago. Now just to see if they really follow through and process the full refund.

Apart from these things it was a pretty usual Sunday. Some comics work, walking Scully with my wife, cooking dinner (Indian spiced chick peas and potato), and three ethics classes.

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Cleaning out the fridge

I ticked off another overdue bit of housework today: cleaning out the fridge. I took an hour or so to remove everything from the shelves and trays and door compartments. I removed the glass shelves and washed them clean with detergent, dried them, and put them back in. Cleaned out the vegetable crisper drawer of all the little bits of old vegetables that had accumulated. And wiped down every other surface until the whole thing is as new. I did it in stages, moving things around inside the fridge so that I didn’t have to leave cold things out on the bench for an hour. There was just enough room. I had to do it just before a weekly grocery shop, because if I tried to do it tomorrow after shopping there would have been too much stuff in there.

Not much else to report for today. The rest of it was pretty much the usual old stuff. Ethics classes in the morning and evening. Walking Scully at lunch time. Made a sourdough loaf.

Oh, I did work a little on my Dungeons & Dragons campaign, preparing for tomorrow night’s game. I added up all the treasure from last session, assigned shares and experience points, and determined that the two dwarves in the party and the cleric retainer all levelled up. I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s game!

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Handyman level-up: locksmith skills!

We’ve been having trouble with the deadlatch on our front door for a while. Normally you can turn the lock on the inside and have it hold in the open position so that you can then use the same hand to open the door handle and open the door. But for a while now it’s been slipping from the hold-open position and relocking the latch, so you need a second hand free to hold the deadlatch open at the same time as opening the door handle. Meaning you can’t exit with anything in one hand.

I’ve been putting it off for a while, thinking I could try removing the deadlatch and seeing if there was anything I could adjust inside to enable the hold-open mechanism and stop it from slipping. Well, this morning I finally got the screwdriver out and removed the latch body from the back of the door. I looked inside and saw that the hold-open mechanism relied on a friction catch between a rotating plate and a surrounding fixed plate. It seems like the metal has worn away slightly with age. I’d been hoping I could just tighten a screw or something, but this looked like it had just worn out with usage.

So after having some lunch I went to the hardware store and bought a new deadlatch. This turned out to take some time, because it’s one of those items that isn’t on the general shelves, because it’s valuable or for security reasons or whatever. There’s just cards that you have to take to the service desk, where they give you the item.

Of course there was a huge queue at the service desk. Eventually I got to the front of the queue. I could see the deadlatches on a shelf behind the counter. I could have reached them, but the woman who served me was shortish, so she couldn’t reach them. I thought she’d use a stepladder, but no. She had to go get a powered lift – one with a stand-on lift platform on top of a moving vehicle thing. It was parked outside the service counter a few metres away. The queue of people waiting to be served was in the way, so she had to get other staff members to help her clear everyone to a different waiting area, so she could drive the lift through.

Then she tried to start the lift. It wouldn’t turn on. She called for some other staff to bring over another powered lift from elsewhere in the store… The whole time I’m thinking to myself if you just let me behind the counter I can reach up and grab the lock off the shelf myself.

Anyway, eventually I got the new deadlatch and took it home. Now, how difficult was it going to be to replace the old one? Well, I already knew how to remove the rear lock mechanism from the door-mounted plate, so I did that again. Then came the trickiest part…

Removing the new latch from the plastic clamshell case. I started using a screwdriver to kind of tear the plastic open, but slipped and sliced my finger. I got two slash cuts on the ring finger or my right hand, and had to go put iodine and a band-aid on it. I got my Stanley knife to teach the clamshell case a lesson and managed to extract the new latch without further injury.

I took the new latch rear assembly and stuck it on the existing door plate, screwed it in tight, and ta-da! The whole job was done in less than 5 minutes from getting the packaging open. Tested it and it works fine. I didn’t bother removing and replacing the front barrel, so we can still use our old keys to get in. The rear key barrel uses the new keys, but that’s okay. If it means saving $200+ labour cost on a locksmith doing the same (5 minute!) job, I’ll live with it.

I also did some cleaning up today. I have to get the place into shape for Friday night, when friends are coming over for our next Dungeons & Dragons session. And tonight started the “Prejudice” topic with three ethics classes.

New content today:

Time to replace the kitchen tap

The aerator has fallen out of my kitchen tap. I can push it back in, but it falls out whenever I turn the water on. I can’t see any way to make it stay in there. There’s nothing resembling a screw thread or a locking mechanism that might be engaged by twisting. This is a problem because the water now splatters all over the place if turned on any harder than a trickle.

As it happens, I’d been thinking of replacing the tap for a while anyway, as it’s been dripping a bit. So I guess it’s time to buy a replacement tap and get a plumber in to install it.

It was another very cold day today, but the sun was out and it didn’t rain, so that was nice at least. We went on a long walk with Scully to Maggio’s Italian bakery after breakfast and I tried a special of the day – a pastry a bit like a pain au chocolat, but with lemon custard also inside and lemon cream on top. We always joke about the combination of chocolate and lemon since on a trip to Rome many yers ago we bought two packs of biscotti—lemon and chocolate—and the old lady who sold them to us muttered to herself in Italian (which I understood just enough of to work out) that it was a bad sign that we liked two flavours that didn’t go together. But this pastry was delicious, and honestly I don’t think there’s any issue with lemon and chocolate together.

I did my 5k run this afternoon, since it was too cold in the morning. It was barely warm enough at 2pm in the sunshine.

I worked on some Darths & Droids strips today, completing one and getting a completed script written for another, which is actually really good progress for a day.

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Deep carpet cleaning

Today was dominated by cleaning the carpets. I hired a carpet cleaning machine from Bunnings (a hardware store) and picked it up this morning. Then after moving as much as possible off the floors, I spent a couple of hours thoroughly cleaning the carpets. The machine sprays hot water with a detergent onto the carpet and sucks it back up via a nozzle. I did two complete runs across all the carpet. The water that I emptied out of the machine at the end was black with the dirt and dust it had picked up.

The carpet was left a bit damp, but it was a good day to do this as it was warm and dry. We had all the windows open so the carpet could dry out properly. This carpet cleaning is exhausting work though, hot and hard on the muscles. I’m looking forward to a nice relax tonight.

We also made good progress on the jigsaw puzzle today:

My wife wanted to finish it over the Easter weekend, but it looks like we made it about 70% of the way. Should be done before next weekend, hopefully.

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Refreshing the bathroom

Today, without my usual array of online ethics classes, I spent a bit of time attending to housework chores. I went to the hardware store and bought a brand new toilet seat, to replace our old one, which had been getting scratched and discoloured due to age. Then I had to figure out how to install it and wrestle it into place. The screws have a lot of horizontal movement in them to allow positioning of the seat relative to the toilet bowl, which is good, but meant that actually getting it into the right position and staying there while I tightened the screws was tricky. But the result looks good, literally like brand new.

I also grabbed some more calcium chloride crystals for the damp absorbers around the house. And then emptied the water out of those and refilled them with crystals. It’s shocking how much water can be absorbed from the air so quickly around here.

At lunch I took Scully out for a walk to the fish and chips shop and got a take-away to eat at my favourite lookout spot with a view across the water to the city. The sky was dramatic with dark grey clouds. It was a cool and cloudy grey day, but the only rain was early in the morning.

I worked on some future topics for my critical thinking/ethics classes. I’m planning one on dreams—as in sleep dreams, not aspirations—and one on asking “why don’t we” questions, to get the kids thinking about things like “why don’t we eradicate fleas?” or “why don’t we ban unhealthy food?” Things with different reasons: economic, social, scientific, and so on.

This evening we went out for dinner, since the usual Friday night tomorrow is Good Friday and most places won’t be open. We felt like Thai food, but since our favourite Thai place closed down there aren’t any within walking distance that have dog-friendly seating. So we drove a few suburbs over to the one we usually go to now with Scully, only to find their outside table was occupied. We drove back another suburb and thought we’d just get out and have a look around the shopping area to see what restaurants were there, and we found a Thai place with several tables outside! It turned out they were all booked (by other diners with dogs), but the staff were happy to carry an extra table out onto the patio for us.

The food was great too! My wife ordered a vegetable and cashew stir fry which was very tasty and spicy, and I tried the daily special, which was a black pepper and chilli sauce over sliced chicken pieces. It was all very good and the staff were really friendly. I think we’ll add this to our list of good Thai places to go to.

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Considering countries

This morning I took Scully on a walk in the cool dampness after a night of rain. She’d been off her food all day yesterday until a late dinner, but was hungry for breakfast and perky again this morning.

Back home I wrote up my lesson plan for the new week’s critical thinking and ethics topic, on “Countries”. I framed much of the lesson around a story about a girl who goes on her first overseas trip with her parents, and all of the different things she encounters. She visits a museum to learn the history of the country she’s visiting, and I’ll get the kids in the class to compare that with countries they know, for example.

The post office received another visit today, as I packed and sent another Magic card to a buyer. I also took the chance to drop in that envelope with the Opal cards in it.

I completed this week’s batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips and uploaded them to the buffer. And made another Darths & Droids strip too.

And with everything I wanted to do achieved by early afternoon, I spent some time cleaning the house. I cleaned up the balcony, sweeping and removing spider webs. I also took out the bathroom window sliding pane and cleaned it, and removed the insect screen so I could reach outside and clean off a lot of spider webs from covering the window. They’ve been annoying me for ages. I really should clean all the windows, but that’s a big job for another day.

And when my wife got home from work I took the opportunity to do a 5k run. The day was warm, though not too hot, so it was a bit warm for a run, but I persisted and got it done.

Oh, and after dinner (potato and broccolini tikka masala with rice) we gave Scully a bath. She rolled around a lot in the grass at the park today, so we thought we should clean her up a bit.

It’s good to have a day when it feels like you got a lot done!

New content today:

Not in hot water

Today I had a maintenance guy from the gas company come around to replace our hot water meter. This is a periodic thing they do every 7 years for all customers, to ensure the meters are up to date and working properly. They gave me a window of 10:00-12:00 when the guy would arrive. Of course, there was no sign of him until almost 12:30. Then it took half an hour to do the job. Meanwhile I was hoping that Scully didn’t suddenly need to go out for a toilet, as I would have had to ask the worker to leave while I took Scully out. I don’t want a stranger in our home while nobody else is in here.

But Scully was fine, and after the guy finished replacing the meter we went out for a walk. The morning was cool and cloudy, with heavy rain from about 6am to 9am. It cleared up, and by the afternoon it was warm and sunny, though not too hot. The next three days however are forecast to be heatwave conditions, with temperatures around 40°C across parts of Sydney.

There’s also the tropical low off Queensland which is expected to be declared Tropical Cyclone Kirrily some time tonight. It’s still tracking to hit Townsville, and forecast to dump over a meter of rain the next few days to a wide area still recovering from widespread heavy flooding.

I spent much of the day writing new lessons for the new week of ethics classes. I have split topics for the two age groups this week: Gift Giving for 10-12, and Employment for 13-15. I managed to complete both of them by mid-afternoon, which is really good going. I also cleaned up the laundry a bit since that’s where the hot water meter is, and threw out some old cleaning products that we were unlikely to use. So that felt pretty productive.

For diner tonight I made calzones, filled with broccoli, pumpkin, and ricotta. Topped with a chilli and garlic tomato sauce, they were really good.

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