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And I went in seeking clarity
by anna at 11:57 AM on October 17, 2004
Our old home had mostly wood floors. This one has carpet. Carpets get dirty. You can vacuum them all you want but there's still a lot of grit and grime embedded in them. So when the price came down I bought a steam cleaner. It has four brushes that rotate and on-board tools. But as far as I can tell, it doesn't work.
I mean this in terms of the dirty water it collects. I spray quarts and quarts of solution on the carpet. I can see it being sucked up. Yet when I go to empy it, there's no dirty water. The carpets look much cleaner. So where did the dirt go?
This is just one of life's little imponderable mysteries that are inexorably driving me insane. Another is fish. You have river fish, like bass, salmon, trout and maybe catfish. You have ocean fish, like shad and grouper. There are even fish that like brakish water, that congregate in deltas where the rivers meet the sea. But never the two shall meet. Trout don't stray into the ocean. Grouper don't wander into the river. How do they know not to do this? It's not as if there's a sign or a wall to prevent them from mingling.
Still another has to do with our education system. We graduate with our heads crammed chock full of historical facts, vagaries of language and useless equations and theorems. We know nothing about the workings of our cars, or our HVAC systems. We don't know how to miter trim properly or how to replace a faucet or a heating element in our dryers. When the spark plug goes bad in our mowers, we tug on the cord a few times and then go buy a new one. We are ignorant of how to negotiate job interviews or office politics. We have no guidance on how to choose mates and maintain relationships. We can't manage our time or finances. Why is this?
The last thing is about politicians. They are always blathering on about big concepts like the economy or jobs or the environment or taxes or something. Much of their rhetoric has to do with foreign policies and wars raging thousands of miles away. I don't know about you, but I am far more concerned with more immediate things. It bothers me that I am awake for 16 hours a day and of those 2 are spent commuting to/from my job. That is 12% of your waking hours. Why don't we ever hear politicians offering workable solutions to problems like that? Perhaps because there are none? Or do they consider such mundane matters beneath them? I remember when Al Gore wrote that stupid book that proposed phasing out combustion engines. He'd have had us peons plodding along in horse carriages while he whizzed by in the back of his sleek limo on the way to do some important government thing, escorted by his motorcade.
And that is why I slowly going out of my mind.
comments (7)
You have such a good way of honing in on life's simple and big questions.
Don't like carpet? Put in hardwood floors. It's fun and easy - that is, if you like big projects with lots of hands on time. If schools are leaving kids only with useless facts and equations - that is a tragedy. That's what happened to me. But there were a few teachers who taught me that it wasn't the specific content of what they taught, it was how to approach and analyze problems, to see relationships and learn how to navigate them. College and graduate school teach you one thing: autodidacticize. Even so, that stuff about mates, finances, and how to fix things in general - it sucks that it's not there, but so few people seem to be able to teach it (i think most people don't know it! I certainly don't.)
When I livedi in the SF bay area my solution to commuting was two things: BART (bay area rapid transit - the subway was very efficient) or I rode my motorcycle. I could get in 15 minutes where it would take a car an hour. Now I live 1 mile from where I work (real estate is reasonable and accessible, unlike in the bay area) where I can walk there along tree-lined streets, yet I still work with plenty of people who could live in neat areas nearby, but choose to to live 40 minutes away for no good reason I can tell (ok so they can afford a fifth bedroom that they never use - and they spend 2 hours a day of their life paying for it). Here, housing is affordable, but there's no public transportation.
by Chris at October 17, 2004 1:25 PM
Well thanks Chris, coming from you that means a lot. Hardwood floors are a tocuhy thing with us because we just had ours redone at the old house. And there are perfectly good ones underneath the carpet and the dreaded tacking strips here. But again, it's a big job and we aren't entirely sure how to do it. All I was saying is that more practical knowledge would go a lot further than all the useless information they force students to memorize.
And the DC Metro system is a joke.
by anna at October 17, 2004 8:23 PM
Ah! you have hardwood under the carpet?
1.) remove the carpet and the tac strips.
2.) Rent a drum sander from home depot, and several roles of 60 grit paper rolls. Sand the floors. It's really easy. Basically like running a power mower over a lawn. You just drag the thing around in strips.
3.) Repeat with 100 grit rolls.
3.) Return the drum sander. Rent a vibrating floor sander, and an edge sander.
4.) Use the edge sander on all the edges. 1/4 turn counter clockwise motions. This is the hardest part. It takes about an hour to get used to the sander. Use knee pads.
5.) Use the vibrating floor sander and 120 grit paper on all the floors. Easy.
6.) Use a vacuum between eachsanding step to clean up all the saw dust. Use a tac cloth to get the dust remnants.
7.) Coat with a polyurethane prep coat (a special intial coat to prevent discoloration from sun bleaching). Let dry one hour.
8.) Follow with two coats of regular polyurethane. Let dry an hour between coats.
9.) Sand very lightly one last time using the vibrating floor sander using the finest paper (150-220 grit).
10.) Clean the dust and apply the last coat.
The whole thing takes about three days. Of course since you've already moved in, I don't expect you to doit. But if you wanted to, it's an easy way to get amazing floors and save yourself at least $5000.
by Chris at October 17, 2004 9:41 PM
Anna, that carpet stuff bugs me, too. Once I saw an article on a man (an environmental science professor, even) who put polished concrete floors into his house. They came out with a dark, shiny finish and looked really good. It would probably hurt like heck to fall down on them, though. Some of the imitation wood flooring they make now looks pretty good, too.
For the life stuff... I swear, hardly anyone knows how to pick out a mate and all that other stuff in the first place. I think that we would be teaching it (in one way or another), if only we knew.
by jean at October 18, 2004 3:50 AM
Damn Chris, my wife is going to be thrilled. I've told her we can rip out the floors once we learn how to refinish the floors ourselves. I refuse to pay craftsmen.
Jean, I must say some of those fake wood floors look great. We put some in our foyer. But you have to cut out this exact pattern with a huge sheet of paper, actually several sheets taped together and... You get my point. We just are not taught the things we need to know.
by anna at October 18, 2004 7:51 AM
The D.C. Metro is a beautiful masterpiece worthy of Da Vinchi compared to the NYC subways. I believe fish are aware of the 'currents' thus they don't swim against the flow. The part about fish reminds me of my beloved Hudson River. "Hi Hudson!" I sometimes watch these two chinese guys catch Eel from the Hudson and they put it in a plastic bag. They ride their bikes from Chinatown with fishing rods and often fish at dusk. Lockheed likes to call them the 'Eel Brothers'. Even though I don't think they are brothers.
by LOCKHEED at October 18, 2004 9:37 AM
Once I felt daring and ordered electric eel at a sushi bar. Eek! What are eel (eels?) doing in a river? Round here we have scads of snakehead that are going to devour all the other river fauna. Or so they say.
by anna at October 18, 2004 5:54 PM