Tying the knot

Okay, so some time ago I was walking right before Big Trash Day in my neighborhood and found a slightly garish but very cool table lamp sitting out on the curb, just begging to be picked up and given a home.

There was just one small problem. The wiring looked like it might not be safe. Not to worry, I thought. I'd just rewire it.

After all, I did quite a bit of my own house wiring back in the day when I lived in Eugene, Oregon (where such things were legal). If I can install an entire electrical service, rewiring a lamp ought to be simple, right?

Tonight I got out a screwdriver and my old wire stripper and set to work. I was making good progress until I came to the place where you tie an underwriter's knot before you put the switch in place. There was a picture of an underwriter's knot in the repair book I was using, but no instructions on how to tie it.

I thought I made a knot that matched the picture in the book, but I just wasn't sure. And it's very important to get this right. The underwriter's knot is the thing that keeps the wires from pulling away from the light socket.

Fortunately, I found this extremely helpful YouTube video with clear step-by-step instructions on how to tie the knot:



The video comes from the home repair web site See Jane Drill. You can find out more about them here.

For more complete lamp rewiring instructions, this video looks as if it would be helpful.

Raspberry Pi

I want one of these. It's a tiny little computer that costs $35 and runs Debian Linux. A person needs a power adapter, a USB keyboard and mouse, a compatible monitor (or t.v.), and an SD card bigger than 4 GB to make it all work, so the total cost would be a bit higher.

Of course, I could probably have just as much fun playing with the various old computers I already have lying around the house. The really fun thing would be to find a similar variety of Debian Linux that would run on my existing obsolete machines. But the Raspberry Pi is made by a nonprofit organization with the goal of inspiring kids to do computer programming, so I may eventually decide to get one. Apparently there's quite a waiting list, anyway.  Unfortunately, the hardware is not open source, but it still seems like a cool project.

Does housework count as real work?

Some time in the foreseeable past, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney described his wife, Ann, as his primary advisor on women's issues. His wife told him that women didn't care about feminism, they cared about the economy.

Democratic campaign consultant called Hilary Rosen set off a kerfuffle when she said that Ann Romney knew nothing about economics because she hadn't worked a day in her life. Staying home to raise five sons counted as working, Ann Romney said. This ignited a silly media row that I did my best to ignore. However, a couple of interesting items showed up on the Web as a result of this silly row.

One such item was Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne's commentary. I think he's supposed to be a liberal. I found his post on the Truthdig Web site. Mr. Dionne basically agrees with the Romneys when he says

For millions of American moms and dads, debates about “feminism” or “social conservatism” are irrelevant. It’s about money.

He goes on to chastise Republicans and conservatives for undermining the economic foundation of most families that would allow one parent to choose to stay home.

This points to a contradiction that few conservatives want to confront. When trying to win votes from religious and social traditionalists, conservatives speak as if they want to restore what they see as the glory days of the 1950s family. But they are reluctant to acknowledge that it was the high wages of (often unionized) workers that underwrote these arrangements.

Yet on the right, economic conservatism almost always trumps social conservatism, and market imperatives almost always get priority over family imperatives. As a result, the United States has the weakest family-leave laws in the industrialized world. We have done far less than other well-off countries to accommodate the difficult work-family dilemmas that most moms and dads deal with in the new economy.

There's much in that second quote to agree with, but I'm left with the strong impression that Dionne considers women's freedom and women's lives irrelevant, unless these are considered as part of a family economy that affects men.

A much more interesting conversation about the topic of women and housework took place on Democracy Now!, where host Amy Goodman interviewed long-time activist and theorist Selma James. Back in 1952, James wrote a brilliant pamphlet called "A Woman's Place," and now James has published a book called Sex, Race, and Class, a collection of her essays.

James argues that the work of stay-at-home mothers is crucial to the operation of capitalism, because mothers reproduce labor. The housewife becomes the servant of the working husband, who relates to her in the same way the capitalist relates to him. That is, he pays her just enough to live on, while capturing goods and services with a value far beyond that.

Selma James says it better than I do. Here is the interview as it aired on Democracy Now! on April 16:



On the Democracy Now! Web site, you can view a longer version of the interview, complete with written transcript.

How pilot lights work

Recently I re-lit my floor furnace. While I was at it, I took lots of pictures and posted them on Facebook, along with lots of little comments. One of the comments I made was that the pilot light of the floor furnace generates enough electricity to operate the thermostat. (In the event of an ice storm bad enough to cause a power outage, this is a handy little feature.) A viewer of this Facebook album asked, reasonably enough, does the pilot light really generate electricity?

Well, yes it does, it says so right in the manual for the floor furnace. But my manual doesn't say how this works. Fortunately the web site How Stuff Works seems to have the answer to this question.

Thermocouples generate electricity directly from heat. They take advantage of an electrical effect that occurs at junctions between different metals. For example, take two iron wires and one copper wire. Twist one end of the copper wire and one end of one of the iron wires together. Do the same with the other end of the copper wire and the other iron wire. If you heat one of the twisted junctions with a flame and attach the two free iron wires to a volt meter, you will be able to measure a voltage.

In a pilot light, one of the junctions of a thermocouple is sitting in the pilot light's flame. The electricity that is created runs to a small electromagnetic valve and holds it open. If the pilot light blows out, the thermocouple quickly cools off. It stops generating electricity and the valve closes.

Pretty neat, huh?

Fun with a floor furnace (Don't try this at home)

I have always thought that one should never expect anything from the weather. By its very nature, weather is ever-changing and unpredictable. Nevertheless, the recent cold and rain in Oklahoma City caught me by surprise. I wasn't thinking that I'd need to light my floor furnace for at least another month. Then I noticed that the temperature inside my house had started to drop to uncomfortable levels. Yesterday, it was 55 degrees inside. This morning, it was 50. Time to act.

Fortunately, last year when I bought my little house, I downloaded the manual for my floor furnace from the manufacturer's web site. So, after a delicious breakfast at the Red Cup, I got right to work.

First, I needed to clean the darned thing. This required me to get out my shop vac.

Then I had to put the cat away in the bedroom so she wouldn't get into the furnace when I opened it up to clean it. Next, I removed the register and the inner casing. Here's how it looked after the register was taken off, while the casing was still in place. I like this photo because you can see the controls over on the left, and how the whole thing fits together:

It took a while to vacuum out all of the accumulated dust, debris, and foreign objects. About two-thirds of the way through this process, I had to stop to clean out the vacuum. The hose seemed to be clogged with cat hair. Go figure. Once I finished with this step, I removed two of the vent covers from the house foundation so that the heater would be properly vented once it was lit. Then it was time to go under the house.

Here's what it looks like under the house as I crawled back toward the underside of the heater:

The chimney needs some repair, which you can tell when you crawl up closer to it. (I need to find a mason.) The furnace itself has a little bit of external rust, but it seems to be in good shape.

I inspected the furnace, all the fittings I could see, and the connections of the flue to the furnace and the chimney. I cleaned all the debris out of the debris pan. First I tried a little brush, and then a rag. Finally, I used some canned air, and that did the trick. You can barely see part of the debris pan in the photo above. Look for a little flat thing on the bottom middle of the furnace.

Here's where the flue enters the chimney:

This photo shows some of the other issues I need to resolve with the house. First, I need to dig (or, possibly, have someone dig) a French drain to keep water from dissolving the east wall and flowing under the house:

But I have a novel that I need to write in November, so that project may have to wait for spring.

I love to hang out under my house, but eventually it's time to get myself out from under.

And then it was time to go back indoors and light the furnace, following the instructions in the manual. At first I didn't see the part about holding down the gas control while I used the automatic spark switch, but it worked just fine with a match. Now my house is warm and cozy.

Some of that is due to the fact that my floor furnace is blazing away merrily, but I also had a lot of help from my friends in getting the house ready to move into. And when it's cold outside, having good friends keeps my heart warm.

A trashy post

 

I've still got to put primer around the edges, windows and doorframes, but I've tested my blue samples, and I think my color scheme is going to work. Meanwhile, I decided that it's getting hot fast and I'd better get going on putting a working air conditioner into my main room. First, I had to get rid of the dead one. With a little help from one of the friendly folks at the collective household up the street, I got the old monster out of the wall and dragged it to the curb.

Within an hour, metal scavengers had taken away the guts of the thing:

 

Shortly thereafter, the outer shell also disappeared. But I had other stuff to put out for Big Trash Day. I'm clearing away overgrown sumacs and birches from along my fence line, and getting rid of the remains of an old sidewalk along the east side of the house so that I can add a much needed French drain.

Not that Paul Bunyan or John Henry will be worried about the competition (yet), but I thought it was pretty good evening's work for a middle-aged woman armed only with a bow saw, some loppers, a shovel, a sledge hammer and a pick.

Prime time

If I don't post a lot in the next little while, it's because I've got a lot of house projects that I'm working on.

I'm painting my front bedroom before I move my bed and dresser in there. It's the one room in the house that has an air conditioner at the moment, and the Oklahoma summer is starting to get warm. I'm priming the walls while I decide what color to paint them. I think I've forgotten everything my painting friends taught me back in January, but it's my house, and I get to learn by making mistakes. Whatever I end up with will at least hide the crappy paneling. If I decide I don't like it, I can repaint it another time.

I'm still not sure exactly what color I'm painting it. Probably some shade of blue, to help me feel cooler. Maybe I'll paint each wall a slightly different shade. I thought about stripes, but that would probably drive me nuts. People always say, "It's your house, you can paint the walls black if you want." Um, well, I think it won't do that. If y'all want to paint your walls black, I hope you enjoy the experience and the results. For me, what it's all about is the freedom not to worry about a less than perfect result, and the freedom to try again.

Trying not to do anything rash

This afternoon, some friends came over to see my little house. One of these women told me she thought that the plant with shiny red leaves that has spread through so much of my back yard might be poison ivy. I'd had that same thought myself, but concluded it was something different. I've pulled lots of it out of my yard, and haven't had a reaction, so I'd thought I had nothing to worry about.

But, then again, back when I was a Girl Scout in Philadelphia, I used to get the worst cases of poison ivy. Once, I had a big red scar on my face and one eye was almost swollen shut. Another time, I managed to get a poison ivy rash in the dead of winter. Hearing my friend explain how much this thing looked like poison ivy, I could feel myself start to itch. If this stuff turned out to be my old nemesis, I was going to be in for some itchy times indeed.

What to do?

I did a web search on poison ivy pictures and found the Poison Ivy, Oak and Sumac Information Center. A quick search of their site turned up a photo of the thing growing in my back yard, which appears to be something called pepper vine. Comments on the site said that this plant can also cause a rash, but so far I haven't gotten one.

This must be my lucky week. I don't have poison ivy and the Terro got rid of the ants.

Antipathy and anticipation

For the past week or two, there have been a very few ants wandering aimlessly around my kitchen counter. I could trace them back to a line that was marching along my living room basement. My kitchen is mostly clean. It hasn't particularly gotten dirtier in the past couple of days. But for some reason, this morning, the right-hand countertop and the cabinet shelves above it were swarming with ants. A bit of investigation showed that they had found a little chocolate pastry from the supermarket that comes clad in only a cardboard package. Discarding the pastry, wiping up under the honey and jam, and murdering thousands of ants with my dishrag did little to discourage them. Convinced that a bounty of sugary stuff awaits them in my kitchen, they just keep coming.

It's time to get serious about ant eradication. I went out to Ace Hardware and got the Terro. Tonight when I get home I'll put it out. It's sugar syrup with boric acid in it, and I've had good luck with it in the past. You pour out a little bit of the stuff on a flat piece of cardboard or plastic and put it where the ants will find it. At first, you draw more ants than you can imagine. They all come out to get this wonderful treat and dutifully carry it back to their nest, where it kills them and their offspring. Ants are difficult not to admire for their hard work and team spirit. I kind of hate to do them in. But it's kinda gross when they climb all over everything. (By this afternoon they had even infested Spot's dish of cat food.) At least with the Terro, I figure they'll die happy.

My little house

Here are some photos that I've taken of my house since I've moved in. As I've said before, it's a sweet little house, but it's going to keep me busy doing repairs for a while.

Cooking with the sun...

...is usually practical in Oklahoma nine months of the year. But this spring is a little bit different, as Peak Oil Hausfrau discovered when she tried to demonstrate solar cooking to a Sierra Club outing last weekend.

Pooling our resources...

I've just finished my first adventure using craigslist.

Out in my backyard, I had this old-above ground pool that was there when I moved in:

I'm not really much of a swimmer, and I have plenty of other things at my house to repair, renovate, and maintain. Really. My friends told me, "The frame of the pool is the thing that is most expensive and difficult to get. Someone is going to want that." But no one I knew actually did want it, except for one woman who didn't have a back yard big enough to put it in.

"Put it on craigslist,"everyone said. So finally, I did, thinking no one really would be interested. Thinking that if worse came to worst, it wouldn't be that difficult to take it apart and haul it out to the curb for the next Big Trash Day.

Well, it worked! I got more emails than I could possibly answer, inquiring about the pool. I picked one email that seemed to have really good energy, and gave the folks a call. Friday night they came out to take a look at it, and Saturday evening when I got home from work, it was gone.

 
A nice family is going to have a nice pool, and I have that thing out of my back yard, so I can concentrate on my next project, constructing a French drain to protect the foundation of the house.

Everything or the kitchen sink

There have been a lot of things I would like to blog about. I would like to blog about President Obama's new budget. I would like to blog about how different forms of oppression interact with each other, which seems to me like one of the most important ways to celebrate Women's History Month. What I did instead this past  weekend was to re-do the plumbing underneath my kitchen sink to prevent a replay of the amazing exploding plumbing episode.

I did go ahead and get the specialized tool for PEX pipe. I  ended up getting the tool for the cinch-type connector, even though I'd read that they were inferior to the crimp type.  My biggest reason for doing this is that by using the crimp type of connector, I could get one tool that would fasten fittings for all sizes of pipe up to one inch in diameter, rather than having to buy a different tool if I needed to connect a different size of PEX pipe. Trust me, buying one tool is expensive enough, even though I violated my principles and bought it at a home improvement chain store. I found that the system was fairly easy to use, but it does require care and a little bit of practice to get the hang of.

Meanwhile, I  found two fascinating books about plumbing through the Metropolitan Library System. One is Remodel Plumbing by  Rex Cauldwell (published 2005 by Taunton Press, shelf number 696.1 C372r). Cauldwell explains why compression fittings (particularly the metal kind) are so fussy:

In metal compression fittings, leaks are normally caused by the tightening nut being a little too big (due to manufacturer tolerances) for the brass ferrule sleeve. As the nut tightens down on the body, instead of  the ferrule evenly compressing around the pipe to make a good seal, one side of the ferrule slips up on the pipe (and the other slips down) resulting in an uneven seal...Metal compression fittings also have a habit of leaking hours or days later.

So, I'm a terribly inexperienced amateur plumber, but it's a relief to find out that it's not just me.

The other great plumbing book I found was the second edition of The Plumber's Troubleshooting Guide by R. Dodge Woodson. (A  2009 McGraw-Hill book with the shelf number 696.1 W898p2.) Most of  it didn't apply directly to the situation I was dealing with, but it did teach me one nifty trick.  A good way to check for leaks around a bit of plumbing is to touch it with a piece of dry toilet paper. Even a small leak will make the toilet paper wet.

Besides  the plumbing adventure, I spent a happy hour or two climbing around underneath the house examining it so I can figure out what I need to know in order to get my house leveled. It seems that the foundation of my house is a mess, but it's kind of an interesting mess. I'll  keep you posted.

Don't try this at home...

...is the title of  the home-improvement blog I have thought about starting. But I've become a bit  sporadic about posting to the blog I already have, so I'll just continue to throw my house-repair posts in here along with everything else.

Earlier  this week I was hurrying to get out the door so I could get to work on time when all of  a sudden I heard the sound of water rushing. Looking into the kitchen, I could see water pouring out from under the sink.  I dashed out to the curb with my meter key as fast as my lame foot could carry me and turned off the water. Turned out that the hot water compression valve had blown clear off the pipe. It had  been on the pipe for a month, and up to that point hadn't leaked a bit. I'm still researching what I might have done wrong. If  I figure it out I'll let you know.

The pipes I put in under my sink are those new-fangled PEX pipes. I'm thinking about going ahead and getting the fancy expensive tool that you use to connect the pipe to specialized PEX fittings. The tool can be expensive--but not as expensive as calling a plumber. Besides, after I get the foundation and the roof fixed, it might be time to install some new plumbing. This testimonial says that installing PEX water supply pipes is fast, easy,  and  relatively cheap:

In all, even with a burnt hand and broken ribs....don't even ask......I am very pleased with my new plumbing system and the fact that I was able to complete it myself without my house floating down the street!

 And also, apparently, quite an adventure.

Spouting off

If you know me, something you may not know about me is that I have a favorite shower head. It is a low-flow shower head that has a little push button thingee on the side that allows you to regulate the water flow. You can get a full whopping 2.5 gallons per minute for a luxurious high-pressure shower experience, or you can shut it down to a trickle. A handyman at my old apartment complex was kind enough to install it for me when he was in my apartment a few years ago doing a different plumbing repair.

The existing shower head in my new house was just not satisfactory, as far as I could see. Now that I'm gone, the management company is probably going to completely remodel my apartment, as they're doing with every apartment that goes vacant. So I figured, what's the harm, I'll swap shower heads with them. So I did.

The difficulty with this scheme made itself apparent on Sunday morning when I took a shower to clean up after moving. You know how you pull up the little thingee on the tub spout in order to send the water up to the shower head? When I did this, most of the water kept cascading out of the tub spout, and very little of it came out up top. I was sure I had tested this before and found it satisfactory -- but this was before I swapped shower heads.

What to do? Unlike most of my other recent plumbing adventures, this turned out to be quite simple. To make a long story as short as possible, I soaked the shower head in vinegar -- following the recommendation in a home maintenance book. After that, the amount of water coming out of the shower head was much better--but the tub spout diverter valve still leaked. So I went ahead and replaced the tub spout.

Now, in case you haven't replaced a tub spout lately, be advised that that there are at least three different types of tub spout, each requiring a different replacement. Fortunately, there is such a thing as a universal tub-spout replacement kit. The one I got over at Westlake Ace Hardware on 23rd even included the Teflon tape that you wrap around the pipe threads. Be advised that you also need something called water pump pliers. Back when I was a kid, we just called these Channellocks. Anyway, I forgot to get them Sunday and had to go back for them Monday. Hopefully my personal hygiene did not suffer too much as a consequence.

Once I'd replaced the tub spout, it all worked like a, like a...well, it worked exactly like a shower should. Yay!!! When I looked at the old shower head, it looked as if there was a build-up of corrosion that had kept the valve from closing properly. Next time I face this situation, I'll most likely soak the tub spout in vinegar, too, before I replace it.

It's good that I like fixing things, or I would have the wrong house.

I live here now

It's a little bit messy, still, because I don't have everything arranged yet. I think Spot likes it okay. And now I need to go off to find the parts to make my shower head work properly...

Spot on

This is Spot. See Spot run. See Spot get agitated and claw and bat at things. See Spot go and explore all the drawers and closets that are empty now as I pack stuff up to move. I tell Spot, "Spot, we're going to have a house. I think you'll like it." But those are human words, and I don't have proper cat words, and I don't think she understands.

This morning Spot will have a trip to the vet. She will stay at the vet for the day, and when she comes home, it will be to the new place. Then she can explore new closets and rooms. At least this is how it has happened before. Spot is the best cat in the known universe and loves new adventures.

No place like home

I was searching online for the text of an old speech by Susan B. Anthony called "Homes of Single Women," in which she argued that every woman needed her own home, she just didn't need to have a husband in it. It's a lovely speech. I wish I could share it with you.

I was thinking of this speech because of the way my house is starting to resemble a home, thanks to help from my friends. On Sunday, several of us were remarking that 30 years ago, there were not nearly so many women with power tools and home repair skills.

I did, however, find the Google Books digitized version of Ida Husted Harper's 1898 book, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony. This is a very long book, but fascinating to browse through. And a very good reminder of how hard generations of women have worked so that we could pick up our power tools and work.

Almost magic

This is one of those times when there is so much happening that I would like to write about, but I am too busy living life to write it down. Next week I'll be in my house. The lease is up on my apartment. I think I'm going to make it, thanks to a lot of help from my friends.

It used to be difficult for me to accept help. Now it is a little easier, but I still don't know how to ask. Part of it is reluctance, but part of it is that asking for help is a skill, like running a photo copier, or attaching a compression valve to a copper pipe. It's a skill I need to practice. Fortunately, I seem to have friends with a knack of showing up when I need them. Yesterday my house was filled with women painting, cleaning cabinets, ripping up carpet, helping me diagnose the operation of my floor furnace. It felt like a miracle.

This week Barack Obama was inaugurated as president. My expectations have not been terribly high. He's a nice centrist Democrat who happens to be African American. If we want progressive programs and actions, we will have to develop and push for them. And yet, it's a wonderful thing that the United States has moved forward far enough to elect its first African American president. It doesn't mean the end of racism, but it's an important step.

In less than a week in office, President Obama has moved to shut down the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay and rescinded the global gag rule. Soon he will sign into law the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Renewal of the State Children's Health Insurance Program may be next. After 30 years of right wing backlash, it feels like a miracle.

The pipes are calling

I am having the time of my life with this house, but anyone who might be reading this blog has noted that I'm not able to post as frequently as usual.

This weekend I'm fixing much of my plumbing. Or trying to. I've got about three different plumbing projects going on, and two of them, the further I went, the more complicated they got. If you've ever tried to do any plumbing, I expect you know what I mean. The good news is, I don't think my pipes froze when we had all that cold weather in the middle of the week. At least, I crawled under my house late Wednesday night after work and spent about 2 1/2 hours insulating the pipes, and I think it worked.

I used to have a private joke that I am not a plumber, but I play one on YouTube. Maybe I jinxed myself.

There is lots going on in the world right now. Here in the US, we're about to have a new president. What else is happening? If you've been paying attention, please let me know what's going on, because I'm just trying to keep my head above water here. Almost literally.