Tag: housework

Cleaning the garage

This morning my wife suggested we go to a food and wine festival, which was being held at a suburb about 25 minutes drive away. Different parts of Sydney have various local festivals throughout the year, and spring is a favourite time for them. We got there early, just as it opened at 10:00, and it wasn’t too busy, which was good. It would have been crowded at lunch time.

There were food trucks and a couple of dozen stalls from different wineries showing off their wines and selling glasses and bottles, and several stalls with small businesses selling things like jars of jam, chilli sauces, sweets, nuts, etc. There were also some general market stalls selling handicrafts, clothes, plants, and so on. It wasn’t huge, and we walked around all the stalls in maybe half an hour. My wife got an açai bowl with fruit and grains. I considered getting some dumplings but the serving size was too large for a snack, and I didn’t feel like a full meal an hour before lunch time.

We came home via The Flour Shop, a bakery nearby which we’ve been to once before and it was awesome. It was again so today. I got a pastrami, jalapeño, and cheese pastry, which was delicious, and a coconut puff to take home for dessert tonight.

After getting home, I cleaned the garage. This is part of the overall ongoing spring cleaning leading up to the grand repainting of our home in October. We’ve been rearranging stuff and throwing things out and now we are moving some things into storage in the garage, so instead of just chucking it down there I thought we needed to clean it properly. I swept and vacuumed the garage floor, removing a layer of grimy black dust, then wiped down any horizontal surfaces on top of storage boxes and the steel cabinets we have in there, before throwing out some stuff and rearranging things to be neater and more compact.

It took about four hours of work overall, but now the garage is clean, as in not dusty, and also tidy. A tough job, well done. It was really dirty though, as I hadn’t given it a dusting for a few years. Real grime-under-the-fingernails dirty, requiring several hand-washings. And a lot of moisturiser afterwards to smooth the dried skin.

Gaming and sketching

Friday was planned to be me running my Star Wars roleplaying game one-shot adventure but I had to postpone it as previously mentioned. Instead we did a regular board games night. I offered to remain the host, but another friend volunteered his place so he could attend – he had to look after his kids, so couldn’t leave home, but he was fine to host board games. SO we had an extra player that way.

We played a new game for me: Bark Avenue. It’s a dog-walking game, played on a map of upper Manhattan, around Central Park. There is a deck of dogs, who live in various neighbourhoods and need different amounts of walking, come in three sizes (small, medium, and large dogs), walk at different speeds, and have different favourite activities (sniffing hydrants, playing ball, or splashing in water).

Bark Avenue

You need to pick up dogs, walk them around, perhaps picking up other dogs along the way, and then return them home after they’ve been walking for enough turns. Each dog walked is worth a varying amount of cash, plus you can get extra tips for taking a photo of the dog while out, letting it engage in its favourite activity, or making sure it poops. You have to be careful planning a walking route, because you need to pick up and drop off dogs in the right neighbourhoods, and various blocks have different activities available. Here’s a close-up of Darwin the beagle, showing the poop token to indicate it’s done its business.

Bark Avenue

It was pretty fun, though I came dead last! After that we played Codenames, and by that time we were done for the evening. Also on Friday I did the usual grocery shopping and teaching five online classes.

Today I made a Darths & Droids comic, and went for a 7.5k run. It was warm and sunny, not my favourite weather for running, but I managed it.

In the afternoon, my wife and I went for a walk over to Greenwich Hospital, to do some sketching of an old building there. Pallister House is an 1892 Late Victorian Filigree country home, which was later used as a girls school, then a girl’s orphanage, before finally becoming part of the hospital. When we got there, we found it very conveniently had several wicker chairs scattered around the area, so we grabbed two and set them up in front of the building to sketch it.

Pallister House, Greenwich Hospital

Later in the afternoon and into early evening, I started cleaning things up. We’re engaging in a huge spring clean prior to repainting the home in late October. We started weeks ahead because we have a lot we want to do. My wife has gone through a bunch of her stuff and cleaned it out, freeing up a stack of storage boxes, which I moved a lot of my Lego bricks into, which in turn freed up some plastic storage drawers. Into those went all of the tools from our under-the-skitchen-sink toolbox: screwdrivers, a hammer, spanners, hex keys, various plumbing tools and spare parts, screws and nails, tubes of glue and other stuff, and so on. The space freed up under the kitchen sink we’re planning to use for a new, smaller kitchen waste bin, to save space currently used by the large waste bin which stands on the kitchen floor. We still need to clean it out and rearrange things for optimal storage and then we’ll buy a new bin to fit the space.

Replacing window sills and cleaning behind furniture

Today was unseasonably warm like yesterday, but unlike yesterday it wasn’t 29°C and dry. Today was 26°C and very humid, which in some ways felt worse. The humidity came with rain blowing up from the south, which will cause temperatures to plummet overnight, back to winter chill for the next few days.

Today builders came in to replace our window sills. We’re having the old water-damaged ones replaced before we repaint the whole place next month. The builders ripped the old wooden sills off, which cracked some of the concrete. One sill in the living room had huge chinks of concrete come loose, revealing the raw bricks below. The builders filled the gaps with new concrete and laid the new wooden sills on top. They’re coming back tomorrow to give them an undercoat of paint, which will then be covered with our chosen colour scheme by the painters in October.

This work involved moving a fair bit of furniture away from the walls, where it’s been for many years. You don’t want to know how much dust and grime was behind them! I vacuumed the areas behind all the moved furniture and filled the cleaner dust container so much that I had to empty it immediately. (Normally it’s good for two whole cleans of the entire house.) I also washed down the walls and skirting boards with sugar soap to get some discolouration and grime off. Although the painters will do a thorough clean and preparation of all the surfaces before painting. I just couldn’t stand the sight of the mess and had to clean it up a bit.

In other renovation news, we got confirmation of a booking date for the electrician to install the new downlights in the kitchen. That will be on the 23rd of this month, the same date as the stone polisher will be in to polish the stone floor in the bathroom. Which is good, they can both do their thing at the same time and I won’t need to stay home twice for two different tradesmen.

I also write my new critical thinking class for the week, on the topic of “Likes”. And a new science class for my science student tomorrow. We’re going to be starting an experiment to grow crystals, and learning about how atoms combine in different ways to make molecules or crystals.

An outing to Tonton

The weather cooled down overnight from yesterday’s heat with a pleasant southerly change. I got up, head breakfast, and then went out for a 5k run. This brought my total running distance for the year up to an even 500 km. It wasn’t exactly a hundred 5k runs, because I did a few other distances in there: a few 2.5ks when recovering from a sore back, and a few 7.5ks when I felt extra inspired.

I began to notice a few months ago that reaching 500k for the year was a possibility, but I wasn’t quite approaching it fast enough with running only on the weekends, and needed an extra effort in December. Fortunately my wife and I have some time off in these weeks and I’ve added some extra runs in mid-week, which was just enough to bring me to the target.

After showering and changing into fresh clothes, we went on an expedition. My wife has been hankering for a December special from Tonton Bread advertised on their Instagram, a coffee bean croissant:

We hadn’t had a chance to head over there (it’s a 15-minute drive) before Christmas, so we took the opportunity today. Unfortunately they didn’t have the coffee croissant that she wanted, but they had a pecan coffee choux pastry, which she got instead (upper right in this Instagram:)

I chose a crookie:

Crookie

This is a croissant with a cookie strip on top, and filled with cookie dough. It’s so rich that I had half after lunch and am saving the other half for dessert tonight.

In the afternoon I spent some time housecleaning. I washed the floors of both the kitchen and bathroom, and cleaned all of the tiled wall surfaces in the bathroom, as well as the front and back of the door. I also did a bit of bookshelf rearranging to shelve a pile of unshelved recent purchases. Which involved a lot of dusting as well. It’s odd how I always end up doing neglected housework during holidays.

For dinner I fried up some vegetarian sausages, and made garlic, chilli, and miso Brussels sprouts to accompany them.

Oh, the other thing I did this afternoon was go through all my photos from day 4 of last year’s trip to Japan, process and upload a bunch, and add selected ones to my travel diary of the day. There are a lot of food photos there!

New content today:

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.

Old and new upholstery

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:

Bridge rain

Bridge rain

New content today:

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.

New content today:

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!

New content today:

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.

New content today: