DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I dread vacuuming now, and it’s all Martha Stewart’s fault. I made the mistake af picking up one of her magazines when I was cooling down at the gym recently. One of the articles had some fear-mongering title like “Are your carpets really clean?”

(After seeing Bowling for Columbine I’ve become sensitive to the selling of fear in America. Do they teach this in magazine school? How many times have you read an article because it promised insider information about something else you should be afraid of?)

Anyway, I hadn’t seen the movie yet, and I was naturally afraid that maybe my carpets might not be really clean, given that I can barely manage to vacuum three times a year, so I had to read. I was rewarded with scary statistics that I don’t recall exactly but will provide the gist of here: after a single pass with a high-quality vacuum, something like 80% of the dirt remains in the carpet.

Here’s my corollary to Martha’s Law of Dirty Carpets: the more advertisements your vacuum manufacturer places in the weekend newspaper, the more dirt will be left in your carpet. I have no scientific evidence, of course; I’m just trying to mong a little fear of my own. I understand it’s good for circulation (not yours, but mine).

Martha had this recommendation for proper vacuuming: for high-traffic areas, make four passes in four different directions. That’s 16 passes total. Don’t blame me if you suck the color out of your carpeting.

At this point I think you should look at a close-up picture of a common household dust mite at 2000x magnification.

I’ve finally begun planning my new drum studio. My drums have been stacked up the garage since August, when we sold the house where we’d built a studio previously… but now it’s time to play again.

I found two excellent resources on sound control. If you’re looking to soundproof a rehearsal space, or really any space at all, check out Acoustics101. The site was created by Auralex, manufacturer of top-of-the-line products for sound absorption and isolation. The Acoustics101 site offers detailed advice and specific product recommendations. It is required reading.

Also useful is Soundproofing101. The overview of sound control techniques is especially clear and useful. Some of their soundproofing recommendations are misleading, I believe, so I treat this resource as a second opinion to the information in Acoustics101.

One of the neat things about having switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout is that I can type ‘tcsh’ with one hand. And it’s the right hand, so the left is free to be doing something else productive with the mouse.

Ahhh, I love technology!

“Dude, what’s with that water?”

“What do you mean?” I asked back, reaching for the bottle.

“Is that… Is there anything in the water?” He smiled to mask an unseemly suspicion.

“Nope, just water.” I shook the bottle dismissively.

He paused for a second, processing his options, and then said in a somewhat accusing tone, “But it’s yellow.”

He was partially correct. If you fill a plastic bottle with well water, and there are even just a few parts per million of iron in the water, or a few dozen as in our case, the bottle will turn slightly orange over time. Or yellow, depending on the room lighting and the accuracy of one’s color perception. I explained this, and he looked relieved, and said “Oh!” with rather more emphasis than I expected. I stared at him for a few seconds, and as realization dawned I said “You didn’t think —”

“What?” he said with less innocence than was genuine.

“You thought I was drinking my own pee!”

Thai curry — one of my favorite things. I wrote out a shopping list for a red curry recipe I’d clipped from the newspaper last year. One of the ingredients was something I had never heard of: haricots verts. I mindlessly wrote “haricots verts” on the shopping list, assuming there would be a bin in the produce aisle labelled “Fresh Organic Haricots Verts”. This is farm country after all; my neighbors grow a lot of things I’ve never heard of.

But my expectation was unfulfilled: my wife returned from the store with all manner of vegetables, but no haricots. Not only was there no bin, she reported, but the produce guy was mystified. This is a guy who sells vegetables for a living, and he’s never seen haricots, organic or otherwise.

Fortunately, curry recipes are very forgiving, in that one can incorporate just about any vegetables at all. My wife had bought bell peppers, spinach, zucchini, tomatoes, green beans, broccoli, etc., a veritable vegan smorgasbord. And I used nearly all of them in the curry, except for the green beans, because they take too long to prep.

A few days later I was looking in the vegetarian cookbook to confirm the boiling time for the green beans. You’ll never guess what haricots verts are.