Cimorene

Everything is tiring again.

Sipuli's ears are dirty for the second time in a row so we will have to keep cleaning them with ear cleaner. Cats hate this, and who can blame them? It's cold goop oozing into your ear. Also, no further cat progress. We are still not doing the stuff the behaviorist recommended, but we have talked about it a few times?

No improvement in Wax's depression and energy levels - she didn't gain anything from the increasing sunlight like I did. She's just dissociating constantly I guess. I haven't had the energy to bully her into making a doctor's appointment; just having a conversation is taxing. I've told her that she needs to twice, and I'm not sure if that counts as an attempt or just a warning shot.

I have cleaned the kitchen a few more times after the time on the 14th when I moved and scrubbed and put things away. It is mostly usable more of the time now, but this has not so far empowered either of us to try any more complicated food preparation. (We are mostly eating frozen falafel with quick tabbouleh, frozen pizza, frozen breaded whitefish and frozen roasted vegetables, or pantry soup - one bag of frozen mixed vegetables, one bag of frozen spinach, one unit of lentils or canned beans, one unit of canned crushed tomatoes, spices and bouillon cubes. These recipes are better with fresh vegetables and especially sauteed fresh alliums and aromatics but they are almost as good this way.)

I have been doing laundry semidaily in an attempt to finally wash all the little rugs (there's like... six or seven loads of them but they can't fit on the drying rack simultaneously), and have got about halfway through them. There's a huge pile of clean laundry upstairs because instead of putting it away I've sort of half folded it into three baskets of foldish-pile-stacks.

I stalled out about halfway through trying to put the Christmas decorations back in the attic.

The plumber who said that he would call us in the first week of the year hasn't called us, but the city has dug up and replumbed a whole entire block leading up to the intersection by our house. They also destroyed the entire bed of flowering groundcover around the old birch tree at the corner of our property🙃. It was big and flourishing and long established before we bought the house. I'm sure they didn't even know it was there because it was under snow at the time, and filling the little verge between the tree and the road. Anyway, our plumber couldn't have done anything while they were there and he was in contact with city plumbers, so MAYBE that's why we haven't heard from him during? But they're done now. And they haven't paved it again (can't until after the thaw when there won't be anymore snow, I'm pretty sure), so I guess that's good for us, if he can do the repairs before they do that? Still though, it's possible that we need to contact him and we don't have that capacity atm.

I bought one of those cordless handheld vacuums at home a few months ago - the main body contains a chargeable battery and it's all about the size of the old Dust Devils and that sort of handheld vacuums I remember from the 1990s, but it slots and snaps into attachments, a floor roller, a long neck, a little brush, to extend its use. I was given one at work and found that even though the actual VACUUMING power is less, so it's a lot less effective than a traditional corded vacuum, the net effect is that more gets cleaned because it is so much more convenient. It's gotten out and put away more easily, maneuvered around effortlessly, so much easier to manage than the rolly floor model with the long snake neck.

Anyway, the same day I got it I was using it to vacuum up some flakes of scraped paint, dropped it on the cement steps and cracked the front edge of the lip of the little dust compartment right where it snaps onto the motor part. So the function was unimpaired, but the little molded edge that snapped into place to hold it together broke off, so I had to replace the dust collector container. In the meantime I held it on with duct tape.

But I was pleasantly surprised when I went to the Bosch website. It was only a few clicks, all clear and easy to find, to a place where I could type in the serial number and a long list of every component popped up, complete with a little line drawing of the whole apparatus so you could see how they fit together, and it was just a few more seamless clicks to order the part. It took a couple of weeks, presumably because Bosch Finland had to get it from a warehouse in Germany first?, but fortunately the duct tape held out.

Soooooo unfortunately I was primed to optimism when our mixer, a UK-made Kenwood Chef, walked itself off the counter while kneading bread and landed on its nose, chipping a splinter of ABS plastic off the several plastic pieces of body that are why the Kenwoods are so much cheaper than the KitchenAid.* Also it fractured the splash guard into several pieces.

"That's fine," I told Wax. "I have an idea that I can get stainless steel versions of the mixer attachments it came with that can't go in the dishwasher, and then we would be able to wash them in the dishwasher. I can order them at the same time."

Nope.

First of all, Kenwood Finland's website doesn't have any obvious "accessories" or "parts" or anything like that on the main page. I ended up going through a menu to mixers, and there I found a submenu that ends with TWO DIFFERENT MENU ITEMS THAT ARE BOTH CALLED "ADDITIONAL PARTS". No spelling differences, no punctuation differences even, not even (a) and (b). What the fuck? On hover I discovered the urls end with "Acc" (so, accessories) and "Attachments". But why didn't the translation cover that? It's not like you can't say those things in Finnish?!

However, the splashguard isn't present in EITHER of these categories! I tried "support". I tried the little tiny texts at the bottom of the page. I searched the site for "splashguard". They apologize, but no results, have I checked my spelling? I tried the Swedish version of Kenwood's website. The Swedish website has a big "accessories" menu item front and center. I clicked, I filtered to the Kenwood Chef, I saw splashguard at the bottom of the list... marked sold out.

I went back to Kenwood Finland and clicked their Contact form, typed in name and email address, the model, and in the message field, "Is it possible to order a new splashguard for the Kenwood Chef Classic? Ours is broken. I couldn't find it on the site." Click send, and...

404 error.

If it were ten years ago I'd just tweet at Kenwood "Why won't your Finnish website take my money?" but, you know... I left Twitter and I haven't got a Bluesky because it is also funded by venture capital. So.

"It's fine," said Wax, "We'll just try again sometime." Granted, the KitchenAid I grew up with didn't have a splashguard. I know how to get around it: I'm making bread dough right now.

But I can't order the stainless mixer attachments - okay, I won't, I mean - without the splashguard.




*(Also it used to be white plastic but now it's all yellowed, and all the plastic parts don't come off without a screwdriver, but there are places where food and flour flung up by the mixer get stuck and crusted inside and you can't get it out properly without taking it apart. We have spent as much as a KitchenAid costs on things before, so I could've replaced this years ago, except we felt like we don't use the mixer often enough to be worth the expense. We go months in between. Unfortunately I was raised knowing how to bake in a house with a KitchenAid and so I'm a snob who is extremely irritated with this poor machine every time I use it.)

I started Tuesday off with a bang by bumping into the corner of one of the shelves in the fridge door, upon which it fell off and a bottle of herb vinegar, a bottle of flax seed oil, a jar of coconut oil, and a jar of baking soda all broke and spilled their contents on the kitchen floor.

I used half a roll of paper towels picking up the chunks of glass and herbs and just reaching the center of the oil puddle, although my sheepskin slippers are also liberally doused, on the wool side as well as the leather side. They were getting pretty worn down and Snookums barfed on them two weeks ago, which is pretty good, because that would've been much more upsetting otherwise.

So wiping up the oil, baking soda, and vinegar and then using a dish towel with hot water and dish soap to attempt degreasing also consumed a bunch of time, and my toast was ruined and my breakfast delayed by like fifteen minutes. Luckily my morning routine has minimum half an hour of extra time in it.

We cleaned the fridge on Saturday. I think the last time we took all the shelves out was 2019, so it was probably overdue. Then Wax unplugged it and scrubbed the whole inside and I scrubbed the shelves.

It was 12°C out, making it safe to put the food in two coolers and an Ikea bag on the enclosed (but uninsulated) porch. We put back the exact same food afterwards, but somehow there even seems to be more space now. Weird.

This fridge was in the house when we bought it, and there's nothing wrong with it, but it's full size and doesn't have a freezer. So we have a whole standing freezer next to it, and together they take twice the space that they should. They were going to be Wax's mom's, and when she died we had to keep them and give our compact, brand-new freezer-fridge to the tenants, because we had to keep all her huge stores of frozen food.

Our plan now is tentatively to get a chest freezer for under the stairs in the hall to keep all the frozen raw cat food in, and apart from that our freezer use is normal now that we've finally eaten through all my MIL's berries and jams. But not until we have some extra money to spend on kitchen appliances.

We have to make new custom window screens to go in our windows, because velcroing net to the frame doesn't work if your very small but fully grown cat is determined to climb on them. We have one that fits the downstairs windows, but we can only open one at a time that way.

And we need to have cross ventilation both upstairs and downstairs in order to finish dealing with these moths! We therefore can't put the wool and clothes back away until we have window screens, so we PLANNED to buy the lumber we needed yesterday, except a technical snafu at another Finnish bank (not ours) delayed salary payments for the entire country by about 8 hours, and the sawmill had time to close before Wax got her salary in the account with a debit card (transferring between accounts is possible, but when they're at two different banks it usually takes a day or two - not fast enough to catch the sawmill before she had to be back at work).

Our wool is therefore in garbage bags shut with rubber bands and our laundry is piled all over the daybed in the library. Wax's cousin (and wife and baby) are due today, and her aunt and uncle are due tomorrow. Big family reunion is Saturday, and it's supposed to rain, but maybe we can swerve by the sawmill in the morning.

In addition to moth-nibbled holes in multiple wool socks earlier, this week when I cleaned out the closet I found two older, not-too-precious sweaters that had been definitely eaten, so we were forced to learn about what to do with clothes moths.

I had seen moth traps before, but I didn't realize that those only work on male moths and so they don't help your clothes at all, they just alert you if you might have an infestation. If you do, you have to kill all potential moth eggs in every piece of fabric in your closet with either heat or cold (or like... poison. Mothballs are poison. They are bad for people and animals as well as for moths though, they stink, and they need very specific conditions to work at all, so they're not nearly as useful as heat or cold).

If a fabric thing made with natural fibers (synthetic fibers repel moths but unfortunately they also repel us, because they tend to feel like shit on your skin as well as not breathing, retaining odor, harboring bacteria and fun stuff like that, because they are plastic) has been in near contact with clothes-eating moths, you have just a few alternatives:

• dry clean it (this will kill the moths and presumably dry cleaning chemicals don't leave the clothes poisonous to people? I've never had my clothes dry cleaned, but surely I'd've heard about it if it poisoned people?)


• kill it with cold: hang outside when it's well below freezing, like around -17 C (around +1 F) for a few days


• kill it with cold: put it in the freezer for a few days, making sure the freezer is set cold enough


• kill it with heat: put it in the oven for a couple of hours at about 70° C or 158° F


• kill it with heat: put it in a sauna at around 70-80 C for a couple of hours

Luckily we DO have a sauna, so that's where nearly every scrap of wool from the house is right now. The silk scarves are going in the freezer, and all the cotton and linen is going back through the washing machine on hot - including all the stuff from the Rarely Worn side of the closet and all the stuff that's already been washed since it was worn (but was then put away in the contaminated closet).

Just half the closet made four loads of laundry. We don't have a dryer (hardly anyone in Finland has a dryer). And we only have three laundry racks!! (Which is already kind of ridiculous, tbh, if we WEREN'T trying to wash 80% of all the fabrics we own at once.) So. The constraint here is drying time.

Meanwhile, the closet, once emptied, needs to be vacuumed thoroughly, washed with warm water, and... it would help if the wood were painted but it's too late for that now (oil paint drying time is way too long to go without a closet and the fumes so close to our bedroom... just no), so I guess we'll just have to put up some of those moth traps for early warning and try to scatter aromatic herbs everywhere, although the word from experts is that none of them reliably works as moth repellent apart from cedar, and cedar only works in an enclosed space where the concentration of cedar oil in the wood is quite high. So I guess... the inside of a chest that's been, what, soaked in cedar oil or something?

PREVIOUSLY IN THIS JOURNAL: The cute little old lady who rents the mother-in-law addition on our house so that we can make the mortgage payment is going to move to Turku at the end of the month, but we were inundated with a surfeit of potential replacements as soon as our SIL posted on FB about it.

Some of the hopefuls were Ukrainian refugees and one of the parties of Ukrainian refugees were about to become homeless, which at least enabled us to select on the basis of greater need. This family of Ukrainian refugees is six people though, which seems excessive for a tiny one-bedroom flat (51 square meters, which I think I remember was 540-something square feet?). Okay, only two of the people are adults - sisters-in-law - and the rest are their children, the youngest 3 and the oldest 12; and granted, the combined mass of these four children is definitely considerably smaller than the combined mass of our four pets and MIL's entire household's worth of junk, so we were definitely more cramped in that flat than they will be. Possibly much quieter though.

We showed it to them and they were still, understandably (since they have no other options), eager to make it work, so we agreed and now we have a sort-of arrangement (no signed documents however). Our current little old lady swears she will be gone by the 29th, and we will call them the moment they can start moving in. In the meantime, we have to compile a list of things we can contribute to their household (spare kitchen table and futon, some dishes, tragically no kitchen implements because we already donated all of those to the local charity shop last fall).

Now the big worry is that we still have to contact the other 6 parties and let them down nicely, although at least it's easier to do this in favor of homeless Ukrainian refugees.

In anticipation of today's meeting, even though we really only HAD to show the addition, we cleaned the entire downstairs of the house pretty thoroughly, in case we invited them in. As it happened, we didn't, but this is the cleanest the downstairs has ever been, I think - we've cleaned the normal rooms properly before, but until now we always had inescapable piles and stacks of MIL's stuff we hadn't got rid of yet and it was never possible to completely clean out under the stairs. But we actually cleaned EVERYTHING (downstairs) now! We're down to two cardboard boxes of Stuff to Sell that don't fit in a closet! Wax even emptied the bathroom sink trap, which was full of hay and bunny fur from rinsing out the bunny water bowls, and I emptied and reorganized the little shelves on the kitchen side table, and we beat all the rug runners and oiled the butcherblocks and even hung art in the hallway (although it still doesn't have its floor or trim and we still have several walls needing resurfaced).




1. Tristana helping Wax clean the sink 2. Our Agent Cooper print by my friend Ella (and Snookums) 3. Snookums and the kitchen floor with a rug we paid too much for but it was so pretty 4. Rowan and Tristana communing in the redecorated livingroom 5. Inspector Japp exploring the redecorated livingroom for the first time

More complete photojournalism is provided here by waxjism.

Oh, and just... to preserve them for posterity... here are the two most amazingly bad bits of advice we've received regarding this situation:

1. One of Wax's middle school classmates: "Homeless Ukrainian war refugees? No no, don't rent to foreigners. You can't trust them. I know a guy who rents and he has a policy of never renting to foreigners."
   
   (There is still some slight friction between us because Wax did not respond that her wife is a foreigner, although obv they have been told before.)



2. My former career adviser, likewise after being told about the Ukrainian refugees: "Renting is good though... try to make a little profit, save a little money!" Mmmmh, yeah, we're not trying to make a profit on the homeless war refugees, my dude.

This dishwasher nonsense went like this:

1. The dishwasher didn't drain after the cycle a week ago last Friday and displayed the 'not draining' error. We bailed it out by hand and cleaned the filters and pump housing as instructed, then plugged it back in and turned it on.



2. We ran a load of dishes and got the not draining error again. However, the dishwasher had in fact drained when we looked in it and the stuff was clean. We unscrewed the outtake pipe from the under-sink trap and plumbing-snaked it. We didn't get much water or any evidence of blockage, so we hooked it back up.



3. But it started working again anyway.



4. It worked from Monday-Saturday, then yesterday (Saturday) gave the same error again. We found no problems in the filters, so we unhooked the drain pipe, but there was no water stuck in it, so we didn't use the plumbing snake. We just hooked it back up and turned it on.



5. But it started working again anyway.



6. ?!

I gueeeesss there might be some sort of sensor issue?????????

I am not cool with this becoming a pattern.

Wax says the cost of the repairman's labor is usually more than the cost of a new dishwasher, but given that it would be a cheaper dishwasher and this one came with the house and is a Miele and isn't even that old but IS out of warranty, maybe fixing it would still save money because it could presumably work longer AND better than its hypothetical replacement? I'm not cool with having to make this decision, either.

In my new freedom from work practice - three former workdays of it so far - , I have kept up with the dishes and made a slight start on all the spring cleaning I want to get done (though I haven't made much of a dent yet). I've also slept a lot, obviously. It really is all a bit overwhelming, like those posts on Unfuck Your Habitat dealing with where to start. As a long-time UFYH follower, I know starting with repeated twenty-minute pomodoros is reasonable, but it's still depressing when you stand back and look at the situation as a whole.

We watched Snatch the other night because I'd never seen it. I see why it's seminal. An extremely well-done example of that style of heist film, rendered extra memorable by all the little moving parts and the way they intersect with each other, almost like a farce. It reminded me of a show I love, Hustle (2004-2012), a British series about a gang of con artists who collaborate to take revenge on rich people on behalf of their victims, like a precursor to Leverage. I like it better than Leverage for the style and the cons themselves, though. I'm extra fond of the style of narrative voice-over background explanations you get in this genre, which we saw in Snatch. Next on the list is Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which I guess I'm not too young for, just too American to have heard of until after the fact.

I knitted for five hours or so the day before yesterday and made some progress on the hat I started January first (which was then on pause for over a month while I didn't watch anything). Very responsibly, then, I didn't knit a long time two days in a row, but spent yesterday evening darning some wool socks instead while watching the second half of James Acaster's Netflix stand-ups. Darning is so satisfying! And yet annoyingly takes longer than it feels like it should.

Wax is having a flare-up of her acid reflux and is tragically forced to cut her tea consumption, which is really extra bad because unlike me, she doesn't like any herbal tea at all. I think the only hot drink she can substitute is cocoa, which doesn't feel tea-like enough to have the proper psychologically soothing effect.

I think I've mentioned before that I've been increasingly disturbed about the global microplastics problem in the past few years, and started trying to reduce the microplastic pollution going directly from our household into the nearby Baltic Sea (which is somewhat in crisis and at present only a few blocks from here).

I've definitely mentioned that the problem with this is that microfiber cleaning cloths and melamine sponges (sold as Magic Eraser in the US and called Taikasieni in Finland, but also sold under multiple other brand names) are much more effective at scrubbing everything from floors to dishes to mirrors and I've relied on them for years. I've looked into it several times over the years without finding a close replacement; and it's microfiber cleaning that enables a huge decrease in harsh chemical cleaners (microfiber cleaning cloths and hot water are often more effective than soap and water or even than disinfectant cleaners).

The last time I looked into this subject, I learned that microfiber, which is usually polyester, actually can be made of cellulose fibers as well because they, like plastic fibers, are chemically extruded. This is significant because the fabrics made from cellulose are biodegradable. So I then went on a deep google dive trying to find cellulose microfiber cleaning cloths of any kind, but I wasn't able to find anywhere reasonably convenient to buy it or very many mentions of it at all, which was frustrating.

But the other day at the supermarket we saw displays of new green products from Finland's big cleaning company, Sini, including microfiber cloths made of natural fiber! They were displayed with products made from recycled plastic and various types of scrub brushes with natural bristles and wooden handles, so evidently there's a trend to this effect, which is further good news.

Of course, as usual, consumer choice can't solve our environmental problems because the biggest culprits are industrial, and this is the case with plastic, of course, but there's also an insurmountable amount of plastics and plastic fiber fabrics out there on people (they make up the majority of fast fashion and almost all performance sportswear and outdoor gear, for example), so 'boycott plastic' would actually be completely impossible even for private individuals in today's society with today's infrastructure. So I'm not trying to solve the issue or hoping that encouraging people to use cellulose microfiber will make a substantial difference in microplastic pollution, here. I'm just concerned with the choices we can make in our house to avoid knowingly causing avoidable harm and possibly reducing the amount of microplastic we, our pets, and the animals in our yard are ingesting and inhaling.