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Syndicate
:D I plan too. The technique for making these is fairly specific. So I expect I will end up with a couple of wonky birdbaths and perhaps a couple of wonky outdoor sinks. I'd like a couple of those anyways for washing veggies and other plant business. I'd like to do some counters as well so the first one will be for outside...to go with the sink... :)
Not completely on topic but since coyotes have been mentioned in this thread.
Here's my recently acquired coyote deterrent.
Now if I could only get her to do dishes....
ElizaQ, you sure? I'd be worried the coyotes might eat one of those.
Air drying of dishes here too, although I confess that's more because I'm a scatterbrain and I find it hard to get through all stages of a task at once. Sometimes I never get back to finish up the latter stages at all. I guess that makes me the opposite of Tommy P.
The window over the sink is also a joy. So many North American kitchens put the sink somewhere else -- don't know why. I've never seen a kitchen in the UK, eg, where the sink wasn't in front of a window. If the window is looking out at your neighbour's wall, you could always think about installing one of those greenhouse windows (yeah, munnee, I know, although maybe ElizaQ will learn that technique next). They are quite neat-looking things, I think, and they can really heat the place up.
Hee :) Well in 10 months or so she'll look something like this.
Here's an article about Maremma's being used to protect an endangered penguin colony.
Gorgeous (I should have said that before), and fascinating, ElizaQ -- I'd never heard of Maremmas before.
Well I just washed some dishes and I agree wholeheartedly. My sink is next to the corner of the kitchen and has two windows I look out of one in front and one beside. Since it's on the second floor of the house I get a great survey view of everything on the property. It's my thinking, my planning time and sometimes just my looking time. Right now there's lots of monarchs flitting about because the pye weed and boneset is in bloom. So not only do I get to look out over a see of waving pink and white there's butterflies!! I lived in a place once that didn't have a window over the sink. Hated it. It made washing dishes feel more like a dull chore then when I have something to look at while doing them.
Maybe this is the thread where I can announce that I got my aprons yesterday, the ones that say "Step away from my kitchen and nobody gets hurt!" I got a yellow one and a khaki one. I nicked my thumb with the box cutter opening the awful mailing bag they came in, so the khaki one now has a tiny bloodspot on it. Well -- it's a kitchen kind of story.
That's great, skdadl (well, except for the boxcutter boo-boo--but now your apron has character!). I loves me a good apron. I got this beaut for my birthday last month:
In indigo. It's from my favourite Walter-Benjamin-themed web store, artintheage.com
It replaced my white apron which said "CANADA" on it (and was a bit stained) and one my mother gave me which said "Chocolate is the answer, who cares about the question!" It didn't really fit my aesthetic.
Its a bit off topic, however I just installed a bathroom sink and fixed a leaky shower. Later today I will be clean.
I dunno about trappin' coyotes. Never done it m'sen. I'd think most of them are too wiley to be tricked into gettin' inside a trap of any kind, unless perhaps you use a sexy coyote to lure them into the thing. You might find yourself inside the trap yourself with Wile E. Coyote watchin ya all interested like from safe vantage points a yonder. Yes'm, you're not going to trick them easily. I guess if they are hungry enough, then they might be had.
Air drying of dishes here too, although I confess that's more because I'm a scatterbrain and I find it hard to get through all stages of a task at once. Sometimes I never get back to finish up the latter stages at all. I guess that makes me the opposite of Tommy P.
Depending on how my feet or back feels, I often take breaks while doing the dishes, mostly to come here and post this or that. Gives my feet a break (after work) and my back-- I think the ergonomics of the sink are off a bit. It's an old, sexist house. I suppose the counter tops were designed for someone five foot four or so, not six foot. Okay, five eleven.
But other than that, yes, years in a factory have me pretty process focussed. I have a particular order of operations, glasses first, then dishes, then cutlery then pots and pans. Wash, dip in the rinse sink, then onto the drying rack. Cutlery is organized and laid out to dry: forks with forks, spoons with spoons, knives with knives. And the forks and spoons are laid out convex side up, so the water does not pool, but has a chance to run off or evaporate.
Sometimes Rebecca West will drop in a stray cup or dish I missed, out of the process order. I will sigh heavily, then clench my eyes closed. Then with my right foot I will repeatedly touch my big toe back and forth on either side of a crack in the floor while reciting "doesn'tmatter doesn'tmatter doesn'tmatter doesn'tmatter".
No, I'm not OCD to that extent-- just a little self satire.
It's a laugh riot around here.
I've found this to be the most logical sequence as well. In my dish rack, all the pointy utensils are placed sharp end down in the cutlery basket to avoid cuts when things are in full motion back and forth from rinse to drying rack.
That is the conventional order. I'm the opposite of OCD, but also MUST have my order when washing.
But I defy the glasses first thing [no grease in water yet] by plates and cutlery first. They fit in the pan together, and I pre-wash then... since I also MUST have some fairly heavy intial organizing of the dirties. Rinsing all the food that comes off quickly means the dishwater lasts longer.
I have a hunch there is something ergonomically wrong with dishwashing even when the counter is higher- with most cooking work as well. Because time doing either will get my back after I've been working elsewhere for some hours [which is the case more often than not.]
Worth noting that this discussion of sinks and washing dishes is in exactly the same spirit as was the guns and ammo discussion. Lot of the same disscussants even- taking the same nerdy approach.
Or I should say, the guns and ammo discussion WAS in this same friendly and nerdy spirit... until some took it upon themselves to dictate that this was not up to the moral fibre expected of progressives.
Tommy Paine wrote: I have a particular order of operations, glasses first, then dishes, then cutlery then pots and pans.
Caissa's order is glasses, cutlery, dishes, then pots and pans. I wash; Ms. C, dries.
I know what you mean, KenS. Somebody somewhere referred recently to the "lifestyle" threads swamping babble (as if), and I must say that wounded me a bit. I had a feeling it was aimed at our apron discussion, which I take entirely seriously (and have paid for in blood).
I mean, there is a semi-effaced historical significance here. Domestic discussions have historically been marked in gender terms, and to many women they remain marked, however co-operative and kindly many FABULOUS men have become. (There are still discouraging stats, although those are about to be disappeared by Big Brother). Implying that domestic discussions are somehow beneath progressives hints at code for something else that I think is distinctly non-progressive.
Anyway, off to wash some floors.
We don't have a dishwasher. The kitchen was built in 1912 and will not accomodate one at present. We also have a sucky set-up for the sink, not enough counter near it and no window. In fact, the guy who did the kitchen before flipping the house did a wretched job - cheapshit cupboards, bad lino, patio door in a stupid place, no good spot for the fridge, counter on only one side of the stove... We've got a reno planned, but had to put it off. We'll move the back wall out four feet, put in a dishwasher, island and pantry. I hope we can do it before the snow flies.
Meanwhile, it's dishes by hand and they tend to stack up during busy periods. Which sucks. I'd rather fire them into the dishwasher, but our last dishwasher was so crappy that you spent about the same amount of time rinsing as you did washing, and it was underfoot (a portable one on wheels), so I banished it.
I have a bit of a glassware fetish, so many of my glasses I don't put in the dishwasher at all, even though my new apartment has one (hooraay!) And yes, they always get washed first.
Why do we rate 'kindly and fab' apart from anyone else for attending to practical matters that are no one's designated task?
Need to put those kids to work.
Dishes time without the children present gives me and Ms. C. to catch up on each other's day.
On that note our oldest made his bed unprompted this morning before Ms. C and I had even got up.
Caissa, I love it when my kids start doing things independently.
Since the blond guy and I work together, we make the kids help with dishes. I was letting them wash, but it took too big a toll on the glassware, so I usually wash, the blond guy packages up the leftovers and the wild girls dry dishes and put them away. If we all pitch in, it's not such a big job.
I quite agree! But it's an evolution, I think. My father was willing to do housework, but had a sort of task blindness - he was never sure where to begin and there was always critique on his efforts, so he tended to stay out of it until help was requested. The blond guy, on the other hand, pulls his weight without being asked - which is unusual given that he grew up in a house where the wife and mother would dive for that dirty dish before you could clear it from the table. He had never made his own bed until he left home. A lot of my female friends are still in charge of the majority of housework simply because we girls were conditioned to notice and take care of it and our male counterparts were not. Change is slow.
Its a handicap in taking your share of responsibility for housework- when you have to continually remind yourself to put on a different set of eyes.
"Oh right. Look again to see, is the house dirty and disorderly?"
I actually came from a household where I had to do housework from a very young age. Even take the initiative for some meals [because my mother was simply too bagged a lot of the time, not because it was asked]. But left to my own devices, I'm a slob. I tell myself I benefit too from the higher standards. But I know I dont really beleive it, even decades later. I cant make it more internal than a responsibility.
Kitchen and bathrooms need to be spotless for our own health. We may have been able to survive outhouses and camping when we were younger, but germs are not an advantage for us as we get older. Mining companies used to pay me to camp out and in filthy conditions most of the time with non-union jobs in the bush. And so I don't camp much now as I tend to associate it with damn hard work.
I sometimes let the dusting and vacuuming go "a few days" behind schedule. I think it was comedienne Phylis Diller who said she left the vacuum cleaner out in full view all the time so as give the appearance of intention to clean, or something like that. I guess that's me sometimes.
That would be for historical reasons, fairly recent historical reasons, and for many women still present reality.
If women have been discriminated against and are still being discriminated against, it's no good pretending that we have a quiet little island of sane egalitarianism here. If certain labour has been marked in gender terms, it remains that way and will affect all women until that ceases to be as generally true as it still is.
For that reason, any version of the old line "You throw like a girl" really gets my back up. "You babble like a girl" would do it too, and to my mind, belittling the sort of discussion that has developed here as "lifestyle" fluff is code for saying "You babble like a girl." I babble like a rational human being who is interested in many things -- Afghanistan, torture, Turkey, the G20, aprons ... it's all the same person. I don't expect to meet many men in my life who grok that point in quite the same way I do, but I live in hope for the future.
Skdadl for what it's worth I think you're a noble and splendid human bean.
It's worth a lot to me, Fidel. Ear scratches for Smoke from me.
The Smoker has a runny eye and is underweight. $200 bucks.
Washing for sport - I set the timer for ten minutes and then go read for ten minutes. I like to see how many ten minute periods I need to get them done or if I have to go into overtime! That's the only way I do dishes!