i insist that the loud noise is the one thing that separated vacuuming from being best sensory experience possible to the worst sensory experience possible. imagine vacuuming if it’s completely silent. it would be so much fun it feels like a beast on a leash swallowing up everything in its way indiscriminately it’s so awesome
get ye a mechanical sweeper
it works without any batteries or electricity; it’s just a little flippy cylinder wheel that pushes dust and garbage into the little side containers, but for that it works remarkably well; I was pretty surprised at how big some of the stuff it picked up was
we use them to sweep the carpeted dining hall at work and they’re pretty fantastic for that although they don’t work well on tile and you’ve got to empty the traps decently often for maximum effectiveness; I don’t know how well it works for house floorjunk as opposed to dining hall floorjunk
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#oooooooh #recs #domesticity #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
the bed making poll is such a funny way to discover that this is in fact my mundane hill that i will violently die on
here is my bed making propaganda:
especially if you have a small bedroom it is one action that will immediately make your room look 3x as tidy with comparatively little effort. you can have shit all over your desk, bedside table, etc but as soon as you pull your sheets up and put your pillows back in the right place you will successfully trick your brain into thinking you have a moderately tidy room
getting into a made bed just feels nice. especially if you’ve just showered. doubly so if you’ve just put a ton of lotion on (and shaved your legs if that’s something you do)
if you are somebody who struggles with getting/staying out of bed during the day it can help delineate “bed time” and “awake time” because it makes your bed “off limits” in a way (but there’s also nothing actually stopping you getting back in bed if you really want/need to; it’s primarily a psychological trick)
on that note i also find it’s a nice little reset – if you leave the house and come back to the bed the exact same way it was when you were tired, depressed, demotivated etc. in the morning it can drag you back into that mindset whereas coming back to a made bed? you left yourself a little present! everything is tidy and fresh!
finally and most importantly if you have a lot of stuffed animals you get to arrange them in a little tableau and craft elaborate narratives about who’s sitting with who and why
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#on the object level‚ this largely does not apply to me #because my bedroom is *so* small that I have a loft bed #so it’s not super visible how well-made it is when you’re not in it #(also I bring one of my blankets down to my computer couch during the day) #((it’s cozy and I can keep the heat turned down lower in the winter)) #(but one could have a dedicated couch blanket: Mom does) #on the meta level‚ I wholeheartedly agree that having Neatly Kept Surfaces in view is *extremely* psychologically important #I am always surprised just how much better I feel after vacuuming‚ or wiping down the kitchen counter #and this post has inspired me to pick up the ground floor #–(the groceries have finished their quarantine and now need to be filed away)– #and set Rosie the Robovac loose on it #domesticity #tag rambles #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
Thinking about getting an air purifier. Given that half of my followers are huge nerds living in various wildfire-smoke-affected cities, it occurs to me that you might have opinions on this topic.
What should I get?
Come on, surely one of you owns one of these. Save me the work of reading a bunch of reviews online.
Build a cube of MIRV 13+ filters and a box fan. Much cheaper than a freestanding air purifier.
Alternatively, if (like me) you live somewhere where high-grade furnace filters are very expensive, go to IKEA and get some air purifiers from them.
The Förnuftig has a carbon filter and is wall-mountable, but (at least in Canada) you have to go to an IKEA store in person to get one and it’s over an hour’s drive away, so instead I got some Uppåtvinds which they’ll ship to you. They’re 50 CAD upfront and they take $6.50/year in electricity (at a weighted-average time-of-use cost of 9.27 cents per kWh) and $10/year in particle filters, vs my previous air purifier’s maintenance costs of $41.41 and ~$35 respectively. (Sure, the old one had a higher CADR, but only 23% higher: I could buy *two* of the smaller IKEA ones and still come out ahead on cost fairly quickly.)
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#reply via reblog #proud citizen of The Future #recs #domesticity
#art #domesticity #that one post with the thing #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Okay so in LA they’ve had the reusable bag and thick plastic bag for ten cents going on for years but in Vegas they still give you thin plastic bags at every store but they’re these really thin shitty bags that you pretty much can’t reuse because they barely survive the trip from the car to the house.
So basically this is how I tell you that I’ve started making plarn that I’m crocheting into a plarn basket that I will use to hold the plarn balls I make in the future in order to control how many plastic bags are pouring out of our cabinets.
3. Cut diagonally into the plastic until the strand is about as thick as you want it to be. (Probably aim for at least an inch thick, it doesn’t have to be super even all the way around but you don’t want it to get so thin that the strand will break)
4. Cut in a spiral until you run out of bag and then diagonally cut your way out of the final loop.
5. Tie the end of the strand to the end of whatever you were working on or to the last stand you cut.
6. Wind or crochet like any other bulky yarn.
The gray disk at the bottom of this post is the bottom of my basket, I’m using an N/10mm hook in a double-crocheted spiral. (I’ve just started the first layer of elevation)
So far I’m about 10-12 bags in and I’ve been trimming the tails of the joined bags as I go.
(One bag’s worth of plarn goes about halfway around the disk at this point, I think I’m going to do 3-4 more gray bags before I change colors; bags come in 3 general colors around here so this basket is going to be mostly white with gray and brown accents.)
Also save the bag scraps, you can use them as stuffing. I’m gonna make a big fucking pincushion with mine. It’s gonna be a cube made out of the leftover cat fabric that I don’t want to use for masks.
Worked my way through the ball in the first photoset, made some more balls. I’m intrigued by the way the patterns on the white bags show up. I’ve got some Ross and 99 cent store bags in the next white ball to add some purple and blue-green to the mix.
Making this basket might actually exhaust my current supply of plastic bags, so I’ve asked my dad to set aside his thicker bags for me in LA so I can compare working both materials.
Kind of get the feeling that I’m going to be a complete gremlin and make a laundry hamper out of the thicker plastic.
Oh this is totally apocalypse punk! Makes me want to make my own for use in small grocery runs. Or just to write a scrappy band of fictional survivors using them, haha.
NGL, cutting apart a pile of plastic trash and turning it into thread and rolling it into balls and crocheting it into fabric does feel like some variety of cyberpunk Rumplestiltskin shit.
Idk that I’d call it ugly because the white part with the little flecks is so cute.
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#art #domesticity #the more you know #fun with loopholes #apocalypse cw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
What is it about fics then, where characters always, ALWAYS, have a spare toothbrush conveniently just hanging about in bathroom cupboards for that time someone is, usually unexpectedly, staying the night?
I have lived a few decades now, and I have never known anyone who keeps spare toothbrushes. Is it really common??
if you are the kind of just-in-case clutter goblin who does not throw things away, and you live in a country where it is standard practice for the dentist to give you a free toothbrush every time you go, then it is extremely possibly to have several years-old unused “spare” toothbrushes of extremely cheap but basically functional quality stashed away in your bathroom whether or not you visit the dentist at the recommended frequency
Don’t people buy multipacks of toothbrushes? I use an electric now, but back in the day I got the ones from my dentist and also bought the 8 pack of toothbrushes then I’d forget about my spare 5 toothbrushes in my cupboard when I see the multipack on sale again and then – you get the idea.
There are people who don’t keep spare toothbrushes??
What if you fumble your toothbrush and it falls onto the toilet plunger, do you then just *not have* a toothbrush?
What if you go to the store–for any toothbrush-replacement reason, fumbling or otherwise–and they’re out of toothbrushes because it’s the 2020s and a store is always out of an absolute minimum of three things on your shopping list at any given time?
*please* let me give you a toothbrush from out of my gallon bag of spare toothbrushes, I am *begging* you, you do not have to live on a knife’s edge
i don’t think i’ve ever unexpectedly lost a toothbrush
but also i think you seem to consider ‘you don’t have a toothbrush’ as… more of an emergency than I do?
if i lose my toothbrush and don’t happen to have spares and it’s too late to go buy a new one what would happen is i would not brush my teeth that night or the following morning, and i’d buy one the next day. and this seems basically fine to me. obviously an inferior outcome to the one where i do brush my teeth, but not a serious problem.
Maybe it seems like more of a hassle if one normally goes shopping fortnightly. Almost any loss of sole toothbrush would require making some sort of special arrangement, going out of my way to do something or convince someone else to do it.
And even if it’s not a *serious* problem, it’s satisfying to be able to simply make a problem Not.
Relatedly, I consider household-inventory buffers to be a good idea by default: with how cheap and small and indefinitely-shelf-stable and inevitably-useful-sooner-or-later toothbrushes are, I would basically need a good reason to *not* have some spare toothbrushes. It’s all just part of keeping a household running smoothly, from my perspective. I store them next to the 20-pack of bar soap I bought at Costco.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #domesticity #medical cw? #unsanitary cw?
What is it about fics then, where characters always, ALWAYS, have a spare toothbrush conveniently just hanging about in bathroom cupboards for that time someone is, usually unexpectedly, staying the night?
I have lived a few decades now, and I have never known anyone who keeps spare toothbrushes. Is it really common??
if you are the kind of just-in-case clutter goblin who does not throw things away, and you live in a country where it is standard practice for the dentist to give you a free toothbrush every time you go, then it is extremely possibly to have several years-old unused “spare” toothbrushes of extremely cheap but basically functional quality stashed away in your bathroom whether or not you visit the dentist at the recommended frequency
Don’t people buy multipacks of toothbrushes? I use an electric now, but back in the day I got the ones from my dentist and also bought the 8 pack of toothbrushes then I’d forget about my spare 5 toothbrushes in my cupboard when I see the multipack on sale again and then – you get the idea.
There are people who don’t keep spare toothbrushes??
What if you fumble your toothbrush and it falls onto the toilet plunger, do you then just *not have* a toothbrush?
What if you go to the store–for any toothbrush-replacement reason, fumbling or otherwise–and they’re out of toothbrushes because it’s the 2020s and a store is always out of an absolute minimum of three things on your shopping list at any given time?
*please* let me give you a toothbrush from out of my gallon bag of spare toothbrushes, I am *begging* you, you do not have to live on a knife’s edge
Tags:
#reply via reblog #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #domesticity #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #medical cw? #unsanitary cw?
Brinens and Things 