This and That – Fixing Things

It’s like playing whack-a-mole. You fix one thing, and another one breaks.

Recently deceased: a ten year old Hoover Tectronic Multi Cyclonic Vacuum Cleaner

My vacuum cleaner tried to ‘digest’ the fringe on a throw rug. I quickly hit the off switch, but it was too late. When I turned it on again, the power head made a terrible racket, then quit. The Car Guy diagnosed a ‘loss of electrical continuity’. Sadly, repair parts are either no longer available or they cost significantly more than the original  purchase price of the machine. A new vacuum will cost less than repairs and should work better than the old one.  Rest in Peace, built-in obsolescence.

When you clean out a vacuum cleaner, you become the vacuum cleaner.
– From a meme at The Haps with Herb –

Silence is golden, duct tape is silver.

Duct tape is a very versatile product. It isn’t a permanent fix, but a good short term solution! I use it to extend the life of work gloves… or should I say glove. It is always the  right hand one.

Another use: apparently if you are attacked by a large number of very small ‘hairy’ cactus spines, you can smooth a piece of duct tape over the area, then peel it off. Maybe that works for slivers, too?

We Can See Clearly Now
Eventually WD-40 and foam weather stripping don’t work  any more – so we  had all the windows and doors in our 40 year old house replaced. This was a fix that made the house more comfortable and corrected the problem of leaky panes and sliders that would ‘stick’ open or closed. The payback period in energy savings is, at our age… lets not go there.

Speaking of Energy, it is not all that easy to ‘Fix’ the Climate because the ‘settled science’ keeps evolving!  Science News now says ‘Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought’. Scientific America says a recent study indicates the world’s corals may be more resilient than researchers thought.

If you didn’t read about these findings, maybe mass media is what we need to fix too.

Slate Cleaning 101

On the long list of old things being made to look newish, enter the simple scrub brush. Paired with a cream cleaner and a lot of muscle power, I eventually removed years of waxy build up on my black slate hearth. There were more caustic products to do this job, but I didn’t find them until I was almost finished doing it the hard way. Good exercise, though.

Sometimes, in order to fix a problem, you have to think outside the box.

I don’t know who came up with this idea, but I can attest to the fact that sometimes the people who own Dobermans are not the best neigbours.