We escaped the center, thank the gods. Last year we were hit directly by both super typhoon Dujuan and Typhoon Soudelor, and had water damage in our house.
It’s typhoon season now, and we’re more ready for this year. As is typical, I have to balance my tendency for impractical over-engineers solutions to things which are actually doable.
As for the coffee, well my children now love to make Daddy’s coffee by pouring it into different mugs to reduce the temperature, so I may have created a monster.
It’s an energy-driven heat exchange. When such an exchange takes place, it is simultaneously a balance of heating energy and cooling energy. I could have said “dispel the unwanted heat energy of the coffee to warm the Krugerrands”, but I was going for succinct clarity focusing on the objective, not a lecture in thermodynamics.
The problem is that if I water them enough to soak the roots, the water drips all over the furniture. A semi-solution would be to put something under each plant to catch the water, but that’s not always possible.
So I devote one spot, upstairs, to watering the hanging plants. There’s a basin on a stand, and I hang each plant over the basin, and give it enough water until it comes out the bottom into the basin. I wait a while, giving the soil enough time to absorb the water, then give it another shot of water. Then I wait a while, and give it a third. Now the roots are thoroughly watered. I let the plant hang for a while, till it stops dripping, then return it to its original location, and repeat the process with the next plant. I also recycle the water that’s collected in the basin.
I usually do one or two plants a day. I currently have 15 hanging plants, so by the time I’ve watered them all, it’s time to start again. I also rotate their locations. Yes, it’s an overengineered solution, but the plants aren’t complaining.
But the problem is that we occasionally get rewarded by solving a problem which is recurring, so we start to see this as something good!
I had a job in the import division of a company, and people were using hand calculators to figure out the costs of a shipment. This would take 45 minutes at times and the who thing would take hours and hours each day.
Not to mention the ordering process which involved salesmen scribbling down the order, giving it to the admit who would type it up into filemaker, print it out and give to us to retype everything.
I almost tore my hair out. So, redoing the thing so we could share and reuse data, it took a weekly process of 15 to 20 man-hours down to 30 minutes. I was a superstar in the company. Men bought me beers, women threw their underwear at me. (Make note to ask them to wipe their butts first. . .)
So a few successes like that make you think that all your problems are going to require complex solutions. But they don’t.
Not exactly what you mean but I was just reading this fascinating piece, Scott And Scurvy, in which it is revealed that although scurvy “had been conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician James Lind proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the disease,” due to technological advances, “Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times.”
The pride and joy of our backyard is the Woodstock windchime we have hanging from the eaves. The slightest breeze presents us with the tones of a Gregorian scale in the tenor range.
Or it did, until years of exposure to the sun made the string holding the windcatcher break. Then we’d need a wind strong enough to move all of the tubes. I called the company for an RMA, prepared to spend fifty bucks or so to have them refurbished. The catch was that I have to find a suitable box to ship the tubes in, then eend them to NY, and wait for four or five weeks to get the refurbished product back.
Rather than wait (and hunt down a box), I went online and bought a new set ($98). When they arrived, I took them out of the box and put the old set in. Soon, we’ll have Gregorian chimes in back AND in front.
I’m always astounded by how strong screws really are.
Cabinet holding full service for 8 people, all my tea and sugar, 2 dozen teacups and saucers, dozens of glasses and mugs? and it has 2 dozen wine glasses hanging from it and a CD/radio.
It’s held to the wall with six or eight screws and it’s rock solid.
I don’t know much about indoor gardening so take this with a pinch of salt, but I reckon that if you were to ever re-pot your plants you could take a nice sized kitchen sponge (brand new and un-used of course), cut to size and place it at the bottom of the pot. It ought to absorb any excess water that would otherwise drip onto the floor. Bonus, you wouldn’t need to water them as frequently.
I was once being paid a ridiculous amount of money to arrange an event to launch a report which had ‘lemon’ in the title (though not actually citrus related). I had people running all over town and calling all possible sources for bucket loads of realistic looking ornamental lemons. Cost a fortune in time and money. A week later I realised real lemons would have been so much easier and cheaper to acquire, heck, you can even buy plastic lemons (containing lemon juice) at every supermarket.
If we bought real ones we may not have needed the lemon scented essential oils either. I can’t believe that not one member of the team figured this out.
