Mending holes in my home

Now it was the pens

Here I was wanting to write down details as I began to give attention to my test lab, a neglected computer test lab because of the distractions of the year past. There were three pens on my desk, and none were ready to give their ink.

On one of my visits to a bookshop in Cape Town, I bought quirky pens with different writing widths like you would have with pencils and a wooden pencil case. I looked up on the shelf and retrieved the pencil case, there was only one pen left in the pencil case. There should be at least six pens in that pencil case.

What is so irksome is over two months of reclaiming full access to my place by taking the keys off my friend and I am the one at fault for first being a poor judge of character in making acquaintances with people who I thought valued friendship beyond benefits they gained from having access to me and my place, I am still finding vestiges of his carelessness and abuses of my things without remorse.

His mittens ruin all

Each time I have had him housesit on my visits to Cape Town, I have returned to a house that is not my home through the way he has rearranged things, misplaced things, or damaged things without a second thought to fix them. The last time, he bested himself, how I restrained myself from blurting out in apoplexy even when I asked for my keys escapes me.

Soon after, when I thought a phone charging unit or a power extension tower had been damaged, I painstakingly when through assessing each element of the connections, and can you believe it was the USB C cable that was damaged? Let us not get into when he thought the USB cables, because of their colours, could be adornments like neck chains, bullet chains, or belts that he wore about his person.

The number of times he invaded my privacy was innumerable, but I just worked on the assumption, I was not the only occupant of my home. I’ll be in bed and hear scurrying about the apartment, the keenest of my hearing would register the key in the lock as he entered, and the rest was left to my imagination, what he could be up to and that might include a litany of misdeeds and mishaps. I rarely let these bother me.

The translation of a wallet

On the eve of my penultimate visit to Cape Town just after the prostate cancer diagnosis and the one occasion he was able to attend the hospital with me, so he knew the seriousness of the condition, I emptied a brown wallet of things I needed for my travel and placed the wallet on my desk.

A week into my visit, I got a message from my neighbour, they found my wallet on a windowsill in the courtyard behind the apartment block. How it got there, no one could explain, the CCTV recording saw a resident runner pick it up and place it there, it had rained some days prior, and I know I had not been in the courtyard for more than a week before my travel. There was one other logical explanation.

I should have taken back my keys on my return, however, I am wont to forgive than to show resolve. My neighbour was of the good mind of kicking him out of my apartment, it would have served me well.

He just does not care

Even though I wrote a long email to him explaining why I had to take back my keys without accusing him of anything apart from remonstrating the unnecessary rearrangement of my apartment including finding my bathroom scale in the wine rack, his response acknowledged nothing, he just did not and could not care, that is fine.

Fundamentally, he had progressively taken away my enjoyment of my home by the things he had unwittingly done whether in thinking he was cleaning up the place by rearrangement or the simple things damaged that he had grown accustomed to me not saying anything about.

I have my place back to myself, I should just enjoy it despite the fact I still find rat droppings somewhere in the house, not so literally, but signs that my friend, if he still qualifies as one has been there, a tormenting daily reminder of associations I should have long abandoned before they hurt me much.

Cleaning the patient off

Unplugging for disaster

In a moment of technical mirth, a colleague suggested a problem on his personal computer on-site had been resolved by the cleaners probably shifting something, cables or dirt came to mind, but it reminded me of the danger of office cleaners and what cost might come with it.

In the late 90’s our data centre housed a number of critical computers but we could not determine why the service had to be restarted in the morning. The server had apparent switched off itself. It was later that we realised cleaners who had gone in to clean the centre after hours needing a socket to plug in their vacuum cleaners yanked a plug out for their device unaware that they had unplugged the server and then plugged it back in after they had finished.

Then, we set aside a socket for the cleaners and put protective tags and notices on the critical power plugs strictly forbidding them to be touched except by authorised personnel.

Cleaning to the heavens

In a short film starring Omar Sharif as a taxi driver taking a young man for a cosmetic procedure, he related a story about a hospital closed for its incidents of unexplained deaths. It then transpired that at night the cleaner went into the Intensive Care Unit and unplugged the life support system for their vacuum cleaner, thereby killing off the patient. However, too many of those incidents had occurred before they found out and it was too late to save the hospital.

Blog - Turn your lights down low, I need to see your liver (Last section – ‘A short story.’

Now, we have all heard it said that cleanliness is next to godliness, what you do not expect is the cleaner dispatching the patient off to God.

Kitchen brain over kitchen brawn

Life in the kitchen

The kitchen is a domain of the variety of life where preparations and expectations work to the satisfaction of choice and hunger to sustain now and keep for later. Be it the order of recipes that I fail to adhere to or the knowledge of experiment or experience, the ultimate result is one to enjoy and better to share.

Aroma and taste with the filling that portends the ingestion of food is without trying to be too profound, the stuff of life within which you can find happiness, laughter, and repartee at meals.

Then after all is done, there is the cleaning up to follow, avoiding unnecessary wastefulness and keeping whatever is leftover to reheating or reuse, I have a dishwasher for most of that, though not everything is suited for a machine and handwashing is required.

Pots for a gleam

A non-stick pot came out of the dishwasher with black crusts of burnt food that did not shift in the wash cycle and it probably won’t have over multiple wash cycles. Scrubbing or scouring the pot would destroy the non-stick protection. Then I remembered something I read online months ago.

I poured some white wine vinegar into the pot to cover the bottom of the pot and then sprinkled in a generous amount of bicarbonate of soda watching it fizz as I set the pot on a hot plate and left it to boil for a few minutes. Taking the pot off the heat I was able to wipe the heretofore burnt crusts off with ease and after a simple rinse, the pot was clean. A good result.

Chew your butts

Blink for the litter

Being a pedestrian, cyclist or user of public transport, it is amazing the amount litter one sees on the pavements, the bike paths and at the transport stops.

Usually, it is not the usual crisps or chocolate wrappers or cans of fizzy drink but patches of discarded chewing gum and cigarette butts of various lengths depending on the finished state of the cigarette as the bus or tram approaches.

Even with the no-smoking areas in stations and specially designated areas for smoking we still have those butts on the ground despite the fact that stubbing bins and sand dishes are provided at those locations.

I find that I frown at people who just discard their litter no matter how close they are to a proper discarding container known to many as a rubbish bin, but it appears that many are oblivious of its function.

A menace, a real menace

Cigarette butts and chewing gun are usually surreptitiously cast off either with a flick for the cigarette or some hand-mouth contact then hand-furniture contact as the chewed gum finds a home after the mastication.

By comparison, it probably no worse than picking ones nose and flicking the rotten greenish yellow grime or using ones hand to transfer spittle from mouth to desired destination.

The chewing gum problem is so bad that one dares not touch the undersides of seats or table as there is the possibility that an “Oink woz here” gum marker has been a stuck there.

With DNA testing and so on, by the time we all have biometric passports and databases full of information that the computers would puke at their content, it might be possible to decipher the marker and fine the culprit for vandalising public places or littering the street.

Stuck with it, annoyingly

The humongous machines needed to remove the gum makes one appreciate the intolerance of chewing gum inSingapore. That ban has since been relaxed but it shows just how much this littering can be the bane of a permissive and free society.

If you have had to scrap chewing gum off your shoe soles, you will understand, but worse still having to get it off your clothes because some asocial twerp has stuck it on a seat or rest then you only have recourse; be livid with rage as you surf the Internet for ideas.

I do wonder if properly policed and enforced fines for littering can help change attitudes to stop this eye-sore.

I have nothing against smoking but I am having serious problems with accompanying poor social graces that allows for the disregard of non-smokers and the littering of our streets. It is like being allowed to relieve oneself in any place one might choose rather than the conveniences.

The cleaning up of the butts is easier and is done either by street sweepers or vagrants looking for unfinished cigarettes.

New edibles – science and nature collide

Starting with chewing cum, I would suggest that it be reconstituted that after enjoying the satisfaction of chewing the gum it can be swallowed.

Better still, once the gum is put in the mouth, it should have some genetic affinity material that makes it want to slither down towards the tonsils that it becomes impossible not to swallow it.

Moving on to cigarettes; tobacco companies can have a major money making new lease of life by making those butts, stubs or filters edible.

Once the smoker and drawn in all the nicotine they can through smoking, they get the final nicotine fix by being able to chew what is left of the un-smoked cigarette having flicked off the ashened part with the possibility of flavouring the bit with a flavour applicator that doubles as a lighter.

Something like a vanilla lighter or strawberry lighter if not chilli or curry lighter comes to mind.

Anybody would quit smoking after a few of these.

Gum profiling and butt identity

Just as our liberties, freedoms and secrets are being sold down the line of outrageous anti-terrorism laws masquerading as patriotism, Big-Brother can analyse discarded cigarette butts to and send notices to the homes of the culprits.

The global market-place is rejuvenated for the food and flavours industry, the tobacco companies can move into health flavours, the DNA profiling and instant identification business would be rife.

Imagine wireless computer terminals at every lamp-post with finger-print and retina scanning sign-on and a biometric analysis rod which can assess DNA material from all sorts of litter, mine databases and send off the notices.

You get a gift voucher for your civic duties and the culprit lives in a world that would soon be too real to forget you first read about it here.

References

Commercial cleaning supplies - Chewing Gum Removal - Gum-Out

Cigarette Butt Litter- Two Billion Littered Butts a Day

CigaretteLitter.Org - The Facts About Cigarette Butts and Litter - Cigarette Litter