miscellanea
Oct. 9th, 2006 11:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wombat11381.) Robin of Sherwood on NTSC DVD. (Mind you, although I adored the series when it was on, I don't think I adored it quite enough to shell out 100 pounds plus shipping from the UK.)
2.) Fun With Plumbing redux. Since one of our toilets had been sluggish for a while but had recently become much worse, I figured that a.) it was probably an issue of gradual scale buildup and b.) I'd rather skip the steps involving the use of thin wire cable or a small metal pick to "floss" the little under-rim vents inside the bowl. For that matter, I decided to skip the wussy acids like citric and phosphoric and went straight on to muriatic, which is an old name for HCl.
I was pretty surprised to discover that conc. HCl (~37% aq.) is not just readily available at the hardware store, it's *cheap*-- about $5/gallon. If you try this, be careful with it; it's dang nasty stuff. (I think our weekly cleaners threw out my safety glasses, because I couldn't find the things; my protective gear ended up limited to a pair of latex gloves. Managed to avoid major safety incidents, though.) I ended up using only about a half-gallon of HCl on the toilet and shortened the soaking period to about 3-4 hours instead of 24; still, it's been much better-behaved since then. I guess I'll have to decide which of our other two toilets has a greater need for the remaining dose.
One aspect of the procedure which the Toiletology instructions skim over is that once the HCl hits the remaining water in the system, it will fume like mad. This is what the plastic wrap over the bowl and tank is for: keeping the fumes in. In addition, you really, really want to have the bathroom fan running the whole time. In between pouring stuff down into the tank, take deep breaths of fresh air and hold them in. Don't get the stuff on your clothing, and be careful what you touch with your gloves if they get smeary.
Minor complications: due to slightly misremembering/misinterpreting the instructions, I wedged a plastic funnel into the bottom of the tank just below the flush valve to pour the acid down into there, instead of into the tall overflow tube. The funnel was fine and everything went pouringly, but it made things more complicated than they really had to be, and it killed the little black rubber disc at the bottom of the valve-- afterward, the valve wouldn't seal off properly. The rubber disc was pretty elderly anyway and had already been leaving black rubber smears on everything it touched, so I pulled it out, took it for another ride to OSH so I'd have an exact reference, and found a chemical-resistant green silicone disc to replace it with instead.
3.) At the other end of the pH scale, solid NaOH has become even more impossible to find. It used to be available as pellets of "Red Devil lye" drain-cleaner, but about a year or two ago, hardware stores stopped carrying it because of (presumably) concerns wrt enabling illegal meth labs. (I've been using it to make soap.) A local restaurant-supply chain still carried it for a while longer, but now they don't have it any more either. All anyone has now is concentrated aqueous solutions of NaOH, which is still great for cleaning drains but not really calibrated enough to work out saponification ratios with much accuracy.
This kinda bums me out, since I'd finally worked out a fairly streamlined soapmaking process that minimized the amount of water that would have to evaporate off later and also used the lye's heat of dissolution to melt the fat. (The trick was to float the entire mixing bowl in a sink of tepid water to buffer any "hot spots" that might kill the bowl.) On the other hand, we're not accumulating nearly as much kitchen fat since the wombat-consort went mostly vegetarian-- we'd pour off the fat into a container and stick it in the freezer instead of down the drain; eventually, when we had a pound of so of fat, I'd simmer it with several changes of water to "wash" it before hitting it with the lye.
4.) I'm still having occasional dreams about finding the intact vintage geta which I think the cleaners also threw out. I'd bought the pair on eBay from a woman who said that her father had brought them home as a souvenir from WWII; once they arrived, I promptly snapped one of the straps when I tried to wear them (the sisal rope core had turned brittle; the rest of the hanao's anatomy matched the description from that site except that the outermost layer was faded red velvet). After that, they got separated inside the wombatcave as I moved the broken one around with plans of fixitude. So when the cleaners came through the first time, the intact one was off by itself somewhere and evidently looked worthless to them. I still have the other one on a shelf without its strap.
The geta haunts me because of this. I can't help wondering about mine: what happened to the woman or girl who wore it? (The red velvet hanao would've been traditionally girly.) Were the hanao made by a professional craftsman, or was the red velvet cut and sewn within the family from an old garment or textile? What was the world she lived in? How many men in her family marched off to die for the deified Emperor, and what acts of courage or atrocity did they commit in his name? Did she survive the firestorms of Allied bombing raids? Did she undergo schoolyard training with her classmates to fight the expected GI invasion with sharpened bamboo stakes? What were the circumstances in which the geta came into the hands of one of those GIs after the war, to be taken home to Kansas and put on a shelf for fifty years before returning back toward the Pacific to be casually half-destroyed?
Not that I could've ever learned most of those things anyway. But still. They bother me.
2.) Fun With Plumbing redux. Since one of our toilets had been sluggish for a while but had recently become much worse, I figured that a.) it was probably an issue of gradual scale buildup and b.) I'd rather skip the steps involving the use of thin wire cable or a small metal pick to "floss" the little under-rim vents inside the bowl. For that matter, I decided to skip the wussy acids like citric and phosphoric and went straight on to muriatic, which is an old name for HCl.
I was pretty surprised to discover that conc. HCl (~37% aq.) is not just readily available at the hardware store, it's *cheap*-- about $5/gallon. If you try this, be careful with it; it's dang nasty stuff. (I think our weekly cleaners threw out my safety glasses, because I couldn't find the things; my protective gear ended up limited to a pair of latex gloves. Managed to avoid major safety incidents, though.) I ended up using only about a half-gallon of HCl on the toilet and shortened the soaking period to about 3-4 hours instead of 24; still, it's been much better-behaved since then. I guess I'll have to decide which of our other two toilets has a greater need for the remaining dose.
One aspect of the procedure which the Toiletology instructions skim over is that once the HCl hits the remaining water in the system, it will fume like mad. This is what the plastic wrap over the bowl and tank is for: keeping the fumes in. In addition, you really, really want to have the bathroom fan running the whole time. In between pouring stuff down into the tank, take deep breaths of fresh air and hold them in. Don't get the stuff on your clothing, and be careful what you touch with your gloves if they get smeary.
Minor complications: due to slightly misremembering/misinterpreting the instructions, I wedged a plastic funnel into the bottom of the tank just below the flush valve to pour the acid down into there, instead of into the tall overflow tube. The funnel was fine and everything went pouringly, but it made things more complicated than they really had to be, and it killed the little black rubber disc at the bottom of the valve-- afterward, the valve wouldn't seal off properly. The rubber disc was pretty elderly anyway and had already been leaving black rubber smears on everything it touched, so I pulled it out, took it for another ride to OSH so I'd have an exact reference, and found a chemical-resistant green silicone disc to replace it with instead.
3.) At the other end of the pH scale, solid NaOH has become even more impossible to find. It used to be available as pellets of "Red Devil lye" drain-cleaner, but about a year or two ago, hardware stores stopped carrying it because of (presumably) concerns wrt enabling illegal meth labs. (I've been using it to make soap.) A local restaurant-supply chain still carried it for a while longer, but now they don't have it any more either. All anyone has now is concentrated aqueous solutions of NaOH, which is still great for cleaning drains but not really calibrated enough to work out saponification ratios with much accuracy.
This kinda bums me out, since I'd finally worked out a fairly streamlined soapmaking process that minimized the amount of water that would have to evaporate off later and also used the lye's heat of dissolution to melt the fat. (The trick was to float the entire mixing bowl in a sink of tepid water to buffer any "hot spots" that might kill the bowl.) On the other hand, we're not accumulating nearly as much kitchen fat since the wombat-consort went mostly vegetarian-- we'd pour off the fat into a container and stick it in the freezer instead of down the drain; eventually, when we had a pound of so of fat, I'd simmer it with several changes of water to "wash" it before hitting it with the lye.
4.) I'm still having occasional dreams about finding the intact vintage geta which I think the cleaners also threw out. I'd bought the pair on eBay from a woman who said that her father had brought them home as a souvenir from WWII; once they arrived, I promptly snapped one of the straps when I tried to wear them (the sisal rope core had turned brittle; the rest of the hanao's anatomy matched the description from that site except that the outermost layer was faded red velvet). After that, they got separated inside the wombatcave as I moved the broken one around with plans of fixitude. So when the cleaners came through the first time, the intact one was off by itself somewhere and evidently looked worthless to them. I still have the other one on a shelf without its strap.
The geta haunts me because of this. I can't help wondering about mine: what happened to the woman or girl who wore it? (The red velvet hanao would've been traditionally girly.) Were the hanao made by a professional craftsman, or was the red velvet cut and sewn within the family from an old garment or textile? What was the world she lived in? How many men in her family marched off to die for the deified Emperor, and what acts of courage or atrocity did they commit in his name? Did she survive the firestorms of Allied bombing raids? Did she undergo schoolyard training with her classmates to fight the expected GI invasion with sharpened bamboo stakes? What were the circumstances in which the geta came into the hands of one of those GIs after the war, to be taken home to Kansas and put on a shelf for fifty years before returning back toward the Pacific to be casually half-destroyed?
Not that I could've ever learned most of those things anyway. But still. They bother me.
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no subject
on 2006-10-09 08:20 pm (UTC)2. and 3. Well, at least one of us is handy around the house for anything other than connecting lightbulbs.
4. That's... really very haunting. The dark flip side of the wonder you feel when faced with a millennia-old artifact; instead, what ghosts are there with you?
no subject
on 2006-10-10 12:17 am (UTC)no subject
on 2006-10-10 09:16 pm (UTC)