Windemere

        It has been a while since I posted an update here and just thought I'd share a more mundane home happening rather than the normal grand disaster posting that have been all too frequent in the past year.

        The other day I finally broke down and bought a silly Swiffer wet jet to aid in keeping all the hardwood floors here clean. I even went to the trouble of getting their special wood floor formula so that I could enjoy all the extra wood cleaning goodliness that was sure to come from this specially formulated cleaning fluid. I brought it home, loaded it up with batteries and the special swiffer wetjet for wood floors special sauce and began to scrub away.

        Admittedly I don't clean up as often as maybe I should, but generally clutter and dust bunnies trigger my OCD pretty quickly so I typically vacuum on a weekly basis. After reading all of the instructions (both of them) I went to work on my living room floor. After a few minutes I noticed how dirty the cleaning pad on the swiffer was. This is great, I thought, all that dirt that had been hiding right beneath my nose is now forever trapped in this handy cleaning pad. So I ripped out a new pad and dosed the floor with some more swiffer juice and continued mopping away.

        After letting everything dry I was dismayed to see how cloudy and dull the floor looked. I re-read the troubleshooting section of the Swiffer manual and discovered that if this was a problem the most likely cause was that you hadn't used enough magic juice. I am thoroughly convinced this is a ploy by their marketing department to sell more refills.
I can just envision a typical conversation on their support line:

Customer: "Hey this thing didn't clean my floor!"
Swiffy:"Oh, did you use a whole friggin $12 bottle of cleaning stuff on it?"
Cust:"Well no of course not"
Swiffy: "Well see that's your problem right there buddy. You should have read the directions where it says that if your floor is all messed up and cloudy you need to use more stuff."
Cust:"But that's ridiculous"
Swiffy:"What'd you expect from a lousy $20 magic mop from the grocery store."

        So heeding their advice I grabbed another mopping pad and re-mopped the entire floor, liberally applying the magic juice until it made my eyes water from the overwhelming scent of CLEAN. As an aside, why do we insist on adding cloying perfumes, fragrances etc to everything to make things seem like they're CLEAN. Why can't we just have products that actually get things CLEAN so they just won't smell in the first place. The floor was probably even worse than before. It just looked dull and flat and terrible. I was pretty sure that I hadn't permanently ruined my nice hardwood floors but that it was definitely going to take some work to get things right again.

        I grabbed a bottle of some sort of Orange essence based wood cleaner and turned my Swiffer wet-jet into a Swiffer floor mop for Orange cleaner. A liberal application of Orange juice to the swiffer pad and several minutes of vigorous mopping and scrubbing and voila I now had a nice shiny clean beautiful hardwood floor again. Of course I have now mopped the floor 6 times in the past two days trying to get from a little dusty to clean. The result though is a floor so clean and well tended that my shoes squeak from the cleanliness. And the mild scent of Orange was far more pleasant that whatever chemical "CLEAN" scent the Swiffer stuff had.

        I heartily recommend that anyone out there who has thought about getting the Swiffer wet-jet not even bother . Stick with the regular Swiffer or probably better yet a plain old fashioned cotton string mop and bucket and just use your favorite household cleaner in place of their horrible stuff. The actual Swiffer mop and pad are pretty great though. Sans the lousy fluid the dry mop part does pick up an amazing amount of stuff and does do a great job trapping it in the pad

        BTW I did try their standard fluid as well on the bathroom tile floor and had pretty much the same cloudy bad results there too. Not sure if it is just me but I'm pretty much convinced that this wet-jet thing sucks and that I've wasted $20.

        Once again on a topic that has little to do with the trials of home ownership but that I wanted to share was my recent experience at the Apple store. Last night one of the fans in my trusty MacBookPro started making decidedly bad grinding kind of sounds and then suddenly stopped making noise altogether and the machine then started to get pretty warm. I was dismayed. For the past two years I have had this laptop with me nearly all the time and looking back I'm not sure how I ever functioned without it.

        With the machine overheating there was little I could do but weep softly, shut it down and hope that Apple would be able to do something to repair it. I brought it in to the Apple store this morning and made an appointment at the Genius desk. After handing over my laptop and giving them my best sad face with full on boo-boo lip. They took a look at the machine and quickly determined that the right side fan had indeed ceased to move air. They checked their computer system and determined that they had the part in stock. Then the orderlies came rushing out with a gurney and they got my machine hooked to an IV drip and they quickly whisked it back into the dark secret chambers within the apple store where they chant their incantations and perform their rituals of magic resuscitation.

        I was left to sign the paperwork and to confirm the allergies and medical history of my little guy. They weren't sure they were going to be able to do the repair that day but they indicated they would call as soon as they had completed the repair. I put renewed effort into the boo-boo lip as I asked "Really, today maybe you think?"

        I left the store with my empty laptop case and headed out to run errands. The errands were more to distract myself from the loss I felt at not having my entire digital world clutched beneath my arm more than any great desire or need to accomplish these tasks. After a haircut, carwash, grocery shopping and some other side trips I got a call from the Apple store. I'm sure the people in line at the grocery store assumed that a favorite uncle or close friend had just awoken from a long coma as I enthusiastically thanked them and promised that I would rush right over to pick it up.

        The laptop isn't under warranty anymore so I did have to pay for the repair. It came to just over $100 (exactly what they said it would be) which is pretty outrageous considering the fan is probably a $2 part but in the scheme of having my laptop back and working and in the scheme of computer repairs in general really wasn't a big deal at all. To be able to bring my computer in on a Sunday morning and talk to a real live human being who cares and understands and to have the machine back and good as new within a few hours is service and support so far above and beyond the status quo as to be nearly completely foreign.

        I had had a previous experience several years ago with a PC laptop needing diagnosis and repair and at CompUSA. At the time I think it was $175 for them just to open up the laptop and look at it and close it back up. If anything was actually broken that would cost more and they wouldn't tell me how much more until they'd opened it up. It took them nearly a week to get to it and I had to call them to get the information because they'd forgotten to actually call me back. I had to fill out all kinds of paperwork to get them to look at the thing in the first place and they were really insistent on pointing out all the places where I had to initial and sign away the fact that, given the ominous tone of the document, they were more than likely going to end up erasing everything on the machine in the process of their diagnosis.

        My experience with Apple couldn't have been more completely different and thus infinitely better. The moment you walk into the Apple store you are greeted as if you are a long lost friend. Just the layout of the store is open and clean and inviting. Everything is just sitting out on tables and there always seems to be plenty of staff in the store. And these people in the store don't really seem to be sales people so much as die hard Cult of Mac enthusiasts who really just want you to drink the Kool-Aid and love it, cause they love it. They do all of this in the most unassuming and non-invasive way too. Then there's the concierge. That's right they have a dedicated person in the store who's sole job is to take care of customers. And not take care of as in a sales kind of way either. I really think they are trained and taught to be there to take care of the people. Listen to their stories, laugh with them, sympathize with them, get them a bag for their purchases, and generally being a FUCKING HUMAN BEING.

        This humanity at the Apple store is probably what make the experience there feel so great and at the same time feel so completely different from so many other customer service and retail experiences. Far too many other places have forgotten the human element of the equation and are merely there to move the product out the door and move the cash in. The fact that the transaction involves a human customer really doesn't seem to be much of a factor.

        In summary, what could have been one of darker days in recent memory (the disabling of my much loved laptop) has turned into one of the happier experiences in recent memory. For those out there who have not yet drunk the Kool-Aid and joined the cult of Mac I hope that this pushes you one step closer to taking that first sip. Come on, you know you want to.... Everyone else is doing it... It'll make you feel good....

        Over the weekend, last night, and this morning we've gotten quite a good dose of rain here in Baltimore. Most of it has been in short intense thudershowers, but overnight seems to have been a pretty steady soaking rain. The reason I bring this up and that it seems such a novelty to me is that for once it seems that all of this rain has remained on the outside of my house.

        I woke up this morning to the light pattering sound of rain tapping against the bedroom window. I very nearly did not get out of bed. I summoned the courage from deep within and forced myself to get out of bed. It took, what I would like to believe is, a heroic level of courage to then venture down into the basement.

        I closed my eyes as I got to the top of my basement stairs and took a deep cleansing breath in anticipation of what may lie before me at the foot of the stairs. I opened my eyes and slowly, but with great apprehension, descended the stairs and turned on the light at the foot of the stairs.

       Lo, and behold the floor was dry.

       I know that for most people, waking up on a rainy day and finding the interior of your home to be dry really isn't that much of a life affirming or miraculous thing. But given my recent track record with internal moisture problems of various origins, my expectations have been set very low. Very very low. So this morning's dread and loathing of what may have been down there turned into near elation at the fact that things were ok.

        It is somewhat akin to what it must be like in an abusive relationship or to be a mis-treated animal. The days that you are kicked are so frequent and common that the simple act of just not being kicked makes it a better day. That's sort of where I am with my house.

        Alright not so much a forest removal as finally getting the great big pile of tree out of my front yard. Last weekend I finally had the opportunity to do something about getting rid of the roughly 8ft x 8ft x 8ft pile of tree that used to be a tree in my front yard, had a brief stint as a tree in my neighbors front yard, and then became a large brush pile in my front yard.

       A good friend of mine sent out a mass e-mail a few weeks ago wanting to coordinate a dump run for anyone with some stuff lying around their house they wanted to get rid of. I say good friend because when I reported back to him that I did in fact have some stuff and oh by the way it was a pile of tree parts roughly the size of a modest second bedroom he didn't immediately hang up the phone.

        Last weekend amidst the rain, intermittent hail, and drizzle he showed up at my house with our 26' box truck and we tossed the whole mess in the back and carted it off to the office to fill the dumpster. In fact, we looked like such professional drowning rats that we were asked by a random passerby if we did stump removal too. If there were any two people in this world who looked less like rugged lumberjacks ready to put in a hard days work at the mill hauling timber Sam & I are probably in a three way split with Justin Long for the trophy.

        Luckily for us it only poured rain for half of the time that we were loading and unloading the truck. But it was totally and completely worth every ounce of soaking wetness to have this pile of stuff gone and forgotten.

        Now I just need to work on remedying the fact that my front yard still looks like a large subterranian boring machine surfaced for air before continuing on it's journey to the center of the earth.