on cleaning clothes

I no longer use a washing-machine powered by electricity. Instead, I have developed a series of buckets in which I clean my clothes, a system that works fairly well. To start, I fill up an old cat litter bucket – one that is clean, squat, and wider than the average contractor's bucket – with the clothes I wish to wash, a dollop of detergent, and water. Usually, I allow this brew to sit for many hours out on the deck so that the soap and water can impregnate the fibers and make cleaning easier. Such long soakings (which make up phase 1) work fine in summer; in winter, however, they find me cleaning my clothes in the evenings, the cold and the dark conspiring with the dirty, frigid water in which my garments have been sitting to make for a miserable task. Now, I process a load in one go, the wash and the rinse cycles following one another closely rather than being spaced out over an entire day.

I agitate the clothes in the squat bucket by poking one side down with a long bamboo pole (a broomstick will also work during this, phase 2), forcing the items down on one side, which pushes them up on the other and allows me to mash the garments thoroughly. After I see a particular shirt or item for the third or fourth time, I put aside my stick and drop a skinnier bucket into the squat one (skinnier in that its bottom goes all the way down to the bottom of the wider bucket), this one with many holes drilled into its bottom and sides. I sit on the top of the skinner bucket, thus forcing the water from the clothes using my own weight. Once I am satisfied with this rudimentary straining, I take the skinnier bucket back out and resume poking at the clothes with my poker, rotating them around and around until they seem well agitated. (The water at this point will be oily, brownish, and filled with tiny particles of sweat, skin, and dirt.) I usually agitate and strain at least three times before dumping out what water I can and moving on to phase 3.

Phase 3 involves putting the skinnier bucket back into the squat bucket but then flipping both over together so that the water runs out. Then, I sit on the bottom of the squat bucket, using my own weight to strain the clothes against the skinnier bucket (which, again, has holes drilled into its bottom and sides). This forces much of the remaining water out of the clothes; I get even more out by rocking back and forth and by shifting position on the bottom of the squat bucket, which allows trapped pockets of water to escape onto the wooden deck, which must be swept off afterward to keep it from rotting quite so quickly. I generally give the clothes a visual check at this point, and a close smelling, to see if they need a third rinse or if the are clean enough to move on to phase 4. This last phase involves taking the wet items from the squat bucket and hanging them up to dry on my clothes-spider, a retractable hanger that perches at the edge of the deck far enough from the house so that the water dripping from the clothes does not seep into the foundation or moisten the siding. I usually leave the clothes there to drip their remaining moisture onto the grass; if I am lucky, they get an additional from the rain. Once the clothes are mostly dry, I move them to lines under the roof of the upper, front porch, where they are allowed to dry fully before being taken in, folded, and put away.

Cleaning clothes in the manner described above takes more time than with an electrical washing-machine; it uses virtually no electricity, however, it is all but silent, and it provides the washer with a good upper-body workout. The cost for the buckets, soap, and poker is less than $20, but the ability to wash one's clothes – without electricity or undue physical strain – is nearly priceless. Regain a slice of independence through honest effort! Mahalo.

mentiri factorem fecit © 場黑麥

on solar elevation

The swift onset of winter caught this whorphan woefully off guard – his solar panels no longer spend time in the sun. Instead of basking and gulping in full exposure, they sip spare photons while lounging in this little house's lengthening shade. While preparing and splitting piles of wood for the wood-stove, he neglected his solar setup; while raking and composing mounds of leaves for the garden, he overlooked the realities of diminished daylight. Oh, how quickly it occurred, how rapidly our planet tilted on its axis, the sun now rising a few compass-ticks south of due east and, after noon, avoiding fully the front yard's short run.

What is a lowly solar farmer to do? Does he relocate his 2 sets of 3 solar panels? In order to do that, he'd have to move the entire battery bank along with both inverters and run some new wire into the house; besides, positioning the panels closer to the drive would put them at greater risk of getting struck by a passing car. Does he raise the sets on bamboo poles clustered and woven together so that they share the weight? This has both advantages and disadvantages. Among the advantages are these: if the panels were raised to a height of eight feet and lashed firmly to bamboo poles, they would be exposed to direct sunlight for a longer period of time during each day (provided the sun were to shine); they would be completely out of the wet grass; they would be at lesser risk of being broken from thrown or falling debris; if run into accidentally by a vehicle, the poles would splinter and bend while the panels above them would remain safe (this is an assumption), whereas if the panels were to be struck by a vehicle directly, they would be ruined totally. Among the disadvantages are these: the panels would face only in one direction and could no longer be manually rotated to track the sun; the wire cables with which they feed electricity to the battery bank would have to be run through a tube or otherwise secured against tripping and entanglement; they would be lashed to bamboo poles, which disintegrate over time, with either rope or some form of metal bracket – either way, the poles and lashings would have to be replaced every few years.

The third option is, of course, to do nothing, to adjust to a diminished charge in the battery bank, and to resign myself to my panels only getting full sun between 0830 and 1030 in the morning. I do not like this third option because it forces me to choose between recharging all my electronics batteries and firing up the 750 watt inverter to watch a full-length movie (a luxury I plan to cut out of my life anyway, as I have seen too many movies of late, and read too few books); it sees me standing by the window each day hoping that the sun will shine when I want it to. Therefore, the third option is off the table; I will raise the panels to a great height, lash them firmly to their mounts, secure all loose cables, wash the mud off my tools, put them away, and go watch Caddyshack for the umpteenth time. Mahalo!

(p.s. Upon further consideration, I have changed my plans. I shall not raise my panels on platforms, and I shall not drag them up to the roof. Now, instead of risking the panels causing damaging to or being blown off of the platform or roof, I have decided to locate them closer to the lane and to cut down a large bush next to the house, so that now the panels are only in the house's shade for maybe an hour, and not all afternoon. Sometimes, the old mantras come in handy; in this instance, I remembered the Latin saying Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate, English for Keep it simple, you bleeping numskull.)

mentiri factorem fecit © 場黑麥

one small thing

It was but one small thing, one simple step not taken, that caused the big battery to drain. It started with d-cell batteries, themselves a few decades old, that I was trying to charge for the first time in their lives, so as to use them in a lamp, for reading; the d-cells, even after sitting in the charger for nine hours, had not retained any charge, providing not even trace illumination. Conceding defeat, I had dutifully unplugged the charger from the extension cord that runs to the 750-watt inverter in the basement, which is connected via alligator clamps to the big battery, a 12 volt deep-cycle marine type.

The reason that the marine deep-cycle exhibited a diminished charge compared to if it had simply sat there not providing power to anything was that I had forgotten to turn off the inverter when done using it; therefore, the little green LED light that burns when the inverter is turned on had slowly whittled away at the big battery's charge, over twelve hours chewing up a couple of amperes. One small thing overlooked, one simple step not taken, had impacted demonstrably, using up less electricity than I had originally feared, however, for after turning off the DC-to-AC inverter, the big battery's charge jumped back up almost all the way back to where it would have been had I not been such a fool. Had it not been for the post-booze haze which moved in Saturday morning and hung on tenaciously all day, I might have remembered to depress that one small button, thus saving myself a bit of consternation, but, ah well, the past cannot be changed, while the future is pregnant with smarter decisions, better made. Huzzah.

And so, I shall hazard to declare, it goes with many things in life – the small and easily-overlooked, if they are indeed viewed as small, if indeed they are overlooked, quickly turn into things of tremendous import, wreaking havoc if allowed to grow from tiny saplings into towering trees. It is for me, then, to remember to attend to the small beginnings of things, and to stay with them, patiently, until they have reached their natural end. In this fashion, then, I might actually make something of this pathetic life of mine. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit