Posts Tagged ‘dust’
Cobweb Covered
They accumulate in every nook and cranny in our utility room. Cobwebs that rival haunted-looking abandoned buildings everywhere. That room in our basement is neither abandoned nor haunted but you couldn’t tell by looking at it. Admittedly, the fact that we have been keeping two annoyingly dusty litter boxes in that space has contributed greatly to the ambiance of abandonment. There is a layer of that cement-like dust on every surface. It even clings to the cobwebs to augment their visibility.
Well, it was time for some serious spring cleaning yesterday. The washer/dryer set Cyndie ordered last January is to be delivered today. Tomorrow, our geothermal furnace will receive its annual inspection. We don’t want the service people thinking we are complete degenerates who tolerate the presence of cobwebs in our living space.
I disconnected the old washer and dryer and pulled them away from the wall so we could clean the floor beneath them. As nasty as that was, being covered head to toe with dust and cobweb fragments was more annoying.
We ended up dumping money into our failing clothes washer last year when the lead time for a replacement was teased as being out to 2023. A short time later, the bearings on the drum of the dryer wore out and Cyndie renewed her search for new washer/dryer sets. She found models she wanted available in March of 2022!
We milked the remaining bits of functional life out of the dryer drum as we waited for this day to come.
Best of all, it forced us to get down and dirty, cleaning out the utility room to almost make it a pleasant place to be.
I’ve lobbied to move litter boxes to the basement bathroom since it gets little use these days. Let’s see how much dust gets kicked up in that smaller space.
Showers after yesterday’s utility room cleaning project was complete felt more refreshing than ever. I remember now why we let it get so creepy looking around the edges down there. It’s because it is so unpleasant to clean it up. We tend to repeatedly put it off for some future day.
I hope Pequenita knows how much dust and scattered litter we tolerate to have her live with us. It’s kinda like the number of my messes Cyndie tolerates in letting me live here, too.
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Bad Chemistry
I am no chemist, but I know what transpired and the results were annoying and stinky, to say the least. This story starts in the dry days of the past summer. Days that became weeks of dry earth and high heat.
Wait, the story needs to start long before that. Skip all the way back to when we first got horses on this property in 2013. The first years we were here were rather wet ones. Put horses on wet ground and what do you get? Mud. Lots and lots of mud.
In the early years, there were several times when we were forced to put up a temporary fence around part of the gravel between the barn and hay shed so the horses could spend a little time off the mud.
The remedy to that mess came in the form of limestone screenings. Our local excavator suggested the crushed and screened limestone as a solution to the slippery mud. It worked brilliantly, although our slopes lend to a fair amount of erosion of the screenings during heavy rains.
The excavator had a solution for that, too. Keep an extra pile of lime screenings on hand to fill in the ravines. It actually worked for us. The weight of horses packs the surface and the hot sun bakes it to a solid surface that keeps the horses out of the mud.
The only downside I’ve seen is the dustiness of the screenings as a ground cover. Horses repeatedly stomp their feet to shake off flies and flies are relentless, so there is a non-stop kicking up of dust.
Anyone who lives down a gravel road knows about dust kicked up when the road is dry. One trick used to control dusty gravel roads is magnesium chloride. It will absorb moisture and leave the road looking a little damp.
What the heck. We gave it a try. Lo and behold, it reduced the dust the horses were kicking up and breathing under the barn overhang.
Jump forward to this past summer when it was hot and dry for weeks and Cyndie found herself spreading more and more magnesium chloride crystals in the area around the overhang. Maybe we used too much.
Last week we received some solid rain at an even rate for many hours at a time that was more than we’ve seen for months. The limestone screenings just beyond the overhang turned into a mare-urine enhanced stinky slurry of muddy, slippery limestone mush.
I wish we could magically extract the magnesium chloride, but lacking the chemistry knowledge of what substance might absorb those molecules, I opted for covering it with more limestone. It’ll either provide more material for the mush or it will bury the stinky stuff and get packed by the horses as the ground dries and hopefully will last until the next big wet spell.
That leads to the next complication as the temperature drops. When it becomes dangerously icy in the winter, magnesium chloride crystals work well to melt the ice around that sloping area.
Maybe I need to create a concoction of two parts limestone screening and one part magnesium chloride for ice melt to avoid ending up with more magnesium than lime.
The bad chemistry is actually a mixture of horses, big slopes, and slippery surfaces. There are only two of those three that we would seek to eliminate in this case.
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Sunlit Visibility
That low angle sunlight of early morning or late afternoon makes for some of the best photo opportunities. It can also be helpful when washing a window or dusting surfaces. Normally invisible detail becomes extraordinarily highlighted to a surprising degree.
Think about all the floating particulate in the air that suddenly becomes visible when the beam of sunlight cuts past you at an almost horizontal pitch. A second before that, breathing was unconscious and easy. After the sun lights up the parts-per-million of little particles, the brain wants to overrule that inhalation reflex.
It’s interesting how much debris we usually get away with inhaling that can be seen when illuminated, yet the much smaller coronavirus COVID-19 has become the microscopic threat that forces us to wear masks.
About dusting, a friend offered up this quip:
“I dusted once. It came right back. Won’t fool me again.”
I can be embarrassingly fastidious about wiping the 1-inch exposed flat surface perimeters in front of me that gather dust, using one bare finger that subsequently gets brushed off on my pants. Beyond that level, I possess great abilities to feign blissful ignorance for long spans of time.
From my reclined vantage point during one of the sunny mornings the previous weekend, I looked up to discover the bright sunshine hitting the stones around our fireplace was revealing a noteworthy cobweb construction effort.
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My first reaction was to think how great it is that beyond those fleeting minutes of direct sunlight, it doesn’t look like there is anything but untarnished stone on that wall. Unfortunately, the second thought was that, if there are that many cobwebs on that little fraction that was lit up, how many of the other rocks must be similarly covered.
Then I noticed one of the crossbeam logs supporting the vaulted ceiling.
Visible in the solar high-beam was a strand for the makings of a giant spider web crossing the significant expanse of open air.
I think we should just cover all the furnishings below with white sheets and embrace the look of a vacant dwelling.
Either that or make sure we never entertain company on sunny days.
We dusted once. It came right back.
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Dust Busting
It’s funny how much clutter we tolerate, until we can’t. Or we don’t have to. Sometimes the tolerating is born of a necessary survival mechanism of prioritizing.
When Cyndie was working her previous day-job, her efforts often overflowed the office hours and consumed vast amounts of her time in the evenings and on weekends. Putting energy toward areas of personal interest became a luxury that she rarely had time to indulge. She has been home now for less than a month and in that time has begun to shake the dust off a surprising number of things and places.
The dustiest of them all is, without a doubt, our barn, with its sand floor and the lime screenings surface under the overhang, toward the paddocks. Daily, the horses kick up dry clouds of dust that waft into the barn, covering absolutely everything. Keeping surfaces clean is a losing battle in the barn, so I rarely bother trying.
Last Sunday, late in the afternoon, when I was winding down toward gathering my thoughts of returning to work the next day, Cyndie began moving things out of the barn. We definitely operate on different schedules of inspiration. The hose came out and the barn received a serious makeover for the next few days. 
All that remains outside the roof now appears to be objects she left as a hint to me that she’d rather we find a different place to store.
Last night, about the time I was considering turning in for the night, Cyndie began moving things out of the over-packed storage room in the basement. Dust and clutter are no longer safe around here. Cyndie is home!
It has been a rude awakening to me of how much I was comfortable tolerating during the time I was home full-time. I had no problem overlooking clutter in some locations while I focused on projects in other areas of my interest.
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Dust
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as if the sun
has to decide to rise
as if the earth
chooses to spin
dust accumulates
marking the passing of time
in ways that lightness and darkness
cannot
so the simple stroke
of a cleaning cloth
becomes an act
of resetting
the immeasurable perpetual advance
of some bombastic
cosmic clock
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Relative Something 