From homes to communities, fixing our world one disaster at a time.
I’ll be hosting the April 16 Carnival of Family Life. I’ll be happy, I’m sure, with all submissions that meet the carnival criteria, but I’ll give special prominance to submissions where your family worked to make your community better. Thanks.
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Most bathrooms can be improved with three simple steps.
 Having a maid tends to make you reduce the clutter that is out and about. (Even if you’re the maid.) Reversing this and putting everything a visitor might want in a bathroom in a basket greatly increases your visitor’s enjoyment of their visit. A broken nail or dry eyes may not rise to the level of needing to speak to the hostess at a dinner party, but if your guest can take care of the problem promptly, they will be more comfortable.
My mushroom-basket contains:
It’s technically not in the basket, but I also put a box of wipes on the floor by the toilet to clean anything that might not be up to my guests standards (What I really hope is that the males in my family use it – see Stephanie’s comment on the last post).
There are absolutely appalling statistics* on the number of people who go sight-seeing through other people’s medicine cabinets and even worse stories about people pilfering prescription medicines from their neighbor’s homes. I moved all my aspirins, etc. to a high shelf in the kitchen. A locked first aid kit attached to a kitchen closet wall might have been better. (I’m fortunate that, unless you’re a dog, my medicine cabinet is pretty sparse.)
*Everyone cites a 40% at parties snoop statistic but there doesn’t seem to be any real research available on this.
I normally haul everyone’s toothbrushes, cups, and other oral hygene stuff down to the dishwasher once a week. If anyone has a cold, I do it once/day. This may have no discernable impact in a house of adults but I’m reasonably certain that if I put my son’s toothbrush under a microscope before & after there would be a discernable difference.
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I’ve finally come to accept that my 10-year old son must be brain damaged. There were signs – he didn’t breathe on his own for the first week of his life, my darling friend Linda, a speech pathologist, gently pointed out at 18 months the fact that I understood his extremely complex grunt and gesture communication system did not mean that he was speaking normally, he spent half his life at school in remedial reading.
I was in denial. I clung to his 9o percentile plus scores on ERBs (standardized tests – well, except for spelling but what is spell-check for anyway?), his evaluations that said he was functioning at a 5th grade level in math in 1st grade, his obvious social presence.
This morning I walked into the bathroom he had just left. Looking at the pool of water on the floor I called to him that “that it is normally considered a good idea to keep the shower curtain in the bathtub.â€
He is a respectful boy. He paused for a moment’s thought (maybe it was a pause to finish his move on a computer game he shouldn’t have been on this morning, but I hope he was thinking about what I said.) “Why?†he asked.
Why???? I did not go berserk. I merely responded, “so that the water coming down the curtain goes in the tub and not on the floor.†(Did he not notice he needed a boat to get out of the bathroom?)
“Oh, . . . Sorry” was his reply.
Would it be a disaster if I blamed it on the male gene?
In the US, insured climate-related losses have gone up 10 times faster than premiums or economic growth since 1971. Lloyds of London issued a report in June, 2006 Climate Change: Adapt or Bust. outlining the challenges facing the insurance industry and their analysis of insurer’s risk from global climate change.
They recommend spending much more money on improving long-range climate forecasting models, using the models to be more aggressive in pricing insurance to reflect the weather expected for the coming season rather than pricing based on historical patterns, and presuming that climate change will occur much faster than predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
I don’t think communities will be in a position to similarly raise taxes precipitously and mobilize a response if abrupt climate change occurs.
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Send in more maid stories – I couldn’t even begin to make this stuff up –
My in-laws returned from a 3-week trip the other day. They are are a lovely, slightly elderly couple. My mother-in-law is a slight, cultured woman who is always immaculately dressed and coiffed. They, with the help of their maid, maintain an immaculate home.
While they were gone the maid came in to clean and water the plants. The maid is a nice, conscientious, personable girl from Poland with a reasonable command of English. Before my in-laws came back she collected the trash (paper towels & the like), walked it passed the doorman, dumped it in the garbage shute and stopped to chat with the doorman.
He, too, is a nice young man who likes to help out the tenants. He gave the maid the pile of mail that had been accumulating and they chatted a bit more. Not wanting to drop any of the numerous pieces of mail, she put it in the clean trash can (she’s Polish – they scrub the trash can each time they empty it) and walked it back to the apartment.
Needless to say, my mother-in-law neglected to check the trash before emptying it when she came back. She did, however, comment on the small amount of mail she’d received while they were gone, in the hearing of the maid. Their next activity was to go through the building trash until they found the mail with several large checks in it.
I do sort-of wonder if she still thinks I’m crazy for checking the trash after the maid comes.
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Conventional wisdom seems to hold that all maids pilfer. If you’ve found a maid through networking this is almost certainly not true. Most maids have a very good grasp of the fact that, like Caesar’s wife, they must be above suspicion. They want to keep their jobs and get recommendations.
Maids are easy to blame – any time my husband’s wallet fails to make it to the nightstand someone is accused of stealing it. Invariably the thief takes her ill-gotten gains and hides them in the washing machine. Obviously the maid we hire isn’t very bright since she always hides it in the same spot.
 Fear of being thought a thief can lead to the failure to clean closet floors or drawers unless you are very insistent – if she doesn’t clean it you won’t think she’s been tempted by the emergency stash you keep in your sock drawer.
Someone I knew had a maid for years. Suddenly, the emergency stash she kept in her drawer started to lose money periodically. Of course the maid was blamed, but because of her long service she was never confronted. The fact that this occurred during a period when my acquaintance’s teenage son was bringing friends to an empty home for lunch each day never set off any alarm bells.
Everyone I know buys toiletries at a superstore and is mildly certain that the maid helps herself when she needs soap. That children or husband might replenish the bathrooms with soap never crosses their minds. (OK, it is hard to believe, I admit.)
If you seriously think your maid is pilfering you owe it to her to monitor the soap before and after she comes. A month should be long enough to convince you that the soap only goes down in the pantry when it increases in the bathrooms.
Sometimes, if you are truly anal, you will note that the fresh roll of toilet paper left the pantry and found its way to the bathroom but the old roll had only been half used. Presumably you don’t think your maid is a victim of Montezuma’s Revenge (you think of a polite way of putting it). Obviously your maid must be risking her job to stuff the half-finished toilet roll in her purse. If you had followed my advice and taken out the trash before the maid came and checked the trash she did throw away, your suspicions would change radically. Your maid is not a thief – she is just crazy.
Maids like places that they have cleaned to look nice. Money is no object to you – after all – you’re paying someone else to clean your house when you could do it very easily yourself. Rather than leave a roll of toilet paper that your child will probably use without replacing before you get to see the lovely job your maid did – the maid changes to a fresh roll. At least you won’t look at the bathroom (left otherwise spotless since said child probably snuck out without washing his hands because you haven’t said ‘wash your hands’ 587 times this month) and ask why didn’t she change the empty roll.
Checking the trash can also lead to the somewhat disconcerting discovery of half the jewelry in the house ending in the vacuum bag. Earrings fall behind the nightstand and the maid doesn’t see them, or drawers aren’t emptied before cleaning and the small pile of earrings in your daughter’s drawer find their way into the vacuum.
The one time I know that my maid took something was from a friend’s, on my behalf. I hadn’t bought new vacuum cleaner bags & the maid, having a good sense of my tendency to need to be reminded before I replace cleaning supplies, borrowed one from one of my friends. She made it very clear that she was using Linda’s bag and that I would need to pay Linda back (by giving the maid one of the bags out of the fresh batch to take back to Linda.) It did absolutely nothing about my procrastination in buying cleaning supplies but it did make me appreciate how important it was to my maid not to be thought a thief.
If you’re new – I wrote the How to Hire A Maid like a book. Click Table of Contents for future articles and links to old blogs in a more comprehensible order – or just click here & go to the bottom to read it straight through by scrolling up to each article.
Deer are currently nothing more than a nuisance in the Northeast – areas with deer tend to have endangered tulips but don’t contend with massive outbreaks of Lymes Disease. Communities tolerate leveled hostas and even an occasional car accident out of a respect for co-existing with nature or a desire to not kill Bambi.
Does your view change if you know the climate will change? (See the rules for the game forthe changes we assume will occur – I know these aren’t terribly likely – that’s not the point.) According to th US Global Change Research Program , a taxpayer funded article that probably could have been written by the editors of Readers Digest, climate change could cause the deer population to explode and consequently cause an explosion in deer ticks. Since we’re working from a different climate model, one that predicts cold winters, would we want to put out feed for the worst parts of the winter as a relatively easy way to keep a source of meat nearby? Do we replace all the deer with sheep?
Assuming you decide deer present too great a risk to the gardens you are depending on for food, do you:
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I’ve been following the marriage for gays controversy with some disbelief. I have decided however that conservatives have a point. Religious marriage is between a man and a woman. (Secular marriage performed by a judge is between whoever the courts say it is and in the future it may change.) Religious, indeed all marriages, have no place in our legal system.
We should purge all mention of marriage from our legal code and replace it with commitment. We still need laws governing the legal obligations, taxes, and breakups of committed people; we just should not be in the business of legislating what marriage is.
Obviously if you get married religiously you are committed to each other. Same sex couples could also be committed to each other. More importantly, people who have children together are committed to each other. Government should be codifying this relationship – all children deserve the same rights and protections regardless of their parent’s marital status. Obviously a person can only be committed to one person at a time without a formal plan of breakup.
It used to be (& I really don’t know if it still is true) that parents didn’t get married because tax and benefit implications made marriage prohibitive. Sometimes people went so far as to get religiously married but failed to file the civil papers.
Marriage would still be a highly desired state. Since we live in a graphical age, perhaps each religious group could permit people married under its auspices to use the word marriage with an icon indicating the flavor – fish for Catholic, three stars of David for orthodox Jews, one star for reform Jews, cross for Protestants, lambda for the Church of Gays Wishing to be Married. Churches could then use the full force of trademark law to insure that their marriage is what they say it is.
Just a thought.
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British Airways has a quaint notion that if they tell their clients with lost baggage that it is not their policy to address the issue they can ignore the problem. This is not legally correct since Britain is a signatory to the Montreal Convention and they certainly don’t even mention it in court when they are taken to small claims court.
If you check your baggage with Bristish Airways and they say even once that “it is not their policy to handle your claim and you need to go to some other carrier” ignore the customer service communications and take them straight to small claims court.Â
Carrier liability for luggage is limited by the Montreal Treaty which explicitly states the maximum liability based on the weight of the luggage and nullifies any claims of reduced liability.
Most luggage is lost during service disruptions when everyone really wants to move along – don’t let yourself be rushed. British Airways does not document for you the weight of your baggage. You must write down the weight of each item on the correct baggage ticket. This may be on your boarding pass but don’t leave the counter until you know how much each item weighs. If your luggage is especially valuable – which it will be if there is a terrorist disruption and they force you to check your cameras, computers, IPODS, etc. – buy a special declaration of interest in delivery at destination. The airlines-issued equivalent of baggage insurance.
Also, be sure the luggage is evenly distributed amongst all the people in your party. If your luggage is lost and you need to sue, you want to go to small claims court. If they helpfully assign all the luggage of a family to one person the single claim will be above the small claim court limits.
British Airways has decided that not delivering luggage when there are massive delays and then only paying claims to those who are persistent is the most cost-effective way to deal with lost luggage. If more people are assertive maybe they will purchase corporate baggage insurance and automatically treat everyone fairly.
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