Tag: home

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One of the things I would change about my apartment is the metal sink in the kitchen (seen above). Every time I look at it, I think it is out of place, particularly when you go into the bathrooms with the nicer porcelain ones. I realize that it is probably not real porcelain but it is close enough in look and in touch for me to give it a pass. It looks like how I imagine a bathroom sink should look.

When I look at the metal sinks in the kitchen, my first thought is this is out of place. It looks wrong. I am sorry for being such a snob but when something looks so out of place from everything else in the apartment, there can only be one good reason for it being there — it is cheap. The contractor threw out all design considerations to save a buck. To Hell with how it looks.

Now I am all for keeping costs down but there is a difference between looking cheap and finding inexpensive materials that still give a quality sense and also fit into the general design of the apartment. This isn’t how this kitchen sink makes me feel. It looks cheap and out of place.

Finally, and most importantly, it is more difficult to use. In order to wash and rinse in one step, the sink needs to be divided into two separate parts. One side for washing and the other side for rinsing. This metal sink is one big long deep trench. I guess I am supposed to wash everything and then go back and rinse them afterwards but this seems like a lot of extra work for me when I can do both tasks in one step with the divide sink.

The other problem with it being too deep and too long is I use an inordinate amount of water to fill it for comfortable washing. This becomes an ecological drawback sense we are being told that the Colorado River is running out of water and do everything we can to conserve on water.

The absolute worst aspect is cleaning the fucker out. In an oval sink, I just sprayed water to the sides and the debris fell effortlessly into the drain. With a square sink, the debris is constantly getting caught in the corners so I have to dig out the debris in order to get the sink clean.

In conclusion, I really miss my porcelain, oval and divided sink.

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Bob and I moved house after 26 years in one place. Our old house was spacious. Having all of this space meant we had to fill of this empty space with stuff. This meant lots and lots and lots of stuff.

Stuff I had packed away in the hidden crevices of my house and had completely forgotten about. Stuff that I have no earthly idea why I bought or what purpose it served. Pictures of people who I no longer remember. Pictures of the Eiffel Tower — from several different trips to Paris. The same tower, the same picture, a different year. Books I will never read again. 300 plus CD’s that I haven’t listened to in 26 years because I no longer had a device that played the music. Checks from 50 years ago. Business cards from a place I no longer worked at. Old documents from a job I no longer had. Paper clips, sticky notes, pencils found in almost every drawer except the drawer where paper clips, sticky notes, and pencils should have been found. Technology that was dated and no longer used. Old flash drives that I haven’t accessed in 20 odd years. The amount of stuff we had was mind boggling.

We had successfully filled those empty spaces, no doubt about it. Now we needed to purge them before moving. Filling trash bags after trash bag. Collecting boxes for Goodwill Charities. Saving the really valuable stuff for a future garage sale. We could then move because we had less stuff.

When we arrived at the new smaller apartment, we still had too much stuff. We had too much furniture and the furniture we had was too big for our smaller space. So we purged some more. More trash bags. More Goodwill. More future garage sale items.

And still we have too much stuff. So we will probably have another purging event soon.

I realized two things. We spent all these years acquiring stuff and all this stuff did was weigh us down. It limited our options because we, of course, had to have big place to store all of our stuff. The other thing is I don’t miss any of it.

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Back in July, I introduced my first household tip, I am now ready for my second. The gap in time should give you some hint on how seriously I take household chores.

Bob and I are getting ready to move so we are getting rid of our unused possessions at a prodigious pace. One of our tasks in this process is a garage sale. I know Tom and Garage Sale would seem like contradictory concepts as there is nothing more than I hate then talking with strangers and selling shit but a guy has got to do what a guy has got to do.

So yesterday, we found some sterling silver utensils which we forgot about on a frequent basis. We usually discover them when we are trying to get rid of stuff. Decide to save them because they are silver and have sentimental value. Before they get tossed back into the drawer, I polish them in order to make them ready for the next time we use them. Which is admittedly rare, I mean do you really want to use silver when tossing a salad that you are going to then eat in front of the TV. It seems a bit over the top.

Which means they get polished, thrown in the drawer and promptly forgotten until next household purging event. Of course, they are tarnished and require polishing.

Any way, we found these tarnished beauties and we were faced with the question — do we keep or do we garage sale. But before deciding, I had to polish which is depressing because I hate polishing silver. So I do what I always do when faced with an easy but hateful tasks, I smoked a joint, got suitably mindless for this mindless task and polished those mother fuckers.

I am not sure why. I worked really hard on this. At least twenty minutes, maybe even a half of an hour. and the results were somewhat disappointing. First, the silver on the left turned out a lot better than the silver on the right. The silver on the right, from my eyes, don’t look like they’ve been polished at all. Both had stubborn stains I couldn’t remove and the blemishes in the silver would make me think twice before bringing them out for Thanksgiving Dinner.

Which brings me to my question. Why does anybody uses silver? It doesn’t look all that great and it is difficult to take care of. Stainless steel is much cheaper than silver and much easier to clean. I could have washed all the dishes from a 4 person dinner in the time I polished these 4 utensils and 2 of them, in my humble opinion, still look like shit. What a waste of time.

If I have any say in the matter these are going into the garage sale. My judgment on polishing silver is don’t.