Blowing and Drifting - Christopher Tassava

Last week I fully joined the standing-desk trend. I had bought a tall “cafe table” for my office a couple years ago, and intermittently used it as a desk, but last Tuesday I finally moved my computer to that table.

Standing Desk

A week into the experiment, I’m ready to say that it’s been a great arrangement. About the only problem so far is that my table doesn’t have enough surface area for much besides the computer and my iPad, which I use as a second screen. I can’t, for instance, easily put a printout or a magazine on the tabletop to consult while I work.

On the other hand, standing has already had several benefits. I’ve found that I’m much more likely to move around more, whether walking across the suite to get a glass of water or just to pop out of my office to chat with someone else. Even when I’m at the desk, I’m hardly stationary: I’m constantly shifting my weight and position. Being upright seems to help a little bit with my ability to focus on my work, too, but that might be due to the fact as that I’m closer to the screen than I had been while seated at my desk.

The biggest payoff, though, is that I am far less sore and achy at the end of the day than I had been after a day of sitting. Even on days when I go to the gym, my legs and back feel good – warm, loose, energized – when I pack up to head home. That’s a pretty nice surprise.

Musing about possible April Fool’s pranks, Julia asked me how hard it would be to rig a bucket of water to fall on someone’s head. Thankfully, she and Vivi went in another, tamer, drier direction. (The dress color and the last line in the description are the jokes.)

Fashion Fairy

Friday morning, I was finishing up some work before heading to Julia’s field trip in the next town when Shannon texted me:

Washer just stopped itself with a load of clothes and water in it and there is a burning smell!

I had a few minutes of before I needed to be at the field trip, so I raced home to investigate. The laundry room reeked with a smoky smell and a load of damp laundry was sitting in the tub. Shannon said that the machine had started again on its own after she texted, but she’d stopped the cycle, worried that the machine would catch on fire. (Having had popcorn burst into flame in our microwave a few weeks ago, she had some reason to be worried.) Without much time to spare, I just unplugged the machine and said we’d have to look at it more later.

That evening – after Julia’s field trip and after she started throwing up with what turned out to be a 24-hour flu bug – I used some YouTube videos to figure out how to open the washing machine cabinet, hoping that I would be able to tell if anything was obviously wrong. Though the process was fairly straightforward (if laborious), ultimately I couldn’t tell what, if anything, was wrong. My first and only hypothesis – that a belt was failing – was eliminated when I found that the washing machine was a “direct drive” model, meaning it had no belt.

Disassembled Washing Machine

So I cleaned the hideously dirty interior of the cabinet, swept and mopped the floor, and reassembled the machine (scraping all the knuckles on my right hand in the process). The next day, Shannon put the machine in heavy use, doing all the usual laundry plus the laundry created by Julia’s sickness. We expected the worst, but nothing has happened so far. It’s a zombie washer.

Vivi wrote this newspaper while I was traveling earlier this week. Click on it to see a more legible version. It’s worth the time:

Vivi’s Newspaper