Cleaning the AC

We have been turning our air con down by a couple of notches regularly for about 2 months now and just can't seem to get the cooling power we know it is capable of. Certainly when you come inside from the heat and humidity you can notice that it is working, but not as well as it could. I did all the usual maintenance things, cleaned the filters, dusted the unit, but it was still not pumping out the air.

Last night as I was trying to get cool, I remembered that just over two years ago, we thought the AC needed gas as it didn't seem to be working. Called out the ac guys - gas was fine , it was the little rotating fan drum unit inside the ac that pumps out the air was clogged and dirty. Some two hours and a couple of hundred dollars later it was working again.
My brain started ticking over I wonder if it was the same issue.

1. Turned it off at the mains.
2. Up on a kitchen chair and armed with a screwdriver I set to work. Off came the cover and into the bath for a scrub.
3. Wiped the condenser down gently with a microfibre cloth - Ew!
4. Then to maneuver something in to clean out the little fan. I'm sure the ac guy used a banister brush... but I couldn't see how I could do that without taking it further apart. First I tried our swiffer - it came out filthy but didn't seem to be moving the dirt. Next I tried a chopstick. Not really effective. Then I tried an old toothbrush, suddenly chunks of black fluff started to come out - like tiny evil dust bunnies coated in black oil. I managed to get most of the dust off the outside but still it looked filthy inside. So next I tried a plastic knife. At last it was really shifting the gunk. I painstakingly tried to scrape every little blade in that drum. I scraped and prodded for two hours. I'd get all excited when there didn't seem to be any more stuff coming out and think I was done when all of a sudden I'd be literally showering in the stuff. I decided eventually to give it up for the day and see how it went.



EW - look at the colour of the swiffer and the dirty fluff stuff. We were breathing THAT!

5. Cover back on and screwed up, filters back in and on at the mains.
6. More garbage floated out as we turned it on, but sucess at last. It's working efficiently again.

Our beautiful clean COOL a/c

My bill will  be in the mail.

Post Script: My husband suggested next time a try a small bottle brush, so I'll give it another go in a months time. For now we are pleasantly frezzing and have been able to put the temperature back up a few degrees

Alphabetising the spice rack

There are small pockets of sanity in my otherwise disorganised house at present, my linen closet is all orderly, my saucepan drawer is back in order and my spice rack is in alphabetical order. now there are some unkind people fairly closely related to me who think that this is actually a mark of insanity or maybe bordering on the edge of obsessive compulsive....
So why alphabetical order? I have tried other methods.

• Group into herbs and spices,  but then I start getting caught up in the Whole what's a herb and What's a spice debate. They all come from plants  - the leaves are the herbs and the bark the spices... but what about seeds - I regard fennel and caraway seeds as herbs, but nutmeg and aniseed as spices. No - all too difficult.
• Group according to recipe - so rosemary, thyme and sage etc go together, but what about those multipurpose herbs and spices like paprika, oregano, chilli and turmeric that seem to pop up in all styles of cooking?
• Group according to maker of bottle the herbs are in - looks nicer... but pretty useless
• Random shelving - most used at the top, least used at the bottom. This was how they were arranged but if you suddenly have a passion for Thai or Cajun flavours  for a month or so, but you normally cook mostly Italian and Greek this system gets wrecked.



Interestingly as I sorted my spices I found 3 bottles of paprika, one almost empty, one almost full and one so old that the paprika was brown, so clearly organisation is necessary.

My new labels - very traditional... but I may yet design something a bit funkier

Now all the spices are shelved alphabetically, I can see where the gaps have occurred (I realised my turmeric must be all gone as there was no bottle) and I can also see that the assorted bottles don't look all that pretty. I tend to reuse bottles and refill with packet herbs so I have created a template in word and I intend to soak the labels off my old herb containers and relabel them so that even if the bottles aren't uniform the labels are. I think I like the labels I have designed but if I get bored, it's a quick job to redo them.

Tadpoles

I love frogs.

When we first bought this house with its barren yard of weeds and a few dying native trees we were excited rather than daunted by the challenge of creating a lush oasis. 23 years later we have that oasis.  The trees have provided food, shade and leaf litter to attract wild life. Our yard now provides refuge to bird life, lots of lizards, insects, spiders, the occasional possum and to my delight frogs
We noticed that the frogs arrived soon after we began planting and watering the yard. Who knows where they came from, but soon we had some  rather large green frogs sitting on our windowsills eating insects. Every so often the population would drop, presumably when we have had visiting snakes but we noticed a gradual increase in numbers.
When the kids were younger we tried raising tadpoles. We tried to be responsible about it, only getting tadpoles from the local area and only taking them from puddles that were drying up. We had limited success but what I really wanted was for frogs to choose our yard to breed in. We installed a pond quite a few years back. We found we had to put fish in and maintain fish very quickly unless we wanted mosquitoes breeding. The fish population grew quickly and I put in water plants and lots of rocks with spaces under them to create a haven for frogs and we would frequently see frogs around the pond, but no tadpoles. After cyclone Yasi last year the pond developed a crack, drained and we lost all the fish.
I still wanted the pond, so I bought a liner to re-establish it. I had kept a bucket of sludge from the bottom of the old pond and all the rocks had a healthy coating of slime so it didn't take long for the pond to balance out,  and I noticed one day the pond was alive with mosquito larvae, so I bought new fish. It was hard getting any that I wanted. The cyclone had caused a large number of ponds and aquariums to lose fish, so there was very little to chose from. I wanted guppies but had to settle for mollies. They cleaned up the mossies in  a day and they looked to be doing well but within a fortnight I had lost all but one. We lost one in the first day but then had a sudden drop of temperature overnight. At the same time as I was restoring the pond we had a large coconut tree removed from the yard and this had effectively shaded the pond. Now the pond was getting afternoon sun and the algae was going mad so I decided that I would replace the mollies with goldfish in an effort to keep down the slime. 6 months later and one by one I was seeing the goldfish die. At the same time we were getting a number of very emaciated toads dead in the pond. We suspect that the toads either had a virus or more likely were eating the ratsak that our neighbour was putting out in his shed and they were coming to us for water. We then suspect that the goldfish were nibbling on the dead toads and ingesting the toad poison. Eventually we had no goldfish left, so this time I went back to guppies. The goldfish hadn't really solved the algae problem and I still really wanted tadpoles and I knew that I'd have no chance with goldfish.
Jump forward another 2 months. I noticed that a water spider had moved in and that we were still getting toad fatalities but the guppies were doing fine. One day we noticed a clump of eggs. A week later I walked by the pond and thought that I saw a guppy swimming strangely. I looked again - it was a tadpole. I looked closer, there were at least 30 tadpoles in there.  I was concerned that they were toad tadpoles, but after some research I decided that they were most likely frogs. I was overjoyed. Last night as I went to water the plants there were two tiny baby frogs sitting on the papyrus, still with a remaining stub of tail, still mostly brown, but definitely froglets. Success at last. Our pond is a worthy breeding spot.