If Jens Voigt was a country, his exports would be Pain Suffering & Agony

[Jeff Gross]

With her marriage, she got a new name and a dress.



Floss Your Teeth (Cog Teeth, that is)

I was talking to Tom Emerick about how hard it is to clean my cassette. I have read about using the edge of a towel or rag stretched between two hands to reach into that dark and dirty, but just as I get a good back and forth motion going, the rag snags on the cog teeth. Tom's great suggestion was to use a thin strip of t-shirt rolled up. Hey, now that is better than sliced bread! Cut and tear a strip from an old t-shirt about 1 inch wide. Do you have an old t-shirt you can spare? Twist the strip into a string, and floss away carelessly! If you have heavy gunk build-up, scrape it out first with a small screwdriver. Thanks, Tom.

Local Area Network in Australia: The LAN down under.



believed safe - I ride right next to the parked cars to give drivers as much room as possible. I am pretty good at checking cars for drivers who might open their doors - oops, I hate tinted windows and high seatbacks! No lane is too narrow to share with a motorist - after all, roads are built for cars as their main user. I have to stay out of the lane because cars will run me over. Anyway, all motorists are really good about giving me three feet clearance, except for those stupid SUV drivers who don't know their vehicle limits. I bike safely.

believed rude - I ride in the middle of the lane if there is no bike lane and the lane is narrow (less than 14' wide). I make cars cross the lane line to pass me, which does irritate some drivers. I think those are the same drivers who would brush my arm if I squeezed over to the right. I do think about being rear-ended, but I figure I am more visible out here, and have more presence as an obstacle to be avoided, than an unobtrusive gutter-cyclist to be ignored. I bike safely.

A boiled egg is hard to beat.



Q: I'm trying to prep my home to put it on the market and hold open houses. Do you have a recommendation on how to hide a cigarette smell other than quitting?

A: Too many sellers focus on the visual aspect of staging their home, underappreciating the multisensory aspect of a buyer's home tours. I suggest that you shift your way of thinking about the issue.

You can't hide smells -- you need to eliminate them. Buyers who don't smoke and never have will be able to detect the smell of cigarettes, pets and their messes, and even intense home cooking smells, often from their first step into the home. So it's essential to approach your challenge as it really is: to remove or eliminate the odors, versus simply spraying something on top of them. To someone who is sensitive or allergic to cigarette smoke, the only thing worse than the smell of smoke is the saccharine-sweet, fake floral scents someone has sprayed right on top of cigarette smoke odors.

Take odor-specific steps to vanquishing smells. What you must do to truly eliminate an odor depends on the odor itself.

With pets, often a thorough vacuum, carpet cleaning and washing any upholstery, curtains, blankets or other textiles in the home can go a long way, as well as making sure litter boxes or other potty areas are outside or in the garage. If a pet has repeatedly had accidents on a particular spot of floor or carpet, it might require replacing the carpet or refinishing the wood floor.

Cooking odors are similar, and can often be vanquished with a good scrubbing down of kitchen walls and floors, ceilings, and even range hoods and vent fans/filters; painting the kitchen walls and ceilings is not overkill. Ask your paint department for paint designed to cover odor (KILZ). Once this is done, it's essential not to simply keep cooking with the same pungent ingredients unless you are willing to go back and reclean the property.

But smoking is the big daddy of all odors. Smoke can get into every crack and crevice. Contractors have even pulled the hardwood floor boards in places because they were damaged and reported the overwhelming smell of cigarette smoke in the floor joists under the floor! Repaint the entire interior with that KILZ paint. Recarpet and refinishing wood floors. Smart landlords have smoking bans on the interiors of their rental properties.

Bring another nose to bear on the matter. Don't go it alone. Our noses simply become used to smelling (and stop detecting) smells once we have smelled them for even a relatively short period of time. Check in with friends and relatives, asking them to do a nose check on your home. If they do say your home still smells, don't shoot the messenger - their honesty is why you trust their friendship.

Show me a piano falling down a mineshaft and I'll show you A-flat miner.

Bike lots,
Jeff Gross
jeff@fullcommitment.com