Agency Happens

Early this morning the following slogan came into my liminal thoughts:

Agency Happens

This intrigued me.  What I had in mind was the sociological concept of agency, i.e. the ability of people to take action to further their own interests. Consider it a response to the more well-known phrase, "Shit Happens". The concept it conveys is "You make your own shit."^1,2

Syntactically it looks like a bumper sticker, so I decided I'd put the following on Facebook:

Today's thought: 

Agency Happens

(If you put that on a shirt and sell it I want my cut.)

This amused me because here I'm contradicting the concept I'm presenting by abnegating my own agency in declining to produce and market the shirt myself.

While chortling at my cleverness I realized there's a second interpretation following the principal/agent distinction in behavioral psychology that essentially says decisions are easier to make for, and when made by, other people, as the indirection diminishes the feeling of responsibility and subsequent dithering about what to do.³ In essence, if blame can be directed towards another the shame of making a bad choice is lessened.

For that I'd have wanted something more like this:

Agency Happens
(If you put this on a shirt and sell it I want my cut.)

which is exactly what one would want to see on a shirt, both in formatting and in change of the pronoun. It might even be more understandable, as there are companies that act as agents in producing such things. But the presentation weakens the original concept, which I still like best.

Sadly, social media technology failed me in both cases because I couldn't see how to get centered or quoted material into a Facebook box in the time I had available. In fact, I'm not happy that this blogging software doesn't let me control italicization within the quote blocks.⁴ Nonetheless, here it all is.

---

1 Within structural constraints, of course, since full agency is a privilege of the dominant members of a society.^↩
2 No, I'm not going to pursue the semiotics of that phrase, although it's worthy of consideration in its own right.^↩
3 "Am I over-analyzing? What if I'm over-analyzing!" Yes, I thought you'd understand.^↩
4 No, I'm not going to override the style sheets to do so. I've already spent too much time trying to make footnotes that I'm pretty sure won't work in the final output.^↩

DIY problem solving

Last summer, when I had an arborist out to deal with a huge dead branch on the silver maple in the back, he pointed out that the lawn care folks' weed whipper was scarring the trunk of an ash tree in the front. He suggested I lay down mulch around the base of the tree, to stop things from growing so they wouldn't need to do that.

So this spring, I determined a reasonable diameter, calculated square footage, and hied off to Menards for ten bags of mulch and some edging to contain it. I then marked the perimeter with six garden stakes and spent an hour with a mattock taking off the grass, trying not to cut through the surface-level roots of the tree. Fortunately, this was April, and it wasn't too hot out.

At that point I found out that the edging needed some stakes I hadn't been aware of, and was told by a helpful neighbor that I should also lay down some sort of mesh that would stop weeds from growing up through the mulch. After more thought, I decided I wanted to use some sort of brick instead of edging (the edging would have to be dug deeper into the sod, again hurting the surface roots), piled the mulch bags in the garage, and made a shopping list for pavers and mesh for the next trip to Menards.

And so the problem sat for the last two months. (Yard work is not how I care to spend my spare time.) This morning, the lawn maintenance crew arrived while I was fetching the paper. I saw an opportunity and decided to solve the problem another way:

I asked them not to hit the tree with their whipper.

Annals of Homeowner Stupidity (DIY Remodeler Division)

I bought the house I'm living in now last February; nice "rambler" (ranch)-style place, one owner since it was built in the '50s, one block from a decent 24-hour grocery store. All in all, pretty content.

Except for the kitchen, which apparently was remodeled by the children of the original homeowners when they inherited it and prepared it for sale. The original 1974 electric range, reset in the cheapest formica you can find; an exhaust hood so low that steam condenses on it and drips back down into the food; the heating register face-up on the floor right next to the cooktop; the fluorescent tube lights set into a drop ceiling. Gah.

At any rate, Tuesday morning I notice water dripping into the window. Outside, it's clear that there's a huge ice dam built up at an northwest-facing inside corner of the roof, with water running under the soffit and down the side of the house behind the aluminum siding (and don't get me started on that bit of stupidity). I go up in the crawlspace, and other than a small pile of snow on the insulation under one of the mushroom aerators, the insulation doesn't look completely useless.

First step: keep the water from soaking the window, and dripping into the sink. Solution: Funnel duck[1]-taped to the shade, drain hose attached, see illustration below.

Consulting with my friend Lester, who knows his way around building insulation, the clear indication is interior heat reaching the roof, causing melt, hence problem. Clued in, I remove the drop ceiling in the kitchen and poke my head up.

The blessed dears[2] had cut away fifteen inches of ceiling from the outside wall into the room, for a length of about ten feet. They cut the top four inches of the inside wall out, exposing both the wall studs and ceiling joists. Then they put in a six inch drop ceiling to mask their sin. Can't see it in the photo, but there's daylight visible to the right of that inset light fixture.

So: one pair of hedge shears, one roll 6.5in R19 unfaced batt insulation, and a half hour measuring, cutting, piecing together, and trying to get the drop ceiling tiles back into place. Hope this is the major cause, and the dripping will stop; it's 36F outside right now, so I won't know for a while. Even if that fixes it, I'll still probably have to pay somebody to steam off the hundreds of pounds of ice next spring, so it doesn't all melt back into the house.

Next summer, if my Tucson and St. Paul houses ever sell, maybe I'll be able to replace the kitchen with something in which one could actually use a funnel for its intended purpose in cooking, rather than to divert leaks.

[1] Not, in fact, "duct" as I had thought for years. That's another post.

[2] This is what's called a "euphemism". The actual term used, elided out of respect for the sensitive, was more pithy, though not particularly original.

dehumidifiers and blatent ignorance

The basement's a bit damp even when the downspout works and the water doesn't seep in through the walls and flood the floor. And a friend tweeted a reference to an article about dehumidifiers. So I start browsing.

One of the things I find is this article, which includes:

... since we're setting it up to drain automatically we can buy the smallest one they make. The pint size is only relation to the capacity of the tank and has no bearing on the compressor size. They're all the same. So at least we saved money buy getting a smaller one this time (30 pint).

Oh, for *#@'s sake.  Is it something about the web that encourages people to make categorical pronouncements that are demonstrably wrong, or does the web just allow people to expose their ignorance to a wider audience?  The "pint size" is a dehumidification capability measure indicating the number of pints extractable by the unit in a 24 hour period.  It's related to the reservoir capacity only in that something that sucks out 70 pints in a 24 hour period probably should hold more than a quart.  See this, and download the Energy Star spreadsheet from that site to compare the efficiencies of different models and manufacturers: .  Look at the Lowe's web page to verify that the 50 and 70 pint/24h models from Frigidaire both have a 17 gallon (136 pint) reservoir.

Assume she needs to remove 20 pints (9.5 liters) per day, about right for a "wet" basement of 1000 square feet (see the calculator).  Her model does 1.4 L/kWh; there's a 45 p/d model of the same humidifier that does 1.8 L/kWh, which would save 1.5 kWh/day or about $4.60 per month.  Could be as much as $55 per year.  For my case (12.3 L/day, 8 months per year), the 70 p/d Frigidaire model would pay for the $96 price difference from the 25p/d model in less than 14 months.

This sort of thing makes "expert" an expletive.  At least it irritated me enough to learn something, though the value of the time I spent is probably nearly the value of the cost savings the knowledge enables.

poem

So I wake at 530am on the first day of a business trip with a poem (of all things) half-formed in my head and screaming to be written down.  Huh.  Well, it's here.  Might as well deal with it.

The sun won't look at you any more.
She buries her head in the fluffy white clouds
and all the cheerful calls of the birds
and industrious buzzing of the insects
will not draw her forth.

I envy her resolve.

Cost/benefit analysis: contracting lawn services

Shelley asks:

So what's their hourly rate? Nine minutes is an awfully small divisor.

Fair question.

Nine minutes to do the yard.  This is probably a best case; it was the end of the day and they undoubtedly wanted to get home.  You need to assume travel time as part of the cost; if the customers are closely located, it's reasonable to estimate that doing my yard added fifteen minutes to their task list.  They do it weekly, so let's say one hour per month.  They charge $175 per month; that includes special cleanup during spring and fall, which certainly takes longer.  Still, with two people, let's say it's about $85 per hour.

As long as we're analyzing:  By invoking the Google we can conclude that a standard residential mower has a swath of about 21".  Commercial ones that seem to be about the size I saw through my window are about 52".  Given overlap, it'd take me three passes for every one they took.  Furthermore, even if I bought a mower that diverted power to its wheels, I'd still take a lot longer to traverse the yard once: the guy really flew.  So say I'd be pushing (2-3mph) at a quarter the speed he was driving (8-12mph).  Round down to be conservative, and in combination of the width and length figure it'd take me ten times as long to cover the same ground.

So: 1.5h per mow.  Add a half hour for trimming the borders and scraping the impacted grass off the mower for storage.  4 mows per month says 8 hours per month, absolute minimum.  My time is worth more than than the $23 per hour plus hayfever I'd get by doing it myself.

Plus, they actually do the job; I'd put it off as long as I could, be grumpy when I knew it needed doing but didn't want to, and resentful when I finally forced myself to do it.

Seems like a deal to me.

The power of professionals

The house I now live in in Roseville is on a quarter-acre lot (0.26 acres, according to the flyer).  The house itself has a footprint of about 1300 square feet, and there's no garden, so there's an awful lot of grass.  I tend to allergies and hayfever, so the thought of mowing that just sent shivers up my spine.  I contracted it out to a company called "Worry Free", who helped me last year with shoveling the snow at my previous house (another task I'm not thrilled about, but in this case really couldn't do since I was gone 3 out of 4 weeks).

The other houses in the neighborhood have similar sized lots, and I see the poor bastards out there on the weekends.  The renter to the east, toiling away.  The husband to the west, same.  Both pushing their nice gas-powered mowers with about an 18" swath, back and forth, forth and back, for the better part of an hour.  Imagine doing this thirty years ago with a manual rotary mower.  Life these days is better, but still: No.

My guys?  Nine minutes.  Timed it.  Pickup pulls up with the trailer.  Guy 1 gets out, grabs the weed whacker, and takes off toward the fence and the shrubbery, trimming.  Guy 2 pulls down the back gate, disappears inside, there's a roaring noise, and out he shoots on a self-propelled mower with a good 4-foot diameter swath, him standing on a little two-wheeled platform that drags behind.  Thing's gotta do ten miles an hour on the straightaways.  Turns on a dime; reverses same.  Three minutes in the front; just under five in the back.  Back and forth, forth and back, out the side gate to the street and up the ramp.  Pull down the trailer door and off they go.

Nine minutes.

Awesome.