“If you can approach the world’s complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things. Keeping that awestruck vision of the world ready to hand while dealing with the demands of daily living is no easy exercise, but it is definitely worth the effort, for if you can stay centered , and engaged , you will find the hard choices easier, the right words will come to you when you need them, and you will indeed be a better person. That, I propose, is the secret to spirituality, and it has nothing at all to do with believing in an immortal soul.” [emphasis mine]
(No, this domain was not just purchased by a squatter. It’s a tale of my trials and tribulations, and ultimately success, with getting a broken fridge fixed.)
Our refrigerator – an LG LFC23760ST model French-door fridge – suddenly lost all power on Monday night. At first I thought the circuit breaker had been tripped, but it was still in the on position when I went to reset it. I flipped it back and forth anyway, to no avail.
I pulled the fridge out and tested the outlet it was plugged into (by plugging a light into it) – it was fine. It’s not a GFCI, so there was nothing to reset there.
I called LG support, which took a long time but finally scheduled a repair company to call me in the next 24 hours to set up an appointment. For this lightning fast service, I had to place a hold on my credit card which would have a late cancellation fee taken out if I cancelled the appointment less than 24 hours beforehand. I was hoping I could find another technician to come before the LG-contracted one, which made me nervous to put the hold on the card. It turns out I needn’t have worried because 1.) no one wants to work on LG refrigerators (a lot of them are subject to a class-action lawsuit about bad compressors and 2.) the one place I found that agreed to take a look at it (only because my problem didn’t sound like a compressor issue) was scheduling appointments several days out.
While waiting for the LG call (that never actually came, btw), I turned to Youtube to see if I could fix it myself. And let me tell you that “white guys explaining how to fiddle with refrigerator bits” is a whole genre. Knowing about the compressor issue, I started watching some videos on how to check that, but I eventually got to videos focused on fridges that suddenly die – no electricity, no lights, nothing.
One red herring that I want to rectify for all the rest of you out there. In the Owner’s Manual and even the technical manual, there is mention of a way to turn the refrigerator OFF (<– they always capitalize it) with an on/off switch. The manuals note that only some models have this switch. And this made sense to me as a possible culprit because my daughter had been opening and closing the freezer right before it conked out – maybe she had hit the switch somehow. But, I want to state for the record that the LG model LFC23760ST does NOT have such a switch. There is no ON/OFF switch.
The problem turned out to be a blown fuse on the circuit board that controls the fridge’s functions. On my model, you have to take off a metal panel on the back to access this board. There’s a fuse on the board that is the first one to be blown usually. You can see exactly what I’m talking about (and how to replace it) in this video. These are glass tube fuses. So, I popped out to the hardware store and picked one up.
Now to install it. I tried removing the old fuse from the connection, but it is fixed in there. So I had to build a little wire bridge from one side of the existing fuse, through the new fuse and back to the other side of the existing fuse. I don’t have a soldering iron, so I attached it only using electrical tape – a less than ideal solution, but I was careful and there’s little chance of interference with other components on the circuit board due to the placement of the fuse. It started right up after I plugged it back in, as if nothing had happened.
I popped the cover back on that circuit board area, took the opportunity to clean behind and underneath the fridge (including dust on the area where the coils are; another possible culprit for symptoms like this), and pushed the fridge back into place.
I felt pretty pleased with myself for having avoided LG $400 flat fee for service with $7 for a pack of fuses and some electrical tape. And, I was able to do all this before everything spoiled in the fridge! I’m going to ride this high all through the weekend. 😉
I found this guide from Evolving Web on using plain language in communications to be insightful and nicely presented. The biggest takeaway for me was that plain language is inclusive – it’s actually an accessibility issue. This hadn’t occurred to me, even as someone who has always tried to promote and incorporate accessibility in anything digital that I have produced.
The guide is careful to note that this doesn’t mean dumbing it down. Making things too simplistic can actually obfuscate meaning. Randall Munroe’s Thing Explainer – wherein the author attempts to explain objects as complex as a Saturn V rocket, e.g., using only the 1,000 most common words in English – is an interesting exercise, but half the joy of reading it comes from already knowing what the things being described actually are. As an educational text, it fails to convey important distinctions, nuances and specifics.
Flowery or even convoluted prose may have its place in literary works, but even there it should be used as efficiently as possible to achieve its purpose. In a fiction writing class I recently took, the teacher stumped us when they asked if there was ever a reason not to use the most efficient way of expressing something. Have a grandiloquent character? Want to minutely describe every detail of the setting, or an action, a la Nicholson Baker? Fine, but you should still do it with the absolute minimum of words to convey that characterization or tone.
To get your message across, use the plainest language possible.
We (should) all know by now that we need to take decisive action on the climate crisis. But which actions?
Most Americans think that recycling is the answer. It’s definitely not.
Jonathan Foley from Project Drawdown has used SCIENCE! to figure out where are the points where we can act right now to leverage our impact realistically, quickly and cheaply. To that last point, Foley says “these cheap climate solutions are the best bargain in human history. They save money now, and prevent disaster in the future.”
I’ll take that deal.
The TLDW is that there are lots of climate solutions out there and we humans should focus on ones that are
- Evidence-based: proven interventions, not wishful thinking or start-up hype
- Cheap: as he says some of these are not only not expensive, they’re cheaper than what we’re doing right now. This is also important so we can do lots of these solutions
- Ready to go: there’s a time-value to carbon so it’s better to act now than later. He compares it to investing. Like the adage goes, the best time to invest was twenty years ago, the second best time is now. (Not included in the adage or talk is that waiting 20 years for the perfect investment is stupid.)
- Targeted: there are geographic hot spots where we can focus our efforts to get the most impact per effort.
- Beneficial: we can use science to ensure that our climate solutions are good for people, too – especially in terms of equity and justice.
- Aligned: here he means matching our climate fighting efforts with the relative importance of each sector. Electricity is 21% of the overall problem and transportation 5%, yet two-thirds of private investment goes toward transport (in the form of EVs). The U.S. government, on the other hand, focused two-thirds of their investment on electricity, to the detriment of “food, ag and land use” or “industry” for example.
As Foley concludes, “We still have a narrow window of opportunity to stop climate change, but we’ve got to make every day, every move and every dollar count like never before.” With science, we can.
Like >90% of the world1, I’m a caffeine user. I enjoy a cup or two in the morning, but I often find myself thinking about the cost of a cup.
I’m not talking about the $4 a day that everyone apparently is spending on coffees – that they could be saving instead to become a millionaire in… just 75 years2. I’m talking about the cost to the climate of getting that cup from the ground to your hand.
And you might be surprised by the answer. It’s not ditching the single serving k-cups. And it’s not even the plastic bags most beans and grounds are sold in.
I personally like buying coffee in paper bags. This is easy enough buying beans from the grocery store, but I’ve also been (slowly) putting together a list of Portland-area roasters that sell their coffee in paper. But packaging is really not the variable to try to fix if you want to have low-carbon coffee. (Though it is throwing another flattened-coffee-bag-sized grain of sand on the landfill problem.)
Transportation might seem like a big source of carbon from coffee, and it isn’t a trivial part. But, since most people live in countries where coffee is imported, there’s no big difference in the choice of coffee. Unless you consider – gasp! – not having coffee at all a choice.
No, the biggest contributor to coffee’s carbon footprint is how it’s grown. So for a person trying to have their morning fix, the largest difference you can make to lower your coffee’s GHG emissions is to make sure it is “shade grown”. Shade grown coffee is grown in the, well, shade of trees. This is similar to how coffee bushes grow naturally in their jungle ecosystems. There are some different types of shade-grown practices, but you don’t really need to worry about that – they are all better than clear-cutting, plantation style coffee growing.
Oh, and did I mention it helps with preserving biodiversity and lowering chemical pesticide and fertilizer use? Cuz it most definitely does.
So, next time you buy some coffee, reach for the shade-grown. You’ll have it made in the, um, penumbra.
- I’m getting this figure from Michael Pollan, but I’m not sure where he got it. And when I look up how many people consume caffeine around the world, I get links to a few studies that say it is the most widely used psychoactive substance. None of them seem to offer figures for what percentage of the world population are caffeineheads. ↩︎
- How long it takes to save $1mil with 5% return and 3% inflation, from this calculator. ↩︎