The Life and Adventures of Mel: Zen and the art of window washing

The rain is gone (for now), the breeze is light, and I have a beautiful 90 degree view of the green trees and patches of blue sky. I am sitting on a bean bag looking through floor to (almost) ceiling windows that I have just finished cleaning. I spent the day before last learning the art of cleaning windows and then cleaning the outsides. I spent today finishing all the outsides (between rains) and just finished the inside of the living room.

Did you know there was an art to window washing? I didn’t. It starts with a bucket of water and your preferred cleaner (apparently the pros use dishwashing liquid). Then you take your scrub brush and wet your first window down, letting the water do most of the work. You let your first window soak while you wet down your second window. Returning to your first window, use your brush and water to give the window a good scrub – loosening all those dirt spots. Next, take your squeegee (whew, glad MS Word knew how to spell that word!) and wipe it down with your towel. Then use your squeegee to remove the water from the window (removing excess water from the squeegee with your towel between wipes). When the window appears clean; use a corner of your towel to wipe the edges of the window next to the rubber lining/pane. Watch a line of water emerge. Use your squeegee to remove this line. Watch the line of water continue to stay next to the edge. Use your squeegee again. Watch your line of water thin out, but remain. Use your towel again. Watch as you smear a big patch of water down the edge. Use your squeegee again. Repeat until the squeegee flies out of your hand in frustration, or until you just don’t care anymore. Move to the second window and repeat.

:-p ha ha ha ha. Oh man, that cracks me up. Really, the process is similar to the above – only I figured out how to get most of that edge line to go away. When I was working on my bedroom door to the outside (yes, I have my own room with my own entrance!) I wanted to finish before it started to rain (again), so I didn’t worry about the water at the edge as much as I had for every other window. Would it really matter? Well, if you look through the window and at the edge, then yes it is obvious – a line of smear right there. However, if you step back and just look through the window like a normal person, the edge is hardly noticeable.

Oh – the reason for the squeegee method and not a dish cloth or paper towel? Armin swears that the latter methods leave small scratches in the glass. I guess when your house is half glass, such things would irritate you (if you were able to notice it through the rain spots that just marred your cleaning job). Would I recommend the process to anyone else? Only if they had floor to ceiling windows; and only then because I think it is an easier method for large/long surfaces than pure elbow grease (although the squeegee does use quite a bit of shoulder grease).

Having spent 2 days cleaning the many windows of this house (I still have 1/4 of the inside windows to do) I can tell you that I have no desire to become a professional window cleaner. However, I also didn’t let the work get to me. I know I spent more time striving for perfection than necessary (and it gave Armin a good chuckle to see), but since I really have nothing else to do I decided to go for quality not quantity. I have to work around 4 hours a day for room and board, so if it’s not windows it would be someting else. I picked up a free hostel book a time back The Snow Leapord. I probably won’t finish it as it’s not keeping my attention as well as I’d hoped. In writing about his Buddhist sherpas and their tendency to offer help cheerfully : “… since they are paid to perform a service, why not do it as well as possible?” I guess that’s kind of how I feel about life here (at a Zen Buddhists home).

One thing I did notice while I was working on the insides of the living area was a small bug on the outside. It turned out to be a tiny praying mantis!! I’d seen a mid-sized one earlier in the day, and a massive one 2 days ago – but this guy was SO small. I was happy that he had fewer cobwebs to get stuck in thanks to my efforts. I was also happy that he was there after I’d finished the outside. If he was there during the outside cleaning, he probably would be drowned by now. I had no mercy for anything living. Today, however, I actually saved a fat ugly black spider from the water bucket!

On other, less mundane news - I’ve done more than just work here. Armin has given me destinations to check out every day. I’d love to write about all of them (Rainbow Falls, Matauri Bay, and today’s Kauri forest), but don’t really want to bore people. So I’m just going to write about today (I really considered shortening the above passages, or posting two separate blogs, but decided if this turns into too long a missive, people can read it in two sittings ;)

The first part of my day was spent in a native forest. Kauri trees are the big thing here – they are massive trees that take ages to grow (oldest carbon dated one was 4,000 years old!). Of course, they were pretty much all cut down for lumber. How could they not be, they grow perfectly straight and shed their lower branches (leaving no knots in the wood!). I had stopped at the Puketi forest on my way to Armin’s on Sunday, but since it is so close I headed that way this morning - while the sun was still out (a strong cold front bringing rain and tornados was forecast this morning).

I started at the short nature walk trail I had taken previously. Only this time, I wasn’t rushed to be somewhere and I wasn’t distracted by the urge to take photographs of everything (since I managed to dunk my camera in a tidepool yesterday – my second camera lost to salt water in 3 months!!!! It’s a whole other story, that, while involving more details than how I broke my camera, isn’t extremely exciting). So, I strolled leisurely through the forest, conscious of the sounds and plants. My first trip through had been kind of eerie. It had been raining all day so I guess all the birds were in hiding because it was noticeably quiet. This time through, the birds were singing all around. At one point, I noticed a bird call that reminded me a lot like the Alaskan raven (kind of a cluop sound?). I quietly walked back the trail a bit and tried to find the bird – which kept singing and then cluoping and then somewhat cluck/barking, it was a bit odd. I really didn’t have much faith in finding the bugger – since the forest was so dense and palm fronds are everywhere obscuring the branches of other trees that are obscuring other trees. However, I somehow managed to spot the blue/black tui. I think what caught my eye was the white beard beneath his beak quivering and shaking as the tui talked. I watched for a really long time as the tui went from song-bird like phrases and then dropped in a couple of the cluops and the occasional bark. It went on for a while. Then it listened for a bit, fanned it’s feathers, and hopped to another branch. It did a complete loop-de-loop around the branch before settling on top and starting to feed. After a short time it flew into a palm tree and there was no way I was going to find it again. So I moved on. As I walked away, I heard the tui start singing again.

(( I just looked in an old Lonely Planet guide I picked up – it says about the tui (or parson’s bird – named for the white feathers on it’s neck) “The tui is perhaps the most beautiful singing bird in NZ. Parts of its song are an almost liquid call similar to that of the bellbird, but it adds clicks, grunts, chuckles and other sounds from its extremely large repertoire of sounds. It may also mimic other birds.”))

After the nature trail, I drove down the road to a 10 minute board walk through an area with prominent Kauris (the nature trail was more of a forest with lots of tree types, whereas the 10 minute walk had virtually all Kauris). I marveled at their size and their straightness. And to think, these are only young Kauris! The trail was well done. The board walk is to protect the roots, which are actually quite shallow for such big trees. There were several sign boards talking about the past – logging, natural history, and gum bleeders (the sap (gum) was used for varnish and linoleum). One section of trail was a straight lane laid out between the top and bottom of fallen Kauri. The trail was built over the section that had been harvested. It was built to the width of what the tree had been(enough wood was harvested to build 10 houses! – though what size houses they didn’t say). Another section of the trail was built in a circular platform, the circumference of which was the size of the largest Kauri ever measured. Really quite a neat place (and it’s wheelchair friendly!). The whole time I heard lots of birds. I couldn’t remember what the tui song sounded like (as the cluop and bark is all that ever really caught my attention), but I imagined I heard similarities in these birds song as I had heard from the confirmed tui earlier. I pictured all these little, white, feathery beards shaking and quivering as a bunch of tuis talked to each other. Makes me chuckle just remembering.