laundry magic!

today i wanted to wash a load of white laundry (i rarely sort my laundry; cold water uses less energy and the load rarely includes brand new stuff anyway) and i was kind of hoping to make my whites brighter, or some other bleach commercial-worthy sentiment.

here is the secret (the internet told me about this and it was correct!): one cup of baking soda dissolved in the water before you add your clothes, then one cup of vinegar added to the rinse water. it didn't even smell vinegary, but it got some blue stains out of several white items (that whole not-sorting-laundry thing is almost always just fine. almost.) and maybe it's my imagination but the whole load seems whiter and brighter.

and now you know.

can we all just agree that unclogging one's shower drain without the use of nasty chemicals is a pretty satisfying accomplishment?

as you may remember from the other times i've written about cleaning my shower, between the large amounts of hair that i shed and the fact that the person with whom i share my shower goes through an astonishing amount of soap, our drain is frequently kind of slow.

i try to pretend it isn't happening, and then when i get tired of rinsing the soap suds off of my feet and ankles at the end of a shower/footbath, i remove the drain cover and dig around below the drain for large disgusting hair clumps. i hate doing this. it is gross, especially after i mentioned to audra that i thought it was strange to find so much lint in the shower drain and she told me that it was actually dead skin cells. yuck. (i am pretending that this isn't true, because it is gross.)

i know that there are several products for dealing with this sort of problem, but i don't want to use anything toxic unless it's absolutely necessary. and it's not! because i successfully unclogged a really slow drain!

i put some baking soda down the drain as far as i could (and since the big box of baking soda that we use for cleaning and keep under the sink had started to clump up from getting damp, there were big satisfying chunks to use! yes!) and then poured some vinegar down after it. after that, i poured a pot of boiling water down the drain...and it all drained right down. aw yeah. (also, the baking soda/vinegar combination is very fizzy, and the noise it makes is nice.)

gosh i love my vacuum cleaner.

i know i've mentioned this already. last night, though, while i was having the usual low-grade nightmares that i've had every single night for the last month or so, i had this wonderful dream about vacuuming! i was vacuuming a bunch of things, including my room (family and friends, shut it!) and it was so great. i haven't had that kind of wonderful amazing dream in a long time. seriously, when i thought about it today i still felt all happy and glowy.

also today i kept thinking about how much i would like to vacuum the carpet in my office. not the entire building, just my office.

can we all just agree that new vacuums are exciting?

oh my gosh. the housemates and i just got a new vacuum and it has changed everything. (our old one was a 1960's model that weighed about 5,304 pounds and was a stunning lime green color, but it decided to go ahead and stop working. also, the hose liked to detach itself from the body while you were using it. i will let you decide if this was fun or not.) it is red and glittery, and it has a bunch of attachments for various tasks. my favorite one is a little oval-shaped brush, which does a great job on molding. there is also the power paw, which i like to call the "power paw. rarrgh!" which is adjustable—you can switch it to be horizontal or vertical, depending on your cleaning needs. the other exciting one is a duster that is made more effective by the power of science—it gets ionically charged or something, and then the dust flies to it. and then you put it back into its special little home, and the vacuum sucks all the dust off of it.

something else wonderful about the new vacuum is that it is bagless, so everything that you vacuum up gets sucked via tiny tornado into a plastic canister, so that you can look at it and be kind of grossed out and satisfied, all at the same time. today i vacuumed the area underneath my bed and both sides of my mattress, as well as some of the molding near my door and part of the kitchen floor. all of us have used the vacuum today. i want to vacuum my whole life.

can we all just agree that getting rid of things is satisfying?

dudes, i have a lot of things that i don't need. many of them are giveawayable (goodwill's about to get a couple megabags of clothes, and people to whom i send packages are totally in luck [superballs! shh...]) but others are not. like bank statements from 2000. all of them. sometimes i wish i had a paper shredder. or a fireplace.

but it's still great to be making more space in drawers and stuff. satisfying. yes. (so satisfying, in fact, that a new tag has been born. welcome to the world, satisfying. i will now have to go back and read all previous posts, to ensure that no satisfying post remains untagged. and when i am done, guess how i will find that?*)

*satisfying!

can we all just agree that there is a lot to say about scrubbing the shower?

because there is. my most recent adventures in shower cleaning involved a disturbing discovery: in addition to forming unholy alliances with the hairballs in the drain, as previously discussed, the soap has also begun conspiring with the shower mold! there are a few lines of grout that are covered with soap, from the windowsill to the edge of the tub, and while i was scrubbing the soap away, all the while thinking about how easy and pleasant it was to gently wash away soap, i realized that there was crazy black mold growing underneath it!

yes, underneath it! it was thicker and scarier and more aggressive-looking than the rest of the mold! and rather than being intimidated or even killed by soap, it just lives beneath it! in a symbiotic relationship! yikes!

can we all just agree that there is something extraordinarily satisfying about cleaning?

today i scrub scrub scrubbed the gross greyish soap scum out of the bathtub. the person who i share my bathroom with goes somehow through truly mind-boggling amounts of soap (like several bars per week!), and the soap he's been using for awhile now has an unfortunate tendency to break up into small pieces, and then it ends up all over the floor of the shower (also known as the bathtub) and then it forms unholy alliances with the astonishing amounts of hair that i shed each time i shower, and then the soap/hairball hybrids close up the shower drain and then the soapy dirty water hangs out while it drains super slowly and then there's crazy soap scum.

that is what happens.

so today, i discovered a fantastic combination of cleaning products for dealing with a super scummy bathtub: this crazy "orange-scented" degreaser called "fabuloso," (although it should be called "¡fabuloso!") and baking soda. the ¡fabuloso! loosens up the soap scum, and the baking soda makes it really easy to scrub it all away! woo!

so yes, i would recommend ¡fabuloso! and baking soda to anyone with soap scum in their lives. that is all.

can we all just agree that, although the use of environmentally sustainable cleaning products is an important goal, there's nothing quite like

spraying bleach on stubborn and gross shower mold and then watching it dissolve? don't worry, i diluted the bleach a little bit and kept the window open, but i scrubbed away entire mold continents with a toothbrush! today! it was really exciting!

(i'm ready to stop being unemployed now.)