Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps

A few months ago I somehow discovered a new favorite product of mine, Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps. I honestly have no idea how this stuff showed up on my radar, but I am sooo glad it did.  From DrBronner.com:

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Shedding Some Light On My Perfectionism

Working in a living history museum where modern conveniences like light switches and flashlights are non existent, we must go the period appropriate throw-back route and use things like oil lamps and candles. For portability we put candles in lanterns kinda like the one in the picture, only not with  big honkin' pillar candles as shown. We use and abuse these candle lanterns, especially during the Christmas season program called Lantern Tours.  They end up absolutely covered in wax and soot, the glass sides are broken, etc.  It's quite the hot mess.

Anyway, a charity group is renting our establishment this weekend for an event and they requested to use some of our lanterns, i.e. someone needs to clean them beforehand.  That someone would be me...

Day 1 of cleaning lanterns I did have help, a co-worker took the job of cleaning the metal frames themselves by scraping the melted wax off the bottom with a putty knife then giving them a bath in industrial strength degreaser to remove the soot residue.  We might have gotten a little high off the fumes.  I set to task getting the wax off the glass panes themselves.  To do this I modified a little trick I learned years ago to get wax out of clothing: Pick off any big hunks of wax, then place a paper bag over what remains and iron the spot.  The wax will instantly melt and absorb into the bag.  Ta da!  For the lantern glass I didn't have paper bags so I just found an old thin cloth rag and laid that over the panes, ironed, and ta da again, clean glass!

Day 2 of lantern cleaning was me alone scrubbing more frames. More getting high. At the end of this day, there were 21 totally clean lanterns ready for the event.  My boss said that should be enough, and I breathed a sigh of relief thinking I was done.

Yesterday was Day 3.  My boss texted me around noon and said that the co-worker in charge the rental had just informed her that the renters wanted a total of 50 lanterns for their event.  50.  5-0.  As in, more than double what I had already finished.  Oh boy.  I drove on down there and got back to work, but this time I knew I wouldn't be able to be as thorough as we had been before.  Working alone I had time to de-wax, but not to de-soot.  By the end of the day I had chipped the wax off the 29 additional lantern frames, but still had to go in today to de-wax the glass.

Day 4- (Today) I de-waxed the glass and was able to leave with 50 completed lanterns ready for use this weekend.  The only thorn in my side was that the final 29 never got de-sooted (is that a word?)  In my mind I had a mini-fail because I couldn't get them as clean as they could be (and the first batch was) due to the time constraints I was under.

Later this afternoon my boss texted me again, and part of our convo went like this (she is white and I am green):

Apparently even my boss knows I'm a FlyLady Flunky/perfectionist at heart...

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End Of Week Wrap-Up and Surprise Comments!

No BabyStep tonight (I know, you were sooo looking forward to it.  I'm sorry.), but I did want to do a quick end of week wrap-up before I head over to my parents' house tomorrow morning.  It's not for anything fun, like Memorial Day festivities.  No, my car lease is ending next week so I have to go with my Dad to get that process started and figure out what I am going to do about a car come June 9th.  It's going to be a long day/weekend of decisions, number crunching and paperwork.  Can't you just feel the joy oozing from my pores? (That was my attempt at sarcasm, by the way.)

Wrap-up Topic #1:  The Battle Against the Ants has ended (I hope), and I won!  Thanks to those who left comments with suggestions on how to get rid of them, and although it wasn't actually one of your suggestions that did the job, one of them did lead me to something that worked. 

This morning I was reading the suggestions and decided to start  with sweet-smelling dish soap set out near the spot the ants were coming into the house.  Apparently after a few days the ants are supposed to be attracted to the smell and will climb in the soap, only to drown in the grease-fighting goodness.  Interesting.  My roommate has some pink-grapefruit liquid dish soap sitting by the sink, so I set a saucer of that out on the balcony.  Not one to just take advice and run with it, my Google-holic self started searching the Internet for others who have gone this route to see what success they had with it.  While getting blissfully lost in Internet-land, I found myself on a website that had several ant repelling/killing methods, including the soap.  As I scrolled down the page another method caught my eye: plain 'ol black pepper.  Hmmmmm.  Supposedly putting a line of this along the doorway would repel the ants.  I had this too!  Two ant-killing/repelling strategies must be better than one!  I grabbed the pepper and poured some in front of the door, balcony side.

Now, for the last few days I have come home to find ants all over the apartment and my cats going ape-*hit trying to chase them down.  Today I walked in and found:  nothing.  Not a single ant.  I looked out on the balcony and couldn't see any there either.  So far so good!  I checked the soap-dish and there weren't any downing victims there, so I have a good feeling it was the black pepper that did the trick.  I know I'm a little weird, but I actually feel kind of bad the soap-trick didn't have a chance to work! So, thank you to whoever suggested it, but I'm sorry I didn't set up my experiment in a professional manner to find out if it worked or not!  Moving on...

Wrap-up Topic #2:  I had an interesting and exciting commenter today!  Apparently NikkiStarr, producer of FlyLady's radio show reads my blog!  My blog!  She left me a message on an older post, and here's what she had to say:

"I live 2 doors down from The FlyLady, and I promise, she is far from perfect and she openly admits it. It's part of the reason I listen to her advice. I can't take advice from someone who is perfect because I'll never be. I also have the privilege of producing her radio show. She is the kindest person I have ever met in real life. She has never called herself a guru, and her only mission is to help others. If tough love is needed she does provide it, but always in a very kind way. She's never been angry at anyone on the air. She doesn't tolerate whining and she NEVER whines herself. Also, the What Part of Baby Steps don't you get tweet was a serious question as we're always striving to make sure we communicate correctly. We should have included a ? at the end. We often post the No Whining picture if we've received a lot of whining posts or emails. Just a reminder that you can do anything for 15 minutes. Most of the time I whine longer than it takes me to just do what I'm whining about. That might just be me though. I struggle to embrace the "Do it now" principle. Thankfully, there is no perfect in this system.

I have been enjoying your blog and wish you the best on this journey. I can't wait for you to have your own home! No matter how these baby steps turn out that will be the best! I hope it happens soon. I'll keep reading and hoping it does! <3"

My first thought was "Someone who actually knows FlyLady reads my blog! Holy crap!"

My second thought was "Someone who actually knows FlyLady reads my blog... Holy. Crap..."  

I mean, this woman speaks to FlyLady on a regular basis.  Has she mentioned my blog to her?  Does FlyLady know I exist?  Does she know about some of the more tongue-in-cheek things I have said on my whiny days?  Does FlyLady know I whine?  Oh God, FlyLady knows I'm a whiner and  that I write about her.  FlyLady is coming after me, I just know it!

I kid, I kid.  Seriously Nikki, it's great to know that you follow my blog and I appreciate your comments!  I hope you continue reading what I have to say and take the snarky (I love that word) things I say in the manner they were intended.  Which would be snarky, but lighthearted. ;)  Now please, tell FlyLady not to hurt me!

Gotta go finish my BBR, see ya on the flip-side!

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BabyStep 21: Ask FlyLady, And Attack of the Giant Ants!

This is going to be a quickie post, it's already 9:00 PM and I try to start my Before Bed Routine around 9:30 so I get everything done before my 11:30 bedtime.  Whoa. I totally sound like I drank the Purple Kool-Aid, don't I?

Today I moved on to BabyStep 21: Check Out Ask FlyLady.  This is a section on her website where she answers a question from other Purple Kool Aid drinkers her followers once per day.  Today's question and answer was about FlyLady's Swish and Swipe habit, but since this is also an upcoming BabyStep I'm not really going to say anything about it right now.  I read it, that's what's important.

In more important (to me) news, our apartment has been taken over by an army of ants!  These aren't little buggers either; my roommate says they are Carpenter Ants that are more interested in eating wood than they are in stealing any picnic food we have laying around.  We live in a historic home, so there is plenty of woodwork in this place for them to munch on!

Roommate also said that this happened last year too, and nothing he did got rid of them.  I used to get ants every summer in my last apartment and had luck with pouring white vinegar along the area where they were getting in. This ALWAYS worked in the past, so of course I tried it first here.  I assumed I would pour the vinegar along the doorway to the balcony (current portal of access), and poof!  they would be gone, leaving me to bask in my all-natural-remedy glory and gloat (just a little) to my roommate. Boy, was I wrong!

These ants must be tempered in nuclear-waste or something, because they pretty much laughed in the face of my vinegar acid-bath.

"What?  You think you can stop US with your pathetic white vinegar?  Muwahahahaha!  We laugh in the face of vinegar!" Bum bum, bum bum, bum bum bum... Nom nom nom... (That was the sound of the ants marching on and eating more wood.)

Never has vinegar failed me when it comes to ants, so I was pretty shocked.  All we can do now is step on them to keep the numbers down until we find something that will annihilate these little devils. It's really gross too; some of them are so big juice goes squirting out of them when I squish them. Sometimes we see live ants carrying away the dead bodies of their fallen comrades.  It reminds me of the scene in Forrest Gump where he carries all the injured soldiers out of the jungle.   

These are all the ants my roommate killed in about a 30-second period.  Blech.  Oh, just so I don't sound totally callous, I would like to add that if I see an ant that didn't die with the first squish and is still squirming around, I do go back and give it a mercy squash to put it out of it's misery. Any suggestions as to what might actually kill these things?

P.S. I made it within my time-limit, it's 9:29 now.  Time to drink more Purple Kool-Aid.

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Odds and Ends and Poofy Hair

I have a little catching up to do!  I have not moved on to the next BabyStep yet, as it involves setting a specific bedtime and I did not want to do that on the weekend where I was free to stay up late/sleep in a bit.  I start back to my regular work week tomorrow so I will be establishing the bedtime starting tonight and will report back on this tomorrow.

In other news:

1.)  I fell a little behind with my routines over the weekend.  I am noticing this is becoming a pattern.  It's just a lot harder to complete my morning routine when I don't have a certain time I need to have it completed by.  When I am working I find it easy to set myself to task and get it all done before I leave the house in the morning.  On my days off there isn't that cut-off point, and I tend to get lax and not do everything.  I could create a self-imposed deadline, but I just don't wanna.

I did get right back on track last night, and I realized how much smoother things go now that these routines are taking shape.  I no longer have to worry that I'm forgetting to take something I need with me to work, because now it was pre-packed the night before.  I no longer have to sit on my couch/bed with the sheets all a muss because I made it that morning.  I'm finally seeing enough improvement around here to feel a little more motivated to do my routines regularly. 

2.)  Although I haven't officially begun Zone work yet, I did feel a little ambitious the other day and took a crack at the bathroom.  Since I moved in this apartment the shower curtains have been driving me batty; they were covered in soap scum that rubbed off on my hands anytime I touched them.  They belong to my roommate so I couldn't just toss them and buy new ones, so instead I decided to wash them in the washing machine. 

Before I did so I Googled around for info, and found that people have actually had good luck with washing plastic shower curtains in the washer and have used several methods to do so.  Some use hot water (theory being it relaxes the plastic so it doesn't shred in the machine), some use cold (they are afraid hot will melt the plastic.)  Some used bleach, some used white vinegar, and some used plain old laundry detergent.  Some combined these one way or another.

I ended up using warm water with laundry detergent and bleach. I also threw in some some white kitchen towels and washcloths to act as "scrubbers". There was no damage to the curtain, and it came out looking a million times better.  Here is the before:

Yuck.  Soap scum city.  Now here is the after:

Much better!

3.)  This has absolutely nothing to do with FlyLady or housekeeping, but I want to share anyway.  I work for a living history museum, which means I dress in 19th Century Costumes and portray life in Ohio for that era.  Mainly I do the Civil War (1860's), sometimes the Ohio pioneer era (1815ish), and only a few times have I done late Victorian (1890's.)  Today I had to do 1890s for a Victorian Tea we hosted, which meant I had to put my hair up into what is called a "Gibson Girl" style.  This is not easy, as my hair is only just past chin length.  I practiced for hours yesterday trying to get it right, and it still took me over an hour to do it again this morning.  Luckily, I found a hairspray that made this all possible, called Freeze It.

To give you an idea of the look I was going for, here are a few pics of an original Gibson Girl, Evelyn Nesbit:

There are many variations to this style, but the key factor is the poof, or "cloud" of hair piled on top of your head.  This is my problem; some of my hair at the nape of my neck isn't even long enough to each that far up the back of my head to be gathered into the knot on top.  The Freeze It took care of that no problem and just held it in place with no bobby pins or anything.  It also has "brighteners" in it that actually made my hair look healthier than it really is instead of giving me that hairspray-dulled look.  I actually found this by accident at WalMart while I was looking for something else, and almost passed it up.  It comes in a gold can and only cost $3.00, so I figured it couldn't be much good.  Luckily I pulled out my iPhone and looked up some reviews, and everyone said they loved it.  I agree!  For this amount of hold and the low price, it can't be beat.  I go through a lot of hairspray doing my hair for work and this will not only get the job done, but not break my budget as well.  I beats the expensive salon spray I used to use for over $10.00 a can!  Here's a pic:

FYI: This shows the Original formula, but I am using the Mega Hold version.  To wrap this up, here are some pics of me with the Gibson Girl hairstyle.  The back loops were done partially with my own hair, and only one small hairpiece.  Sorry for the yuck quality on most of these, they were taken with cell phones:

Setting out the lemonade.

Working with the cast iron stove.

Being silly and wearing a gentleman's hat on top my my Gibson Girl hair poof.

12 hours and a hard day's work later, the hair hasn't moved! (God, I look tired!)

The back.  I'm sorry I have to go brush this out now!  Good night!

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