My Ecofriendly Side Takes Another Hit

I tried, y'all.  I really did.  But once again, I've given in to my need to be, you know, CLEAN.

I feel so dirty.

You might remember the Stank-Smelling Laundry Fiasco of 2012.  What I thought I had written and apparently only did so in a feverish, surfactant-laden dream was that the STANK came back after the bleach thing and I bought something called "Lestoil," which was touted by all of these folks on the interwebs as THE  THANG WHAT SAVED MY HUSBAND'S CLOTHES.

No.  No, it wasn't.  It was, however, the thang what made my clothes smell like a combination of Pine-sol, lighter fluid, and stank.  I stood in the middle of my laundry room, sniffing sheets and wailing imprecations to the Filing Cabinet.  Then I beebopped over to Publix and bought some damn Cheer.  And some color-safe Clorox 2 to go with it.  BOOM.

My clothes no longer have the stank.  I have not looked back.  Word.

However, this was just a minor little blip on my green journey, right?  I still use washrags instead of paper towels, you know?  I use baking soda and Dr. Bronner's to make a soft scrub for cleaning.  I am back to making my own bread.  (Please ignore the Rolo pretzel sandwich I just ate.)  And up until a week ago, I was using eco-friendly dish washer soap.

I had considered making my own, but following the SSLF2012, I decided that my life needed surfactants and given that dishes are, you know, greasy, I probably needed a good lot of them in order to have clean dishes.  I did, however, switch to a Seventh Generation liquid from my Cascade because I love my Seventh Generation dish soap, so I figured I was good.

Then Will quit smoking and started drinking coffee.  And it got cooler in the mornings and Jeffrey started wanting tea more often.  And my cups started looking like toilet bowls from movies in the early nineties starring Ewan McGregor, a prepubescent-looking Owen McKidd, and Rumplestiltskin before he got all freaky and weird-eyed.  (Also, I just realized Rumplestiltskin was in The Full Monty.  And my brain exploded.)

What?

Right, gnarly coffee-cups.  Y'all, it was gross.  And while I realized it was just staining and I could scrub it off with a little liquid detergent, that struck me as tiresome and inefficient.  Also, I would think of toilet bowls and heroin and gag a little every time I scrubbed.  But I forged ahead.

Then my silverware started looking iffy.  Not DIRTY, per se, but a little grimy.  A little filmy.  A little maybe not as clean as I would like, but easily dealt with by applying water and my thumb.

I started wondering if it was the dish washer stuff I was using and so I switched to another natural product, this one promising to remove tea and coffee stains.

IT BROKE ITS PROMISE.

Not only that, but the silverware went from iffy to straight-nasty in two days and my plates were like, "You know, we think we're going to hang on to these bits of food that you aren't washing off before you put us in the dishwasher so that if a zombie apocalypse happens, you can totally eat off of us and we'll be HEROES."

THAT'S RIGHT, PEOPLE.  MY PLATES STARTED TALKING TO ME.

Then last week, our pipes backed up.  Now, this happens once every six months or so because the builder who built our neighborhood is notorious for doing things not exactly correctly thirty years ago when he was building all of the neighborhoods in Dingleberry and some pipe or other that leads to the septic tank isn't big enough to handle the waste products from our house and some filter or other gets backed up and our laundry room floods. Generally, these back ups fall around summer vacation and Christmas.  It's all very festive.

We called the plumber, who'd been expecting us, and the guy came over and took out the gadgets I now refer to as Maude and Claude and got to work on the pipes and filters and other stuff while I baked bread.  When plumber dude was done, he came in and said, "Well, we're all done."

"Great," I said.

"Man, there was a lot of grease.  I mean...a TON of it.  I never SAW so much grease.  It was as if all the grease in your neighborhood was collected in your pipes."

Y'all.  Y'ALL.  I'm so tired of the word "grease" that I could throw up on it.  I'm so tired of the word "grease" that I don't even want to hear the word "baklava."  I'm just SICK of grease.  And grease-related issues.  I proceeded to launch into a tirade about green cleaning products and surfactants and builders and pipe-size and Lestoil that took a good five minutes to wind down at which point in time, the plumber blinked.

"Well," he said.  "You sure have thought about this a lot."

I handed him the check and followed him out the door so I could drive to Publix and pick up a bottle of Cascade.

One wash, my friends.  That's all it took to get my coffee cups looking like not something Ewan McGregor would dive into. My silverware sparkles now.

My.  Plates.  Are.  Silent.

Look, I WANT to be green.  I want to save the planet and be all earthy and stuff.

But I also want any fantasies of red-haired Scottish actors to involve kilts and wind-swept moors and NOT chatty dishes and dirty needles.  

Priorities, people.  Priorities.