I was going to bake today, but I think I’ll do it tomorrow, and get the kitchen all tidy today. Don’t attempt to bake five loaves of bread and tidy the kitchen at the same time. It’s heartbreaking.
It’s hard to describe what sugar soap is, but this is what it does. I’m not sure what you’d call it! It’s something I’ve used in the past for washing paintwork and walls in preparation for redecorating. You can make your own mix of sugar and soap but the ready-mixed boxes are better because you get less residue. Alternatively, you could settle for washing up liquid (detergent) and water. It pretty much does the same job.
Biological washing powder is the type that has all its enzymes still in it, whereas non-biological washing powder doesn’t contain any. Simple as that!
There’s a common European complaint that US laundry products suck. It may just not be available here. Here’s one company’s ingredient list. It looks like a combo of a regular (plant based, in this case, 'cause it’s an eco-friendly firm) laundry soap and an enzymatic cleaner like Nature’s Miracle (I don’t think anyone has released an enzymatic detergent for public use in the US, we reserve it for pet odors and hospital use) and an oxygen based bleach like oxyclean. Seems like a great idea. I don’t know of a US version, unfortunately.
It’s just a generic term for detergent powder, I think:
Sugar soap is an industrial cleaning material, with a variable composition and supplied in either powdered or liquid form. The powdered form looks like granulated white sugar, which explains the first half of the name, although sugar soap contains neither sugar nor soap. It is a mixture of basic salts, such as sodium carbonate and sodium phosphate, dissolved in water to form an alkaline solution. It sometimes contains an abrasive such as sodium silicate.
And, I see ScareyFaerie already answered the biological question. Yes, I think the reason we don’t know about it is that enzymatic cleaners haven’t been pushed for laundry use here. Yet.
They haven’t been pushed here and if they ever are, US clothing manufacturers are going to have to scramble–enzymatic cleaners are powerful enough to ruin a lot of the dyes used in clothing in America.
Is anyone but me and GingerOfTheNorth in both this thread and the weight loss thread? It all started to seem like too much to me–the regimen of losing weight AND the regimen of keeping the house spotlessly clean. One or the other has to slide… and I’ve decided it’s the housecleaning that will slide. I still keep the kitchen and bathroom sanitary, and do laundry regularly, but dusting? Vacuuming? When-ever. I totally don’t have the resources to worry about dust bunnies right now.
On the plus side, being on Weight Watcher Core involves so much cooking and preparation that I’m forced to really keep up with washing dishes, or I wouldn’t be able to cook!
OK, well, at least I’m not missing something I could be using. 
On the plus side, I discovered yesterday what washing soda is, and that you can get it in the grocery store–I think. (It’s sodium carbonate, and quite caustic, but otherwise a lot like baking soda.) I’ve always wondered; I thought it was one of those British terms and would turn out to be something different in American.
I should be on the weight-loss thread, but I’m not. I figure I can only do one big life-improvement push at a time, and it’s probably easier to change my cleaning habits than to lose a few pounds. I do go to the gym regularly (well, not this week, owing to contagious children) and I’m trying to cut down on sugar. I think I may have to actually join WeightWatchers :eek: but now I have two friends who work there, at least I’d have support.
Bathroom day! And it sure does need it; I gave my husband a haircut in there last night and there are little clippings all over the counter even though I wiped a lot up. He looks like he lost about 10 pounds, just by having less hair.
I’m not posting to the weight-loss thread, but I’m working on it anyway. I go to the gym 3-4 times a week, and yes, it’s a challenge to try to keep up both. But I’m doing okay. I usually spend at least half a day on weekends and at least half an hour on weekdays on the house. Of course, Himself is a big help. He does the dishes, and helps with the laundry.
(dangermom, I just noticed a month old email caught by my spam filter from you. Sorry about that. I just sent a reply.)
And I sent a reply, so check your spam bin!
I’m tackling some big jobs lately so I can’t get much of a day-by-day system in place yet - the clutter from the upheaval has spread out everywhere. This weekend I’m removing a huge, unused computer desk from our bay window area, getting it to the porch, and then out to the curb Sunday evening for garbage pickup. I’m replacing it with a few metal racks I bought at The Container Store; they’ll hold my base computer, modem, router, printer, and scanner. Crap from that desk is all over my dining room table, which will then be organized and put into my filing cabinet.
This past weekend I bought the aforementioned racks, cleaned most of the crap off the desk (throwing out what I didn’t need, the rest went onto the dining room table), and shredded several years’ worth of check carbons.
Future projects: Get two bookshelves from Ikea to replace crappy old ones, get them delivered, then install and put books in place. Organize DVDs so I can find movies. Get rid of gigantic sofa and put a new cover on our Ikea Poang chair to match the new bookshelves.
I want to get rid of the desk in my “office”, too. I never use it for an actual desk, so it just becomes a clutter collector. I want to get some short bookshelves to go there and put the router, printer, etc. on 'em and have some more storage space.
I’m about to start a large pile of dishes. Someday I’ll have a bigger apartment or a house, and thus a dishwasher.
The table has started to accumulate stuff again. I’m going to clean it after the kitchen’s tidier.
I was being dead good about going through my list every day and ticking things off, feeling generally smug and self-satisfied.
Then on Wednesday I had to get the baby out the house early in the morning for her monthly check-up and so our routine went to pot. The result of this was me not wanting to do anything when we got home, so I found myself sitting about, reading online and eating biscuits :eek: . I woke up on Thursday with very little energy, forced myself out of bed, worked through the list of chores and felt much better. I also didn’t raid the biscuit jar. AND I woke up feeling much better today.
Now I am wondering whether there is a connection between the two. Does doing the housework make me more energetic, does not doing it leave me a more apathetic biscuit muncher?
I think it may well be that way. Anyone else?
Yeah, something like that. Weird, isn’t it?
Today I shall tackle my eternal nemesis, the clutter counter, again. Clean up the dining room, possibly do the dusting, and also clean out the car. Which died yesterday, but is back to life today. So I have a bazillion errands to do, but I should also go to the gym…argh.
Hey, where’s all the slobs? I didn’t see the thread last night and forgot to do the dishes! I’m catching up now. Still the same; maintaining but not gaining. I’m thinking it’s like weight loss - you backslide, you plateau, and you advance
For the fellow-sliders, a message this week from Flylady: ‘You have no guilt: You are not behind!’
After all…tomorrow is another day. [/channelling Scarlett O’Hara] Tomorrow’s a good time to start over!
I think the answer is yes to both. Any exercise at all increases your oxygen intake and circulation and so you’ll feel more energized. So getting up and doing stuff around the house can certainly help.
I honestly thought I was a neat and tidy person, until I started this. (Joined FlyLady, although a) I’m not wearing shoes in the house, b) I’m not keeping a Control Journal and c) I will go to bed when I bloody want.) I started by shining my sink, and it made no difference! I’d thought it was going to gleam, but it just looked the same. I’d like to think that’s because I was always a good dish-doer, rather than that I didn’t do the bleaching thing properly. Or perhaps there’s just no way to get a stainless-steel sink back to being factory-fresh.
Coincidentally, we had to move some furniture in the bedroom, which required taking everything out of my armoire, so before I put it all back, I sorted through it. Now I have two drawers full of sweaters, while the shelves have only t-shirts, instead of the shelves being crammed with shirts and sweaters, while never-to-be-worn-again junk lurked in the drawers. One bag for Goodwill.
But then I started on the kitchen drawers and cabinets, and boy was that an eye-opener. I found my bagel slicer! And my squeeze ketchup bottle! Both of which I am now using. Half a bag for Goodwill, and a lot more for Jeremy-down-the-hall and his just-out-of-college roommates. (They only have one charred potholder; I gave them two more and a set of oven mitts.) I have so much room in the drawers now, I plan on rewarding myself with a Wonder Cup. Also, in the food cabinet, I found a kit for making chicken gumbo. It should still be good; all I have to get is the sausage and greens – we already have chicken. That’ll be my project for next weekend: once finished, I will divide it five ways and that’ll be Mr. Rilch’s lunches for the week.
In the bedroom, the hampers no longer have those deposits of never-to-be-worn-or-washed clothes (equivalent of Zsofia’s top-of-the-dryer). In the bathroom, all the lotions and bath oils have been pulled out to be used. The scented powders were an interesting case. One of them was pressed, the other in a canister that only released a few grains at a time. Reasoning that they were not going to get any more usable on their own, I broke up the pressed powder and decanted it into a plastic container, then spent an hour, off and on, shaking out the canister. It was a huge pain in the tuchus, but I only had to do it once. I think that applies to a lot of these tasks.
And last evening, I told Mr. Rilch I wanted us, in tandem, to declutter his desk. You should have seen his Tex Avery eyes. See, this was the obverse of the “it’s not clutter if it’s his” principle. Always before, I figured his desk was his business, and I wasn’t going to mess with it. Didn’t realize that he actually would appreciate my tidying it for him! But my reasoning was that I honestly didn’t know what to do with his papers, other than separating opened mail from unopened and like that. So tomorrow, we’re both going to go through his papers, and at the end of it, hopefully I’ll know how to sort them.
One of my besk friends cleaned my desk yesterday night. It took her two hours. She cackled happily with doing it. My desk was two feet deep with sewing/craft junk. It’s very clean.
I tidied the livingroom yesterday. I think I need to go on another throw-out binge.
You guys, remember when all this started it was triggered by my freaking out because I was throwing a birthday party for my son and my borther and sister in-laws (my wonderful but annoyingly *perfect *sister-in-law) were coming over, along with 20 of my best friends? And the place was a total wreck and I just couldn’t stand it?
Well, next Saturday is my daughter’s birthday party. This time both my mother-in-law and father-in-law (both of them have OCD - you could do surgery on any surface of their house without risking infection, and that includes the driveway*) will be here, along with perfect SIL and over 30 of my best friends! And you know what…I’m pretty mellow about the whole thing! Yeah, there’s stuff to be done. Yeah, we need to really mop with a bucket and rinse water and I’ll dust again on Friday. But there’s nothing like the amount of work there was a month ago. And I’m so freaking happy about it! 
*I shit you not, he scrubs down the *driveway *every day with soapy water and bleach unless there’s snow covering it. Winter drives him batty because he can’t wash his driveway. :rolleyes:
Yay! Good for you!
Soapy water? Driveway, Really? Wow. My dad only shovels if there’s three or four flakes of snows, and rakes if there’s a single leaf marring his lawn. Your FIL makes Dad look normal.
Yep. He dries it with the leafblower.
This is the house my husband grew up in, remember. There’s a reason why this issue has been the most challenging of our marriage. He thinks this sort of behavior is normal.
Today will be my last paper day! By the end of it, the last 2 1/2 ‘in boxes’ full of stuff to file will be emptied. My guess is 95% of it will be shredded rather than files (since these are the ‘oldest’ of the in baskets) but …you have to look at the stuff, right? Because who knows what might be in there.
After that, Paper Day will mean only filing what came in during the week, balancing checkbooks, paying bills. IOW, nothing to speak of! Hmmm, should I find a new Sunday task, or give myself the day off as a reward for my hard labor?