Product Junkie, Part Deux

I'd concluded last week that there was a problem in my "junk" wiring for products. But it does not stop at cosmetics, lotions, etc.

A few weeks ago, I went into crazy clean mode, Autumn-style. It was two days of scrubbing, dusting, scraping, pummeling, Q-tipping, oven-cleansing, vacuuming, "waxed on/waxed off"-ing, fun. Not really.

Truth be told, I HATE cleaning. Loathe cleaning. It is the bane of my existence. When I was a kid, I never did an exceptional job cleaning because I knew my mom or sister (it's her b-day today, btw…Happy B-day, Lynn!) would take over. My sister is a clean/neat freak. We shared a room, much to her chagrin. I never could understand those people that find cleaning, "therapeutic." "Tra la la…oh, I was having such a bad day, but dusting, scrubbing the floor and re-organizing made my bad mood fly away." Riiight. I can think of 100 things that would help a bad mood that do not include a mop, a dustpan or any other household item…Alas, my world is different today, being an adult and all. While I dream of having a cleaning person, its not going to happen for a while. While I wish my sister lived closer so that her disdain for reorganization could be put to good use, I have to suck it up and just do the dirty deeds (done dirt cheap…tee hee). And when I am ready to do it, I have to just be in that mood and run with it, no interruptions…

But, what gets me through, time and time again, are my beloved stock of products.

When I was younger, I started out with the products I'd grown up with, Ajax, Windex and a few other odds and ends. But when Pine-Sol ("smells like a Carolina pine forest") started wreaking havoc in the pantry of my parents home, the smell stuck with me…it meant, "Clean." But after a few years of smells, you start to realize (much like people) that things need to actually be cleaned and that sometimes, "smells" are simply covering the real funk that lies beneath.

Sometime in my early 20's, I was friends with this great English girl. She, her husband, brother and his wife had an amazing apartment near a set of L tracks in Chicago. I went to their apartment one day for dinner. The fumes entering their apartment nearly knocked me out…they cleaned everything with bleach. No name, nothing special, but good ole, American "kill the germs and everything in its path" bleach. They then also told me to use rubbing alcohol if I could not get my hands on bleach. I jumped on the bandwagon. My bathroom in Chicago had a window that had been painted in countless times, so with no fresh air, but a war mentality, I would scrub the bathroom top to bottom with a bucket of water and bleach, sometimes alcohol (always with rubber gloves). Then I would pass out. People would come to visit and I would give them surgeons masks. But it was clean.

Then came the Lysol fix. I sprayed everything with Lysol. It’s a way to become germ-phobic, even if you're not. If you sneezed, I sprayed. If you coughed, I sprayed. (Funny, I never linked together that spraying and hacking might go hand-in-hand) . I also discovered Glade plug-ins and all sorts of other "cover-ups." I did clean, but the smells made everything seem just a little cleaner. But the cornucopia of smells all running together…gag. My Lysol days ended with environmental fears of adding to the depleting ozone.

Much like my special cabinet for toiletries, my cabinet for household goodies is ever growing. Three different types of counter wipes. Two types of organic sprays, orange scented, mind you. Next to those, three almost-nuclear sprays that could wipe out a small town. I have beads that you put in the vacuum cleaner to gain a citrus scent. There are three to four sprays for different "air" scents. Clorox bleach spray (my favorite cleaning product in the world), Scrubbing bubbles, all of the Oxy products and Febreeze all run a close number one for me.

And I wonder why I have a million allergies.

P.S.

Oh, and the other thing that helped me through this last cleaning jag?? Jack.

No, NOT Jack Daniels, Silly Wabbit's…

Who's Jack? Jack FM is the newly formatted radio station at 93.1 (Los Angeles). It has new songs, old songs but mostly, all good songs. Barely any commercials, barely any talking and sincerely, the best format since my WXRT days (ironically, 93.1 in Chicago).