eruthros

I sometimes feel I've missed entire pockets of knowledge growing up -- that there are all these things nobody told me about taking care of a house or about personal care or about makeup or whatever, probably because they thought my mom would tell me.

So! In that spirit, here are some household + body care things I have learned in the past few years:

1. If I put skin lotion on right after I get out of the shower, it makes my skin happier and less dry! I have been going to dermatologists since I was eight, and not one of them has mentioned this -- they all gave me steroids and asked me if I used lotion before bed, which I did. And then someone told me this, and it's like a miracle, it works better than using steroids in the morning, it's cheaper, it's better for me, and I can use the steroids as-needed.

2. Cleaning venetian blinds is really hard. The easiest way is to take them off and spray a hose at them, or wash them in a shower, but if I'm too lazy for that those floor-cleaner pads work, and so do disinfecting wipes.

3. If you have a slow-draining drain and you don't have or don't want to use chemical drain cleaners, try pouring in a cup of baking soda and then several cups of boiling water. If that doesn't work, try it again and pour some vinegar in after the boiling water. (Some people say put the vinegar in after the baking soda and then seal the drain, but I've never tried that.) If that doesn't work, agitate it with a plunger, and then run more boiling water. If that doesn't work, call your landlord. :)

4. I have very pale eyebrows, so pale that they're basically invisible, so an eyebrow pencil always looks kind of hilarious. However! I now know that I can use a mascara brush dipped in eyeshadow to just color the hair in the eyebrows. Who knew! (Probably you.)

5. Butter keepers are amazing.

6. If you have ever had to wear a brace that holds moisture in and found some red rash under it with little raised dots? Surprise, you might have diaper rash! If you don't have allergies to creams, some over the counter steroid cream can help. And you can prevent it (sort of) with diaper rash cream like A+D. It smells like lanolin, but it makes life better.

If you have adulthood hints you've recently learned or amazing and brilliant solutions -- things that make cleaning windows easier or that help you figure out which pants are likely to fit or that fixed your broken cuticles or whatever -- please comment and share! Eventually I'll learn how to be an adult by osmosis.

1) I need the election to happen now, because of how I spend my days reading blogs and violently skyrocketing from joy and sniffles to despair and anger to complete bafflement and hilarity.

I mean, seriously, firefox's new most-visited feature informs me that, after from igoogle (my home page) and you guys, all of my most commonly visited pages are either political blogs or stuff for the super sekrit project.

2) I now have early-morning physical therapy appointments twice a week. So I'm getting up when it's still dark, going up to the office to be hit with sticks, and I have to pay for it. This hardly seems fair.

3) I cut myself on my bialetti coffee maker this morning. One of those nice deep gouges in the knuckle. How is that even possible?

So last night I did some laundry, mattress cover and the awesome thick high thread-count flannel sheets my mom bought me as a Christmas present last year. And I made the bed...

... and this morning I couldn't get out of it. It was warm. It was cuddly. That sort of bright, cold light was shining through the window, muted by the trees still on the leaves, and it was clear that outside the weather was frosty and cold. I was warm in bed; I had perfect sheets and a down comforter; I wasn't going anyplace.

I didn't go back to sleep, but I did just snuggle up for half an hour and go "mmmm" while the back of my brain was going "READING! You have reading to do. Do you remember the reading? Hey! You!" I was like "mmmhmmm."

Perhaps I should be using sheets made of, like, hair shirts or something instead. Because clearly this is going nowhere good. But oh, how perfect is a morning with thirty minutes in bed, not even reading a novel, just watching the trees move outside and enjoying the warm flannel sheets?

***

PS: Sierra Trading Post is now doing ANOTHER 20% off all shoes before that coupon, so. Tevas and Joseph Siebel and Ecco, oh my.

Okay, y'all. I Netflixed Supernatural because so many of you seemed to be interested in it, and I watched the pilot, and you'd better swear to me a) that it gets better (and girls eventually have, like, characters, and sometimes horror cliches don't turn out the cliche way) and b) that people (by which I mean, Dean) stop mumbling.

If there are closed captions on the DVDs, I can't find them, and WinDVD can't find them. Amazon.com says it's got 'em, but where the hell are they? GOD. Like we've all got perfect hearing and won't be continually rewinding two seconds, all "what did he say?" Actually, I need a special skip-back-two seconds button.

On the other hand, I hear episode two has Callum Keith Rennie, so at least there's that.

***

In other, unrelated news, I turned on my shower tap to discover no cold water. Now, no cold water's an unusual problem, but one that you can usually work around -- the apartment in Philadelphia had such a meager amount of hot water, with the temperature set so low, that I could've run the water for a minute and then jumped in, probably. Here? Here, not so much. Here, I sometimes nearly scald myself washing dishes. If I run a bath set not even slightly above the middle of the dial, I can't get into it for a good ten minutes at least -- which is saying something, because I'm an avid hot-tubber.

So I turned it off and tried again. Still no luck. Tried the sink; it had cold water. Solution: I ran a hot bath -- and when I say hot, I mean hot -- wandered off for about a half an hour, and then went and took a still quite warm bath. But it seemed a problem, one I should call the landlord about, so I left a message.

And then I went downstairs to start some laundry, only to discover standing water on the floor and the washing machine full of water. So I mopped up the water, and left the landlord another message.

Turns out? That what I halfway suspected was true. Yes. Someone in the building left the door to the laundry room wide open (I suspect my doesn't-know-how-to-live-in-an-apartment upstairs neighbor), and since it is not directly heated -- it's a basement, heated by the hot water heater, and by the pipes running up to the radiators -- well, some of the cold water pipes froze.

I should've known, because I remember noticing that the floor was exceptionally cold recently; it's frequently cooler than I'd like, but I walked into the bathroom and went "fuck! Ow!" But I didn't think about it at the time, thought it was probably just me overreacting to the cold again after so many nice forty degree days.

So anyway, the landlord's coming out to check out the pipes and see if they're still frozen, or cracked, or what, and when I can expect to have cold water in the shower again or do laundry, and I'm seething at my upstairs neighbor -- who also is the person who started a load of laundry this morning and then left it. Pah.

So today I have injured myself in such a way that pressure hurts in TWO places. I managed to slice my finger on my nice sharp knife while doing dishes, which makes this the first time that I've done such a thing. So I have a bandaid on, but it still hurts and I keep trying to figure out how to type, and also it hurts in hot water. LOVELY. I didn't need that piece of flesh, apparently.

And then! I was going to bed last night and somehow stepped funny and suddenly... owww. I used to have this happen all the time when I was a kid, something in the ankle that's neither a twist or a sprain, and I'd shout and tear up and make awful faces like Rodney McKay and then gingerly limp around until all of a sudden, wham! It was better. Well, I haven't had the better yet. So I'm gingerly mincing around the unshovelled walked on campus, continually hoping that this next step will be the step. Also, it kept me from sleeping well, because I kept bumping it and waking up shouting.