JESUS SOAP SAVES!

Bottle of Miracles!

At this point, I should point out that I hail from a long line of Germans.  Its not surprising then that I have more than a healthy dose of OCD when it comes to cleaning and organization. When I was a kid, one of my favorite activities was cleaning the garage with my father.  I would sit for hours sorting nuts and bolts by size and shape, paint by color and gloss, lumber by genus and species.  I'd divide the screws into phillips and flat-head categories and make sure all the screw-drivers were lined up in ascending order according to height.  It was the best!  To this day, nothing makes me happier than a perfectly organized garage, but because I don't have one, I have to make do with other obsessions.

Why do I have so many teal shoes?

Though its true I've color-coordinated every last drawer, shelf and closet space in my little one-bedroom, and test driven just about every product at the Container Store, I've recently had to up my game to really make things interesting. Oddly, its these newfangled online delivery services that have helped me develop other pastimes. For example, I derive extreme pleasure from timing the delivery of household products so they arrive just as I'm using up the last bit of the old stuff.  There's little room for storage, so ordering precisely what I need for the month has become an obsessive game -- will the Tom's toothpaste arrive just as I squeeze the last little bit from the tube?  Will Cricket's dog food last until Friday when the Wag.com order arrives?  Can I water down the dish soap until its back in stock on Fresh Direct.com?  Its a sickness, I know.  But its also unbelievably satisfying.

For me, Saturday is cleaning day.  Always has been, always will.  Saturday begins with a leisurely breakfast, a pot of strong, black coffee and then its time to tackle the kitchen, the bathroom and the floors before getting on with my life.  Sweet, dear Cricket Jean isn't entirely housebroken yet, and while I'm obsessive with the Nature's Miracle and Swiffer 7 days a week, it still needs a good, thorough floor-washing every Saturday. (I don't care what anyone says, swiffering is NOT the same as washing a floor.   It just kinda moves the bacteria around and gives the illusion you're doing something productive.)  Anyway.  I was all kinds of excited because there was a sale on some organic looking cleaning fluid at the Whole Foods this weekend.  It had this cool, vintage looking bottle and all this tiny writing on the label.  Plust it was lavender scented which just so happens to be my preferred cleaning fragrance for the kitchen.  Oh yeah.  I also have this weird thing about scents -- cleaning products used for the kitchen (dish soap, floor wash) CANNOT smell the same as cleaning products for the bathroom.  I automatically equate any scent used in the bathroom, no matter how flowery or delicate, with a toilet bowl, and the thought of smelling a toilet on your silverware is enough to make me gag.  Lately, I've been using that Mrs. Meyers Geranium-scented toilet cleanser and antibacterial spray in the bathroom and saving the Lavender for the kitchen, so you can imagine how exciting it was to find a huge bottle of that lavender stuff on sale.  I washed the entire floor almost immediately and it literally smells like a miracle, its so sparkling clean, I can scarcely believe it...but when I looked closer at all that teeny tiny writing I found out I just washed the floor with Dr. Bronner's Castile Soap, which is pretty much just body wash with a whole lotta Jesus propaganda thrown in.

If you're curious, here's a link to a very helpful article about all the Jesus Jumping -- footnotes included!

In the end, I decided I don't care that I wash my floors with body wash because this is the loveliest my place has smelled since I moved in.  There are far worse things in this world than washing your floors in Jesus Soap, people.