Cleanliness is next to....?

Good info. Hamburger! (They didn't know what tepid meant???) No wonder hospitals are a dangerous place to stay.


Sounds like you need to smudge, BlaiseDaley.



You need a lighter, a smudge stick, like one of those in the photo, and either a large shell or a small pottery bowl filled with sand. Open every window in every room of your house or apartment, and if security allows, every door. Starting in one corner, I usually start at the front door, light the smudge stick and blow on it 'til it is really smoking... nudge the smoke into each corner... close the front door... go to the next room (I go to the right, just so I can keep track) and nudge the smoke into every corner of that room, continue into the next room -- catching any ashes in the sand pot/shell as you go. Smudge every room, cupboard and closet. Literally push the smoke into these dark corners. <You can chant if you've got something to say. Otherwise, just feel grateful you've got the smoke from the plant and how great your place is going to be.>

Go upstairs and downstairs and end up in the kitchen or wherever you feel has the most cooties. There, plunge the smudge stick burning side up into the sand (watch it, it is hot!) and leave it somewhere safe to smoke out the room for at least five minutes. Finish by turning the stick upside down and dowsing the hot end in the sand.

Your house should smell strange. Now, light some of your favorite fragrance candles and let them burn for a couple of hours. You can also light some incense if you want. Your house will feel much more like your very own and all the cooties will have gone up in smoke.

Thanks, ma'am. Is that sage or what?

I've done some informal smudge work but it's mostly involved partaking of beer and fried pork skins.

Desert Sage works and burns well. It stinks... but you ought to be used to bad smells after a night of beer and pork rinds.

Sweet grass smells a little better but is hard to keep lit. Cedar is good but needs to be carefully wound up with the thread or it'll get away from you (ie. you might start a bigger fire than you planned).

Be careful!

If you were doing a real smudging ceremony it would be a lot different. This is just a way to get the cooties out.

I reckon a bong won't do the trick,eh?

Sweet grass doen't need to keep well, Pifka. You can usually find braids of the stuff in the local flea markets.

Pixie dust works too, dlowan.

Blaise - I did what the landlord suggested when the disposal up and quit - I nailed it a couple times with the butt of the broom. It worked - oddly. Or it worked as well as it had been, which was (and still is) badly. And, YES, sponges through the dishwasher! I threw away a couple of sponges at my mother's house. She went through the trash and pulled them out.

If the sponge is used on plates about to go into the dishwasher (I use a seperate scrubby brush to pre-clean dishes and plates) that's fne for the dishes. But, those dishes leave gunk on the sponge which needs to be cleaned out of the sponge before you wipe down the countertops. In my opinion.

Dag - I am using an old soap dish for the sponge. It's ceramic with holes in it which drain to an aluminum base. It's decent. And, what's more, I don't have to spend money on a new gadget.

Dishwashing the sponges works better than microwaving them and is less toxic than bleaching them. Perhaps if the 'ew, it's gross' crowd threw them in the wash BEFORE they got rank, it wouldn't seem to gross. I put our sponge in almost every time I run the dishwasher.

I use wood cutting boards too. Unfortunately, so do my raw meat preparing housemates. They say that wood tends to be less bacterially ridden then plastic.

Oh, and I'm glad I'm not alone. The real EEEWWW! comes from seeing my HMs handle raw eggs and meat and then wipe their unwashed hands on the hand towel. Yuck! That and my mother's nasty, rank sponges.

What are cooties?

The kind of germs from another person that you don't want to snuggle up with.

LOL.... Jane, your asking this question comes from never having gone to school in the USA. Cooties are what the icky kid sitting in front of you had... and he left some on the desk, so you don't want to sit there now. I think cooties may have started out as body lice. There's probably a whole webpage about 'em.

eeehhhhh, I don't want to know more about it

In all houses I moved to, old kitchen and bathrooms were
ripped out and new ones were installed, and only THEN did
I feel at home. I get paranoid with icky things like that.

Look. I have shared houses with more menfolk than you have had hot dinners (platonically of course) and worked as a cleaner.


I ain't cleaning up no more of ANYONE'S dust...pixies', gnomes', elves, I don't give a ****.

lk, get a distinct new cutting board, best with veggies depicted on it, and ask HMs repeatedly to not use it for meat ever. or vice versa, designate one for meat. hmmm, now i'm thinking of how to put signs on a cutting board... i know! hot metal! burn it in! Like "Don't you even think of putting that chicken on this board!" or somesuch. Sounds like a perfect Dasha project.

More importantly, can they travel via the Internet? Does Norton make an Anticootie product?

See, you can combine this idea with smudging. Just be sure to disable the smoke detectors.

Why not just hide the cutting board you want to use?

Cooties, my dear CL, are those things that horrible boys give you in the 3rd or 4th grade by chasing you around the playground and touching you...some of the worst boys can infect you with cooties by just looking at you....

Then one of your girl friends has to rush up quickly and give you a cootie injection. This is done by transforming your index finger into a hypodermic needle, and the thumb into the plunger on the syringe.

That is why girls of that age stick so closly together

Below is a picture of a "cootie catcher"....both open and closed, the girl with cooties must choose various numbers and colors, that are interpreted by the cootie catcher operator.

It is WAY more complecated that any mere boy could figure out, that's why they really don't know anything about them. Generally, they would only catch a glimpse of the cootie catcher will it was being employed in the middle of a huddle of girs.

While I have never seen it catch a cootie, it does remarkably well at predicting which one of the boys "likes you (ewwwww)" so you can be prepared to watch out for him.

Be it known the most virulent strain of cooties are the ones boys get from girls...they are so bad that often end up as the heebie jeebies.

Wow, those California cooties are really tuff.

I did not know that....

how does one recover from the heebie jeebies?