Bah

I often send a grocery list with A. when he goes into the Small City for court. Why not, right? He's there anyway, unencumbered by small, disruptive children. Whereas I am here, definitely encumbered, and unwilling to drive fifteen miles for milk.

So. List.

Today's list, however, went unfulfilled, because he ended up being in court so much longer than he thought he would be that he just stopped at the gas station on the way home for the milk I had requested. We're pretty much always almost out of milk, so he figured that was the biggest imperative.  I was glad to have the milk, and I said everything else could wait.

I was wrong.

When I rolled my sleeves up (literally) this evening in preparation for doing the day's enormous accumulation of dishes, I remembered that we're out of dish soap. All the way out. Not even a tiny bit in the bottle to be rinsed out with water.

Aw shit.

There was no one home to go to the store to get dish soap, and with two sleeping children upstairs, I could hardly leave the house myself. But surely, I thought, we have something that will work. I mean, it's just soap, right? We have lots of soap! How about . . . this stuff?

"This stuff" was the homemade liquid hand soap I made awhile ago. I have not been too impressed with it since I made it, and I'm not planning on making it again. But I did still have a quarter gallon of it, and it is liquid. So I dumped some into the dishpan, whisked it around with water to dissolve it, and commenced washing.

Since we're always mostly out of hot water by the end of the day, I took the precaution of boiling water in the tea kettle for an extra rinse, just to make sure there was no soap residue on the dishes. It seemed to work for awhile. But the wash water ended up with little floating globules of fat on top. No doubt because we had lamb for dinner, and sheep fat is the most solid, difficult-to-clean fat EVER, but still. Gross.

I guess that meant the fat wasn't on the dishes anyway, but every time I pulled a plate or whatever out of the water to wash it, I was dragging it through this scum of fat. It got rinsed away with the scalding water rinse, but I was still not too happy with that.

I changed the wash water a couple of times, but the fat kept appearing shortly after I started washing, so I gave up after I had cleaned most of the mess up, leaving the plastic things like the salad spinner* for tomorrow when I have proper soap and hotter water. Because plastic is a lot harder than glass to rinse clean of soap residue and grease.

So I wouldn't recommend that soap for hand washing OR dish washing. My public service announcement for the day: Stick to Dawn. I certainly will.

* We had the first salad of the year from the garden today, from the thinnings of the hotbed planting. WHEE!