Safe cleaning products without spending a fortune.

This morning's post will be about cleaning products and such and how to make your own.  I became a convert to the ways of the crumbly after being poisoned for a year with chemo.  If I don't know wtf something is, I'm not sure I want it around my family or myself.  People who go at the crumbly thing hard core are crunchy.

This is one store purchased product I get and use.  I want to say I paid 6.99 USD for the 32 ounce bottle two years ago at a now closed grocery store and STILL have plenty left and I am a clean freak.  Mrs. Meyers Lavender All Purpose Cleaner is eco-friendly, can be used on all kinds of surfaces, indoors and out, and I will give Streak the credit for pointing me in the direction of it.  The list of ingredients on the website explains what's what and why it's used.

I have a spray bottle that I purchased from the dollar store and the spray part is purple.  That means I use it with my diluted lavender cleaning solution, and because it's purple, when I'm grabbing a bottle, I know that's what I'm grabbing to use.   (Spray bottle, 1.00 USD.)

One cap of the concentrate in the spray bottle is about all that's needed and then fill the bottle up with water from the tap.  Instant multi-purpose cleaner for a variety of surfaces, and the smell is clean and not overpowering.  (There are also other scents if lavender isn't your thing.  I'm thinking next time, I'll try the Lemon Verbena.)

Another cleaner I use and do purchase by the gallon--yes, GALLON--is white vinegar.  I use it as fabric softener in my laundry.  (The vinegar smell dissipates.) I also use it on mirrors and other assorted places.  Sometimes I feel like using my lavender cleaner, sometimes I feel like using my vinegar as a cleaner.  Vinegar is a fabulous deodorizer and cuts grease really well, which is another reason why it works great in the laundry, especially with having monkeys who come home with various stinky dirt activities.  (If you don't like the smell and you want to use it as a cleaner, try tossing a drop or two of essential oil in it.  For cleaning off counters after raw meat has been on them, pure white vinegar or lemon juice kills bacteria.  Yes, I still go over that with hot water and soap, but damn, isn't vinegar and/or lemon juice way safer to use than some of those fancy name brand kitchen wipes that even have on the label "Wipe surface with water after use."  How many people don't pay attention to that shit? )  (Price for a gallon?  Less than 3.00 USD.)

One soap I made was by using Kirk's Castile Soap and this is something that can be found at the grocery store.  I got a bar and shredded it and added an appropriate amount of water, then slowly cooked it down into a larger amount of soap.  It does act a little funny with hard water but works well as another multi-purpose cleaning item in the home, laundry, dishes, etc.  (A bar is generally around 1.50 USD, contingent upon what store you're purchasing it at.  I've seen it for as little as 1.19 USD or as much as 2.25 USD.  Price check if you can, or check their website.  A travel sized bar is .99 cents.)

Dr. Bronner's is yet another one.  A small bottle can be 3.99 USD at the store and totally worth it.  It's so multi-purpose, I'm not even sure there's an entirely completed list of all the uses.

(Quick mention of essential oils, I want to tell you that essential oils and fragrance oils are NOT the same thing.  Essential oils are made from natural sources.  Fragrance oils are faux (fake) and man-made.  For someone who is a chemical-phobe, this is an important thing to know.  I also try to be responsible and make certain that essential oils I use are sustainable, fair trade, reasonably grown, etc.)

If I keep going with this, it will be an extremely long post, so I'm going to suggest that you hit Pinterest up for some of your own recipes and such, there are some very useful laundry detergent recipes there, and some I wouldn't use.  That's up to you.  I have discovered Foca laundry detergent out of making my own and have just about decided the Foca is more economical for me.  (Less than 9.00 USD and it does 120 loads when I use 1/2 cup per load in a top loader, lasts me nearly three months, the one I get is eleven pounds in weight.  It's also phosphate free.  It comes in a bag, so I transfer it into an old, washed out to be clean, plastic tub that once had cat litter in it.)  

I don't have a rosemary plant yet, so I haven't made lemon-rosemary cleaner, so I haven't mentioned a recipe for that here.  

You get the idea.  It is entirely possible to find and use great cleaning products that are multi-purpose that aren't harmful to your health without spending a ton of money.

So I'm old and intolerant.

Thanks to Streak, I've developed an appreciation for taking 3mg of melatonin at night.  It helps with the sleep thing so much, except when I can feel the coiled wire in my neck from where the aneurysm was repaired back in October.  Yes, I can feel it.  I don't know if that's normal or not, I just know I can feel it when I lay down at night and I'm still.  It feels strange and once I even felt it shift or move in my neck, but that was within the first few days it was in there.  Of course my brain had to go into spaz mode about it.  Fun thoughts like what if it twists and the end starts poking out of my neck.  Would I bleed to death before I woke up?  Would my husband wake up before I was done bleeding to death out of a hole poked in my neck by the wire put in it to fix the aneurysm?  Why does my brain even think about these things?  Is it because I stared Death in the face for an entire year and I'm still alive, somehow?

(Streak, if you're out there, you need a blog so I can link to it on the side.  You could call it Streak's Corner and it would be awesome sauce!)

Speaking of, if there ever was a song that was fitting as part of a soundtrack to my life, that would be I'm Still Alive by Meatloaf, especially after being poisoned by chemo for an entire year.  That is my anthem.  Yes, I'll be pretentious enough to say that.

Yes, I say poison because that's what chemo is.  It's poison.  Don't believe me?  Look it up.  No, I won't change my mind about that because facts are facts.  It is poison and I will be outspoken about it.

I suppose with any new readers coming in, they will notice they can leave comments, but said comments will be moderated.  Any comments I decide are on the ridiculous side will be quoted from, picked apart, and treated as entertainment, especially comments like "You're mean!" and "You're evil!"  I will be very amused and generally not give a fuck that someone wasted enough time to tell me I'm mean and evil, just so you know, because haters gonna hate and Idgaf if they do.  Or I could just already say I'm a SOB; sassy old bitch.

Moving on to other things besides being mean and evil, I changed the wash for the hair to liquid drained off garbanzo beans with a diluted white vinegar rinse.  We'll see if my hair likes that wash, so far it made it super soft to where I couldn't do much of anything with it. Loading it down with silicone and paraben laden products seemed to make it unmotivated to grow more and faster, so alternative hair care methods have definitely done it a favor. After all, I may be steroid fat and shaped like a pear because I have no breasts, but by damn, I will have decent hair.

And I will have clean laundry, be it from my own laundry soap I make or the rocking awesome Foca laundry soap.

The coffee grinder we have had for a million years, okay, well, maybe not a million, it's just been the one and only coffee grinder we've had finally bit the dust and I had to go get a new one.  That was an interesting experience, let me tell you.  How complicated can coffee grinding be?  I mean there was like eleventy one of them to choose from and they all did multiple of fifty thousand things.  Wtf?

Upcoming celebratory number on Pinterest.  When that happens, I'll announce it on here just because I know you people have inquiring minds and want to know about this sort of thing.

Moving on, I got barn time in.  A couple of the horses looked like they'd thrown mud pies at each other's manes.  I guess I'll be picking dried mud out of their manes for the next three months, but that's okay.  I don't mind because horses are amazing creatures.  I love horses the way a horse-a-holic loves that horse fix because horses, fuck yeah!  

Some people I wind up encountering and/or dealing with on an occasional basis, I just have to fucking wonder about and wonder where Darwin is with his Award for them.
And some people are just fucking interesting as hell.  I accidentally found a blog post by Melissa Gilbert, yes, THAT one.  She called it A Tale of Two Titties and I think it's fucking awesome she shared.  Some of you may read it and say it's TMI and Idgaf if you do.  This stuff needs to be spoken about.  (For those of you interested, check out this awesome photography project, What is a Perfect Woman? and The SCAR Project because I'm a bad ass who figured out how to embed links.)

As I began reading, and continued to read, what I discovered was that I was agreeing with much of what she said, especially about body and self-image stuff.  I was pleasantly surprised she'd breastfed her babies, and amazed to see she has many of the same issues that any other of us females have to contend with.  The relevance to my blog in conjunction with her blog post is that she's having her implants removed.  Breast related, correlationally (I just made a new word, woot!) speaking, it's chest related surgery.

Melissa, if you're out there and tracking your stats on your blog and you see traffic from my blog to yours, you are probably wondering "What the fucking fuck?" to utilize your fun phrase.  Best of luck to you if you ever see this and I hope you recover well and quickly.  (I wore Holly Hobby dresses when I was a kid because they were vintage looking before the vintage look was cool.)

It's time to tackle the four loads of clean laundry piled on the couch because I am an Angrivated Laundry Faerie Housewife Minion.  (See what I did there?  That was clever of me.)

To quote Johan;  Toot, toot.

(No, you're not going to get that unless you're a big fan of coffee.)

How do you do and a fuck you, too.

Welcome to the new readers.  Thank you for taking the time to read what thoughts tumble out of my brain, through my fingers, and into words on here.  So, how do you do?  I'd like to add a thank you for stopping by.  I hope you don't mind that I put the further content of this post together since it was something I think I've been wanting to say, but hadn't quite figured out the verbosity of it.  You can quit reading now, if you want to.  I wouldn't be angrivated about that at all if you did.

I would like to mention I've done a bit of remodeling since I seem to have more traffic these days.  Comments have been enabled, although I reserve the right to moderate them because I'm an evil bitch like that and I like the fact that I can refuse someone's comments about how evil I am because I'm evil.  Just saying.

I've gone from visits from the continental US and Alaska to worldwide visits, which is pretty awesome sauce.  (If anyone was wondering I've been on the internet over twenty years now, and have been blogging off and on for thirteen years, as well as being a wife and mom, married for twenty-five years with three male monkeys raised, so I do have a variety of life experience which makes me more than qualified to do whatever the hell it is I want to do.  Right?  Right.  Just saying.)

All of that said, the fuck you too goes out to the fuckers who kicked me to the curb when I was diagnosed with HER2+ breast cancer for whatever reason and the ones who just don't fucking comprehend that there is no going back to the old normal self and those who think they "know" better than I do about me and my life.  Instead of telling me that like you have all the answers, which I know you don't and in my book, that makes you delusional in an amusing way, why couldn't you have asked me what you could do to help me?  Oh wait, it's because you know everything, which I find damn funny.

Since some people seem to think they know everything, then maybe they have answers about how to cope with a cancer diagnosis and a year of poisoning with shit made from some of the chemical components of Agent Orange, being consistently and intentionally lied to about anything and everything related to said diagnosis, having the entire upper third of their chest ripped off their body to leave nothing but skin over ribs and not being allowed to have physical therapy because the surgeon "didn't see a need for it."  (I still have fucking problems with fine motor skill and dexterity nearly three years out from being surgically mutilated.  Even hand writing a check is very difficult for me now.)

Tell me how you know you have all the answers about how aggressive scanning isn't something that's a big deal when said scans are bad for the human body, how any ache or pain needs to be explained and/or monitored to make certain that I don't have mets, be it from chemo, what's done to me to monitor me, or whatever.  Sure, you have all the answers about me being the age I am and trapped in a body that has an added twenty years to it because of what was done to me and I'm sure you can completely explain all about normality and functionality when it doesn't truly exist for me any longer, just like you know all about my bitchitude because I talk about this shit and not the fake, smarmy bullshit of pink ribbons and glitter.

Let me think about this for a moment.  Done.  (That lasted maybe half a millisecond, didn't it?)

Bitchitude and being brutally honest so that maybe it helps someone else versus fake, smarmy bullshit of pink ribbons and glitter and hope, because you know, people with cancer just "hope" it away.

Guess what the content here will be?  Yes, you guessed it.  

Bitchitude and plenty of it, so haters gonna hate on my bitchitude, Imma tell you go somewhere else and fuck yourself.  Or if not, you can always come back and read my future post about the cancer INDUSTRY and then you can tell me you don't believe me when I say it's an industry after I put the fucking numbers in front of your nose and then still keep your comments to yourself.

Still rocking the Foca laundry soap and vinegar for the laundry.  I have Castile soap which I'll be using to make body soap and shampoo, although I think tomorrow, I may do a molasses rinse on the hair.

Been busy; busy can be a good thing.

This month, I've been busy.  

Busy with football stuff because Football Monkey is just that busy with football. 

Busy with volunteering at both the school and at a nearby horse farm cleaning stalls and tidying up in the barn.  

Busy learning that it's evidently not too difficult to befriend a sheep and have her follow me around with her nose in my spine at the nearby horse farm when I'm there like she's my new instant BFF.  (Sheep can recognize faces, or so I've read.)  Sheep are really larger than I realized.  Their backs come up almost to my waist.  The one sheep loves it when I talk to her.  The other one stares at me, and the goat just looks at me like I'm deranged when I talk to them.

Busy figuring out I'm afraid of the two chickens.  They have claws.  Chicken claws that want to rip and shred.  Beaks that want to peck at me if I get in a six foot proximity of them.  Put me in front of a 1,300 pound horse and tell me to move it and I'm good.  The barn cat doesn't seem interested in me at all.  (Seriously, about those two chickens, they don't seem rabid, but since my exposure to chickens has been very limited, I am afraid of them.)

Since I made mention of the horses, there's a radio at the barn.  If the rest of the humans wander off, I sing to the horses.  And I dance.  They seemed interested because they watched me and their ears were perked up.  I suppose you could say they were a captive audience since they were in their stalls.  

Busy trying to get the house cleaned up for the holidays.  We all know how well that's going.  (Watching Good Eats just makes me want to go start cooking.)

Busy trying to convince The Fat One (Fuzzy Manatee Cat) that she cannot have a drop of milk because she is lactose intolerant and will barf if she ingests even the tiniest drop of said amazing beverage.  She is pouting pitifully on top of her sun worshipping space.

Busy trying to convince The Smooky One (Little Black Cat That's Not So Little Now) that he doesn't need to climb on top of the kitchen cabinets since College Monkey decided to teach him that he could climb up there because he's a cat and cats like tall places.  (Before Army Monkey went into the Army, he taught The Tigger Cat how to drink out of any glass or cup he could stick his face in.)

The awesome husband did the grocery shopping, so we have a smoked turkey breast and a ham.  He also acquired more of the Foca laundry detergent.  That is some good stuff to do laundry with, under ten dollars and I can get 120 loads out of the big bag.  Woot.

Wearing my Solidea sleeves today since my arms were annoying me last night.  Hello nerve damage, fuck you.  (Because no blog post would be complete without me dropping the F bomb at least once.  Because, you know, I'm just so fucking evil.  Just saying.)

About to hit a milestone on Pinterest.  Will announce that when it happens, if anyone is interested.  Even if nobody is interested, I'll still announce it since this is my blog and it's all about me.  (See what I did there?  I'm clever like that.)

And I wrote a couple of new reviews on Urban Spoon and over here, I added a few new blog links to include Angrivated Mom and Laundry Fairy.  

Versatile vinegar and why it's so amazing.

Have you ever wondered why vinegar is so amazingly useful?  Because you can use it for a gajillion things, that's why, or at least I do.

First of all, there are many different kinds of vinegar.  Since I use mostly DWV, distilled white vinegar, and ACV, apple cider vinegar those are what I'll be referring to the most here.  I also have some BV, balsamic vinegar, but I don't use it like I use the DWV.

I use DVW with soap to wipe down counters after I've prepped meat and to clean the stove.

I also use it on tile floors and also to decontaminate bathrooms.

I use it for decontaminating toothbrushes if I can't get right out to get fresh ones if someone has been sick here at home and I need to be home taking care of the sickie and not out purchasing a new toothbrush right at that time.  Why take the chance on someone with re-contamination when it's as simple as soaking a toothbrush in a cup of DWV to make it clean again?  Most mouthwashes contain some very yucky chemicals, which are things we try to avoid in our house.  Don't believe me?  Go read some labels and get back to me on that sometime.

I've used it to clean windows.  I've used it to clean wood.  Weed killer.  Bug killer.

Sometimes recipes call for it in cooking and yet another use is in cough medicine.  Yes, I make my own.

It's great to use diluted in water as a hair rinse.  (I don't find there's a lingering odor with using it as a hair rinse.)

My favorite use?  Laundry.  Yes, laundry.  I use it in place of fabric softener.  It works fabulously well and there's no lingering odor.  (15 loads of laundry a week for 25 years equals 15,600 loads of laundry.  Unfortunately for much of that, I used icky commercial products and didn't know I had alternatives out there to use.)

Speaking of laundry, I got some stuff from the store instead of making my own.  It's called Foca, purchased for 8.59 at The Red Dot Logo Store.  It's got a cute critter on the front and it's excellent stuff.  I rounded the price up to 9.00 and used half a cup for each load and got 100 loads out of the big bag of it.  People, that is .09 cents per load of laundry.  It worked as well as the laundry detergent I make, and yes, I would purchase and use it again.

Anyway, vinegar is versatile.  Don't believe me?  Look on Pinterest.