Friday, January 19, 2007

New Wardrobe

Today I have learned the hard way the drawbacks of washing clothes in the sink with laundry soap in POWDER FORM. After many minutes of scrubbing, soaking, swooshing and swirling, I rinsed the clothes off and neatly laid them atop the heat radiators to give them that ribbed look for style points.
Once the clothes were dry, I noticed they were all covered with white dots. I guess soap spots aren't that bad. Heck, it almost blends right in with my team kit - the multitude of black prunes are now cow-patterned! I suppose this is OK with my plant-based ideals, but I guess it could be compared to faux fur or mock meat. Some say these are almost as bad as the real thing because it perpetuates actions that are deemed morally amiss.

Lessons learned when washing clothes in a sink:

Always use liquid detergent.
If only powder detergent is available, be sure to wash clothes inside out; try to dissolve soap in water basin before adding clothes.

Did i miss any secrets to successful basin bathing?

:Peanut

5 comments:

gewilli said...

using warm water will aid in the solubility of the soap... and dissolving the powder will essentially make it liquid... but the spottyness is two things:

too much soap

not enough rinsing

and too many items being washed at once reduce the volume to surface area and well... its all science ya know...

science is fun...

Dave Shishkoff said...

heheh..i was going to comment on a bubbly outfit while racing as well. =)

Anonymous said...

I think you've received a lot of helpful advice on doing your laundry already, and I shall refrain from making any comments on how does the surface-to-volume ratio affect the process of washing (I would need to apply for a NSF grant to study this properly anyway ...), but if everything fails, find a nearby body of running water and beat your clothes on any hard surface (e.g. a rock). Worked for me on my camping trips, and didn't pollute the pristine streams much.

However, I can help you with your quest for that elusive ° (degree symbol) on your keyboard. It is not there, but try (if you live in a PC world) holding down the ALT key and typing on the numerical key pad 176. When you release the ALT key, this little 0 (degree symbol) should appear. If you do your own HTML coding, or in this blog, type & followed by # and 176 (you should see °).
Also, should you write in the future about how many Euros one can expect for start money in women's racing, use "& and # and 8364" to get €.

henry j
a grateful recipient of a candy wrapper in Gloucester

gewilli said...

HJ,

the number pad sequence was covered previously, but discounted as trying to get the laptop to fake a numberpad just don't work usually terribly well...

but the HTML coding bit is a great suggestion -

i'll add to that with the recommendation to do the html addition from the "edit html" tab NOT the "compose" tab... which is probably pretty obvious...

but... well... nevermind... gewilli off rambling again with TMI

Anonymous said...

I guess this is old news now - and possibly not as interesting as the subject of how to create the degree symbol using as many key-strokes as it takes to spell out the word "degrees" - but Christine's team's site has a nice little article about, and photos of, the Flanders Indoor CX the other day...
http://lpapetitesreines.free.fr/spip.php?article30
-- E.C. Chamberlain