Why we’re not meant to be alone, a few good band names and the omission of Monica Lewinsky

The best thing about being home alone is that you can do weird things like try and get your white dress shirts their whitest by trying out miracle laundering cures. That’s right. There’s stuff like Oxymoron Stain Out (not a real product, but you can feel free to use the name if you’re trying to bring a stain remover to market; I just ask for 17% of everything you make)–which I’m trying write now (get it? I love the immediacy of that) to get the rings out from around the collars.
The shirts are kind of identical. Not exactly the same, but still, it was a challenge to know what to do laundry-wise. One shirt tab’s instructions wanted me to use the gentle cycle and warm water. The other just wanted me to wash with like colors and remove promptly from the dryer (I think). The former also wanted me to tumble dry on low. The part about washing with like, uh, colors, was relaxing.
Still, they were all more instructions than I wanted to deal with. So I compromised. I ran the load, which wasn’t so big it should be called a load (baby load, anyone?) on the gentle cycle but I set it to have an extra rinse. Now is that the best of both worlds or what? Then, for the dryer part, it seemed reasonable to set it on low (so as to tumble dry) and then remove promptly.
I did throw a couple of old white t-shirts and a pair of white gym socks into the mix just so everything would “balance.” You hear the word “balance” thrown around a lot: In order for you to have success you need balance. Why don’t they say you need good balance or you’ll probably end up falling down? It’s much simpler and to the point. But, I kind of get what they’re talking about. Balance is important. You need balance in your professional relationships. You need it in your personal relationships. And, as I’m finding out, you need it in your loads of laundry as well. In fact, one might say, balance is understated when it comes to laundry success, especially if you have an old washing machine that can easily get out of balance and begin running off on you down the hall.
The ring around the neck stains I knew would be the least of the stain challenges for Oxymoron. It was going to be the red wine I had spilled on my sleeve last year and tried to hastily remove myself back in the day, but not before letting it sit embedded for 48 hours before attempting said laundering repair, also known as stain removal. The shirt, which was barely worn more than a few times and fits perfectly, has had this faint, yellow stain where the red wine used to be, for far longer than I care to admit.

Now I know you’ll wonder if I tried wearing a suit jacket over it so the stain couldn’t be seen. Well, I haven’t, although I’ve been tempted because the shirt, like I said, is still almost brand new, relatively-speaking, and unsightly stain notwithstanding.
Here’s where I digress
Speaking of unsightly stain…that’d make a great band name—all lower case, too, for low key success.
Now back to the case of the wine-soaked sleeve

The shirt does have some laundry miles on it. I washed it several times to get it to the dull, faint yellow stain it had before I began my last ditch, shirt-saving effort some 600 words ago.

And what everyone has been waiting for
The results of the Oxymoron experiment are in and they are a mixed bag. My newly acquired red neck and the accompanying stains it has provided are all gone, and as I knew they would be, I might add. The even greater, more anticipated results regarding the soiled sleeve are less impressive. While the stain seems to have faded even more, it’s not completely gone. That said, I will not hesitate to use the shirt again since unless you’ve read this and attend the same function I am when I’m wearing the shirt and check the sleeve for the faded stain (ooh, another great band name!), no one will probably be able to tell. So, like I said…a mixed bag—not completely gone, but still, gone enough so that I might acceptably wear the shirt again.
In other home alone news
The stink bugs are still around. We make sport of them, capturing them when they buzz around one too many times and whisking them off to watery graves in the toilet (you didn’t think you’d heard the last toilet reference in this blog, did you?). We don’t like killing them, or any living creatures, but what comes in that isn’t welcome, is well, fair game, so to speak. While “Get Outta My House!” is not as powerful as “Get Off of My Lawn,” it still means that what’s unwelcome is unwelcome with respect to pests and the like, like like colors and like, insects.

It was a hot day. Probably the hottest we’ve had so far this year, but maybe not. But there was a lot of humidity (that is my rapper name, pronounced “Humi-Dity”) and so it made it really uncomfortable and hard for everyone to think. While at the grocery checkout earlier, the woman in front of me asked the clerk if she only had two bags, and he replied that yes, she did. The woman took her two bags and walked off. The clerk began checking my items over the scanner when I noticed the toilet paper (which wasn’t mine) at the top of the bag carousel. I called his attention to it, told him it could be a critical item for the woman, that he might always be remembered fondly if he ran out and delivered the woman’s toilet paper before she drove away. That was all the urging he needed before he ran out after her with the toilet paper in hand.
If Joan Collins were here now she would stare me down unsavorily and thrash me with one of her best Dynasty lines ever: “Get out of my life, you filthy has been.”

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