It’s cold and flu season, a phrase that chills me as much as the ‘Back To School!’ banners happily strung up in stores in mid-July. One of the many admonishments from health officials is to always wash our hands. I’m sure there’s some stipulation that not a single person actually follows, like “Scrub hands vigorously for two minutes under boiling hot water before applying hand sanitizer and singing hands with a blowtorch set to 500 °C MINIMUM to remove any excess tissue and bone matter.” Well, I do my best with soap around the house*, though you wouldn’t know it since it sounds like a Dickensian orphanage overrun with tuberculosis, what with all the coughing and wailing and “please may I have some more gruel?” mewled from street urchins dressed in rags and cowering in the shadows.
So…soap. It was time to renew our household mélange of foaming hand soaps in a variety of scents ranging from Clean Lemon (my favorite) to Christmasberry (my wife’s choice) to Xtreem Sugar Vanilla Cinnamon Roll Blast (Child Harbat going for broke). CH and I went to Bed ‘N Bath ‘N Body ‘N Aerosolized Perfume to stock up. They think they are smart because they put a sink and stepstool and a variety of testers of soaps and skincare products. They are not smart because they don’t count on someone like CH using EVERY product at once in copious amounts. Oh, how I wish you could experience the smell of ten salt scrubs and scented soaps at once:
Just imagine cramming a couple Skittles up your nose, spraying yourself in the face with teen-market body spray, then being steamrolled face-down in a rosebed. But at least her hands were clean and germ-free. In your FACE, health officials!
* “Doing my best” means this is the first time I took charge of buying soap instead of my wife, horrifying her that I might not use a coupon.
Writer, architect, father, husband.
You are going to get busted for not using a coupon. That’s actually a great idea to get kids to wash hands! Now you just have to stop everyone from spraying 2 billion microbes in an aerosol spray from their cram holes every time they cough!