Sometimes I just create my own sticky situations.

Hello all!
. 

I love going to fairs and little stores and finding all sorts of natural products.  Anything from jams to body lotions, I love the idea of "natural"  "home made" "farm fresh" "Organic."

Whenever I go to the Renaissance Faire, I try to get a salt scrub for my hands.  You know this stuff, it's like chunks of salt, scented for your pleasure.  A woman with a rose in her cleavage shows you how to scrub away all the toxins and whatnot stored on your hands, and then she rinses them off with some water  and your skin feels like a baby's butt. I love it! $10 a jar later, I swear to myself that I'm going to use the stuff this time and it's going to be magical.

I have a closet full of these items.  I have no trouble buying them.  Apparently USING them is a problem because, after all, I paid so much money for this nice, natural thing, I should really make it last a good long time.  (I'm waiting for a special occassion for my skin to feel nice...apparently the rest of the time I can just walk around looking like an alligator.)

So yesterday I realized that I'd just purchased yet another jar of sea salt scrub, this time stuff for my feet, but that I had a jar I'd bought a couple years ago still in my cabinet.  Well, best use the old before the new, so I pulled out the old jar.

It was sort of hard to open, a little sticky.

For those of you who have never worked with this sort of thing, let me give you a hint....sea salt should never be sticky.

Undaunted, as I generally am, I dug some of the grainy, sticky stuff out of the jar with two fingers and then tried to rub it on my hands.  The sea salt rolled on my skin sort of like a really bumpy, sticky stone.  Instead of individual grains of sea salt clinging to my skin like clean sand, this was like that last bit of honey in the jar, the stuff that's petrified and no amount of warming will make it right. 

I should have stopped there, but as we all know, I'm not one to really learn from a small mistake.  I've got to keep going until ALL the bells and whistles are going of in my head.  So, I dug in for a second, larger fingerful of the sticky goo and tried to rub that up and down my arms.

At some point, my fingers stuck together, and large balls of sea salt glued to my arm hair, I realized that this particular product was probably two years past it's expiration date and I was no longer working with sea salt, but with some sort of oily, greasy super glue.  My first instinct was to wash off the goo, so I pumped out some Bath and Body works hand soap and tried that.

All I succeeded in doing was getting the soap pump stuck to my hand.

I was clearly not going to be able to do anything else until I cleaned the now hardening goo off my skin.  I had to think carefully about my next move because my hands were so sticky, anything I touched was going to require cleaning...if I wasn't permanently attached to it first.

What gets out sticky sea salt based goo?

Then it DAWNED on me!  If Dawn dish washing detergent can clean up that baby duck in the commercial so nicely, it could certainly work in my case.  And, since Peaches is such an animal lover, we just happened to have TWO big bottles of stuff in the kitchen.  (You know the ones where a dollar goes to some wild life foundation.)  All I had to do was go to the kitchen and clean myself up with it.

Have you ever  counted the steps you go through to get from a bathroom to the kitchen to wash your hands?

I have, because I had to do it without use of my hands.



The duck is actually laughing at me.



1)  Open sliding bathroom door.  (Did this with my toes.  Took some extra time because I had to wedge one of my toes under the door first.)

2)  Open the bedroom door, walk through it, then close the bedroom door before a cat gets in.  (almost worth NOT shutting the door because I was sticky from the elbows down and had to open and close the door with my armpit.)

3)  Open the kitchen cupboard.  (Used the toes.)

4)  Get the bottle out  (Had to use my hands)

5)  Turn on the water.  (Again, the hands...stuck to the handle a bit.)

6)  Open the bottle.

7)  Rub the soap on the skin

8)  Rinse.

There's a step 9...the moment when I realized that Dawn was NOT working for me.

9)  Reevaluate...again...just how stupid you are.

Well, I figured since I was at the since anyway, and since I already had foaming dish soap going, I'd do the dishes.  So there's that.

Their motto should be:
We are can clean
up many messes.
"Stupid" is not one of them.

I did a lot of dishes, rubbed my arms in Dawn again...nope, still sticky.

Later Hubby and I went for coffee.  I warned him, as he took my hand, that I was a little sticky.  He was amused for a bit, saying that he liked not having to use much pressure to hold my hand  (note to self:  Just how hard is it to hold my hand?)  but then when we separated to do something, he refused to hold my hand anymore, saying he didn't like how sticky HE WAS.

Yes, I tossed the old jar of the sea salt scrub and yes, I vow to use the jar I just bought all up before the year is out.  I'm happy to say that now, 24 hours later,  any sticky residue is gone from my skin.

I wish I could say the same thing for the soap pump in my bathroom and the Dawn soap bottle in the kitchen.