Category: Daily Dullness & Observations

It was one of those blazing hot Saturdays in the summer of 1999. The church picnic was in full swing, and Lisa, nine months pregnant, looked like she’d rather be anywhere else than roasting in the 100°F heat. Her spaghetti-strap sundress clung to her as she fanned herself under a big oak tree.

“Want me to get you something to drink?” I asked, noticing the sheen of sweat on her forehead.

“Oh, yes, please!” she sighed, brightening up a bit. “An iced tea would be amazing.”

I returned with her drink, and she eagerly took a sip, closing her eyes with a relieved smile. “You’re my hero,” she said, only half-joking. Then she added, “Would you mind grabbing me a little snack? I’m having these cravings, and I think my blood sugar’s low.”

“Of course!” I said, ready to play the role of catering service for my friend. “What are you in the mood for?”

She thought about it, her eyes drifting over to the food table. “Hmm, how about some coleslaw, macaroni salad, a couple of rolls, and maybe a small piece of fried chicken—the tiniest piece you can find. Oh, and some potato salad. Gotta have the potato salad with fried chicken. It reminds me of my grandma’s picnics when we’d take road trips.”

Armed with her requests, I made my way to the food table, dodging all the darting and screaming kids playing tag, and returned with a heaping plate of her favorites. She laughed as I handed it over, her eyes widening at the carbs.

“Oh no, I’m really in trouble now,” she said, patting her belly. “I’m not supposed to be loading up on all these carbs. But here we are!”

We settled under the shade of the tree, Lisa picking at her chicken and savoring every bite of potato salad and macaroni. Church friends stopped by to wish her well, ask how far along she was, and whether she’d picked a name for the baby.

“Not yet,” she’d answer with a smile. “Maybe I’ll know when I see her.”

The rest of the day passed peacefully under that tree. A breeze would drift by now and then, just enough to give a little relief from the heat.

As the picnic wrapped up, I hugged Lisa goodbye. “Take care of yourself and that little one,” I said as I patted her belly.

“You know it,” she replied, waving as I headed to my car. I drove home, did a little cleaning, and had just finished folding laundry when my phone rang. It was Leah, our friend from the picnic.

Her voice was tense. “Lisa’s in the hospital. They’re saying food poisoning. And…it’s serious. She might lose the baby.”

My stomach dropped. “I just saw her! She seemed fine. What happened?”

“They’re not sure yet, but they’re doing everything they can. Keep praying, and I’ll let you know as soon as I hear more.”

The hours dragged by as we called family and friends, asking for prayers and support. It was the next afternoon before Leah called back with better news.

“The baby’s here,” she said, sounding exhausted but relieved. “She came early, but she’s okay. Lisa’s stable too. It was touch and go, but they made it.”

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “Thank goodness. What caused it?”

“The doctors said it was food poisoning.” Leah paused. “And everyone’s blaming the macaroni salad. They think it sat out in the sun too long with all that mayo.”

Within days, the church was buzzing with theories. People were quick to point fingers at the family who had brought the macaroni salad, loaded with mayonnaise, and then left it out on the table for hours. 

“Who in their right mind leaves mayonnaise in the heat?” someone muttered.

“It’s just irresponsible,” another chimed in.

But a couple of weeks later, the test results came back, and the doctors gathered us to clarify the culprit. It wasn’t the macaroni salad, they said—it was the potato salad. Most people thought mayonnaise was the typical food-poisoning suspect, but the doctors explained otherwise.

“It’s actually the potatoes,” the doctor told us. “Cooked potatoes can harbor *Clostridium botulinum*, which thrives in low-oxygen environments. If the potatoes aren’t cooled properly after cooking, they’re a risk.”

“So it wasn’t the mayonnaise at all?” one church member asked, looking around at the group, surprised.

“No,” the doctor assured us. “In fact, mayonnaise gets a bad rap. Most cases of foodborne illness are due to improper handling of cooked potatoes. If they sit out too long, especially in warm temperatures, they can produce dangerous toxins. It’s something many people don’t know.”

The doctor’s explanation put an end to the speculation and finger-pointing. Plus, we learned an important lesson about food safety—especially when it came to something as unassuming as potato salad. So it wasn’t the mayo. It was the potato salad and the next question was….who brought the potato salad!

There is another major mistake floating the internet and it is the recipe for do-it-yourself Dawn PowerWash, a product I mocked initially but have come to rely on and love.

But it is $5 a bottle.

For this once spendy gal now turned cheapskate, there had to be a better way, because it only took a minute of mental math to realize this alone could prevent me from a proper and timely retirement.

So, I set out to make my own in a giant-sized jar.

Being the kind of person who must keep my regulars on hand like soap, oil, pantry staples, trash bags, Ziplocs, life’s essentials for quick grabbing, I couldn’t chance having to remake this anytime soon.

Truly, I cannot be trusted to stop what I’m doing at the moment to get more of whatever it is I need and will make do with some awful other option just to save time and effort.

For the sake of convenience, I am, above all else, a little lazy. I will always opt for the path of least resistance during the flurry of my life.

I mean heck, I have been known to order the digital version of a movie from the basement when I have it on DVD upstairs and cannot bear going all the way up there to then hunt it down.

I cannot lie, sometimes it’s laziness, and other times it is that I am mentally exhausted and cannot be bothered.

Don’t judge-LOL.

I do work hard and need a bit of ease in my life sometimes, and just had to make a boatload of this DIY power wash for future convenience. Luckily I’m not dumb and knew to make a small batch to test before I go full gusto into the half-gallon jar I plan to fill-with this kitchen gold.

First stop, Google! and I was not disappointed with over 2000 results. So naturally I picked the top listings and clicked away. I wanted to be sure and verify that this is indeed the correct recipe and so it seems, it was!

Over 30 pages touted the same exact formulation which gave me the utmost confidence in it.

The internet instructs you to use the following recipe when making the homemade-dollars-saving-power wash: four tablespoons of blue Dawn soap, two tablespoons of rubbing alcohol, then fill to the top of your original but empty bottle.

I whipped up my test batch and started using it everywhere, like I usually do. It’s such a great little cleaner. So versatile. So nice.

I went spritz, spritz, spritz all over my usual places but immediately knew it was all wrong. It created a gooey grime that left clouds of sticky residue all over my countertops.

I then spent an inordinate amount of time unfairly kicking myself as I so often do– flogging myself with phrases like:

Didn’t you double check it?

Did you read it wrong?

And oh no, the whole bottle is wasted!

Perfectionism is a beast. And, it had reared its ugly head in that moment. From there, I morphed into a master scoffer only to scapegoat my fellow man.

Asking myself, how can so many people blindly copy this formula without noticing the mistake?

How does this happen so quietly to this degree, without protest?

Are people in a coma?

Did they not test it?

I pondered the layers, the facets, and the fact that this doesn’t bode well for all of humanity.

This blind-leading-the-blind approach on such a large scale cannot spell success for our future as a people.

Who copies others’ info from the internet without attesting to its true quality?

It’s not the blind leading the blind. It was the dumb leading the dumb, I thought to myself, and I was done.

What a hassle! This crap was nowhere near the store-bought power wash. Now I had made a bottle’s worth of this useless sludge. Feeling pressured to use it up as not to be wasteful because I am, above all else, a careful person.

So I spent the whole next week delightfully spritzing my syrupy PowerWash wherever I could just to run the bottle down.

It wasn’t all a waste, though. I smartly used my spritzing time to contemplate the ideal properties of store bought power wash. Using my scientific powers of observation and deduction, I determined that rubbing alcohol provided the necessary evaporation and quick dry-time, Dawn soap provides ideal degreasing effects, and then water provides proper dilution.

Now I had a framework for success, and luckily the crappy internet recipe was a good starting point.

The rubbing alcohol must be 70% concentration because the 91% formulation evaporates too quickly to be effective. I decided to double the alcohol in the original internet formulation and cut back on the Dawn soap by a considerable bit because I knew it was contributing to the soap residue left behind. And because the dilution was close, I only needed a little more water in my version.

I tested it and voila! The new formulation is much closer to the commercial version than the internet’s version.

Try this recipe: three tablespoons of blue Dawn, three tablespoon of the 70% rubbing alcohol, and 16oz of water.

Stir.

Double it, triple it, or even quadruple it so you have plenty on hand when you need it.

The internet is wrong—very wrong—about when Ice Ice Baby was first released.

One day, I was describing how much we heckled a guy my senior year in high school, that last semester. We teased him, good-naturedly, about how he looked exactly like Vanilla Ice. He’d respond with dismay, claiming he wasn’t trying to and didn’t see the resemblance. Except for the fact that he dressed exactly like Vanilla, cut his hair like Vanilla, and tried to strut like Vanilla…he wasn’t trying.

Anyhow, someone told me that was impossible because that timeframe was 1989, and Ice Ice Baby didn’t come out until I was in college—in 1990.

Hmm. Not used to having my timeline challenged because my record is solid, but I was still open to the possibility of a mistake. It’ wasn’t ‘s not about ego; it’s about accuracy. I’d hate to keep repeating an inaccurate story, but beyond that, it made me question my sense of the past.

So I set out to research this and it wasn’t looking good! Page after page said 1990 for the song’s timeframe. I dug through about 20 pages of Google results and nowhere did I see 1989 specifically linked to the song. As of this post, that is still the case. What I noticed, though, was that these sources were basic gossip blogs, not major site. So it must be a case of people blindly copying content from each other wihtout verfiying.

I assumed the larger sites and media outlets would get it right, but even some of them were slightly off, inadvertently confusing readers with statements like:

“Top hit of 1990,” or “Vanilla Ice wins AMA award for Ice Ice Baby, January 1991.”

Major sites like New York Post, Billboard Magazine, and Top40 Weekly all tout it as a 1990 song. That is so misleading, yet still technically accurate.

1990 is when the song shot to meteoric fame! It topped the charts for a week, beating out Mariah Carey and other “heavy hitters” that year. So it feels like a 1990 song to most people. But for those who remember, it’s a 1989 song—and I love that! How fitting that this catchy tune became a virtual anthem for leaving the ’80s behind.

Still unresolved, I combed through the internet and found a tiny corner, a little cobweb of an article with a passing mention of him working on his album in 1989. That helped a bit and encouraged me to keep looking.

I got specific in my search with “Ice Ice Baby 1989.” Adding the year really helped! Buried a few pages in was a 1989 video of him performing the song.

Phew. Success!

Problem solved.

Crisis averted.

And Ice Ice Baby belongs to the 80s–barely but it’s ours nonetheless.

My memory is still solid. As accurate as ever, and I am relieved because I take pride in my accuracy. I want to be known as credible when I retell stories that others have forgotten.

I knew someone briefly in 2019 but sadly, he was a huge letdown. Definitely not worth the hassle.

As if things weren’t bad enough, I had to kick him out of my house within the first month!

He was such a disappointment that I didn’t bother with a second chance because after so many years on this Earth, you know a waste when you see it. Once he was gone, I didn’t miss him at all–got right back to my normal way of doing things and was glad for it!

Fast forward to 2022 when I ran into him on Facebook. It was just in passing thank goodness. But then a week later he was suddenly showing up EVERYWHERE online–my Facebook feed, in my Insta reels, and TikTok.

He had suddenly become popular and I was in total disbelief.

Had he changed?

Or, were people blindly accepting him and catapulting him to superstardom?

I scoffed any time I saw him online especially when he was filmed with all those women on TikTok.

Gross!

They had him in their houses just laying there in front of everyone: the kids, the husbands, the dogs, the viewers. He had no shame being the center of attention at all for no apparent reason. I just couldn’t believe it.

How could he be worth the hassle, the trouble, and the cost?

What were they thinking? I huffed at the screen. UGH!

When he wouldn’t go away, or slide into the shadows as I expected with this kind of viral fame, I began to question myself:

Had I missed something?

Did I overlook his best qualities?

Maybe I mishandled him somehow?

I suddenly regretted letting him go and quickly hatched a plan to get him back. It was going to take a little effort and expense but I had no doubt it would be worth it now that I saw he was popular and worth my time!

You may be surprised to know that I’m not talking about a real man in the human sense. Nope. I’m actually, quite pitifully, talking about a sponge. Not just any sponge but a special, beloved one.

His name is Scrub Daddy. I’d been with him before but now he was everyone’s love and I just had to give him a second chance.

Realizing he wasn’t just a fad–I went and got another one to find out what I had overlooked. Now, I was curious to see if he had changed or if it was me that had changed.

That first time I brought him home and threw away the box, he didn’t really clean very well. He was cute but nothing special. In fact, he was awkward, ineffective, and took up too much space. He wasn’t the kitchen champ I had hoped for.

And to my surprise, I discovered this time around–he hadn’t changed a bit.

It was me–I had been the problem all along.

This time, I read the instructions on the box whereas I had discarded the box years ago without so much as a glance at the information. I mean–who would’ve thought you needed to read directions about how to use a sponge?

Now, he was amazing– worked like a champ, put my high-end sponges to shame with their dank, germy stank.

What is it , though, that really makes him so special?

For one thing, it’s his history that sets him apart. He got his start on Shark Tank from the inventor, Aaron Krause, who brought this brightly smiling sponge to life for the investors, and brokered a deal on TV with Lori Greiner. Then it became an overnight sensation, which is not the usual path to fame for a sponge.

From there, Scrub Daddy wasn’t just another household item; he had become quite a phenomenon.

Why? What is the real appeal?

Well, it’s because this sponge is so effective—and has a charming little smile. His cute “face” actually has a purpose. The eyes are finger grips, and the mouth is shaped to clean both sides of utensils in one go, which, yes, is weirdly satisfying.

But the real secret sauce is in the material. It’s made of this high-tech, polymer foam that stays firm in cold water for tough scrubbing and softens up in warm water for gentler cleaning. You can scrub a pan like you’re sanding wood, then switch to wiping delicate glassware without a second thought. And it doesn’t scratch.

Not kidding—nonstick pans, glass, stainless steel—Scrub Daddy just sails through them without leaving a mark. Plus, it dries faster than traditional sponges, so it doesn’t smell like a wet dog after a week.

In this age of the cleaning hack, CleanTok, and Instagram, Scrub Daddy found his place. People started posting about it online, giving “Scrub Daddy hauls” like it was some coveted item, and the brand ran with it. They put out new colors, new shapes—there’s a whole Scrub Family now.

It’s almost like the sponge has a personality, and somehow that makes people want to scrub their dishes more. Go figure.

So, Scrub Daddy’s fame is both a product of the right backing, smart design but also pure luck. Its rise was as much about practical genius as it was about hitting the cultural sweet spot for viral, quirky cleaning products.

Scrub Daddy is a true testament to innovation, and he delivers on all promises.

I feel bad for ever doubting him.