We got our Dyson DC07 Animal as a wedding present last October. It’s great. It sucks. It really, really sucks, in that good way that a vacuum is supposed to. I think this thing could suck grass right out of the ground. If it ever has to be replaced, we’ll replace it with another Dyson.

Wendy and I have a simple policy about cleaning our bathroom. We believe it should be done once every 70 years. There are a number of bathroom cleaners out there, but only one has worked so well that we were surprised by it. Scrub Free Mildew Stain Remover does exactly what the product indications say it does. Spray it on the mildew and you can basically watch it disappear. It doesn’t matter if the mildew has been there 24 hours or since you were in kindergarten, Scrub Free gets it done.

A few years ago, right after we bought our house, some ants turned up in the kitchen. I checked Wal-Mart for anti-ant products, and picked up a box of Hot Shot Max Attrax. It’s a gel, you put down a couple of beads in corners, and the ants eat it and carry it off to the hive. It kills them and/or sterilizes them and/or simply drugs them and causes them to fall into a deep depression and throw themselves in front of trains. I don’t know how it works, and I don’t care. By the next morning, all the ants were gone and they stayed gone.

Our dog is a power chewer. Give her an anvil and half an hour, and she can destroy it. She’s reduced every toy we’ve given her into a pile of plastic shreds in a matter of minutes. Every one, that is, except for her Kong. She can’t do anything to it. She loves to play with it, but it looks just as good as the day we got it, except for the slobber factor.

We’ve been using it since we started gardening, and our tomato plants usually get about as tall as I am and produce more tomatoes than we can think about eating. Granted, the plants themselves do have a tendency to grow wild if you use this stuff, so you have to keep an eye on them and get the “sucker” branches off as soon as they pop up... but that’s just part of gardening. Miracle Gro for tomatoes also works on other vegetables. We never spend a summer without it.

Dandelions think of this stuff as Kool Aid. I swear, the times I’ve used it, I’ve actually heard the dandelions laughing at me as I applied it. I’ve applied it just as the direction’s indicated, and gotten up the next morning to find all the original dandelions in tact, along with new ones, all smirking and flipping me the middle finger as I stare at them out the kitchen door. Round-up is a waste of time and money.

Actually, they work great... for up to fifteen minutes after you first plug them in. Then, they start flaking out. You push buttons and nothing happens... or else, other buttons stay stuck in the pushed position. This can be annoying if, for instance, you’re playing a stealth game and trying to sneak up behind someone and your M60 keeps firing off random bursts into the floor. The one good thing about these controllers is that, since they’re wireless, they’re easy to throw.

We’re big banana eaters. I have to have one a day, and both of our boys love ‘em, too... so Wendy picked up a banana hanger a few years ago. I was thrilled with it, at first. It is, after all, a great idea... keep the bananas hanging and they’ll ripen evenly and won’t get bad spots from surface contact, right? Well.....

Our experience with the banana hanger was that if you hang a bunch of bananas on it, you then have to spend about 90 minutes trying to balance it precariously, in just the right position, so that it doesn’t tip over. Building a house of cards while drunk with one hand glued to your forehead is probably easier. If you accomplish this mean feat, you then have to ban anyone from walking into the kitchen, as the slightest movement will cause the banana hanger to collapse like a Styrofoam trailer in a hurricane. If you rig it so that it CAN’T fall over, using counterweights, ropes, nails, glue and outright threats, it WILL actually hang your bananas and not drop them... but then you learn that suspended bananas ripen in about three minutes, so the green ones you had when you went to bed will be fly-covered brown, oozing turd-like banana zombies when you wake up in the morning. This makes cutting down all that rope and prying out all of those nails an especially bitter experience.

Permalink -- Posted by Darrell at 18:27