No adventures, so you get some household laundry tips

It appears I'm not having many "adventures" right now unless you count looking in the mirror every morning at new wrinkles and such, so decided to share a brilliant tip and a more ordinary tip.

A couple of weeks ago I spilled some melted butter on my favorite, warm, cuddly, embroidered-logo UCSB sweatshirt. I pretreated it before washing, but when it came out of the dryer, the giant spot was still there. Damn! So a couple of days ago I googled "getting out old grease stains" and clicked on this site: http://members.tripod.com/~barefoot_lass/grease.html . There were lots of interesting suggestions, but the strangest (and therefore, the most intriguing) to me was this one: Spray WD-40 on the spot, then add liquid dish soap and scrub it a bit. Rinse, repeat the dish soap application, and launder as usual. Weird, eh? Well, I had a couple of other grey sweatshirts that had even older grease stains, so decided to try it on them first. The fabric didn't dissolve, the spots didn't turn black, so I went ahead and did my fave too. The only thing I did differently was that instead of the 2nd application of dish soap (I have a front-loader and didn't want all the suds from the dishwashing soap), I used my liquid laundry detergent (All "small and mighty" 3X concentrated, for those who want all the details). Then I flung them into the washer followed by the dryer and VIOLA! The grease spots are completely gone with no sign they were ever there! The fabric is intact, and the sweatshirts look like new. Whodathunkit? I must admit the washer smelled a little like WD-40, but I washed a "rough" load and the smell now seems to be gone. Will next try it on some brightly colored sweatshirts, see what happens to the color, and report back.

My 2nd tip is this: instead of buying Oxi-Clean, when I want to "brighten" a load of laundry, I pour into the liquid bleach dispenser somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4 cup of plain old, cheap, 3% hydrogen peroxide. It works better than Oxi-Clean, which I had used for several years. Got this tip from some list of uses for hydrogen peroxide someone forwarded to me by email.

And here's a bonus tip: You can use Softscrub to clean tough burned-on gunk off your glasstop stove. Won't hurt it at all and works really, really well. Thanks to my DIL and her mom for that one!

So long, toots!