Rubber Brush

Another thing that bothers me.  

We all, almost all, brush our teeth, our tooth.  Some even use toothpaste or teethpaste and we all know that it comes in a tube.  From time to time, especially if someone doesn't squeeze from the bottom, you have to move the toothpaste back up to the top of the tube.  Forever and ever I have used the end of my toothbrush (the end without the bristles) to "scrape" the tube and push the paste toward the spout.  I'm sure that everyone employs the same method, right?  

The problem I have run into in the past several years is that in an effort to make toothbrushes that sell better manufacturers have begun to put a rubber coating on the handle.  While this coating makes for incredibly clean and sparkly teeth, it does nothing for the pushing of the paste to the top of the tube and in fact, it prevents it.  The rubber coating prevents the toothbrush handle from sliding on the tube and therefore, you are left to roll the tube, which we all know doesn't work worth a hoot.  

If you put a slimy coating on the tube the rubber will slide, but who wants to put slobber on the toothpaste tube?  

My wife quit allowing me to cut the tube open in order to use every last bit of paste.  She said it was too redneck.  I pulled a vacuum on the tube and all the paste indeed came out, but then I had to try and convince my wife to suck on the tubing to get some paste.  It was a no go.  It was almost impossible to extract the paste from the tubing without sucking it out, and so I was back at square one.  

I hate to give up, but what am I to do?  I am trying to reconcile throwing away toothpaste with the financial crisis and climate crisis that we are in right now.  We all have to do our part, right?  I mean some people are having trouble putting gas in their cars.  You know the ones.  The ones with the latest cell phones, manicured nails, and $5000 dollar set of rims.  I'm having trouble sleeping at night.  I wonder if there are toothpaste credits I can buy?  

El Toro Negro

Ouch

This happened at work at a piece of equipment that had just been installed but has yet to receive the proper grating to keeping people from falling through the floor.

El Toro Negro

Shower Thoughts

I'm not that old.  In fact, I'm young.  37  One of the things I have attempted to do, rather I gave in, when we moved into our new house is to accept some of the things that are the current "trend".  Some of these things involve the shower.  

Soap.  I never realized that there were so many kinds or that I couldn't survive without using them correctly.  I always used a bar of soap, Irish Spring, Dial, Lava, never Dove (it is like using Crisco), to do all the washing of my body.  Hair, face, body.  Hey, clean is clean.  In and out in just a few minutes.  Great.

My wife has been trying to coerce me into following the current trends, but dang, there are too many types of what I call soap.  Now it is called body wash.  You have to have a shampoo for your hair and you have to know what type of hair you have.  Is it dry or oily, brittle or dandruffy?  You have to get it right or your hair will fall out.  But, after you wash it, you aren't done.  You have to have something called conditioner.  I didn't know EVERYONE'S hair was out of condition.  Does the shampoo put it into an unsafe condition?  

Then there has to be a certain soap for your face.  Again you have to know your skin type.  Specifically, your face skin type, not to be confused with the skin type of the rest of your body.  And, it doesn't necessarily correspond to the type of your hair.  I am informed that your face could peel off and blow away if you use the wrong soap.

Generally, as far as I can tell, the rest of your body can be placed in the same soap category, and I think there is a bit of personal preference that is allowed here.  Do you like bar or liquid soap?  Do you want something that smells good or causes every woman within one mile to suddenly want you?  

Now this information is if you take a shower and changes slightly if you take baths, which I don't care for all that much.  If you take a bath you have to factor in bath oils and/or bath salts.  I took baths as a youngster only because we didn't have a shower.  Baths don't make sense to me.  They take longer and use more water.  I just don't want to wash the dirt off and sit in the filth.  What happens when you stand up to get out of the bath?  Does the dirt in the water magically sheen off of you?  I don't think so.  You just have some recycled body grunge.  Get a head start, right?  Now I understand that if you are sore or want to relax that a bath offers what a shower can't give you.  So in that I can do the bath thing.

It was hard to get used to the idea that I had to use a loofa or scrunchie to scrub with.  You know what I am talking about.  The little plastic puff thing that you put your soap on and then use it to apply the soap.  I also am lost when it comes to the wash rag.  My wife has to use about eight of them for one cleaning.  Won't one do the job?  I don't know.

There are people that feel that there is a conspiracy in the BIG soap business.  With the media's help, they have convinced us that all these things are necessary.  You are weird if you don't use shampoo, or "body wash".  Instead of having one that will do all the cleaning, it now takes no less that 37 to get the job done.  More stuff to buy.  

I'm sure there are some of you that are saying right now, "You forgot about such and such.  You can't shower with out such and such."  I am only a novice at these new fangled soaps and bathing techniques, but with time, coaching, and a lot of study I think I can learn.  I only wish they built a shower caddy that was big enough to house all the crap you have to have just to get clean.

PS.

I let my wife proof read this and she informed me that you never use soap on your face.  It should be a type of cleanser.  So there you go folks.

El Toro Negro

Crazy Kid

I found this kid at a pizza place and thought there must be something more in the pizza.  I can just see him on some reality dance show in a few years.

El Toro Negro

Cabbage Casserole

A rather large section of my followers have asked me to post the recipe for the cabbage casserole I referenced in the last post.  This recipe came from Sister English.

Cook one cup of rice.  In heavy skillet saute sausage (1 lb).  Add 1 c. sliced red onion and 1 c. bell pepper.  Cook till veg. are slightly cooked.  Add rice, one can cream of mushroom and one can rotel plus 1/2 can of water.  Chop cabbage (about three cups).  Spray 9x13 dish with Pam.  Put cabbage in bottom.  Add sausage mixture.  Add salt to cabbage.  Sprinkle cheese on top.  Bake at 350 for one hour covered with foil.   

My wife has some variations but she isn't here right now to tell me.

Enjoy, I do.

El Toro Negro

The Nerve!

You might be wondering why I have had so many post in such a short amount of time, given my recent slowdown.  Well, the reason is that over my Thanksgiving vacation I started reading.  I started with the Twilight series, all four books.  Our exchange student was reading them and I got into them rather quickly.  My son has been asking me to read the Eragon books for some time so after the vampire books I started Eragon,  then Eldest, and finished Brisinger about the time I started posting again.  I like to read and when I get started I do it to the exclusion of all else.

So what am I going to write about today?  I have been forbidden to write anything "crude" by my wife, at least for now, so I will tell you what I had happen to me today, or rather what a friend of ours said.

Before I start let me say that I'm not mad about what happened.  I fact I am rather amused by what happened, especially considering who said it.

We have some friends that live here in our small town.  The wife seems to show up at our house quite often, not that I mind all that much.  Our friendship is such that I can tell her when I have had enough of our socializing, and not offend anyone, not that I worry about that too much.  

My wife makes a cabbage casserole that is very good, and it so happens that her grandfather grows cabbage.  He brought us two big heads over Christmas, more than enough for four 9x13's.  Her plan was to cook one for supper and freeze the others to have for another time.  It quickly turned into a cookfest.  My wife called this friend and asked her if she was interested, all she needed to buy was one ingredient, and she could have two of these casseroles.  It was decided and she came over.

After our usual jarring, we like to pick at one another, I heard a comment from her that made me laugh.  Mind you that my wife is doing all the cooking, provided almost all the ingredients, using her double oven, etc.  When my wife told her that it would take about an hour to cook I heard our friend ask my wife is she could come back in an hour or so to pick up the two dishes and take them home.  WOW.  

Well I proceeded to let her have it, in a fun loving way, really.  She is a great person and friend to both me and my wife, but I made fun of her for being offered two huge, heaping casseroles, and then not being willing to at least keep us (mostly my wife) company while they were made and cooked.  I thought that was very funny.  The only explanation I could think of was that she is from California.  

El Toro Negro

Pillow Talk

We just celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary on the 6th of January.  I think it would have been cooler to have been married on January the first.  You know, new year, new beginning.   But I was out voted.  So I just tell people it is the first.  They don't have to know, and what is a few days.  

One of the things that I have learned in fifteen years of sharing a bed is that the pillow case has to face a certain way.  I'm not sure how long it took me to figure it out.  It probably was always there, and it is not just my pillow, but my wife's pillow too.  So which way does it have to face?

To the outside of the bed, naturally.  The reason?  I can't say for sure.  It must have something to do with the feel of it.  When I put my arm up, behind my head for example, I don't like to feel the open end of my wife's pillow.  The closed side is so much more pleasant.  You don't have all that extra pillow case bunched up under your are.

And what is the deal with the body pillow?  My wife has one and I don't understand it.  It's huge and always seem to get on my side of the bed.  I don't find it comfortable to have a huge pillow between my legs when I sleep.  I've tried it.  Then again, I don't sleep on my side often.  The one my wife has is bigger than she is.  

That brings up the issue of how do you divvy up the space of the bed.  Do you do it 50/50, since there are two of you?  We have a king size bed and my wife is rather small.  I get 2/3 of the bed because I take up so much more space.  She wants more but she understands.  I did give her a bit extra when she was pregnant.  Her argument was that she was actually two people.  What is a marriage if it's not compromise.  

El Toro Negro

Ski Pics

So you wanted to see some of our pictures from Colorado.  Well, here are three.  Below are three of my six kids (the ski ninja is my oldest) with my wife.  The others are of the resort.

El Toro Negro

They Say It's Your Birthday

I work with a bunch of young kids.  I say kids because most are in their twenties, and I am a bit older than them.  Their behavior often times confuses me, not that it is unexpected, but that I just don't understand what is so appealing about what they do. 

One guy in particular, not my buddy, always starts his stories at break with "we were so drunk", as if all he does is drink.  Perhaps that is what he does, every night.  Often times the story ends with some friend puking in his jeep, or at least having to stop on the side of the road to puke.  

One of the things that I find most curious is the asking off from work for your birthday.  They all seem to do it.  Why do you need off for your birthday?  We work part-time.  They get off in plenty of time to go out.  Now I know that they do it so that they can go out partying the night before, since we start work so early.  But why can't you wait till the weekend?  We never work on Saturday or Sunday.  Is their something about the day of your birth?  In reality we only have one birthday, then a lot of "anniversaries" of our birth.  

My wife hates this outlook on birthdays.  I play along with whatever she wants to do.  Parties, cakes, presents.  She claims that it is to show the person that you care for them and love them.  I guess that is as good a reason as any.  But I could never do what some people do, spend hundreds of dollars on one kids birthday.  Fancy restaurant, rent out the whole theater, take 20 friends to the amusement park.  What the heck?  But today so many kids run the home.  Ridiculous.

So have your day off for your birthday.  It's fine with me.  I just don't understand it.

El Toro Negro

Stall Hogs (part dos)

I want to know who invented the toilet seat that has the missing part in the front.  Or, I want to know who perpetrated the myth that a man could pee in a toilet with this type of seat on it, leaving it down, without getting some pee on the seat.  I guess that is the purpose of the horseshoe toilet seat.  Leaving it down and peeing seems, on the surface, a good idea.  Let me just inform the mass population of men out there that in no way, shape or form does it work, at all.  Don't try it.  You can't do it.

 

Do what I do if I am in a bathroom that doesn't have a urinal.  Use your foot, if you have a shoe on, (pee on the bottom of your shoe is about the best place for it, if there can be a best place) to lift up the toilet seat, because if your in a public restroom or in a bathroom at work and it is not the executive bathroom, the seat is going to have pee on it.  

So what about the women out there, when they have to use one of these bathrooms shared with men, what do they do?  Or what if you have to go big (euphemism for poo poo, (there are about a thousand for poo poo))?

Well there are a few solutions.  You can always do the wipe method (not the one you are thinking of).  Simply wipe off the pee with toilet paper.  This will work, provided that you are not anal about pee residue being on the seat, and you can't use method two.  Fact is, that unless you used a Clorox disinfectant wipe, on any seat, it probably has pee residue on it.  I have heard of people using the disinfectant hand gel on their butt after the wipe method.  These are the same people that think using toilet paper after going big actually gets you clean.  That is like doing auto work on your car, getting your hands greasy, wiping them off with a towel, and thinking that they are clean.  Sure, go ahead and eat your lunch with those hands.  Your butt still has poop on it after you wipe, smeared poop.  There is that select group out there that uses a bidet.  

Method two.  Hover. This is still the primary method in France.  (Google squat toilet.)  This is claimed to be used by everyone that goes to Mexico and is forced to use a public restroom, and a lot of women in general.  The actual number that can pull it off, especially considering the amount of time and effort required to hover while going big not to mention the general out-of-shapeness of most of the women in this country, remains an unproven quantity.  I would guess that a vast number of people that claim to hover actually are wipers.  

Another option is to use the toilet seat cover that is in some of the restrooms in this country.  Using them correctly is a mystery.  Trying to get that flap in the middle to rest in the toilet (so that you can just flush and the whole thing goes down the toilet) while you have enough of the cover left to actually cover the whole seat is a feat that is rarely pulled off.  The most common coverup sub-method is to use toilet paper, or a combination of both.  The toilet paper to cover where the real cover doesn't.  

Option four, and perhaps the hardest, Hold It.  I know of more than several people that have perfected this method.  Using a toilet seat other than their own appalls them, or just grosses them out.  I know of two women that had to have every toilet seat replaced in a house that they bought.  OK.  I can understand, a little, having the seats replaced in a house that you buy.  But putting yourself in pain, just so you can make it to an "acceptable" toilet seat...

Perhaps it is a privacy issue.  Most places have a stall.  I think it is more that people don't want others to hear the inevitable farts that happen when you go big.  How embarrassing.  Women don't fart.  Who can remember, back in the day, in the field house?  Just a row of toilets.  No stalls, no walls, just a place to poop.  There is probably some federal law against having that type of facility now.  

Now another matter.  This could be a post in and of itself but I add it here for your enjoyment.  www.cs.umd.edu/~dabe/Poopie.html

What is it?  Ok, we know it is something braided, but from what?

El Toro Negro

Stall Hogs

I know some of you hate when I blog about bathroom stuff, ie the Ipod.  Tough.  Just wait till I get to the fart posts.

I have noticed this before, but it became a peeve of mine this week while skiing in Colorado.  We have to go during the busiest week of the season, at least the first two days we were there were crowded.  It took us about half an hour longer to arrive which made us a bit late for the ski school the kids were enrolled in.  (Everyone else was late too.)  The lift lines were crazy, at least at the bottom lifts.  If you stayed up on the mountain and went in the singles line (not necessarily a place to meet chicks) it wasn't too bad.

Now my recently realized peeve.  I went to the bathroom and found a line for the stalls.  I know that this is a common occurrence for women for I have seen their lines come out of the bathroom, wind around the room and then continue out the door.  I see it all the time.  No wonder they are always so irritable.  They must have primping stations in each stall for the lines to get so long.

There were two guys ahead of me so I had a minute.  I noticed that the urinals were about half full the whole time I waited.  I also noticed that a couple of the guys in the stalls were only peeing.  What the heck.  After I thought about it I remembered times when I have followed behind guys into a bathroom and have seen them pass up the empty urinals to go to a stall only to pee.  It always seemed strange but never bothered me until I had to wait on some stall pee-ers to get a stall.  

Why would you not use the urinal on the wall?  As long as you observe the spot on the wall rule everything is fine.  Is there some issue that I have never thought about?  Me, I'm in favor of bringing back the trough.  You can stack a lot of guys down a trough.  No lines.  Are men so worried about being seen that they can't take the chance?  I don't get it.  

Just use the dang urinals to pee and we will never have the lines that the women have.  

El Toro Negro