Little Victories : Discovering Awesome Household products

Today I bought medical gloves to wear for house chores.  Specifically for any use of beach products or cat duties/doodies.  I slapped on the green nitrile gloves, got inside our bathtub and sprinkled Comet all over and started scrubbing away.  I got really into it.  Within about two minutes of finishing, the bottoms of my feet had slightly swelled, my legs had feathery currents running up and down up from toes to knees, I was sick to my stomach, nauseous, my head was pounding.  The chemicals had seeped up my bare feet, paying no mind to the hand protection I wore, and penetrated its way up.

Our bodies absorb everything and our feet are no exception.  To most people, these chemicals and toxins build up over time and your immune system will start figuring out what it is and find out by what process to get rid of them.  If too much builds up you will get sick, down the road.  With an autoimmune disease progressing in my body, it immediately acknowledged unlawful entry and planned an attack toward my own body.  I've known for a while I must go natural on home cleaning products, but I doubted they're effectiveness.

But it's a good day.  I really didn't have much faith that homemade cleaning products could be any good, but I figured it was still something I had to look into being at how transparent my pores could be to anything around me and honestly, the tub was in dire need of a serious scrubbin'.  Remembering back on my favorite book on domestication, No Hassle Housecleaning, I had learned about cleaning with tea tree oil, a natural powerful antiseptic big corporations are slapping the sticker their flammable liquids.   Additionally, I now have cat babies and they're the ones closer to the floors we clean with toxic materials; a reason many pets are also getting diseases in this modern world.  Oh yes, your dog may have lupus too. Inconceivable!

I bought a few ingredients for very low prices, some I already had, once my Target floor cleaner had been used up.  I looked up a recipe online and found this wonderful blog article and recipe:

BEST FLOOR CLEANER EVER

• white distilled vinegar
• distilled water
• tea tree essential oil
• baking soda
• spray bottle
• Optional - essential oil for fragrance - peppermint, grapefruit, eucalyptus, lavender, etc.

Obviously, sharing the recipe isn't my method of persuasion.  But I promise it was better than the expensive natural cleaners my mop was chugging through.  So, what are the hang-ups you might have?

EFFECTIVENESS
Amazing! Stains that had been on our apartment floor since before we moved in were cleared out.  A bit of baking soda smooths grit and leaves a polished gleam.  It takes some tweaking -more oils for me, waaay less baking soda -but it leaves the floor (and counters) sparkling!   I couldn't stop finding surfaces to clean.  I was so excited I almost sprayed Chev Chelios...the cat.

SCENT
Your house will not smell like salad dressing.  This was an important one to me because I DO NOT Like that acidic smell and am easily nauseous.  The good news is that the scent of vinegar fades and leaves behind the aromatic smells of the tea tree and/or the optional additional flavor you add on.  You must use the tea tree to clean and disinfect, the rest are just for additional aroma.  I had peppermint on the shelf so my house ended smelling fresh.  I did notice you have to shake up the bottle before each use or it'll smell of the smell of vinegar takes longer to fade.  I wanted it to smell stronger of peppermint, stored in my pantry for fresh breath, digestion, and muscle pain, so I added double the drops it called for.  An added plus is that peppermint repels bugs,roaches, and other creepers.  Even without an additional oil though, there will be a clean overall feel about the place.

PRICE
The above ingredients are all you need.  If you have a home water filtration system you're set in that department.  If not, buy...

• Distilled Water - Free or by the gallon. $0.65 cents. $0.25 for refills.
• Distilled White Vinegar, buy by the gallon about $2 or 3 dollars.  Will last a few months.
• Baking Soda - $0.78 per box.
• Spray Bottle - $0.98
• Tea tree oil - Starting from $8.99 and up at Vitamin Shoppe if you can't find a health food store. Will last forever.
• Optional essential oil - $4.89 for Peppermint (good for repelling bugs and creepers

CONVENIENCE

• You have a start-up fee of about $15 or less and don't have to replace the oils for a long time.
• The larger the sizes of vinegar and oils, the more you save.
• It serves wonderfully as a floor, stove, surface, multipurpose cleaner.
• It's safe enough to eat off the floor.
• The pets may feel free to lick the linoleum, if they're into that.
• Tie a red ribbon around it and it makes a cute homemade gift for all your "green" friends, ill family members, new moms, etc.
• The oils for other purposes as well, like ailments, aromatic burners, base massage oils, and bath and foot soaks.
• You can clean barefoot and not have to worry about dry yucky feet.

As you've read, I've been fighting my health issues since December, but it's taken me this long to pull a simple recipe together.  However slow at it may be, start allowing the idea to simmer that chemical free is better, and nature has always been superior, without the side effects (and the side effects do come to stake their claim one way or another).  Maybe in a few months or a year you'll be ready to try it too and love it as well.  I'm started to round up more ingredients already, like alcohol and borax, and see where that leads me.

Personally, I'm taking this experience as proof I can confidently venture into more homemade cleaning products, like bathtub, oven and glass cleaners that don't require a Hazmat suit to have a sparkly smell-good home.  I just had to share.

Additional Links:

• Best Floor Cleaner Recipe

• The Happy Slob Blog  - Author of No Hassle Housecleaning

• No Hassle Housecleaning Book - With recipes and quick home maintenance methods (Her cats follow her around while she cleans too!) 
• 

The Long Winded Ugly Truth

It's not that I forgot about my beloved blog, but I took a tiny hiatus to consolidate, arrange, and manage the numerous events I had going on.  Eat, Pray, Love would have us think that the best place to balance yourself is in Bali.  For the other 90% of us that can't afford a trip and stay to the other side of the world, we can definitely meditate and reinvent ourselves at home. Being unemployed gave me plenty of room to relearn and prepare for this lifestyle shift that I had no say in executing before the next working phase started.

For all those out there with autoimmune and chronic fatigue, I'm beginning to feel you a bit more.  Trying to enjoy all my free time with so many limitations has become a real challenge.  My body is still always tired, even though unstressed from the duress of a full time job.  So without a structured day, I was able to veg out for hours with the excuse that I didn't feel well.  Well, that doesn't lead to anything productive, or fun.  Sedentary reading and  Supernintendo Zelda never led to recuperation.  As a matter of fact, I learnt that my fingers stiffen up even faster, up to my forearms, and down to my toes, if I played for too long.  Reading in the same position too long made my back swell.

With more time and less bosses around, I was able to clean and organize my house to completion.  But the hurdles were the same.  The floor is still cleaned a portion at a time.  A bathroom scrub here, a vacuuming there.  Sitting sessions in between everything.  At the end of the day, it felt I had cleaned all day and barely rested.  Muscles still get sore swiftly and blood literally feels intoxicated.  However, I didn't have severe exhaustion as when I had the 9-5.  After about 3 weeks of being a full time housewife, I was able to think straight and started coming to terms with my limitations and new ways to handle things and healthy perspectives.

Some symptoms have worsened.  During this time I didn't write.  I wasn't avoiding the things I enjoy, but I was being forced to drastically give up a few more gifts we naturally have, into a Nazi type regimen. Rest and medicine, rinse, repeat.  That's what it felt like anyway.  I had heard that people with Lupus should not receive sunlight. As usual, I thought I was the exception.  Although the heat had already started giving me hives, the sunlight didn't seem to be the culprit.  However, the past few months had been spent indoors at work.  Now I was noticing that a short trip to the grocery store was inducing palpitations, a weird head stretchy feeling, mental fogginess, shallow breath, weakened and tingling muscles, and sobbing spells.  Basically, extreme fatigue.  So yes, I now cannot healthily tolerate the sun's rays, which instigate my immune system to attack itself.  Instead of getting sad about it, I resisted at first, as I do with anything you tell me I cannot do.  I told myself it's all in my head, I'm being dramatic, I'm being a wimp.  Then I found myself a blessing of a Colombian neighbor who also has Lupus and validated my new symptoms for me.  But all this free time, and I cannot sit at the pool, go to the beach, take a walk, or drive to the library in the day.  I'm still molding to this particular restriction but have worked out a more nocturnal lifestyle.  I still do plenty of these things and pay for them later, much like it happened with my diet.

On top of being laid off, I was so stressed about the toil and trouble of preparing gluten-free, vegan meals w/o nightshade vegetables, preservatives, additives, etc., that I would still "cheat" (what is otherwise healthy eating to others: a tomato, a lean steak, a whole wheat slice, oatmeal) about once a week.  I was hungry and too sore to make my scratch meals.  My habits didn't change much at first either because I was in a celebratory mood and didn't want to spend all my day cooking.  But after enough bladder spells from pizza sauce, inflamed colons from one cookie, and hair on the floor, I couldn't take it anymore.  I'm avoiding all detrimental foods like no tomorrow.  I spend all day now cooking, sitting, cleaning, sitting, folding clothes, stretching.  By sitting, I don't mean I sit and stare at the wall.  I pay bills, have friends visit, write letters, or just lightly walk around.  I actively rest, like hardcore strength trainers do.  I may not be able to work out, but I push myself like one would.

With a very unhealthy momma-in-law in the way, we both came to the epiphany that sometimes to be healthy, we need to focus on ourselves, and almost, but  selfishly tend to our needs.  Therein lies the reason I usually resist my next incremental phase in this disease, because I don't want to focus on just health all day (says the girl who was previous a health nut anyway).  But the truth is, just like I would rather my ma-in-law to be selfish than sick, I surrender in saying the same goes for me.  I know that it's better to fight for my health than try to keep living a life that wears down my body.  My husband would rather watching me suffer turning down stuffed waffles, than suffer washing my hair.  (Yes, it's starting to get difficult to even include showers.)

To me, and all who have been through a similar path, it's a victory.  I take pride it keeping my health and home.  I have not let my limited energies keep me from living a satisfactory lives, limit my amount to love others and do what I can for them.  I still continue on a path to health and in search of ways to halt this progression, because it can be controlled and maintained.  The proof is my neighbor who once tinted all her home windows, crawled to bathrooms, and her joints deformed.  Now she goes to the gym on a sunny day consecutively after cooking a meal from scratch.  I have high hopes, if not very ambitious goals.

In a few days, I begin bare minimum diet that helps heal the stomach through vegetables, grains, and juicing.  I added more natural things to control my pain and inflammation: Collagen, alpha lipoic acid, noni juice, aloe vera juice, liquid multivitamin, colon cleanse, chlorophyll...every day. Three times a day.  I will be adding flax oil as well.  These keep my body maintained and my skin almost looking like it did before I was ill.  I just received a juicer as a gift so that I'll be able to add more nutrients into my bloodstream without slowing down my digestion which doesn't work very well these days.  Oh yes, big plans in the works and I'll be sharing some of the things I've learned or will learn along the way.

And lastly, I got a job.  Unfortunately, full time, but it will not be exhaustive.  If for any reason it does, I will selfishly start looking elsewhere again.  I'm on a mission to take care of myself (and be humble enough to ask help when I can't do it myself); it might be expensive, tiring, frustrating, and outright stupid at times, but it ain't nothing I can't handle.

Anyway, that is the update.  The future still looks ultravioletly bright and I have a few things I can add to this here blog.  Thanks for reading!

Qwerty-itis

Being solely a housewife, housewifing around, is as bittersweet as I ever thought it would be.  It's okay, I like bittersweet.  It's the only chocolate consumption that I have control over.  But not having a mandatory, preset hour to rise, scheduled lunch hour, and clock-out time has me all over the map.  Now, I could definitely see myself enjoying this unemployment if our income remained the same:

• Coffee rendezvous
• Charity work
• Gourmet meals everyday
• Expensive hobbies
• "Lunching"
• Raising babies

Nope, I'm confined to a 5-mile radius to save on gas and eating more rice and beans than my country people back in El Salvador.  Being forced to take it easy is nice on my energy levels, but the bone-works still creak and spasm.  I still clean-up in the same manner I did during the good ol full-time days, in tiny spurts.  I've gotten more workouts in, more reading, more rest, and family time.  But I'm spending plenty of time plugging away at the keyboard as if I still had a job to get out of the house as soon as possible.

My one rule when I got canned was to wake up and get dressed, including makeup, even if I don't plan on going out or felt like poop.  Some days I dress casual, some I get in gym clothes, as if I could still make the treadmill cry.  It makes me move at a steady paced as opposed to PJ mode.  And sure enough, I've signed up at staffing agencies, scattered my resume across the Tampa-metro, and gave monster.com a good spike in web traffic.  In between brakes, I cleaned kitty litter.  They're so much happier now that I have time to refresh their potty box more often.

Progress update:

I'm still avidly searching with hints at a slightly better future.  Not too much.   Let's not get carried away here.  I'm looking for part-time so that my body may live 5 more years than if I had the full-time job, but those gems don't abound.  Administrative skills call for "9-5" days which are really8-5.  What a deceiving term.  Focusing on the Downtown Area so that I'll land in the heart of the city and feel more spunky than I did in an office with three guys burping and farting.  Making sure that this time there is a balanced gender environment, for sure.  I got a go-ahead from the county to take a Civil Service Exam and see if I can squeeze into a position for Library Assistant.  Dream. Job.

I immediately drove around my alloted perimeter and checked out books on the information I will be tested on and have been practicing my typing skills.  It is required to have 75 words per minute with 90% error rate allowed.  Haha, yeeaaaaa.

The next two days I will be practicing my little fingertips off and refreshing my multiplication skills (since I've had Excel do all my math work in the last 10 years).  I find the task challenging and exciting and it keeps my day mentally busier than killing the 30Rock Seasons on Netflix.  Even if I fail this time around, I love any reason to go to Downtown government buildings; and there is always next year.  I want that job.  I'm already practicing bossing people around, telling them to "Shhhhh!", and visualizing myself rolling around in a pile of books when the lights are out.

via blog.calgarypubliclibrary.com

So, what's your typing rate?
http://www.sucss.state.il.us/etest/itest.asp