A New Broom.....

Gentle, gentle readers. I must admit that I've been too Facebooky and not Bloggery enough lately. But I got tired of good taste: There's only so much you can say about it, after all - if you have it, you have it. If you don't, well.....

So I thought I'd try something new: A new look, a new feel, a new focus: I'm thinking a cross between thrifty housekeeping hints for Your Modern Home, and Living The Life of an International Trend Setter and Style Guru (Which, although you would never guess it to look at me, I am. At least in my own mind).

So I shall endeavor to impart upon you, my dear and loyal following, the accumulated bits of ephemera and other nonsense that I have managed to accumulate in my forty-four years on this Earth.

I'm calling this new endeavor "The Lost Art of the Sofa Painting" because you just don't read enough about sofa paintings these days. A Google search of it leads one absolutely nowhere, and that is a real shame: If the internet is good for anything (and the jury is still out, as far as I'm concerned) it should have at least five hundred websites devoted to the topic. But alas, it seems to be just you and I, and that greenish Grecian concoction in the header of this page.

So what is today's tip? Glad you asked: Today's tip is cleaning your spaghetti shades.

A spaghetti shade - as if I have to tell YOU - is a delicate collection of spun plastic that was commonly used, in a gentler time, as a lamp shade. They are lovely to look at, and you'd think they would be durable, but they get brittle as they age - especially if they have been mistreated by people who put too high of a wattage lamp in their fixture.

I recently picked up a wonderful lamp with spaghetti shades but, like so many lamps, it had lived too many years with a smoker. Smokers are notorious non-dusters, so everything they owned ends up with a sticky, nasty nicotine-and-grease combination on it that is hell to get off (Yes, I know I'm wildly stereotyping here, but stick with me - There's a point in here somewhere). But don't despair: It's actually pretty easy to clean most nicotiney stuff if you know the secret ingredients: lukewarm water and Dawn dishwashing liquid (which is also what you should use to clean a bong. I don't know why I know that, but I do)

So fill your dishpan (not your sink - the sink is too hard, and can crack your spaghetti shade if you hit it against the sink) with lukewarm water and vast amounts of Dawn. Put your spaghetti shades in, one at a time, and gently move them around the water, like you would if you were playing with a toy boat in the bathtub. Then just leave them in the water and go have a cocktail or take a nap or something. Let them get good and soapy, and then put it in your dish drainer, and rinse it prodigiously with cold water (NEVER USE HOT WATER. IT MIGHT SHRINK THEM!) and let them air dry. You'll find your spaghetti shades sparkle like new and, with a little dusting and non-smoking, will stay sparkling for months on end.

If you follow my directions, you'll get a lamp that looks like this, and doesn't everybody want a lamp that looks like this?



And here's a close-up of a spaghetti shade.