cleanliness is next to freakishness

i DO use soap and water now!

i'm not a huge fan of cleanliness.   although nowadays i do regularly wash my hands, admittedly this is a fairly new habit of mine.   but i rarely got sick even when i was a handwashing poo-pooer.   always been healthy as a horse.  

i know plenty of fanatical hand-washers that carry PocketBac antibacterial gel in their purse or (gasp) in their pocket, that get sick quite frequently.  so, even while inundated with handwashing propaganda, i haven't jumped onto the handwashing as the leading defense against illness bandwagon.

who actually follows this procedure besides surgeons?   and why bother when they are going to put gloves on anyway?



do it or you will die!



are there actual studies reporting good health for horses?   we have that idiom denoting a strong connection between the two.   sure, horses generally do what you want them to do most of the time and appear healthy, but how are they really feeling?  i'll have to send a query to robert redford. 



a few years back one of my best friends, olive, threatened a boycott against me if i didn't become a regular hand-washer.   she used to lecture me about germs.   her friendship meant more to me than saving water or a minute in the bathroom, so i obliged.   i've never regretted my decision. 



olive is a freak about cleanliness, germs, and stray hairs.  although she'd have to be strong-armed into admitting it, she really does love me.   i know this is true because i always have stray strands resting on my shoulders, clinging to the sweater on my back, lingering all over.   right now i'm looking over my shoulder and all around on my sweater and have spotted 4 of them.   i would take the time to pick them all off, but they multiply in minutes, so it's just a waste of time. 

and if i'm around olive, she'd rather my loose tresses just stay put on my sweater than be anywhere near her skin.  i hesitate in mentioning this next nugget due to jinxing laws, but... i have never had head lice.  have never had any head infection, or problems with diseased hair.    and like i mentioned in my previous blog, my hair is usually shampooed clean in the shower every day or at least every other day.  so there isn't any logical reason why olive is creeped by my hairs.  but she is.   and she's also not yet convinced i'm as avid a handwasher as she requires in a friendship.

case in point.  the other day, olive asked me to help her edit a letter she'd composed.   after sitting impatiently next to her for a few minutes while she hunt-and-pecked my editing suggestions into her letter, i finally told her to just let me do the typing.   she balked.   just move over olive!   she didn't budge.   fine, whatever, you like to type?  surprising, since you only type about seven words per minute and look up and down and up and down from mouse to screen before you can move the cursor to a different sentence. 

and still, she put the cursor in the wrong spot.  so i tapped her computer screen to show olive the spot for the capital letter.   she shuddered a tiny and said 'are you touching my screen?".  oh my god, she didn't want me touching her screen or her keyboard!  

so i plucked a piece of hair from my shoulder, threw it at her.   hair doesn't sail, so it landed on her carpet.   olive picked it up with a kleenex and put it in the trash can. 

engineer it so i'm never expected to bring a home cooked potluck item again