Ode to a Dustpan

I love my dustpan. In the morning, it's so easy to grab it and do a fast sweep of the bathroom floor. In just a few seconds, I'm done. I don't have to drag my vaccuum cleaner out. Oh, you can howl to me about how well the Dustbuster works but I'd have to go find it, and plug it in, and wake up the ratties just as they were drifting off to morning sleep. Swish, swish, I make the raisins disappear.

In some ways, it's gotten way LOWER tech around my house since I got the rats. In every way. In fact, it almost borders on frontier life: the wild girls live in the bathroom and, while they love their mommy, they have retained much of their natural skittishness. The vet suggested that I install red bulbs in the bathroom and leave them on all the time because turning the artificial light on would disturb them. Well, the red light disturbs me so I've opted to use my bathroom in the dark. In fact, I operate all over the house in low light now. I can only thank God that I've never accidently grabbed the dish soap for the salad oil.

Back to the dustpan. It's cheap. I found it in the Dollar store. So I bought two and I keep one near each cage. I'm sure not going to buy 2 Dustbusters.

I've pared down my cleaning products to the basics: Hot water, soap, ammonia, lemon juice, salt, baking soda, bleach, peroxide, vinegar, old cotton towel and t-shirt rags. I started getting really shy about using strong smelling cleaners including the pines around the rats because I was worried about the chemical smells affecting their breathing. I report to you that the aforementioned products work great and safe. To tell you the truth, most of the gunk around your house will liquify in hot water ALONE. Ordinary soap will do the rest.

Medically: same thing. And now I have backing. It is reported (don't ask me where: my info is purely based on rumor and innuendo...) that doctors are going back to the advice that if you get a cut: just wash it with soap and water, dress with some kind of cream and cover it. Don't bother with the antiseptics including antibacterials soaps. The problem is, these products have very low levels of germ killers: not strong enough to actually kill germs dead. So the result is that germs become MORE RESISTANT as a result of these products.

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