No soap!

People who know me, know that I have a tendency to be sick. I rarely ever took a REAL vacation because I'd spend my vacation days here and there due to every cold that came down the pike. When I was working at Google it was even worse because there was 4 hours of driving involved every day, and if I was feeling under the weather that would make it MUCH worse, plus the fact that I'd be stuck at work with no way to leave until the shuttle returned to Portland at the end of the day. My illnesses, while not major by any means, have caused me significant problems.

Which is why it's such a landmark for me to say that I've not been sick for over a year, and I have only one thing I can possibly attribute to my newfound increased healthiness.  I could say diet - I've been eating better lately, but honestly my diet hasn't changed THAT much.  I eat more vegetables in general, and maybe less steak, but all in all, the change in foods that I consume are fairly insignificant. No, I'm pretty sure the reason I've not been sick is because of soap.

Or, rather, the lack thereof.

I'm going to rant a little bit here, mainly because this is something that I complained about back in the mid-90's. Antibacterial soap. You see on the label that it kills '99.9% of bacteria', right? That's a pretty good number, until you look at just how MANY bacteria are on you at any one time. A quick googling gives varied numbers between 1500 and 1 million per square cm on the hands, so let's say for the sake of argument 100,000 per square inch, or if the hand has ~20 square inches of area (palm side only) then about 2 million bacteria. 99.9% of 2 million kills all but 20,000. However, those 20,000 are at least semi immune to whatever it was that you're trying to kill them with. That number will double around 30 minutes, then double again, and again... in 2 hours you'll have 160k semi-resistant bacteria on your hands. In 4 hours you're back over 2 million - how many of those will your 99.9% cleaner kill now?

Your immune system is designed to handle the regular bacteria, but not the resistant stuff. This is why we now have superbugs that are resistant against antibiotics. But I digress.

Instead of using soap, I've simply been washing my hands with water. Or if I have dirt or grease/oil on them, a squirt of Doctor Bronners (which is a natural castille oil soap). But after using the bathroom, I don't use the antibacterial soap that EVERY place has installed next to the sink. Not even after I poop.

Let me ask you a question: when you're done going number 2, do you stand up after wiping and wash your hands IMMEDIATELY afterwards? Probably not, because your pants would be around your ankles with your privates all hanging out. So, what do you do? Right - use your HANDS to pull up your pants, zip up the fly, button the clasp, buckle the belt, tuck in your shirt, put your phone away...  And THEN you wash your hands. By this point you've already wiped any fecal material you got on your hands onto your clothes.

So yes, just water. Usually warm, if not hot, but I don't wait around the sink for a minute or two for the water to get warm if it's cold. Rinse, rub, dry, done.

And I do believe that THIS is why I'm not getting as sick as I used to. The worst 'sickness' I've had in the past year+ has been a headache that was probably a combination of not sleeping+hangover+caffiene withdrawal.

Moving to days

Today I made the transition to dayshift. Normally I work graveyard, mainly because I'm not a morning person. My body clock is and has always been between 8 and 12 hours shifted from what most people call 'normal'. I slept fine last night, and got plenty of sleep, but was tired when I awoke and am still tired right now - a good 4 hours after initially waking up. At least today is sunday and I don't have to worry about dealing with people too much. Tomorrow will be worse - the lights will be on and I'll have people around me, making noise and talking and whatnot. Because of that I can't drown them out with music, at least not unless I put in some earphones. It's just a pain all the way around.

The only real saving grace is that the family is also on normal time, so I'll get to spend more time with them as well. At least I'm thinking that will be a good thing...hope it just doesn't mean more fights. I guess we'll see, won't we?

More going on...

The more going on about me over a year ago was due to severe depression. At that time, I had been unemployed for over 2 years, my mom died a couple of months before, all of my kids had come to live with me (which was a good thing, but it was a BIG change), and my girlfriend and I were almost broken up. Due to all of that, I pretty much forgot about this and my volvogeek blog. Right now I'm taking a facebook hiatus so I feel like I need to express myself in SOME way, and since I have this, why not, right?

Since then, I reconnected with an ex-gf of mine and we started dating again, the kids have all adjusted, dogs have been acquired - as have a gaggle of lizards, and most importantly, I now has a job again! It's not a great job, but it allowed me to go back to school for a couple of terms due to the schedule. I'm not sure how I feel about school as a whole anymore at this point in my life, but I did enjoy it. Job is working graveyard shift, 6:30pm to 6:30am Sun-Tues and every other Sat, and mainly it's just monitoring things in case they go bad and provide support to the groups that own machines. Not many machines though, so it's really very easy and very boring. But at least it pays well and I've got insurance as well for all of the kids, so bonus.

Lots has gone on since all of that, but it's mainly boring day-to-day stuff that could probably be best found via facebook, so update yourself there and I'll put more interesting things here from now on.

Soap Update

I stopped the not using of soap a while ago. I think the catalyst was when I swapped out the oil pan in my car. I was crawling around under it, my head and hair got pretty much covered in oil, and there was NO WAY oil wasn't coming out of hair without soap.

So I used a minimal amount, but I really enjoyed the way my hair felt after that. I still don't really lather up my body, and I use a washcloth sans soap for that, but I feel like my hair needs a little more love.

There's more going on with me, but I don't think I'm ready to share the rest of it with the internets right now.

More No Soap

So back in January I posted about not using soap, and I've kept to this regimen for the past 4 months now. I'm not completely 'product-less', as I use deodorant and shaving cream (I'm not gonna shave dry, ffs), but when I shower, I don't lather up on the body nor the hair.

The only thing I've noticed in my own smell is that if I go without a shower for a couple of days, the deodorant starts to wear off and I smell a lil ripe. That reminds me to go shower and re-apply. I think the main issue with that is that the soap generally has a scent, and it masks body odor a little better than just deodorant. But it's not THAT bad, because if it were, my girlfriends' overly sensitive sense of smell would kick in and she'd bathe me herself.  Not that this is a bad thing, but I'd rather it not be because I was stinky.

So, so far, so good. The only issue I've had at all was when I put some gel in my hair (it's at a weird transitional length and looks funny) when I went to jury duty, the shower after that reactivated the gel and my hair was kinda funky for a couple of days until the next shower. Other than that, nobody has been the wiser except the few people I've told in person and the 0 people that actually read this blog. Haha.

No soap!

I remember reading about this guy who decided stop using soap back in February 2010.  Well not ALL soaps, but mainly shampoos and other body-lathering substances whilst showering.  It intrigued me.  Then he updated about his experiences about a year later, and now I think I'm gonna try it.

I took my first soapless shower this morning.  I used a washcloth to scrub my dirty parts, and only used some shaving gel as lubricant to shave my face and head (I recently shaved off all of my hair because I was in a mood).  To be perfectly clear - I'm not against soap in general.  It's good for cleaning dirty hands, and lets face it, you don't want to be handling food with hands that have been stuffed who-knows-where into who-knows-what.  I DO have a problem with those so-called antibacterial soaps, that kill '99.9%' of germs.

Bacteria multiply exponentially, people.  It does not take that long for something to be completely coated in germs.  But I'd rather put a germ that my own immune system can kill into my system than one that has made it past that 0.1%.

But I digress.  Trying this out.  We'll see how things go after a week or so.

Google Laptop!

Last night (well, tuesday night) I came home and there was a package waiting for me.  I figured it was something from Amazon that I had a recurring subscription for, but alas, it was not.  Instead, it was a Google ChromiumOS Laptop!  OMG WOOHOO!!

And though I was going to play with it in stock form for a while, I ended up not being able to wait 24 hours before putting it into dev mode and installing ubuntu.  Mainly because I wanted to use this thing as a megasquirt tune box running Megatunix.  And so far, Megatunix runs and everything - I haven't hooked it up to the keyspan I've got nor to the actual megasquirt box, but that will come soon enough.

All in all, I'm really enjoying this little laptop. It's a bit smaller than I'd honestly prefer, but it has most of the features I'd want in a laptop (plus a SSD!).  It's reasonably fast, though it could probably use a bit more ram even under linux.  No cdrom, but honestly that isn't as big of an issue as you might think.  Most everything can be dropped onto a usb stick or sd card, and this has both a usb (just one!) and a sd card slot.  It wakes up instantly, and even when shut down completely it takes maybe 5 seconds to boot to a login screen.

I think the biggest thing it has going for it is that now I won't have to turn on the behemoth of a desktop (quad-core, 8gb ram, 2+tb storage, dual monitors, beefy video card) every time I want to simply browse the web.  My phone does a reasonably decent job of that, but even a 4" screen is sometimes too small.