Listen, I never said I was domesticated...

Subtitled: Adventures with Bleach

OK, look. As H.I. said in Raising Arizona: Now ya'all without sin, can cast the first stone...


I never quite understood about bleach. I mean, it gets stains out. You can't use it on colored clothes. This is the sum total of my bleach knowledge.

So, I had a white polo shirt. It had some kind of weird red stains - probably some sort of fruit juice, I dunno. No idea how it got there, probably something dripped on it while it was in the hamper. (or, let's be honest here, on the floor...)

Well, I've got some bleach here. I've got a white shirt with a stain. Seems natural - treat the stained area, right? Then throw it in the wash. With other white stuff.

Hmm. Well, whoops, and one sorta dark grey neat "Pirates of the Carribean" embroidered Disney polo shirt that I'd only worn twice.

(The ride ... not the movie. Yeah, that's right - I have shirts of the Disney RIDES. Your point?)

Still probably wouldn't have been a problem, 'cept of course, the white shirt landed on top of the dark grey one. I think that's what happened.

All I know is, coming out of the wash....everything looked great...except, the weird tye-dyed effect on the grey shirt. Which is now sort of an off-white in a few spots.

Well, of course I did what ANY of the rest of you would do, right?

Sure. I washed it again, this time all by itself, with about half a cup of bleach. Figured I'd even it out, y'know, it'll be just as cool as an off-white polo shirt...

Hmm, that didn't work. Came out a lot lighter all over, but the drippy spots still all tye-dyed.

OK, so, back to the drawing board. I dumped a gallon of bleach in a bucket, and soaked the shirt in it for a few minutes, stirring it around, taking it out, wringing it out, dipping it in...you know, figured I'd make sure it was all evenly drenched in bleach.

Washing it again now. What's gonna happen? I don't know, but it's gonna be fun to find out.





I do this kind of stuff sometimes, you know. It's been that kinda weekend.


Another example, since I'm having the fireplace professionally cleaned next week anyway - I was doing some science experiments on Friday night.

I was curious, you know, to see how hot it got in there.

(click for full size on any image. Taken with my old Nokia 3650 camera phone camera, nothing else handy when I was doing this...)


Would you believe that this:





Placed in the fireplace like this:





Ended up like this. Actually 3 chunks about this size, but anyway:





I wouldn't have either. Amazing.

A friend told me that the candle holder probably wasn't 100% glass but some kind of weird glass-plastic mix. I suppose that's possible, but...it was a candle holder. That seems kind of unsafe , doesn't it? I chucked another little decorative glass doodad in there later that sort of half-melted, so...I dunno.

I also attempted to melt some gold jewelry (no, not my wedding bands, nothing melodramatic, just a 14k "spare" wedding band we had that came as an estate piece when we bought her engagement ring...small, unadorned, and uninteresting....) which you can see sitting in a small porcelain crucible in the middle pic, above. Didn't melt, though. Didn't even seem to soften much.

Anyway, so, I'll keep you all posted on if I can turn the grey polo into an offwhite polo. :)