I’ve always cleaned my bathtub with Mrs Meyer's Lemon Verbena or Honeysuckle. I would buy Costco-sized containers of the multi-surface everyday cleanser, and refill my bottles. But at some point I’d run out and hadn’t re-ordered and that was unacceptable.
To be honest, I’d been allowing a lot of things to fall to the wayside that were usually under my strict care.

That falling to the wayside came to a head today. The state of my tub was, itself, unacceptable. So I filled it with water and bleach to clean it. I scrubbed it with a brush. I walked away. And when I returned to the room I noticed the bottom of my bathtub had turned orangish yellowish.

I panicked. I did not know what I’d done. I did not know how to fix it. It looked as if I had killed someone in my bathtub, and left the body to decompose there for 6 days.

I drained the tub immediately and started searching for a fix, cursing Mrs. Meyer for her absence. I decided to put hair shampoo on it (it was that or pumping hand soap) and scrubbed the bottom of the tub with a dustbin broom because the dustbin broom was the most corrosive brush in my vicinity. With all that effort, my tub now looked like the crime scene cleaners had been and gone, and this was “as clean as we could get it.”

I looked down at my destroyed tub and wondered how much it was going to cost to make it white again. Was there a way to make it white when bleach made it yellow? Could I just paint porcelain?*

This is why I need a housekeeper.
I re-ordered Mrs. Meyer’s. I went with the Lemon Verbena.

And I’m getting back on track.

*Don’t bother googling, I did just before I posted, and the answer is Hydrogen Peroxide. I just need a smidge of that and I’ll be fine, tub-wise.

Permanent Retrograde

Lolcano