What Nougat, Cindy Brady and a Betta Fish Have To Do With Washing Dishes

There are several words I hate in the English language.

Nougat is at the top of my list. It creeps me out.

I don’t ever want to eat anything with nougat in it. Just saying the word nougat in my head makes me all twitchy and I squirm around in my chair.

I also hate the word phthalate.

What the hell is UP with that word?

There aren’t enough vowels.

I don’t know how to pronounce it, and it’s the only word in normal everyday usage that I can’t spell after looking at it once.

It is a creepy word.

I want to say “thalalate.”  There aren’t two “la’s” in the word, but I add one nonetheless. Then I inevitably start singing Deck The Halls in my head, using the word thalalalalate instead of fa la la  la la. And I do that all day long. Every.time.I.read.that.creepy.word.

Also, saying “thalalate” makes me sound like Cindy Brady. Or Sylvester the Cat, both of whom also annoy me greatly.

And then I start thinking about how phthalates kind of looks like the word pilates. And then I am reminded I haven’t worked out in more than three years, and really I should, and damn you, phthalates, for making me feel bad about myself and my lack of workout motivation.

See why it’s such a creepy word? It has no redeeming qualities. Because I have better things to do than think about Deck The Halls in July and going to Pilates and Cindy Brady and Sylvester. But it’s not just that.

It’s a creepy ingredient that  is in a lot of our home products. And it’s potentially dangerous and toxic and scary.

I don’t like dangerous, toxic, or scary. And mostly, I don’t like creepy.

This was a problem recently when I had to start washing a lot of dishes by hand. You see, we’ve been in the midst of a MAYJAH house renovation. As luck would have it, our cabinet company sent the wrong cabinets for our kitchen island.

Which delayed other important things like floors, sinks and countertops.

The hideous end result of the whole debacle was this: I had no dishwasher and no kitchen sink or faucet for 3 weeks.

I washed dishes in our laundry sink, which has no water pressure. And it’s upstairs. And at the time, it was also the home of a dead betta fish that we bought my daughter for her birthday. She was torn as to how to properly bury her fish so it sat in a plastic tupperware for 2 weeks in the laundry room. It was a teachable moment about body decomposition. And what things can make you puke in a laundry room.

If you’ve never done it, there is something inexorably gross about washing spaghetti-covered dishes in the laundry room next to where your clean clothes are. And a dead betta fish.

I was nearly at the end of my dish washing rope. My nerves were shot. My legs were exhausted from hauling giant piles of dishes up and down a flight of stairs multiple times a day.

But I was emotionally buoyed by this: I wasn’t washing all of those hundreds of dishes with a dish soap that included Thalalalalalates. Or phthalates. Which meant that I was spending my time thinking about really important things, like how I might get excused from jury service or shaving my dog so her hair doesn’t get all over my new hardwood floors.

What was I using, you ask? You know the answer to this already.

method Dish Pump soap, of course.

method specifically excludes phthalates from its formulas and chooses packaging materials that do not contain phthalates. So you can be sure that none of these sneaky chemicals will find their way into your home from any of method’s products. Instead of using potentially harmful chemicals, method’s dish cleaners include derivatives from coconut oil, aloe vera, and purified water.

Yay, method. You did it again.

My current favorite scent of method dish pump is Lime + Sea Salt. It’s a limited edition scent you can only get for a short time. Long term, I plan to go with Sea Minerals, because, well…it’s blue and blue is the accent color in my kitchen. If it ever gets completed.

While I wait, I plan to enter method’s new sweepstakes to win a year’s supply of dish soap! Take a dishy personality test on Method’s Facebook page to find out your signature fragrance, and enter. Residents in the US and Canada (excluding Quebec, désolé!) are eligible to enter once through the Sweepstakes app on Method’s Facebook page. Contest is open from July 10 to August 6.  

This wouldn’t be a method post without a fun video, too, right? This one’s called Give Your Nose A Hug. If you ever wanted to see a rad chick skate through a sink full of soap bubbles and watch a giant nose jump on a trampoline? We’ve got ya covered.

disclosure: I am a part of the method mavens program, which means that I received compensation for this post as well as free method products. I’ve mentioned that I love method, especially now that they’ve gotten me through that whole dead betta fish-laundry sink episode. All opinions are my own.

Tagged as: #cleanhappy