Frills and Spills

As the states south of NSW look through parched, tearless eyes at the dry puff of sand that comes down the Murray Darling river, and we say, “Whoops. Sorry, we used it all,” I’d like to address an important matter.

But first, some of the techniques and ideas I mention below, were employed in earlier times. Please contextualise them with the knowledge that I invented some of these when it was normal to move leaves off your lawn with a hose, and that washing the car was considered a bit of a family activity. Try to put out of your mind a world where people are routinely punched to death in their front yard for possibly watering on the wrong day.

Shower Curtain Management.

The problem: The shower curtain that would react to the slight low pressure in the stall and float in towards me. Now, you might already have the melody of “I lied about being the outdoor type” floating through your head, and that’s ok. There are some things I’m good at, some things I’m not. Coping with the clingy, cold, wet, nylon shower curtains as they wrap around your legs on a winters morning is not one of my long suits.

Solution: Wet the other side of the curtain and seal it to the tiles and walls. It’ll puff in at you like spinnaker, but won’t actually bind you up like a soapy mummy.

The problem: The stiff plastic curtain that bends in at you the wrong way, won’t go all the way to the edge of the wall, or resists you and bounces back from where you want to put it.

Solution: Temper the curtain. Hit it with a super hot blast of the shower head. No cold. If possible make the thing borderline molten. Then mould it to your will. When you’ve go it exactly where you want it. Hit it with the cold. It is now ‘set’ in the correct place.

I am currently in possession of a curtain rod that is not permanently mounted on the wall - and this has led me to an invention of sorts.

The curtain rod has a rubber grommet on each end, it is extendable in the middle and is designed to stay up by jamming it into place and letting the grip of the rubber do the rest.

In general, the place where the curtain needs the most cleaning is at the bottom. It’s not a huge area, maybe two centimetres height at the most. Keep a little knife in the bathroom (it’d give those murderers a fright too, when you start to stab them back through the curtain at the same time. A Face Off meets Psycho kind of arrangement.) and just cut the yucky bit off. When it starts to get close to being too short, lower the curtain rod. You’d get years out of one curtain.

I’m not just here to point out the obvious stuff, people.