I’ve been reading for years about Dawn dishwashing liquid (the original, not the “new” kind) and its ability to get rid of fleas and just kind of went “ehhh” about it.  Not that I didn’t believe it worked at all, I just figured it probably didn’t work as well as people claimed it did.

I was so wrong.

We have had an awful time with fleas this year - which makes me want to cry because for years we were flea-less until the neighbor dogs moved in a couple of years ago, but anyway - this year has been the worst ever, and I don’t think Frontline is working as well as it used to, though it does seem to finally be working, or at least I think I’m finally seeing a dent in the cycle because most of the fleas I’m seeing now are juvenile and baby ones (heh, that sounds funny).

I’ve been reading a lot lately where people are saying Frontline Plus is no longer working, or works for a week and quits, or suggesting going back to Advantage a while and then reattempting Frontline, or postulating that the fleas are gaining immunity towards all of that type stuff.  One of the statements I see frequently I tend to agree with most - Frontline Plus just does not seem to work as well as Frontline Top Spot.  I do think the cycle is breaking, but it’s certainly not with the speed and severity that Frontline Top Spot always had.

In any case - before I get off topic any further - we’ve just had a time this year and among some other things I’ve been trying, and trying to avoid spending any more than the megabucks I finally had to cough up for Frontline and other measures, I finally decided to see if the Dawn legend really worked.  It does!

My flea traps are drowning a number of those suckers nightly, all for the cost of a bottle of original Dawn dish liquid (a whole 96 cents at Wal-Mart right now).  I have played around and tried a few different things now with it all (including another dishwashing liquid) and this method seems to work the best and attract the most fleas to drown.  You need:

1. Said bottle of original Dawn dishwashing liquid detergent.  Not the now-regular Ultra or anything else.  Just plain old original blue Dawn.
2. A shallow bowl of water, preferably white.  You can use clear ones, but the white bowls seem to attract them more.  If I use a clear one, I put a piece of white paper under it and that seems to help too.  But my small French White bowls (I call it the creme brulee size) and a Corningware mini-casserole dish I have seem to work best.
3. Best spot to place the bowl is on the floor.  I’ve tried other and higher spots and they’ll work, but it seems to attract more if on the floor.  You can put it in a corner or out of the way otherwise, they’ll find it, believe me.
4. A book light or night light.  Many places you read will say a night light and those may work, but my problem is I live in an old house with few electrical outlets and even fewer where there’s any floor space underneath.  I had a couple of mini-book lights, the kind that clip on the book and have the little bendable arm - you can get them at Walgreen’s lately, two for $3 - I just clip them on the side of the bowl and bend the light where it’s over the center of the bowl, and voila.  I have tried some other little book lights since, such as some that Dollar Tree has right now, but they just don’t seem to attract as well as these little lights Walgreen’s is selling right now do.

I have one bedroom that has been hit particularly worse than the rest (Tojo the Psycho Cat’s bedroom) and my flea trap in there is catching 15-20 or more a night and starting to slow down a little, finally.  The rest in the rest of the house are only catching one or two a night now, but it’s definitely all working.

I don’t usually use flea collars because they really don’t do much other than keep the pests away from their heads, but I did buy one for Tojo - unfortunately it was a cheap one and seemed to be making the fleas WORSE than they were, so last week I got the pricier Adams one.  And last week washed all the bedding in the house, too.

Bombing the house, which would probably have been the quickest and surest way to eradicate all fleas, just wasn’t an option - there’s nowhere for all of us to go for a day - and after having spent a small fortune on Frontline, and other stuff leading up to the Frontline which was wasted money because nothing was working - the fact that the Dawn really DOES work, for 96 cents a bottle, is just WONDERFUL.

It’s all working.  We are not 100% flea-free yet, but it’s better and we’re close, and I will swear by this Dawn method from now on.  The dogs (and quite possibly one very mad cat) are going to have a bath with flea shampoo next week and then it will be time to Frontline everyone again, and after that (fingers crossed) with any luck we can go back to only treating the dogs with that stuff.

But I will be keeping at least one or two homemade Dawn flea traps on the floor at night at all times, maybe all year long but definitely during the warm months, probably one in Tojo’s room and another in some other corner of the house somewhere.  I now highly recommend it for any dog or cat owner.  Even if you don’t really have a flea problem or aren’t seeing any, just one bowl set up like that with the Dawn and the book light or night light ever night will almost certainly assure you don’t see any.  It works!

Why fleas like the Dawn so much more than other liquid dish detergents - and why they prefer it as opposed to the newer, “ultra” Dawn - now that’s something to ponder, but I can tell you for a fact that they don’t like lemon Ajax as much.

So I got one of the new Fruitista Freezes at Taco Hell today because it’s like a million degrees outside in Memphis today. I got the just Strawberry instead of the Strawberry Mango, ‘cos sometimes mango doesn’t taste too good to me.

I give it a pretty enthusiastic thumbs up, even with the half dozen ice cream headaches that came with it.

The Squirrel Queen claims that one can relieve brain freeze by pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth, adding that it warms the nerve endings there that cause the ache. And Rachel agreed with her. But I dunno about that, that sounds awfully weird to me. I’ll try it next time tho.

(1) Somebody (Jag? Aunt B.? I can’t find it now) wrote about these a while back and I was covetous and waiting for them to appear on Memphis grocery store shelves. Finally they have, and now I can NOT stop eating them because they are the best thing EVER:

(2) I just got back from a 24-hourish trip to Birmingham. I drove through a monsoon in Mississippi to get there. Got there and Alabama was, like, sunny and warm and had been all day. Today it was like 78 degrees and felt as humid as any June day in Tennessee. I get back to Memphis and not only am in rain again but immediately have to change into a sweatshirt because I’m freezing. Grrr.

(3) Trying to decide if I should be worried about Dobie having eaten a few Nair wax strips, but considering all the other dangerous, ridiculous, and just plain gross things he has ingested in his 13 years on the planet, I think probably not.

Oh hey, remember my Roger Abramson Watch?

He’s baaaaaaaack! I guess I can take it down now (or soon). I know my fellow Rogerettes are thrilled as well!

Unfortunately not on WordPress, but on Blogger (heavy sigh). I still cannot leave comments successfully on any Blogger blogs and haven’t been able to in months (exasperated) - but that’s okay! He’s baaaaaaack!

(And so too recently, I note, is Sean! Woo! Watch me get all excited about politics and current events in 2008 now, this should be fun, huh?!?!!!!) :D

This is another one of those long-delayed posts, much like the one about my trip to Los Angeles in March. Coincidentally, it was on the plane trip back from L.A. that I finished this book. I wasn’t long into reading when I realized this should not have been an airplane read and I should have read it at home in a weekend or something… mainly because it was a tremendous struggle to keep from weeping buckets uncontrollably on the plane.

I’m not sure I can truly do this work any justice with my words, so I’m not going to even attempt to make this out to be a big review of sorts. I just need to write about how awesome it is.

The novel I am talking about is Rolling Stone editor/writer Rob Sheffield’s Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, now soon releasing in paperback in December. The book was brought to my attention last winter by Mike over at Chez Bez, who wrote about it here and here and brilliantly so, and I was just immediately, like, oh yeah!!!… I HAVE to read this! So I ordered it, then it took a while to get around to starting it as I’ve just gotten so lazy about reading anything that’s not on a computer monitor screen these days, and then I opened it, finally… and was immediately hooked.

It’s the story of Rob and his wife Renee, who had little in common except a grand love of music. He was a shy, geeky Irish Catholic boy from Boston when he met her, a loud and extroverted Southern girl (borrowing those astute adjectives from an excellent Amazon review, well put!), and they bonded over their rather extreme connection with the music thing - a dynamic I have not been unfamiliar with in both past and more recent years myself. They married during the Nirvana/Pearl Jam/and/all/that grunge age of the Nineties, and were happily so until Renee’s sudden and untimely death from a pulmonary embolism in 1997, dying in Rob’s arms in their kitchen and at a distressingly young age.

It is quite simply the most wonderful, and most gut-wrenchingly sad and heartbreaking, story I have ever read, I think… but it’s probably so to me because it hits awfully close to home - same age, same time, similar circumstances, and almost the same places. I cried not only when she died, but pretty much through the whole thing; I think I wept reading the first or second page, in fact.

I believe the only other book I have even come close to weeping so much over was Doug Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma, and that experience just doesn’t even compare - while heart-wrenching, the story itself is a fantasy. Sheffield’s tale is achingly real and almost unbearably so, but wonderful and beautiful all the same.

This book is probably not for everyone, but if you’re a total music geek like me - and especially if you are in your late thirties or early forties and were around and in the indie music scene wherever you were at the time - and even more especially, if you ever spent hours making countless mix tapes on those ancient antiques called cassette tapes, back in the days before the computer age - yeah, you really need to read it. And have a box of tissue handy - seriously.

I am a bit tardy in posting my official endorsement of this brilliant idea, but yeah.

Cranky may claim to be cranky (cough)… but do you really know anyone as crotchety and curmudgeonly as this guy?

I mean, come on.  Hell, they even look alike and Sarcastro’s got the sneering from behind the desk down freakin’ pat. I’m all for it!

I think I should probably admit that the other night when I uploaded the new Graffiti Wall and all the other updated pages that they all said 1999 at first and I didn’t change them to 2000 until I was on AOL and had already uploaded ‘em all and realized what I’d done. Yup, I’m pretty darn close to perfect, mm hmm, but not totally infallible. (snicker)

Anyhow… man, there is so much I want to write right now but while the brain’s going about ninety miles an hour, the bod’s saying It’s after 2 a.m., go to bed, dumbass!! I will scribble until I get too tired anyway and then save the rest for later, the healthy dose of melancholy bit (always good for the soul, that, heh) should probably wait until I’m a little more awake or I’m bound to say a thing or two I’ll regret.

At the risk of sounding like a commercial (again) let me just say that Pantene Pro-V is the most fantastic shampoo and conditioner ever! Jeez, these companies should really send me samples in the mail more often! Most of you regular viewers know how picky I am about my hair… so, I was going out of town this weekend and trying to pack as little as necessary, and I have these gargantuan bottles of Clairol Herbal Essence and just thought, “Crap, I don’t wanna lug those around again,” then remembered I had these two sample bottles of the Pantene I’d gotten in the mail so I tossed them in the suitcase and off I went. Man, this stuff is so great! Shampoo doesn’t usually excite me much, honestly, but I just cannot believe the wonderful things this stuff has done to my hair this weekend, it even passed the slept-in-wet-hair test! Awesome and it smells so good too.

Speaking of smelling good things (and more commercials) here’s another one, you know that Clairol Herbal Essence shampoo commercial where the chick’s just going berserk washing her hair (and it does smell good, but I think I like the Pantene even better)? Well, my word of advice is to pass on the Clairol Herbal Essence Body Wash soap stuff - it just doesn’t smell that great - but go straight to the store and pick up a bottle of Suave’s new Passion Flower & Rosemary Body Wash - I’m telling ya, it’s much like those Clairol commercials, I’d just about stay in the shower 24 hours a day to smell this stuff it smells so great.

Well, anyway, enough of a commercial break, we now return you back to our regularly scheduled programming… the weekend was nice, I love driving on roads I should about to be able to drive on blindfolded, which especially came in handy Friday night as I felt so horrible that by the time I arrived at my destination I really wasn’t sure how I managed to drive there nor did I even really particularly remember driving. It’s always kind of odd to me tho when I hit that one particular stretch that for two years used to be my exact route to and from school every day, it’s still almost like habit that I almost make the turn off to go to school or the turn off to go to what used to be home (and probably a wonder I didn’t do that in the condition I was in Friday night).

On the way up there I thoroughly enjoyed my newly acquired early Cheap Trick remasters and wondered again when in the heck they’re going to release some more of the remasters, as the next in line should be the ultimate Seventies rock & roll live CD, Cheap Trick at Budokan, darn it, which I’m really looking forward to as I happen to like the live versions of a couple of songs better than the studio cuts… I guess Sony’s dragging their heels or not going to release any more remasters at all, it’s been like two years now since the first three were released (which sucked at the time since I’d just bought the first two Trick CDs right before they released the remastered CDs). I have to say again tho, the new tracks on Heaven Tonight are just a hoot, I think they must have been drunk when those outtakes were recorded and there’s an actual goof on the “Surrender” outtake too, heh heh.

I’ll probably do a writeup on the remastered CDs next for the Music page or something, but I was thinking that I recall having a debate some time ago over which Cheap Trick album was the best and was in disagreement at the time, and still am but I have changed my mind about my pick - even tho In Color has two of my favorite songs of all (“Downed” is one), Heaven Tonight is the best instead - the entire, what was on LP, Side One is just awesome and it picks up again towards the end, I mean, how can it not be the best - “Surrender” ranks right up there with “Rock & Roll All Night”, “School’s Out”, and, I don’t know - one or two others - as the ultimate Seventies rock anthems. So, just put on the first five tracks of Heaven Tonight, then cut to the last two… I’m sorry, the ever-vaunted Dream Police LP can’t even stand up to it at all. Anyway, so for those of you who have no Cheap Trick (I’ll save the rest of that for the Music page later, pardon me, I ate breathed and slept that band for about seven years straight in between sneaking out to Ramones shows), after my bit of Seventies nostalgia Friday night, I made the trip back with Marshall Crenshaw (another very favorite songs, “Whenever You’re On My Mind”) and Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds and Madness and The Plimsouls and a host of other Eighties pre-hair-band bands and that was fun too, thanks to brother-in-law I now have the entire set of Rhino’s NW ’80s series and you know, there just isn’t enough time between northern West Tennessee and Memphis to listen to everything I want to on all fifteen volumes… tho I did manage to get thru all but one. (giggle)

You know, one of the best movie scenes ever musically is in Valley Girl when Nicolas Cage takes whatsherface to the punk club and Peter Case and his Plimsouls are up on the stage doing “A Million Miles Away”. Anyway, I’m listening to all that and it’s another wonder about music there for you, one song and suddenly you remember exactly what you were doing or where you were or who you were with fifty million years ago when whatever song was on the radio all the time, strange how one little song can make one miss someone they haven’t missed in years and years and vowed never to miss again, which is actually kind of disturbing.

You know, tho, I think (and someone will make me eat these words, I’m sure) I actually have all the music I need right now… I’ve got my entire Rhino ’80s set, I finally got The Beatles’ Rubber Soul on CD, plus all the other stuff almost that I’ve been wanting for a while, and I even just landed a copy of The Monkees’ video box set I’ve been wanting for ages finally (thanks eBay), but CD wise I almost have everything I want and the rack is finally almost full. Oh, there’ll always be something else I want, I’m sure, but right now I’m just set. Which is really cool. Well, someone can still get me The Who’s Maximum R&B box set…

Anyhow, so Greg and I have gotten in this habit when I’ve been making all these long drives lately, since I have free long distance across TN in the evenings and weekends, of him listening to my (very loud) car stereo via my cell phone so we listen together and that’s kinda fun, except it would be nicer if someone would buy me a speakerphone cell phone (ahem). It’s made all this traveling a little more pleasant as opposed to godawful, and speaking of which, I am sooooo looking forward to this coming weekend and having nothing to do, no one to see or speak to if I don’t want to, and nowhere to go driving or flying to… it’s all been nice these last four or five weeks running here and there and doing this and that all the time, but I am tired and desperately looking forward to having a lazy Lynnster weekend again, finally. I may just stay in bed all weekend long and not answer the phone and not even move. Probably not, but all this socialness has been tiring and I’m looking forward to being anti-social for a change, even tho I finally bought a new battery for my cordless phone after being without one for like eight months, I just wanna I think be alone for the first time in weeks, that sounds the most appealing.

For now, I am yawning a whole bunch, so off I go ’til later - ‘night…