This is about as mundane a blog entry as it gets: a report on our usage of dish soap during the pandemic. Last night I opened our 19th bottle of J.R. Watkins Dish Soap since the pandemic began. No, this isn’t an ad for J.R. Watkins although we are in love with their grapefruit-scented soap, this is a reminder to ourselves about the year when we used 18 bottles of dish soap. In all likelihood, we didn’t use that many bottles of soap during the previous 20 years. In part because we weren’t doing the dishes all that often because we ate out a lot, and then there were those years we’d use our dishwasher, but as time has gone by we never really got along with that infernal machine running for an hour and then having dishes come out not absolutely spotless. So, we wash all of our dishes by hand and have done so for years now. Still, it’s been more common for a bottle of soap to last so long that as we approach the bottom of a bottle that it’s a thickened goo from all of the moisture that evaporated. For all I know, a bottle of dish soap previously might have lasted for years. I mean, who tracks this type of consumption?

Well that’s a contradiction, John, as you are reporting here the opening of the 19th bottle, so you obviously are tracking it. Not really, it’s about the convenience of Amazon, their order history, and my realization that we appear to use a lot of this stuff.

Have I ever shared with my readers that I recently calculated how much toothpaste I’ve used in my lifetime? I think I missed that, so here it is. Over the previous 21,170 days using 0.5 grams of toothpaste per day, I estimate that I’ve used more than 23 pounds or 10 kilos of the minty stuff.