Product review: Dryer Balls!

I made a terrible mistake this week. I went and bought dryer sheets from my local dollar discount store. Only 99¢, I figured dryer sheets were an innocuous enough item that it was no big deal. I washed my bedding and tossed them in the dryer with the cheap dryer sheets. BIG mistake.

The first night I felt itchy and thought it was a dry skin thing. By the morning, my skin was covered in a pink rash and felt like I'd been sleeping in mosquitoes. I thought I'd developed bedbugs overnight.

After the second night, my skin was on fire and I was convinced that my next-door neighbours had infested my bedroom with some alien bugform that came through the walls and invaded my bed to torture me. Taking a shower was excruciating.

Finally, after tearing apart my bed and inspecting every inch of the mattress and platform, I figured I either had invisible microscopic multi-legged demons in my bed, or I'd developed an allergy to my bed linens. Then I remembered the dollar-store dryer sheets. I took a fresh one out of the box and rubbed it on my arm. Instant agony.

I went to my local natural products grocer and saw these blue "dryer balls" on the laundry aisle. They were priced at $9.99, and after reading the package and thinking that I'd give ten times that much to never itch like that again, I purchased a pair. They claimed to fluff and soften laundry without chemicals.

They're made of some kind of rubberised plastic and look like giant, blue pollen spores. I took them home and washed my sheets and pillowcases twice, with one extra rinse cycle to get all of the offending chemicals out. Then I tossed everything into the dryer and threw in the Dryer Balls.

The first thing I noticed was the muffled banging noise as the dryer ran through the cycle. Mildly annoying, but not too bad. I had set the timer for 40 minutes instead of the usual 60, because the package claimed that my laundry would dry in less time (therefore saving even more money on energy costs).

At the end of the cycle I discovered that yes, the load of fitted sheet, flat sheet, and four pillowcases was totally dry. They also looked poofier than usual, as if the Dryer Balls had beaten air into the cotton fibres. They were slightly less wrinkled than usual, and I noticed that there was no static, which was kind of a big deal since I live in an extremely dry climate and I usually have very serious static in the laundry if I don't use liquid fabric softener or dryer sheets.

I put the sheets back on the bed, and they were at least as soft as fabric softener would have made them, but without the weird oily film that it can leave. Encouraged, I tried the Dryer Balls with a load of bath towels.

The result was quite dramatic. They came out so fluffy that the stack of folded towels was almost too fat to fit on the linen closet shelf! I also noticed a measurable increase in absorbency and a decrease in lint fuzz - my lint screen in the dryer had caught far more lint than usual, but the towels were left fluffy-soft and almost totally lint-free.

I am very pleased with the performance of the Dryer-Max Dryer Balls and would highly recommend this product, especially to anyone who has skin sensitivity to chemical fabric softening agents.

Life flashes in front of your eyes one frame at a time

In the summer when I was five or six years old, I remember sitting in the grass in the back yard, seething about some annoyance. I was peeved. Really peeved. About something. 

My Dad got home from work and came outside still in his work clothes and sat in the grass next to me. He didn’t say anything. He just sat there for a few minutes, and then, looking into the trees, leaned over and nudged me with this shoulder.

“What,” I said. Short, clipped, the anger of a five year old.

“Wanna see a trick?”

I didn’t look at him. “What?” Still clipped. 

He looked around in the grass for a moment, and then pulled a fat blade from the green, prickly carpet. He fiddled with it and placed it between his thumbs and then put it up to his face and blew. It made a screech like a train whistle and I jumped.

“Wow! How’d you do that?” 

Anger forgotten. To this day I don’t remember what I’d been mad about.

Yeah, Dad… how did you do that?

Deja Root Beer

This afternoon I went to the vending machine at work and discovered they'd stocked it with real brown glass bottles of IBC root beer for one dollar. Cool.

At the first swig I was catapulted back 35 years to my favourite family tradition: Every spring, usually in late April or early May, my whole family would get together on a Sunday evening and retreat to the cool shadowed basement to cook up a batch of homemade root beer.

Amidst the washer and dryer and the gigantic concrete wash sink that was bolted to the cement wall, Dad would bring out the cases of empty glass bottles, our huge 10-gallon pickling crock, the hoses and bags of shiny new bottle caps and lay them out on the cement basement floor. Mom would fill the sink with scalding hot water and all the bottles went in the bath to clean out any bacteria (and possibly spiders) and my brothers and I would put them on the drying rack that dad made out of a plank with a forest of wooden dowels growing out of it.

Meanwhile, dad made the root beer. He filled the crock with water, sugar, real root beer extract and active yeast and mixed it all up with a huge wooden spoon. It took about a half hour, stirring slowly, for all the sugar to dissolve. By then the bottles would be dry.

Dad used a red rubber piece of tubing to siphon the root beer into the bottles, making sure to leave a space for "growing room" at the top. He then handed the filled bottle to me so I could carefully place one of the bottle caps on top, and I'd hand it to my oldest brother so he could use the long-handled bottle cap crimper to seal it tight. Then my middle brother would take the filled, sealed bottle, wipe it off with a towel and place it back in the wooden crate. After an hour, we had about 100 newly-minted bottles of homemade root beer, give or take a few, lined up in the crates like little brown soldiers.

While Mom cleaned out the pickle crock in the big sink, Dad and us three kids would nestle the cases of root beer in the dark, cool space beneath the stairs in the basement and cover them up with a furniture blanket to catch any glass if one of the bottles should burst. We always lost a few, and sometimes we would hear one blow if we were in the kitchen when it exploded. There they sat for 30 days in the dark so the yeast could ferment and make the fizz. (No mean feat in Colorado, where the altitude could cause cakes to bake flat like goopy chocolate tortillas.)

The day after school let out for the summer in early June, Dad would wake early and take out six bottles and sneak them into the back of the refrigerator. We would have a great feast that lasted all day, with roasted chicken, potato salad and fresh corn on the cob from the local farmer who sold it 'thirteen-ears-for-five-bucks' from a rickety stand right on the edge of his cornfield. We would make hand-cranked ice cream in the afternoon, and have watermelon-seed spitting contests in the back yard. Dad would take the train out of its shed where it slept through the long winter and spend the day tinkering and adjusting the engine and sending us kids out to clear any grass clumps from the train tracks. He would never let it run on that first day -- he just took it out so he could check it over and get us kids excited about it all over again. The first 'train day' always came later.

When the sun was going down and the fireflies were just starting to spark little wavering spotlights in the trees, Dad would bring out the ancient, thick art-glass mugs filled with scoops of ice cream, and with much fanfare and anticipation, he would open that first bottle of root beer. It was always a tense moment... would it be fizzy and foamy or would it be flat?

But always, with a satisfying *pop*, the bottle cap would go flying, we all cheered, and Dad would pour the root beer over the ice cream in each mug, insert a long-handled sundae spoon and a long straw, and the five of us would enjoy the rewards of our labours in the summer grass. We always agreed it was the best batch of root beer ever.

And thus, Summer officially began.