Oh.

...Water softeners work much better when they're plugged in.

It took two tries, the first about a month ago, to figure out why the water-softener seemed to not be water-softening so well. The first time, I noticed that the salt wasn't melting very fast, and it'd been a few months since I'd replaced it. But when I turned the dial and ran it manually, it seemed to work.

This time, I checked all of the checklist items in the Reader's Digest How to Fix Everything. I even removed all of the old salt (which has gone brown) and washed down the inside of the tank. (what the heck do I do with a five-gallon pail of not-very-attractive old salt? ...wash it off and use it? Put it out with the trash?!). It took an embarrassing length of time for me to realize that the dangling power cord wasn't the Skil saw which sits nearby, but the water-softener.

The last time I used that saw, and apparently unplugged it twice, was well before Christmas, possibly before Thanksgiving. Oops...

That might explain why the dishwasher has been leaving more and more white film on the dishes; it's been washing with really really hard water. *headdesk*

(Anybody know whether I've done irreparable damage to the dishwasher with this escapade? Or the pipes?)

non-food things in the microwave

OK, I was curious. So I just googled around. Yes, lots of pages suggest it's fine to put staples in microwaves. Mostly recipes. But this guy says otherwise, and I believe him because his page is called "UNWISE MICROWAVE OVEN EXPERIMENTS." Oh, and he's an electrical engineer and he wraps his explanations on microwave ball-lightning and explosions in very expert-sounding detail. Fascinating site.

Anyway, he says stapled paper bags in microwaves cause fires. So that's it for me.

...To follow up something else bats22 told me recently, ivory soap has interesting properties in the microwave. You end up with a big puffy thing that hardens, and is still soap.

I'm so going to try that.