Method Dish Liquid and Alice.com

My least favorite kind of stress is the kind that makes you randomly gag and wretch during the day, struggle to retain composure, and makes people wonder if you're trying to hide a pregnancy. I'll save the details for the novel that will render my financial success a foregone conclusion (please, magic book deal people, I'm sure I can think of something you'd want to publish!), but I found myself craving something very comforting...and yet very cheap.

Two weeks ago I was up in San Francisco visiting my brother and sister-in-law, who live the lifestyle of the people you'd imagine live in the spaces shown in the CB2 catalog. They had this Method Dish Liquid in the kitchen and I strangely found myself finding excuses to do the dishes. The pink grapefruit scent is perfect -- calming, soothing, not quite as sharply citrus and energizing as lemon but somehow spirit-lifting and happiness-inducing all the same. I also bought the all-purpose cleaner and have been cleaning a lot more...for fun! Equally non-toxic as my home-made cleaning agents, they smell a million times better than my vinegar-y concoctions. And they made me feel...better! Like, a lot less stressed...and just by washing dishes!

You can buy it pretty much anywhere nowadays, but one easy way is via Alice.com. Alice's prices are very competitive, and best of all, shipping is free AND you don't have to leave your home. Alice, your online domestic helper, will send you reminders to refill certain things at intervals that you specify. It's a great idea -- and once Alice gets a critical mass of inventory so that I can take care of all my household shopping online -- I will gladly fully outsource all of that to Alice. Worth trying out -- the more people that try it, the more leverage they'll have to get products.