Mrs. Meyer’s Bodywash: Garden-inspired cleansers I love!

Many of you know that I am a bit of a “garden fanatic”, always looking for new herbs, flowers, and veggies to plant in our garden at the Elkhorn Inn, and thanks to being a member of Crowdtap, I recently had the opportunity to sample (and now review) a great garden-inspired product:  Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day Honeysuckle Body Wash! http://www.mrsmeyers.com/honeysuckle-body-wash/ I have to say that I am Very glad I got to try it, because I’ve now found a new product- and a new line of products- that I really love and will be buying more of! The natural, garden-inspired fragrance of the Bodywash is really delicious- naturally sweet honeysuckle, not cloying or chemical-smelling, and I love the way it leaves my skin feeling:  smooth, silky, and really clean! I use it in the bath, as well as the shower, because while I find a shower invigorating, at night I really love to soak in a hot, fragrant tub before I go to bed to really relax myself! And I've found that Mrs. Meyer’s Honeysuckle Body Wash is a lovely way to do just that, and go to bed clean and fragrant!

Mrs Meyers Bodywash on my tub...

 Another great plus, is that Mrs. Meyer’s Bodywashes are really inexpensive- a big 16 oz. bottle is only $7.99! (They also have a really good coupon on the website right now:  http://www.mrsmeyers.com/) I do wish that a store in our area (southern West Virginia or Bluefield Virginia), such as Walmart, carried Mrs. Meyer’s products, but as they don’t, we’ll be ordering online…) The Honeysuckle Bodywash contains Aloe Vera Gel, which softens the skin, and a unique blend of essential oils, including flax-seed oil.  It makes a delicate foam that really rinses clean, and leaves my skin smooth and soft.  And it’s been terminologically-tested to be gentle on the skin, as well.

How it arrived from Crowdtap!

Mrs. Meyer’s products are made with essential oils and are truly garden-inspired, and as I am BIG into gardening and love natural scents (who wouldn’t?!), for me this is a major plus!  They have a lot of great garden-inspired cleaning products, such as household cleaners, laundry products, and air fresheners, as well as body and hand care products, and now that I have experienced the lovely scent of the Honeysuckle Body Wash I want to try them all! Check out this list of the natural scents of their cleaning products : Basil, Lavender, Lemon Verbena, Geranium, Sunflower, Rosemary, Bluebell, Radish Honeysuckle, Apple, Watermelon, Parsley, Rhubarb, Baby Blossom, Peony, and Lilac! Don’t these sound wonderful? They’re definitely not the “run of the mill” or chemicals scents you usually find in cleansers and cleaning products! Top of my list to try are Basil, Sunflower, Radish, Watermelon, and Parsley! Check out their webpage here for info on all their different scents: http://www.mrsmeyers.com/scent/

Mrs Meyer’s products are made with essential oils from flowers and herbs- which I love (I even have an essential oil diffuser on my desk next to my computer!), and so they not only smell nice, they really work hard, and are great cleaners! Other very good things are that Mrs. Meyer’s products are “earth-friendly”, not tested on animals, and their products don’t have chlorine bleach, ammonia, petroleum distillates, parabens, phosphates or phthalates. Yay!

Another thing I love about Mrs. Meyer’s, is Thelma Meyer herself! She is the inspiration behind the products: a down-to earth Iowa homemaker and a real, live person! I like her philosophy of being “perfectly imperfect”-  I guess because heaven knows I’m imperfect! LOL  As she says: cleaning is something that just has to get done, so if you can make cleaning more pleasant, why wouldn't you? My sentiments, exactly!

The Mrs. Meyer’s website is really neat, too, because it doesn’t just advertise their products; they have a great “DIY” page with a lot of nifty craft ideas:  http://www.mrsmeyers.com/do-it-yourself-projects/

I also follow their Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mrsmeyerscleanday/  and Pinterest page, as both have lots of neat ideas, too: https://www.pinterest.com/mrsmeyersclean/

One of the great things Mrs. Meyer’s does is sponsor “green” projects, and this year they are sponsoring events on Plant Something Day, May 19. In Chicago, Illinois and Austin, Texas they will be planting and gardening with the American Community Gardening Association, and online they will be donating $5 for each MrsMeyers.com order between May 15^th  and June 5^th to the ACGA, up to $10,500- AND each order will also come with a little something to help you get your own garden growing- while supplies last, so hurry up and order! How cool is that?! We will Definitely be planting something on Plant Something Day at the Elkhorn Inn- probably our Sunflower Meadow, as well as herbs and veggies! Will you be taking part, too? Did Mrs. Meyer's inspire you to do something "green"? Tell me in the comments! http://www.mrsmeyers.com/our-story/garden-inspired-giving/

Hot pepper plants for the garden!

Our Sunflower Meadow across from the Elkhorn Inn

 

Zep - GREAT for cleaning, disinfecting AND removing stains!

Dan used Zep Cleaner on aircraft when he was Parts Manager for Mobil Corporate Aircraft, and he loved it for cleaning everything from aircraft interiors and exteriors to offices, so we were delighted to be chosen to be part of the #sponsored #ZepCleansters Crew by #Crowdtap and get to try Zep at our home and the Elkhorn Inn- & it's excellent! If you haven't yet, you seriously should #TryZep! We got to try two products- the Quick Clean Disinfectant, and the All-Around Oxy Cleaner and Degreaser- which not only cleans, but takes out stains while you watch! Check out our "before and after" photos below or proof! Zep has been known as an excellent cleaner for commercial use for many years, and we are SO glad it's now readily available to regular consumers like us!
One of the best things about the All-Around Oxy Cleaner and Degreaser is that we can also use it to take out stains- even old stains- on tablecloths, down comforters, carpets, and other fabrics, and it works great! Yes, we love the Zep cleaners, and yes, we'll be buying more of them- and with an inn as big as ours, a Lot more!

Spraying on the Zep Quick Clean Disinfectant...

Our bright and shiny Zep Cleaned & Disinfected tub!

Me, very happy with our Zep Cleaned & Disinfected tub!

Old coffee stain on a table cloths before Zep...

After Zep: we watched the stain disappear!

Dan with our Zep Cleaned & Degreased kitchen stove!
One happy Chef!

Selfie with our Zep Cleaned
and Disinfected sink!

Me: strong as Zep! :-)

Let 1000 Flower Bulbs Bloom...

Five years ago when we bought the flooded mess that we (Dan) would turn into the Elkhorn Inn, there was nothing out front and to the sides of the building (as well as inside the building) but mud & debris. And by debris, I mean rusted appliances and moldy furntiure, topped with the heartbreaking remnants of people's lives that surface every time it rains following a flood disaster: plastic silverware, kitchen tablecloths, broken cups, shards of glass, children's toys... (Five years later, things Still surface when it rains here...) The only thing in the door-less, mud-filled building were 6 antique, claw-foot bathtubs, which I, being a NYer, doted on & couldn't wait to soak in- once my husband, (wearing his "plumber" hat), could figure out how to create hot water...

Our basement had 5 feet of mud in it, and Dan, with 2 helpers, cleared it out with shovels during the December 2002 Ice Storm. The truth is that you really don't understand what "5 feet of mud" is until you're eye-to-eye with it, and you're 4'9" tall, and the icy, solid mountain of garbage-studded mud is over your head...

The first thing Dan did that winter was gut the entire first floor of the 90' x 40' building, power-wash it three times with bleach and dry it out to get rid of the mold that went 6 feet up the walls, after which, in January of 2003, we could safely move in. The next thing he did was take the 5 feet of mud out of the basement & install hot water boilers in its place. The next thing he did was crawl the length of the building 12 times during the ice storm, playing "hunt that leak" and repairing three lines of busted plumbing so we could finally fill those Ab Fab claw-foot bathtubs with hot water. (You know how much you REALLY love someone when you're bathing with Clorox Wet Ones for a week. The "kitchen" was so cold that water froze in the sink nightly).

And pretty much the next thing he did that winter was build me a garden in the front of the building. He dragged railroad ties into place for a border, filled it with basement mud topped with pick-up truck-loads of potting soil, and planted rose bushes in it.

I will never forget it, because those rose bushes made my heart sing.

Dan & I both had a "vision" for this place, and oddly it was the same one, but one that no one else could see, so they thought we were nuts & would be gone inside of 6 months. (What they didn't know was that we had no place to go!) Where everyone else saw a slated-for-demolition disaster-wrecked shell, we saw an elegant mansion with flowers out front, and cute umbrella tables and chairs on the patio, where we'd sit with a cup of coffee, watching the birds at the feeders...

(We both, obviously, lead a pretty heavy fantasy life...)

And when Dan surprised me with that first garden my heart literally leapt because I knew not only that our "vision" was for real, and that he'd be able to make it so, but also that he loved me with all his heart.

The "garden" thing took on a life of its own, however, as my Aggie Roots began to reassert themselves. As a teen I had to choose between Art & Agriculture, and temporarily, at least, Ag won. I went to John Bowne High School in Queens, NY as an Aggie. (I still have my blue, corduroy FFA jacket with the big seal on the back, my name embroidered in gold, & my Chapter Farmer pin). My Dream Book was the Burpee Seed Catalog, my hero was Gregor Mendel, and my father built me a Gro-Lamp greenhouse in our attic where I grew gardenias & african violets. My goal, at the time, was to go to Cornell and major in botany & plant genetics, but I wound up at The Cooper Union as an art major after realizing that I Sucked at math, having nearly flunked both HS Algebra & Chemistry. I did, however, spend many months from the age of 16 working on Kibbutzim in Israel, and some of my happiest memories are of riding a tractor through the cotton fields of Givat HaShlosha at daybreak, in my bathing suit, fat & brown & muscled, noting down how many bugs were caught in each of the traps...

But I became an illustrator and a writer, and plants dropped out of my life to the point that I couldn't keep a houseplant going for more than 2 weeks.

And then came West Virginia.

You may be able to drag a girl off the kibbutz, but you can't suck kibbutz out of the girl!

We now had LAND- real land! Not just a postage-stamp-sized yard, either- we had Serious Land! Places for trees and rose bushes and herbs and vegetables... and bulbs! LOTS of bulbs! And so the annual saga of the fall bulb planting began.

I will say that from the beginning Dan backed my gardening obsession, but Very Grudgingly at first. He helped me, brought home Garden Tools & Bulb Food, and even a Giant Insecticide Spray Gun with a back-pack tank, & he did do the Heavy Work, as they say, which involved tilling up the coal-lump filled rock-hard soil with a spade, but he did it with a sour look on his face and only after the ground had pretty much frozen, making bulb-planting a miserable and painful exercise. But we got the damn things in finally, and when April came around it was truly breathtaking. Car-stopping gorgeous. I was vindicated, and so I wanted More- not just in the front of the building, but on the sides, too...

And so Dan (still grudgingly) built us Another garden, this time on the parking lot side: dragging in more railroad ties, hauling in more truckloads of dirt...

With the dirt came the need for annuals, to put in after the bulbs faded, and then perrennials, so we wouldn't have to put in so many annuals each year... Then came the goofy, mail-order 5-fruit tree I'd always wanted as a kid, and the 2 half-dead bargain-bin peach trees from BigLots that we coaxed back to life, and the wild lilies we dug up on the side of highway & replanted on the other side of the buidling, and the Paulownia treelings & the butterfly bushes...

So then Dan dragged in some More railroad ties and several More tons of Dirt and built me (still grudgingly) the veggie/herb garden of my wildest, Aggie dreams, and we planted tomatoes and corn and cucumbers and peppers and basil and potatoes and sunflowers and... (more on "Kibbutz Goldstein-Clark" in another post...) And then the Burpee & Park Seed catalogs started to arrive, and I entered Dan's recipe for oregano-stuffed roast turkey in their contest and he won First Prize, so we had a $50 gift certificate with which to buy still More plants, and then in November bulbs went on Super Sale again at Wal-Mart...

And then Dan attended a WV Tourism Conference and came home with the expression "curb appeal"... And the next thing you know, he was building a ramp (more RR Ties) and another garden (still more RR ties, additional tons of dirt & mulch...), and I was ordering another 35 ton of gravel for the parking lot.

And tho' he still rolls his eyes when Tulip Planting Season arrives, he also comes home from Wally World with flats of annuals and giant, bargain bags of bulbs...

A Water Story...

The pictures below tell a story. Look at the pictures and see if you can figure out the story. Then scroll below and read the story and see if you were right!

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there lived a Prince and his Princess in a Big, Old Castle*. The Castle was on one side of a creek, but the water meter for the Castle was on the other side of the creek. For five years the Prince and Princess had asked the various Kingdom Water Companies to move the meter over to the Castle where it belonged, but you know how Kingdom bureaucrats are! So for five years the Castle had a Big Hose that draped over the creek and brought water to the Castle. This didn't look very Princely, and it gets so cold in the Kingdom in the winter that their first winter in the Castle the water froze in the Big Hose and the Prince had to go thaw it with a blow torch. The Prince repeatedly replaced the Big Hose, once by tying it to a rock and flinging it over the creek to the Princess (the Prince has pretty good upper-body strength), and once by getting down into the creek (which made the Princess scream). The Prince insulated the hose, wrapping it in foam, putting it in a white plastic pipe, and all sorts of other magic things, but in the winter they always left the water running a bit in the Castle so the Big Hose wouldn't freeze and there would be running water for the guests from Far Away who came and paid to stay in the castle. And then one night, right before New Year's Eve, when it was very cold and snowing, the water in the Castle just stopped.
The Prince & Princess had guests in the Castle that night, and when the the guests arose in the morning, they found that they couldn't bathe or brush their teeth, and the Prince and Princess couldn't even make coffee for them before their departure! This was a Very Bad Thing,.as the Prince & Princess depended on their Castle's income to keep them out of the Poor House.
The Prince and Princess made many telephone calls to the Kingdom's Water Provider, but none were returned. They then learned that the Kingdom's Water Provider had a Big Problem, for many other people in the Kingdom were without water, as well. But when the Princess finally reached the Manager of the Water Provider, she was told that it was their problem- that even with the Castle taps running, the water must somehow have frozen in their Big Hose, and they would either have to replace the Big Hose themselves (in 18 degree cold during a snowstorm) or "wait until the temperature rose and the hose defrosted itself".
The Princess nicely explained that this Problem was the Water Provider's responsibility, as they'd already had 5 years to move the meter across the creek to the Castle, and that the Water Provider must have let the pressure get too low again for it to have frozen, even with the Castle's taps running, but the Water Provider kept repeating a passage from her Guide Book to the Princess, insisting that they didn't have to do anything. The Princess then actually begged for help putting a new hose across the creek, explaining that she had had a heart attack, and that the Prince had ruptured discs and a pinched nerve in his back and was in a lot of pain, but the Manager just read from her script again, word for word. The Prince and Princess waited, in the hope that someone would come to help them, but no one ever did.
Naturally, the Prince and Princess didn't want to stay dirty until the spring thaw, so the Prince went to Wal-Mart and bought a very long, green garden hose.

Then he fetched the Castle's fishing pole, and taped the end of the fishing line to the golden head of a magic, red arrow (1).

Then he jammed the fishing pole into the waistband of his jeans (2),

and he and the Princess, clad in Very Warm Clothing, went outside in back of the Castle (3),

whereupon the Prince shot the arrow across the half-frozen creek with his hunting bow! (4)

Then the Prince (whom the Princess- and a few other people- refer to as "McGuyver") cut the fishing line from the pole & tied the end to a rope (5),

and the Princess tied the rope to the garden hose, and the Prince went to the other side of the creek and found the magic arrow (6),

and pulled the hose across the creek (7, 8), and connected it to the water meter.
And that is how the Castle got it's water back!
And then Lo! The Prince and the Princess Bathed, with much Pomp (& bubble bath) and great gladness in their hearts, and they washed dishes and did laundry with great joy, and clad themselves in clean & festive garments, and there was merrymaking throughout the Castle, after which the Prince took a bunch of Tylenol.

But the water froze in the Big Hose the next day Again, because the pressure was too low, and Prince "McGuyver" went out there with his bow & arrow & fishing rod & another damn garden hose & did it again.
And again.
And again.
And the Princess, who by this time was truly ready to slam her head into a wall, e-mailed everyone she could think of (including the newspaper journalist) in the hopes that Someone in the Kingdom would give a hoot & McDowell County (oops- The Kingdom!) might see running water before the tulips came up & Wal-Mart ran out of Tylenol.
And so they lived happily ever after!
The End!

*The Castle is the Elkhorn Inn & Theatre, in Landgraff, West Virginia: www.elkhorninnwv.com