NEW SOAP WEDNESDAY

Still muddled in the midst of our year-end close, getting out of bed is admittedly harder each morning. Until all of this documentation as per governance regulations goes away (Thank you very much, Mr. Sarbane and Mr. Oxley. I hate you both.), there’s nothing more that I want to do than stay under the covers. In the morning at the Casa de Condon, Katie gets up first (she has to get her teach on way earlier than me) and then I follow suit. Once she vacates the shower, it’s my turn. Fiddle-dee-dee.

But today was no ordinary day. I had a welcome surprise awaiting me.

It’s NEW SOAP WEDNESDAY!

Don’t get the wrong idea. By declaring today NEW SOAP WEDNESDAY, I am not admitting to blowing off an afternoon of work to catch One Life to Live and General Hospital. I’m a working man, and I don’t have time for mid-afternoon drama. (Although, I think it would be hysterical if we had a ranking officer in the military whose name was something like Gen. James H. Hospital. NO ONE would take him seriously. I guess he could always delegate responsibilities to Captain Crunch.)

No, NEW SOAP WEDNESDAY is the day in the recurring toiletry cycle when it’s ok to break a new bar of soap out of the package for daily use. There’s nothing finer that a brand new bar of soap. I’d expound on this, but before you can find out where you’re going, you need blog about where you’ve been.

At the end of the life cycle of a bar of soap, it’s a pretty sad state of affairs. Once a proud contributing member of the hygiene society, the soap bar has been reduced to a shriveled, small, soap dish tenant with little self-respect. In those waning days of effective life, the soap has become no wider than a paper clip, more slippery than an ice cube, and so sharp on the edges, you better be stocking band-aids in the shower. God forbid you try and clean under those fingernails. That type of soap will cut you with the fury of a thousand papercuts.

What’s more, the size of the dying soap bar does not make it easy to use. When it’s no bigger than a cracker, how exactly are you supposed to apply the soap? Hold it with four fingers around its edges? If you apply any pressure with those fingers, it’s going to find the same fate that the cracker would. Crumbled pieces, on the floor.

(And there’s nothing more fun that having the drain clogged with fallen soap shards.)

But there is hope. For all of the pain and hassle you had to go through utilizing that old soap bar in its waning moments, you will be rewarded on (you guessed it) NEW SOAP WEDNESDAY. A brand new bar of Irish Spring waited for me on the newly vacated soapdish this morning.

And it was great.The ability of a bar of soap to fill out your entire grip, still have that new-soap smell (this is how I picture the entire nation of Ireland to smell, by the way), and knowing you don’t have to ration your suds throughout the shower – this all can turn around what was seeming to be a rough morning. But there is one caveat when it comes to NEW SOAP WEDNESDAY.

If you drop it, it’s going to hurt your toes a lot more than its predecessor.