I don’t drink alcohol, but recently I had to make an expedition to the local booze store to buy more vodka as I had run out. This was the first time in my life I had ever bought alcohol despite being almost 41 years old. Previously, my ex-husband had purchased it for our household use, and I’d finally run out of the big bottle which he’d bought many years ago.
So what do I do with the vodka if I don’t drink it? For starters, I clean with it. Vodka has great antibacterial properties yet is a non-toxic liquid that doesn’t bother most with chemical sensitivities (at least if they don’t drink it). So I keep a spray bottle of vodka by the kitchen sink, and any time we scrub the kitchen counter especially after cutting up raw meat, we spray it down with vodka on the first pass.
I also keep a spray bottle of vodka in the bathroom, and my ex-husband did the same. We use it as deodorant, again because of the great anti-bacterial properties it has. The bacteria in our armpits are part of what create the body odors that our society doesn’t enjoy. Using vodka as a deodorant helps kill the bacteria and reduce the odors. For me, I am able to just use a vodka spritz most of the time (along with soap and water in the shower, too). My ex-husband found that for him, he needed more. The safer, natural deodorants were not strong enough alone to handle his body odor. However, if he combined the deodorants with the vodka, he was able to get a workable natural solution.
Theater companies often use vodka to spritz the costumes between performances. Rather than having to professionally dry clean costumes on a daily basis, a complicated, expensive and often impossible task, the vodka is used for its deodorzing properties to keep the costumes, worn by the actors under very hot lights, from reeking after a long series of performances. So too can vodka be used to spritz up ordinary clothes that aren't too scented. Simply spritz the area of concern and let hang to air dry.
I find it very amusing that my children now think of vodka as an antibacterial. At one point, one of them asked me, “Do people actually drink that stuff? Why?” I suspect I’ve probably unintentionally created some kind of Pavlovian response in them that vodka will forever be a cleaning agent that they can’t imagine using for other purposes! We keep the bottle under the kitchen sink with cleaning supplies or in the laundry room next to the detergents, probably the last place most people would keep their alcohol collection.
© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC
So what do I do with the vodka if I don’t drink it? For starters, I clean with it. Vodka has great antibacterial properties yet is a non-toxic liquid that doesn’t bother most with chemical sensitivities (at least if they don’t drink it). So I keep a spray bottle of vodka by the kitchen sink, and any time we scrub the kitchen counter especially after cutting up raw meat, we spray it down with vodka on the first pass.
I also keep a spray bottle of vodka in the bathroom, and my ex-husband did the same. We use it as deodorant, again because of the great anti-bacterial properties it has. The bacteria in our armpits are part of what create the body odors that our society doesn’t enjoy. Using vodka as a deodorant helps kill the bacteria and reduce the odors. For me, I am able to just use a vodka spritz most of the time (along with soap and water in the shower, too). My ex-husband found that for him, he needed more. The safer, natural deodorants were not strong enough alone to handle his body odor. However, if he combined the deodorants with the vodka, he was able to get a workable natural solution.
Theater companies often use vodka to spritz the costumes between performances. Rather than having to professionally dry clean costumes on a daily basis, a complicated, expensive and often impossible task, the vodka is used for its deodorzing properties to keep the costumes, worn by the actors under very hot lights, from reeking after a long series of performances. So too can vodka be used to spritz up ordinary clothes that aren't too scented. Simply spritz the area of concern and let hang to air dry.
I find it very amusing that my children now think of vodka as an antibacterial. At one point, one of them asked me, “Do people actually drink that stuff? Why?” I suspect I’ve probably unintentionally created some kind of Pavlovian response in them that vodka will forever be a cleaning agent that they can’t imagine using for other purposes! We keep the bottle under the kitchen sink with cleaning supplies or in the laundry room next to the detergents, probably the last place most people would keep their alcohol collection.
© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC
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