The How to Get Rid of Things Blog

Q: What’s the difference between algae and boogers? A: Kids will eat boogers.

If, Odin forbid, I ever have a kid, I fully intend to teach the little leach how to suck algae. Until that time, however, I guess I’ll just have to get rid of algae the same way everyone else does. All it takes is a little prevention, determination and know how. The article Aquarium Algae Control focuses not only on algae prevention but also on what to do if your tank or pond does happen to become overrun by the stuff. Don’t let algae ruin your fish keeping experience. All it takes is a little time and care to get the most out of your little glass box of life.

Natasha and I would like to wish all of you a Happy New Year!

It finally snowed in St. Paul, MN. Hooray!

We here at How to Get Rid of Things would like to wish you all a merry Christmas, a happy Hanukkah, a delightful Kwanzaa, and a very good New Year. We would also like to thank all of you for your patronage, your advice, your links and your support. We look forward to helping you get rid of even more things in 2007, and you can expect to see new and original content on the 2nd of January, 2007. Until then, go spend some quality time with your family, eat some good food, and enjoy this winter solstice.

- The Authors of How to Get Rid of Things

Quick solution to this one: defend it. I have defended my own thesis, and it has been approved. That means two things:

1. I’m officially a master of English.

2. More articles will be coming soon.

I would also like to thank those of you who have commented on the blog lately for your words of encouragement. Note that these delightful comments keep that little fire lit under our asses, and they bring big smiles to our faces. Starting tomorrow, Friday the 1st of December, this will be my full-time job.

Have you ever watched the Discovery Channel during Shark Week? Sharks can smell a drop of blood in the water from miles off. But when it comes to smelling cat urine, those sharks don’t stand a chance against my girlfriend. Amber is a pee shark, able to smell and locate a single drop of cat urine from anywhere in the house. For this reason, I’ve had no choice but to learn the best ways to get rid of the slightest traces of cat urine odor from my home. If you’ve got a leaky kitty, take a look at How to Get Rid of Cat Urine for some tried and true hints and suggestions on how to keep your home smelling pretty.

I just finished an article about how to clean a laptop screen, not a tough subject, but an interesting one. I hadn’t any idea that manufacturers actually clean their LCD screens with an alcohol-based solvent before they ship them out. This is good to know because the focus of this article was how to clean a laptop screen with alcohol. It’s cheap and very effective, and a far better way to clean than using window cleaner. Window cleaner can be dangerous if you use it on computer monitors because many monitors have an ant-glare and static coating on the glass that can be easily rubbed away if you use something like ammonia and something as seemingly innocent as a paper towel. Never use anything other than a damp cotton cloth and some alcohol to clean your laptop screen–or a product specifically designed to clean LCD screens. This article has been filed under the newly created How to Clean Electronics section of How to Clean Things.

So, we’re busy, busy, busy here at How to Get Rid of Things, but more recently at How to Clean Things, where our newest article about how to clean a microwave will be found. I’m going to be honest with you here. Cleaning a microwave is not that difficult. You scrape the crap out with a paper towel. You soak the stains and spattered soups with a solvent like vinegar (that’s what I recommend if you don’t enjoy eating chemical residues), and then you wipe them out with a dry paper towel. If that isn’t enough, I suppose you could get some rubbing alcohol on a rag and really go to town, but I’ve found vinegar to work just fine. It’s a miracle, that stuff, I tell you. The important thing here is to make sure you remove the microwave tray before you begin cleaning. Things just get a whole lot easier if you have a removable tray, because that’s what usually gets the brunt of your microwave disasters, and you can soak that in some natural dishwashing liquid–to make sure you don’t ingest any more all-purpose cleaners. Then you let that thing dry for an hour. Voila. You’re done. If you want the whole scoop on cleaning a microwave, here’s a link to the article, and a link to the How to Clean Appliances section it’s found under.

Well, this is the first of many articles that will be written about How to Clean Things (cleaning.getridofthings.com), a sister site and subdomain of getridofthings.com. In this article I focus on how to clean a coffee maker with vinegar. I chose vinegar, as I’ve explained in the article, because vinegar is a non-toxic acid that acts as a solvent and a descaler. Vinegar really is the best solution for cleaning a coffee maker, but there are other ways. On the sidebar to the right are some commercial coffee maker cleaning products as well as another natural solution, citric acid. I hope this helps those coffee addicts who expect the most from their coffee makers in terms of brewing time and taste.

It’s that time of year again . . . no, not pumpkin pie and Turkey time — coldsore time! Coldsores are painful, and painfully embarrassing, and that’s why we have a brand new page all about How to Get Rid of Cold Sores. We’ve suffered from cold sores ourselves, and understand that all you want for Christmas is get rid of those cold sores quickly and painlessly, and maybe even prevent another outbreak, so go check out How to Get Rid of Cold Sores for the suggestions that we’ve found to work best.

I must apologize for the lack of recent articles. Right now I’m working on the final draft of my thesis and on a new sister site to How to Get Rid of Things called, as you might have guessed, How to Clean Things. I’ve decided that we need this new site because the phrase “how to get rid of a dirty coffee maker” is not as efficient as “how to clean a coffee maker” in a search string through your favorite search engine. The possibility of us moving the Stains section to the new site is there, though people are certainly still searching for how to get rid of mattress stains and how to get rid of rust stains. We will see how things shake out in the end, but rest assured I am working my ass of to help you learn how to get rid of things and how to clean things–the right way. When the new site is up, I will post it here. Both sites will use this space for updates.

[Update: Here is a link to the How to Clean Things site.]