Yesterday I learned a few things about soot. On Saturday we invited Sigga, Logi, Már, Stína and Ingimundur over for dinner, to thank them for all the help with the apartment. We had fondue: meat and veggies boiled in hot oil, and fresh fruit dipped in melted chocolate. Yum. I think everyone had fun, and they all admired the progress I made cleaning out the living room earlier that day. The place is slowly starting to look like a home. After dinner the get-to-gether sorta turned into Már's birthday party. We exchanged gifts, drank, chatted and acted silly into the weee hours. 'Twas good.

So anyway - last night I was doing the dishes. The night before we had ruined one dish-brush by trying to wash the soot off the outside of the fondue pot, and gotten soot all over some of the other dishes in the process. Quite a mess.

Since the normal dish-brush method had turned out so poorly, I decided to try using a paper towel to wipe the soot off. That worked reasonably well - I got the soot off the porcelain dishes and onto the paper towel and my hands. But scratched plastic and skin seemed to have more affinity for soot than the damp paper towel - so more expiramenting was necessary. After a little bit of thinking I had an Idea: butter! I figured that if I were an itty bitty soot particle, then I'd rather embed myself in butter than skin or plastic. And it worked. I felt kinda silly washing my hands with butter... but it worked. Whee!

So. I'm good at empathizing with dirt. Does that mean I'm dirty? I wonder what else butter is good for? ;-)