"Be a safety-first girl..."

My little apartment has been in a state of upheaval for the last few days. I had some minor plumbing issues with the bathtub/shower, but it was enough to throw off that part of my routine entirely. After cleaning the bathroom on Saturday, I didn't want the tub to get all scurvy again before I had maintenance up to scope out my problem --- so I've been taking showers only since Saturday morning. Well, the maintenance guy was here yesterday and replaced my shower head and all the metal fixtures in my bathtub. You should have seen the water pressure I got this morning! Practically blew me out of the bathroom. I'm excited to get back in the bathtub this evening, though.

You know what I did learn during the last few days in Showerland? If I roll my hair up when it's freshly washed in the morning, it doesn't hold the curl nearly as well as when I wash my hair the night before and just wet it in the morning. I also found out that I'm way more excited now by the clean-ability of my bathtub fixtures than I am by their look. Once upon a time, I might have been concerned only with the fact that they were cute. The first thing I did when I got home yesterday was to check out those fixtures to see if they'd be easy to keep clean. And I think they will. Score 1 for the housekeeper!

My lunches for the last few days have been almost identical to Monday's. (I'm a one-woman household and that soup has got to be eaten up!) I'm definitely not feeling any afternoon hunger - which is a happy surprise considering that the vintage lunch has 2/3 the calories. One more day of the creamy broccoli/egg-salad combo and I should be ready for a new vintage lunch menu on Friday. This next one sounds a little, well, strange. Will I be able to choke it down? Will I actually enjoy it? Stay tuned...

I'm going to try the night-time deodorant thing tonight. The first time I read through the 1946 grooming routine, I thought it was nuts to apply your deodorant immediately after taking your nightly bath. Wouldn't you want to be as fresh as possible in the morning? Wouldn't you sweat it all away during the night??? So I was chatting with a friend the other day and she told me that she'd recently started using one of those new "clinical strength" deodorant/antiperspirants. Strangely enough, the directions on the container tell her to apply it at night! Maybe those vintage beauty experts were onto something after all. Well, we've sure got the right conditions to give this technique a run for its money. Temps should reach 104 or 105 degrees F. again tomorrow.

By the by, 169 seems to be my watermark when it comes to matchmaking. Since Monday, no less than two people have suggested setting me up with somebody! An acquaintance wants to set me up with a 44-year-old engineer who's a friend of the family. She describes him as "a little nerdy," but very athletic (hiking and swimming). She's one of the kindest people I know, so I'm intrigued. One of my closest co-workers also wants to set me up with a friend. Which would probably be a bad idea seeing as she's also kind of a supervisor of mine. I think I'll try to pass on that one!

Soap Opera

What on earth did people do when there were shortages of soap during the war?

If there's one thing that's become absolutely clear to me with these nightly baths, it's that I'm going thru a lot more soap than I was in the shower. One bar lasts me about ten baths before it breaks into pieces and has to be recycled to the soap dish beside my sink. Now imagine if I had a family of six (considered average in the '40s). My household would probably be going thru a bar of soap every other day. Unless I had a passel of little boys, that is! I know there are tricks to making a bar stretch. Like turning the little bits and pieces into a jellied soap. But even a few tricks like that won't keep your family squeaky clean. The only thing I can figure is that folks just got used to being a little less clean than they'd like to be...

Another thing I've noticed about my baths is the bathtub gets grimier and in need of a cleaning much more quickly than it used to. It no longer surprises me that the authors of America's Housekeeping Book (1945) recommended that the tub be thoroughly cleaned each and every day. Here in a single-person household, mine could probably use a good scrubbing twice a week.

Though the vintage articles on bathing I quoted from last week were split on whether a woman should soak in the hot water before - or after - doing her washing and exfoliating, I've fallen firmly into the before camp. The water is at its hottest and most likely to take the knots out of your shoulders. And it's not all cloudy with soap scum and, well, probably dead skin cells. If I waited to lie back and relax until after I got myself all cleaned up, I'd be soaking in my own grime! Definitely, definitely a before kinda girl.

All told, my nightly baths take me about 40 minutes. That's counting from the time I begin drawing the water until I'm drying off after my brief post-bath shower (for shaving and for washing my hair). It's more time consuming than a single shower in the morning, but I love the feeling of being super clean when I climb under the covers. Even better, it's a ritual that's actually getting me to bed earlier at night. It used to be I could easily stay up until 10:30 or 11:00 puttering about, surfing the net. These days, I'm into the tub by 8:30 or 9:00 and ready to turn out the lights and go to sleep by 9:30 or 10:00. I'm all mellowed out, I guess, by the time I get out of the tub. Don't feel like watching TV or even reading. I just want to call it a day. And you can't beat a little extra beauty sleep!

One of my vintage beauty missions this week is to be very mindful of giving myself a vigorous dry with the towel after my bath. It's also made me more mindful of my towels! So I'm going to go thru them in the next few days --- thinning out the linen closet, so to speak. If it's threadbare in spots - if it's not something I'd put out for a guest - then it's time to hit the rag bag. (The ratty towels will make great cleaning rags once they're cut up.) If I spy any loose threads, I'll trim 'em off with my sewing scissors. This will clear up some room for a few new towels in vintage colors.

A Morning with the Ambergs

A few more pictures of Mrs. Amberg hard at work at home in September 1941. It's interesting that the shoes she's wearing are not the pumps we usually see in vintage ads of women at work; they're just oxfords. And she's wearing cotton socks. So she's dressed for comfort, with her hair tied up in a simple ribbon. Before preparing lunch, she's changed into a striped dress - maybe because Gilbert was coming home. Looks like it's toasted sandwiches and soup on the menu at the Amberg house. Stay tuned tomorrow to see how this 1941 housewife spent the afternoon...


Jane Amberg, housewife & mother, busy straightening up before launching into some heavy cleaning w. dust mop & carpet sweeper in her living room at home.


Jane Amberg scrubbing the bathtub in bathroom at home.


Jane Amberg using pop-up toaster w. slices of bread as she makes sandwiches for her three children at lunchtime in kitchen at home.

Jane Amberg, serving lunch to her husband Gilbert who has come home fr. the office a few minutes away & her ever-present kids at the kitchen table at home.