Salon post: September 7

[jenett]

Welcome to this week's salon post!


Useful notes
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Topic of the week
Brought to you by a conversation last night about the fact I am able to take short baths, what do you prefer for bathing? Shower? Bath?

Are you (like me) fond of interesting bath things? What's your routine, and if you're willing to share, why?

What I've been up to
Many work. We had students back on Tuesday, which utterly changes the rhythm of the place (in a good way.)

Last night, longstrider told me about the existence of The Good Place: The Podcast which if you have watched the show, and can do podcasts, I highly recommend, and I'm only an episode in. It's hosted by Marc Evan Jackson (Shawn) and there's a lovely rotation of people involved with different parts of the the production to talk about how it goes together.

It is hugely full of spoilers, and The Good Place is worth watching without being spoiled if you can manage it, but if you like the show, then, podcast. List of episodes here.


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Comments

[jenett]

So, my own habits were formed by a combination of things.

(Briefly: I started horseback riding seriously. Due to a batch of bad hay in the barn, my mother developed farmer's lung disease, which is a hyper-allergy to a mold on hay that's not good for horses either.

Many consultations with specialists later, my stopping riding for a while, my grades and general happiness taking a huge nosedive, and many consultations with doctors later, one of her lung specialists pointed out it wasn't the horses or hay that were actually the problem, but the mold. And that if we found a well-managed barn and I took some precautions, and didn't do stall cleaning, and my clothes right in the laundry when I came home, things would probably be fine.)

One of those precautions was that as soon as I got home I went right into the bath, to soak for at least fifteen minutes and scrub, because there are things that would come off with applied hot water that wouldn't necessarily in a shower. So I'd come home, drop the riding clothes in the laundry, and go sit in the bath for 15 minutes.

However, it was often *only* fifteen minutes or twenty, because I'd normally be at the barn from after school (arriving 3:45 or 4) to 6 or 6:30, and then we'd have to drive home, so it'd be 7:30 before I got dinner. But that was my life for more than five years.

I've had stretches of my life since when the only option was a shower (and I do that on swimming days, now) but you can't read in the shower. And so my showers tend to be on the order of 4-5 minutes. (These days I do baths because it helps keep some skin stuff under better control, too. Immersion for 15 minutes works a lot better than showering.)

I am entirely capable of taking a lengthy bath until the hot water is no longer hot, mind you. Just I also routinely do the 15 minute version too. I throw epsom salts or sea salt in, usually, sometimes other things, like the stuff from Fantasy Bath and I've got a host of bath treats for special occasions.

My preference on timing is when I get home from work, to split the work from home more cleanly.

[jazzyjj]

Well...I took baths as a kid, up until about age I don't quite remember. When I first moved up to the top floor in this building, I had a bathtub shower. It was kinda pointless as a bathtub though, because there wasn't enough room to sit in the thing. It ended up collapsing a few years ago anyway, due to not having drywall. I found this out kinda the hard way, but luckily it happened after I had taken my shower one morning and was having breakfast. So I immediately notified the appropriate people, and I now have a nice stand-alone shower and the toilet got replaced as well. But it seems our landlords have gone on hiatus or something. Actually my father and neighbor across the hall both think they're going to sell the building. One of them told us they weren't going to be around for a very long time anyway, so that might've been a clue. We just got a new neighbor downstairs, and we discovered a leak in his bathroom. My shower was not draining properly up until a few nights ago, when a neighbor next door came over and fixed it. We've been trying to get hold of the landlords, but absolutely no response.

[mindways]

My habit is "shower before bedtime each evening, unless washing hair or vigorous workout in which case do it earlier in the day". This is a little odd, as having a shower revs up my brain and gets me thinking about stuff, but it also gets me warm, and in the cooler months if I go to bed already chilled falling asleep can be a bit miserable.

I enjoy baths a great deal, but have some troubles making them work.

1) I am tall enough that in most bathtubs, either I'm only immersed the waist down, or a good chunk of my legs are sticking up out of the water, neither of which is nearly as relaxing as legs + torso + arms immersion. (Partly a temperature thing, partly due to losing that feeling of buoyancy.)

2) I have trouble staying in hot baths for very long due to overheating. (I may be perfectly normal in this regard; hot tubs usually have a "do not stay in for more than 10 minutes at a stretch" sign. Or it might be because I am low-insulation and am quickly affected by ambient temperature. Not sure that it matters.)

3) I like reading in the tub, but doing so without getting the book wet is a bit fiddly, especially if I've immersed hands and/or am getting out of the tub and back in.

I was going to put "4) Time", but that's not true; my showers are often 10-20 minutes, which is plenty of time for a short bath (though filling a large tub full takes a while).

I have solutions for all of these - we have an extra-big tub on the 3rd floor; I can try for very warm water rather than hot or make sure I have cold water available to drink; etc - but it makes it a little bit of a production, and usually one that needs to happen in a narrow time-window between kids' bedtime and keshwyn's bedtime, so in practice it doesn't happen all that often - most frequently when I'm recovering from a lingering muscle injury/tightness.

During the winter, though, I have taken to semi-frequently soaking my feet in hot/warm water; it's a *fantastic* way to warm up my entire body. I can do so super-easily in a bathtub, or fill a small plastic tub / basin and bring it into my workroom and soak while using the computer.

[jenett]

I would love a *better* tub.

I still dream of my last place in Minneapolis which had a lovely clawfoot tub. There, I had one of those metal things that goes across the bath and that you can set books and a mug on. And I keep a towel handy for the drying of hands. But yes, that is a consideration.

I usually run my baths for soaking moderately hot but not steaming, and then run a little hot water every 5-10 minutes as things cool off. Especially if I'm soaking for health reasons rather than pleasure.

I actually find the bath an interesting contrast to the float tank (which I've been doing monthly, though I'm about to cancel my membership for a couple of months to shift that money somewhere else for a little.)

[alexseanchai]

omg the scented body wash aisle of the grocery store is dangerous of the same kind that bookstores are

(to a lesser degree, unless we're actually talking Bath & Body Works or the ZUM online store here, but the same kind)

...

questions for jenett and anyone else who does an email newsletter:

1) how did you set up such a thing? I know there are many competing thingies for distribution of such (I can name MailChimp but only it and idk why it); which is the thingie you use and why?

2) how do you decide what goes in it?

3) how many hours do you spend putting together each email?

4) how often do you send it out and why?

[jenett]

1) For the "This is my personal newsletter with links", I use TinyLetter, which is free, and owned by the same people who do MailChimp. (Um, for people who don't know about that newsletter, it's over here.)

I'm also working around to setting up something on MailChimp (probably) for a different project. Several of the options are free or very cheap until you hit a certain number of subscribers (usually at least 1000. I currently have 38.)

TinyLetter is designed for more personal (rather than business focused) ones and doesn't have a lot of business options like doing A-B testing (sending slightly different variants to your list, and seeing which ones get opened) or being able to do sequences of emails (such as for an email course, or "You signed up, day 1, you get this, three days later, you get this other thing.)

If you want something simple, TinyLetter is really easy. Putting it together is sometimes a little fiddly codewise to get the formatting to do what I want, but that's it.

2) What goes in there: That'll depend on what the newsletter is for - mine is a "Here is a roundup of things I've written in different places" plus "Here is interesting stuff I've come across and thought people might find interesting." I get one that's from a librarian I respect with library stuff (she does it intermittently when she has a bunch of stuff).

I dump links I might want later (for personal use, like recipes, things I want to come back and read, things I might want to stash) in an Instantpaper account (Pocket is a similar service, there are others). Every two weeks on Sunday, a note pops up to set it up, and I go through and sort those into folders, one of which is "newsletter".

I then:
- Put in the header image.
- Do the section of things I've written (my regular blog post goes up every other week, so sometimes I need to wait for that one)
- Do a "Here's something beautiful" which is a shareable image (Unsplashis great for this)
- Do the links of interest section. Usually I see some sorts of groupings, and I'll pull related links together. Each gets a sentence or more of explanation (because I want to do not just 'this is interesting' but 'this is why I find it interesting') and that section is the bulk of the thing, usually 400-800 words.
- Send it to myself to test it.
- Wednesday after work, come home and send it out.

3) I'd say it probably takes me between an hour and two hours, but I often do it in pieces, so it's hard to tell? This is a newsletter week, so I'll see if I can keep count. Doing the initial set up took me about three hours to figure out how things worked and how I wanted to do the format.

4) I do it every two weeks, because I like the word fortnight and the idea of it as a unit of time, and because things on a regular schedule are easier to put into my todo list so I work them in. It's on Wednesday because I don't usually have a lot else going on Wednesdays and it gives me the preceding weekend and a couple of weeknights to put it together if I spent the weekend doing things that required more focus.

(For business uses, there's some research that Wednesday and Thursday are good to do newsletters, though 'let's wrap up the week' ones sometime do well Friday or Saturday.)

[alexseanchai]

*takes notes*

Thank you!

[sporky_rat]

I do a bath probably every two weeks or so as a muscle soak. Otherwise I get clean in a shower.

I like epsom salts, but not much else in the bath. I'm pretty boring - but I practically scald myself in the bath. I have a speaker and listen to non-wordy music. I'll stay in there until the water is just above body temp.

[swingandswirl]

Showers! Which themselves feel like such a luxury, after having grown up using a bucket and mug (The joys of living in a drought city in the Global South.) I don't think I've ever had a bath, even on the rare occasions I've lived somewhere with a tub - it's just not a habit of mine. Perhaps the next time I'm someplace with a tub I shall buy a bath bomb (Lush makes such fun-sounding ones) and indulge.

I love interesting bath things! Solid shampoos are my favourite, and I've been experimenting with scalp scrubs. Not having access to a tub means no bath bombs or bath oils, but I love hot oil treatments for my hair - it's thick and wavy and oil once a week makes it SO much easier to manage.

[silveradept]

My bathing routine tends to be a morning shower before work. Being a creature of very long limbs, baths tend not to be relaxing as much as contortions, and the relaxation effect of having steam and water gently drumming on my head is rather nice.

I've never used a bath bomb or other fizz, and I'm curious about it, but I also tend to have a very limited set of scents that I can tolerate. Candle stores and / or perfurmeries are places I have to give a wide berth, or I will be a cranky Silver with a headache.

[alexseanchai]

...noted in case of future social with you. (I luuuuvs pretty scents.)

[silveradept]

Small amounts of scents I can tolerate, but the word "moderation" has yet to be followed seriously in scented anything that I have encountered.

[jenett]

If you're comfortable listing stuff that works for you, I bet people could make suggestions.

(Most artificial perfumes get me hard, and some specific notes for natural ones, but the natural ones are a lot better for me.)

[silveradept]

It's a fairly small list, regrettably. Orange, blueberry, non-artificial strawberry, and chai spice so far seem to be the only likable scents. Perhaps other citruses and berry scents that resemble the scent of the actual berry.

I know I strongly dislike clove, cinnamon (by itself), artificial vanilla, potpourri, the evergreen or tree scents, lilac, lavender, the scents of black tea and roibos tea, and most artificial berry scents, which disqualifies most scents.