Cleaning silverware with SCIENCE!

Maryanne and I picked up a really nice antique silverplate service Saturday at a little antique shop outside of Pittsfield with the intent of putting it to use as our everyday flatware. It was moderately tarnished, and today I set to work with the silver polish to try and get it back to lustrous beauty.

And after about an hour of work to get half a dozen pieces done, I decided there had to be an easier way. Dr. Google, as usual, had some great suggestions. I decided to use the one that presented the least amount of work.

Set a large pan on the stove and line it with aluminum foil and lay out some silverware on the foil. Every piece of flatware must be touching the aluminum somewhere, even if it's only a small point of contact. Pour water into the pan to cover the silverware by a couple of inches and turn the fire on under the pan. Bring the water to a full boil.

Shut the heat off under the pan and sprinkle the water liberally with baking soda. The water will appear to foam as the baking soda works, and there may be a "rotten egg" smell. That's hydrogen sulfide, a byproduct of the chemical reaction cleaning your silver.

Hydrogen sulfide is poisonous, but you'd have to seal yourself inside a plastic bag along with the reaction to get a dose big enough to do you any harm.

The foaming will stop after a few minutes. Leave the silverware in the solution for a little while longer to allow the reaction to work as completely as possible.

Remove the silverware to a dishpan filled with warm, soapy water and clean it thoroughly. The tarnish should be mostly gone, and the silver will have a lovely matte finish. If you want a more shiny look, finish off the cleaning job by quickly buffing it up with a bit of silver polish.

<<- Before

After ->>

So how does this all work?

Silver combines with sulfur compounds in the air to form silver sulfide, which is black, and appears on the surface of the silver as tarnish. Removing the silver sulfide coating from the surface makes the silver shiny again..

You can remove the silver sulfide two ways: scrub it off the surface (i.e. use silver polish) or reverse the chemical reaction (i.e. turn the silver sulfide back into silver.) The method I used uses a chemical reaction, sped up by heating the water, to turn the silver sulfide back into silver.

Aluminum has a lower ionization energy than silver - it takes more energy to remove electrons from a silver atom than it does from an aluminum atom. During the cleaning process, the aluminum foil is oxidized (loses electrons) and the silver is reduced (gains electrons.) The silver turns bright and the aluminum foil darkens as the tarnish is "transferred" from the silver to the aluminum.  Because this is an electrochemical reaction, the silver and the aluminum must be touching.

Dog vs. Skunk

Zim is allowed on the couch when he hasn't been tangling
with polecats.

So I let the dog out last night and shortly thereafter the house started to fill with the smell of skunkfunk. Seconds later, the back door slammed shut and in ran the dog, circling around like mad and licking his muzzle (yeah, the dog knows how to open doors, so he was dragging the smell through the house before I could trap him in the bathtub.)

As much as he hated it, he got a deodorizing bath and now he's (mostly) skunk-free - but I didn't want to get the bath concoction in his eyes, so he's still a little stinky around the top of his muzzle.

If one of your domestic animals (this category includes kids) gets sprayed by a skunk, forget the old saw about washing them in tomato juice. Setting aside the fact that tomato juice doesn't work, think of the cost. You'd need like a dozen cans of that stuff to thoroughly bathe a dog/child. Instead, use this:

Anti-Skunk Dogwash

1 quart 3% hydrogen peroxide

1/4 cup baking soda

1 tablespoon dishwashing detergent

Combine ingredients in a shallow pan and swirl around briefly until the baking soda is mostly dissolved. Apply it immediately to the dog, working it into his fur and giving him a really thorough washing. The combination of hydrogen peroxide and baking soda breaks down the chemicals in the skunk spray and renders them odorless, and the dishwashing detergent helps carry away the residue. Rinse the dog really well and if he's still funky, mix up another batch and do it again.

A couple additional tips:

• Dawn dishwashing detergent is gentle and very effective for this. But if you don't have it, use what you've got. When your dog smells like a tear gas grenade just exploded at your feet, you don't have time to go running to the store for a special brand of detergent.
• Try to keep the wash out of the dog's eyes. When I wash Zim's muzzle, I use an old sponge so I can keep the bathwater where I'm aiming it.
• Mix a batch up fresh when you need it. Don't mix it up ahead of time! The mixture is not stable - it gives off gas when it's blended - and trying to trap it in a closed container will cause pressure inside the bottle to build until it explodes.

I finished Zim off with a peppermint soap shampoo. Now he's ashamed to go out and meet other dogs because he's afraid the big bulldog up the street is going to call him a sissy.

Sniff Test: MAN CANDLES by Yankee Candles

Two days ago, the news broke that Yankee Candles had begun marketing a line of candles to men, imaginatively called "Man Candles."

Lynnafred and I were heading up to Greenfield, and Yankee Candle's home store in Deerfield MA happens to be right off of I-91 on our way, so we decided to stop in and see what these Man Candles were all about.

Yankee Candles in Deerfield is a "destination store," as well as a popular stopping point for vacationers traveling north to Vermont, so it's usually packed. We were lucky on this early Friday morning to find few customers.

Not many customers. Tons of candles, though.

The place is a maze of showrooms. We wandered around for a while before finally giving up and asking a very friendly sales associate for help.  On the way to the store, Lynnafred and I were joking about the Man Candles, calling them "Mandels." So of course, when I inquired about them, I asked the sales associate where we could find the "Mandels...uh, sorry, I mean the Man Candles." She took it in stride, though, and just laughed and pointed the way.

We would never have found it without her help. Yankee Candles has about a billion square feet of retail space here, with multiple duplicate displays scattered here and there grouped by theme. But the Man Candle display is this small, 4-foot by 4-foot cluster in one of the side rooms. It really was rather underwhelming. Since just about every other scent in the store was represented by sixteen thousand candles each and the Man Candles were lucky to show a couple dozen in the frontages, we guessed that Yankee is gingerly dipping their toe into the testosterone pool here.

The sales associate (whom I am going to call "Helen" from now on to protect her identity) offered us whiffs of each of the candles, along with some surprisingly frank personal assessments of each one, before leaving us to our own devices.  Here's what we thought of the new Man Candles:

Man Town

Yankee Candles' Catalog Says: Escape to the man cave with this masculine blend of spices, woods, and musk.

Helen Says: "It reminds me of the cologne a stationery salesman would wear."

Our Impression:  Lynnafred and I took a snort of the fragrance, looked at each other, and said - both at the same time - "It smells just like Axe!"  before breaking out in laughter. I don't know what we expected, though I imagine a place called "Man Town" would smell more like old pizza boxes, sweat socks, stale beer, and crotch.

Riding Mower

Yankee Candles' Catalog Says: Hot sun. Cool breeze. And the intensely summery scent of freshly cut grass.

Helen Says: "This is one of my favorites."

Our Impression: Very grassy aroma, but more like a freshly cut field than a suburban lawn. The smell I experience from freshly cut grass has fruity, almost watermelon-like notes to it.

Wandering the store, we found another fragrance YK calls "Green Grass" with the description, "Nothing says summer like the familiar heady scent of a freshly cut lawn." The only difference between Riding Mower and Green Grass, besides the name and arguably more masculine label design on the Man Candle, was a touch of perfuminess in Green Grass.

First Down

Yankee Candles' Catalog Says: Game on! This combination of orange, patchouli, vetiver, and leather is as exciting as game day.

Helen Says: "It smells like leather and sweat."

Our Impression: Leather, yes, but not just any leather. First Down really does evoke the smell of a well-used, well-oiled football. Unfortunately, the rest of the fragrances combine to smell like an electrical fire.

Also, patchouli's association with hippies totally disqualifies it as a men's fragrance.

 2 x 4

Yankee Candles' Catalog Says: The warm, unmistakable scent of freshly planed wood and sawdust evokes a sense of confidence and quality.

Helen Says: "This one really needs tweaking. It doesn't smell like sawdust at all."

Our Impression:  2 x 4s are usually pine or spruce, and so the sawdust that results from framing a shed or building a workbench generally smells woody, a bit resinous, and a little like freshly grated nutmeg. The smell of genuine sawdust and shavings is one of my favorite things. And Helen is right - these candles don't even come close. There is a strong woodiness to the scent, but it's an "old barn" smell, not "freshly planed wood."

If I were going to buy any of these candles, it would probably be "Riding Mower." It has the most authentic of the aromas. Even at that, I don't think I like it enough to spend thirty bucks on it. I'll just go outside and cut the lawn.