I confess I am a particular person. That is, particular about brands, sizes, and the precise nature of things I see, use, and consume. The kind of fussy person who has to have things "just so." I'm not obsessive about it, but I do sometimes get teased. I like Q-tips brand cotton swabs. I use one just about every day. Now, we can quibble about them marketing these things as "beauty applicators," but let's face it, I use them to clean-out my ears. After a hot shower, nothing feels better than to swab-out each ear canal for that "out of your ears" fresh feeling. So, when I went to visit my parents this past season, I asked for some "Q-tips" for while I was there. What I was presented with were "Publix" brand cotton swabs. These might be fine for applying makeup or lipstick (who would do this?), but not so great for the ears. What's the difference? They bend! You can't get the leverage to press these against anything because they all bend in the center. Wortheless! It is always so interesting to stay in another person's/family's home. So many things that you are used to, are different. Super-thick toilet paper. Puff's tissues in every room. Super-fruity shower gels. Last year when I went to visit, I made a list of gripes from the trip, and high on the list was the selection of shower gels. I commented that they used a shower gel with some awfully sweet, fruit-flavored smell that no man, woman, or child would like to smell like. I am sad to report, things aren't much better. There was promise, of course. Upon getting into the shower, I saw a new bottle of Caress brand shower gel. The bottle said "Tahitian Formula." The first thing that came to mind was Tahitian vanilla. A warm, soothing scent, no doubt. Instead, the bottle was orange/red colored, and what came out smelled exactly like Hawaiian Punch fruit beverage. I don't know about you, but bathing in Hawaiian Punch doesn't make me feel clean. To make matters worse, the gel was peppered with these red corpuscles that looked like droplets of oil. They were some sort of "exfoliating microbeads" to help you shed-off dead skin. I didn't care for that. There were too few of these to do an effective job. I actually looked up this stuff online, and found a number of "customer reviews." Some folks actually like this flavor, and one I remember reading, went to great lengths to find other products by other manufacturers to "go along" with that scent. Everyone has a different measure of taste, and all I'm really saying here is... of all the toiletries my family and I have in common, there is only one. We both like the thicker, "livin' large" Puffs-brand tissues. Evidently my stunt from our last visit of replacing every toilet paper roll with Scotts-brand tissue didn't change any minds.

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