Tuesday, August 28, 2007

The mystery of the tarnished rings

I had an interesting experience today.

Jay loves to swim. His family owns a lake house in central Mass and they go there almost every weekend during the summer. However, he is spending this summer with me and my family in Utah, and though we spent the 4th of July swimming with his family there, I can tell he is suffering from withdrawal. So, me being a loving fiancee and sneakily trying to get out of running one morning (we've been trying to exercise every day except Sundays together, and running is the free-est thing we can do, though definitely not my most favorite form of exertion.) I suggested that we do some laps at a nearby pool, that also happens to have a really cool water-slide. To my dismay, he suggests we run there, instead of drive, so I didn't get out of my run, but at least we had a fun slide as our reward. :)

We enter the club confronted with a large sign warning us of some disease, coslp;aoidjoweia, that people seem to be contracting from the pool. They are thus, not allowing anyone with diapers (Jay lovingly announces at the counter that I must remove my diaper or we have to go home) or small children in the pool and they highly advise us to not drink the pool water. (who drinks pool water?) We ran all the way there and we were not leaving without using the water-slide at least once, so after no debate we agreed not to drink the water and headed for the locker rooms. (I'm proud to say, I only had one naked-old-lady-encounter and she was at least wearing some undies) Everything seemed fine, except the water was a bit warm for my taste, and the pool seemed to be extaordinarily chlorinated - probably overcompensation for the coslp;aoidjoweia discovery.

Jay, with a bit of bewilderment and chagrin, noticed that the high chlorine content had turned our sterling silver CTR rings a nasty shade of gray - not how silver usually appears when tarnished. (This doesn't regularly happen, does it?) Luckily, my white gold engagement ring escaped unscathed :)

Upon returning home (after 20 laps and several slide runs) I tried soaking the rings in my ring cleaning fluid and then vinegar, neither worked. Luckily, the internet was, once again, able to save the day, and I discovered a lovely home remedy for tarnished silver. Note: you cannot simply sit the silver item on the aluminum foil, you must rub the foil all over the item, so get a container big enough for your hands and the object. Pretty cool eh?

Now we await the potential attack from coslp;aoidjoweia...

1 comment:

Laura said...

I discovered this a few years ago (ha!) and used it to clean my mum's silver set. It's totally great!! Everyone should know this thing.