Mite Work, Mite Not!

As I threw my Alligator Loki Barbie shirt in the Antarctic ocean, I realized...  

That nobody know what the heck is going on! Welcome to my life, friends!

One of my favorite things about having mostly ADHD friends is that they're not only somewhat sporadic about contact in general, but they're particularly sporadic about volunteering pivotal aspects of their lives. So, shit will go down that I hear nothing about until months later when we're in the middle of a massive battle or seeing the fifth specialist or two shock pads and a couple of Heimlich maneuvers into the thick of things.

 And they rarely think to be like "oh yeah, so background here: broke my shoulder two months ago and then was attacked by dogs trying to get my job back and I was kicked out of my house by wolves, so that's why I'm now living on the street planning a counterattack against the wolf clan that apparently lives near city hall..." Instead it'll more likely be a cryptic text saying "grey wolf got mobbed by crows but then the jay beaked me. You got any antibiotics?"

My friends could be anywhere in the country doing anything and I won't know

 I am no different. I will vanish off the face of the earth and/or carry on polite conversation while simply not mention a darned thing for months before it comes up (probably via blog) that such and such a huge thing has happened. The real talent is that I can do this while simultaneously oversharing!

 I don't know this to be the case, but I assume that those of our neurotype are bigger fans of non-chronological or "confusing" storytelling, because with my attention span going in and out, that's pretty much the norm! My life is a blender of Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Cloud Atlas with a little bit of that scene in John Malkovich where he crawls into his own head and everyone is John Malkovich talking only in "Malkovich"! 

And yes, buckle up, cuz that's where my brain is at today! Also, no, it's not anything important.

Another of my favorite things about being AuDHD (or, just generally, me) is that I will adopt rigid rules about how things should be done that absolutely must be followed at risk of fuss, sturm und drang... and then every few months I'll decide those rules are not the perfect rules and come up with a whole new set of very important rules that must be followed at peril of severe distress!!!! 

So, for three months, the bed must be made with crisp folded sheets over duvet and hospital corners. Then the bedding needs to be pulled back and folded up at the foot of the bed. Then I don't care about the bed at all, but the white bowls and the patterned bowls must be separated apart, and the cups have to fit in the cupboard according to size and use and don't get me started on the four different categories of forks and two or three of spoons!! 

It never settles, but it always feels very urgent. And involves many wheels spinning.

This week, I've been back to research mode on figuring out the balance between managing dust mites and maintaining the life of my beloved t-shirts! It's looking like it'll all end in paralysis, but I learned all kinds of interesting things along the way!

I'm grossly allergic to dust mites (or really their poop and their corpses). The little buggers live in every fabric thing and crap out allergens that give me all manner of symptoms.

The rote advice at every "Dust Mite Allergies for Dummiez 101" encounter is to wash everything at above 130F then throw it all on a hot dry session. There's decent research that water above this temperature definitely does kill mites. SO that's cool. 

 Funny story: not all laundry machines get that hot (they can heat unevenly, or the water heater can be set at lower than 120F for instance)!

 Ah well. If you do get it to beyond scalding, this is supposed to kill them most effectively as well as remove the allergens they produce. 

However, funner fact: it also kills most fabrics to toss them into super boiling water with an agitator than a clothes oven for another hour.  

After a few years of my clothes getting absolutely chewed every few months, I went back to the drawing board on whether maybe there were ways to mitigate dust mites that didn't mean absolutely shredding all my clothing. 

Oh yeah, while all these mitigation efforts definitely do result in lower numbers of dust mites, there's not a ton evidence that any of the typical dust mite control measures substantially help improve symptoms of those with dust mite allergens (wahoooo!).  Doesn't mean it doesn't help. We just don't know, I guess. There's decent evidence that we're so buried in allergens that it just doesn't make enough of a dent. EIther way, I'm just as happy to bag the bed and not have my mattress gain ten pounds of mite poop over the year. 

They're cute. Can't we just get them diapers??

Good to know- years of frustrating research into a field basically dominated by memetic advice based in a minute body of actual research - a top loading laundry machine will also mechanically remove about 70% of dust mites and most of their allergens even in cold water. I had thought that I'd read that adding hydrogen peroxide to a cold wash seems to improve that number, although I can no longer find the research study on which I based this belief, so maybe this isn't true at all. It does something in cold water, I swear! I read an article about it like fifty times to try to figure out how much they were adding! Adding benzyl benzoate (a known contact allergen, so no) also seems to kill them in cooler water. Adding bleach definitely kills them all, but of course also kills your clothing. Adding an extra rinse helps up to two additional rinses. Sooooooooooo I leave the rinse setting on. 

The thing is, we all know ultimately that it's a losing battle. You wash the shit out of your clothes and then bring them back to the closet and more than likely they'll be immediately recontaminated. It's really hard to keep the environment pure of microscopic life forms! At a certain point, you unclench and hope maybe there's a "good enough". 

For the last several months, I've been going about my life assuming that it's the allergens I care about and that wearing something relatively freshly washed is probably going to be about as good as it gets. I can't say I notice a difference in my allergies, though I still wash my sheets on "hot" (however hot it actually is). 

Let's not even guess how many tardigrades are in my shirts! I hope A LOT

But recently I've been replacing my boring ass ugly t-shirts with pretty t-shirts. And pretty t-shirts with graphics are fussy! They don't do well in the dryer. They honestly don't love even the cold wash in a laundry machine. Even the absolute gentlest wash has an impact (I think we have hard water, which makes it worse)

One solution that fits my appetites has been to simply buy tons of them. This increases my dopamine and means that any given shirt isn't being washed every week. 

So far so good. 

Except, well, that means the shirts are sitting around getting pooped on by the dust mite survivors for longer and longer. And, while it isn't a problem within a week or two, going beyond that and the shirts do start to get a little itchier. 

What to do? 

I can't bleach them. I can't use hot water. I don't want to wash them more frequently. 

So... I looked into it. 

People who use LLM to answer your questions, I have a question for you: seriously???

Granted, I seem to come up with weirdly specific questions that are hard to find internet answers to ever, but I feel like I almost never come up with a question that Gemini or Chat GPT can actually answer without a ton of bullshit and misunderstandings. 

It'll be like "to keep your shirt in good health, you need to wash it on cold because hot water can damage graphics, especially screen printed or iron-on decals..." (So far so good)

Then follows up with: 

"Since a cold wash alone will not kill dust mites you need to use one of these two methods, both of which avoid heat exposure to the graphic:

Oh the answer to my question about how to mitigate dust mites without damaging graphic t-shirts! Sweet!

Method A: Tumble Dry On High Heat"

no no no no no NO NO NO! That is a big big no no with graphic shirts. While ideally you hand wash everything, the number one thing you can do to prolong your shirt's life is to hang or flat dry it. The dryer devours shirts even on the gentle cycle. 

Gemini doesn't stop at that. It adds:  "Set to the dryer to a high-heat setting or at least 15 to 20 minutes. A temperature above 130F is required..." 

NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Just. No. 

If you check the sources on that, you'll be shocked that the sources have nothing to do with t-shirts or graphics. 

The second suggestion is one I had already been researching... Freezing!

There's some mimetic belief that freezing fabrics kills dust mites. Which is... debatable, but if you believe it hard enough, maybe it's true? Should be note that it will not remove the allergen that they create, so you will still have to wash anything that was frozen in some way, because the dust mite allergen has like a 20 year half-life or something nuts. 

According to a study published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, at -15C (about 5F), 50% of mites died after 24 hours and the survivors died within ten days and didn't lay eggs. After 48 hours at 5F, they mostly died. SO, good news. The average freezer is supposed to be set closer to 0F

I've heard others say that mite eggs can survive up to -70C, so... lord knows. But could help. Not totally pointless. 

So in theory. You could freeze the shirts. Then wash them to get rid of the allergens (mite poop), and then store them securely so they don't get contaminated again (plastic is often ideal). And this would probably leave shirts pretty good to sit around for a month or so without needing rewashing. I mean, maybe then they just mold over instead because life is funny like that, but hey! Project!

But does that hurt graphic t-shirt graphics? I poked around the internet a lot for a few days and even asked my engineery spousal unit and came out with something like "maybe but maybe not... depends".  So what the heck. What do y'all say, AI overlords?

Thanks, Bing. Not my question...

Thanks again, but I never said anything about washing my shirt in the arctic ocean and I don't think most washing machines have a "frozen" cycle. And all the sources are about hot water. The source it specifically quotes repeatedly says that washing in "cold water" prevents fading, cracking, and peeling. 

I did get further with Chat GPT and it at least delved into some more relevant materials to surmise that there isn't a lot of evidence this will be a problem but... a million caveats that basically say "your experience may vary and it's not my fault if you do it and it goes poorly" 

Most of my shirts I'm assuming are platisol ink (the gold smelly standard), with fewer being water based inks. I know some things about curing plastisol and storying the ink before it cures, but nothing in specific about  how it fares after. Seems like rogue moisture would be the biggest concern (which makes sense to me) and the adhesives may add variables. 

Anyways, I'm not sure how necessary it is, but I think it has potential as long as the shirt is legitimately dry. 

Also, it may be that I'm overthinking this. 

But I want to have millions of t-shirts well stored and comfortable!

Not looking good in there!

Clearly what I need is a new deep freezer for the closet! 

Aaaaanyways, that's been fun! I'm not really sure where I'll land but it's been a journey anyways. Given I'm living in the house with a cat I'm allergic to full of carpets and unwashed stuffed animals, it might be that my clothing battle is less urgent than I think. But always hard to say!

At any rate... back to the begining!

The Autumn School Schedule(!!!!!) is almost in place now. Every service and group and class except for maybe one that won't start until October is ongoing. Which means a lot more walking here and there, and less aimless wanders in the afternoons. 

We still get a few days out at the duck pond for as long as the ducks, gulls, and herons come out!

This bruh scared the crap out of me when it took off flying right next to where we were 

On the walks to and from school we get a goodly showing of lil birds, which is increasingly of interest to me. 

Crows are a gateway bird to straight up birding! And birding is basically just analog Pokemon Go for people of a certain age that maybe I've reached at this point. I'm excited about reaching the point where walking around and pointing while whispering "loook!" is considered a hobby!

Mostly a variety of sparrows on our walks, but occasionally we run into some Steller's Jays (not blue - we don't have blue around here, but we do on youtube!) Jays are also corvids, so they get the extra love. They are smart, scrappy little buttheads with a "song" that sounds like a little siren. Gotta love 'em. 

But the local crows are still my favorites at the moment. They like to caw wildly from a neighborhood tree. Stare at me. Caw some more. Then fly to a different tree and caw some more. Maybe in between, dig the shit out of some soil with a stick. I feel that too many people want to be cats. I'm starting to appreciate the crow lifestyle here. Especially because crows are known to bite cats' butts for funsies. 

I think I channel more pigeon energy than crow, just yet. Pretty in a messy feral trash-eating kind of way, a little credulous, ambivalent to people but kind of dependent on them, and deeply underappreciated. But I'll aspire to crowdom at any rate. 

Or seagulldom? I dont think I'll ever be that out of fucks to give and generally looking for a fight! Aspirations, though. Aspirations!

At any rate back to dunking Alligator Loki in the ocean while the wolves fight the jays!