Confessions from the Cleaning Cupboard

My name is Beren, and I'm a cleaning product addict.
Hello Beren.
It's been three days since I last bought a cleaning product.
Or something like that.
It's true. My list of addictions grow: Diet Coke, cruising the Oregon Humane Society Website for the next doggy love of my life (www.oregonhumane.com) and now, I confess, cleaning products.
No, I'm not drinking them. Diet Coke offers enough in the way of chemicals, thank you very much. Not huffing them, sniffing them, or any other unusual purpose.
I like to use them, I like to buy them, I like to spend time examining them in the cleaning aisle of the grocery store.
Oh, I like the colors, I like the smell (though I have finally come to know that not everyone shares this passion, and stopped cleaning the house five minutes before company comes) and I like the illusion that my home can be really clean, by using Product X.
What I really want is a product with that is Mandarin orange, smells like Grapefruit, and cleans with the wave of a wand.
But I buy into the fantasy, again and again, that Orange Glow will make my floors shine, that Bam will clean my doorframes of the multi-layers of fingerprints, that Simple Green will cut through the layer of dog dirt tracked in on a daily basis from the backyard.
I like to think of myself as somewhat Green, but I know that I cannot truly make this claim while my cupboard is stocked with Mr. Clean and Comet (or drink Diet Coke on a daily basis).
So I try to compensate in other areas; no insectidies, no fertilizers, minimal watering (except during August when I let our preschooler loose with the hose on a daily basis, and considered it water well spent to get something done-and boy is our backyard LUSH!) and recycling up the wazoo.
I fear that there is a special chemical hell for people like me, sacrificing the world a little at a time for the smell of Pine Sol, but I try not to think about it.
I'm a cleaning product addict taking it one day at a time. I'll try not to buy any, or use any, today.