At some point, you will see an opportunity to save a paper towel. This will seem like it is a very good idea. You will be tempted to try it. Don’t. Trust me.

Last week, I invited over a friend of mine to eat obscene quantities of fresh ravioli and help decorate the Christmas tree. I really like having other people help with the tree. It’s like a craft project. And I have a crazy tree. It’s about twelve times too big for our apartment, but I bought it just two months after Austin and I got married. I wanted a tree we could grow into, sort of like buying a fourth grader pants.

And the tree is absolutely covered with ornaments. The really good kind. None of that fancy, schmancy Martha Stewart crap. Uh uh. I have the Calvin and Hobbes cut out of wood that my grandfather made when I was absolutely obsessed with Calvin and Hobbes. (Really, who isn’t?) And I have the cross-stitch ones my great aunt makes and puts on packages as gift tags that I saved. I have the baby’s first Christmas ornaments from when I was a baby and my stepmom’s entire collection of wooden ornaments from when she was stationed in Germany. (Odd since she’s Jewish, but hey, I’m over the moon about them.)

But this particular year my tree helper friend was very, very, very pregnant. I don’t have a lot of experience with pregnant women, but it seemed like the thing you should do is clean your house, lest your dust bunnies mutate into drug-resistant strains of baby-eating mutants, which would cause your friend’s child to be born with a fluffy cotton tail and, you know, horns, and it would all be your fault. So that’s what I did. I cleaned.

This is where the thing with the paper towel went awry.

I’d just squirted down every available bathroom surface with 409, but when I’d subsequently wiped it all back up again, I found that my last paper towel had hardly any 409 on it at all. It was practically good as new. Surely, I thought, SURELY I can use this practically new paper towel to wipe the Windex off my mirrors, right?

Wrong.

Now, I know you’re not supposed to use 409 on glass. I get it. But I had spritzed the area liberally with approved glass cleaner, and there was hardly anything on the paper towel, and what had been there was now dry. It couldn’t possibly matter.

Except it DID. A LOT.

It’s been a week since this unfortunate incident. I have since cleaned my mirrors at least half a dozen times with Windex and fresh, never-before-used towels. And there is still a milky, streaky film on everything that I’m beginning to think is permanent. Nothing helps. And there’s a fairly good chance I’ve been running around with blusher on my chin and lip gloss on my eyelids because I can’t see my reflection clearly.

But hey, my tree looks great, and I hear the ultrasound shows hardly any horns at all.