YELLOW LEGO, WHITE LEGO, YELLOW LEGO, WHITE LEGO....

What a fun couple of weeks it has been. Luscious Lyn is out at schools, participating in her first teaching prac, and I've taken my first properly holiday since starting the new day job 18 months ago in order to take on the housey chores in her absence. Which has meant, amongst other thimgs, that a bunch of those niggly naggly little chores that I haven't found time for have finally been dispensed with-- the dishwasher's been removed; the towel rail's been put up in the kitchen; the lego has been cleaned....

Huh? I hear you cry.

It's like this: a few weeks ago, Georgie Girl participated in her school's science fair. Her project involved soaking discoloured Lego bricks in various solutions, from water through to Napisan, leaving them in different levels of light, and recording the results. She won second prize, beaten only by the girls who injected various distillations of iron into apples to compare to haemophilia treatments.

Yeah, I know: makes me wish I'd paid more attention in school and hadn't spent all my time trying to connect the element names in the periodic table together into dirty words.

However, I had purchased a 1994-era police truck on the extremely cheap precisely because it had discoloured bricks: a bit of internet research had clued me in to the best ways to clean up discoloured bricks, and the price made it worth while to give it a try. If I succeeded, I'd get a much better kit for my money. If not, I hadn't paid enough to really bemoan the failure. all I needed was 15% hydrogen peroxide, an oxy cleaner, and a source of UV light.

Vroom, vroom. I am a 40 year old man and I play with adult toys!

Oxy cleaner: check. We have kids, therefore, we have Napisan. UV light, check: thank you, approach of the spring sun. 15% hydrogen peroxide...... hydrogen peroxide.... Beuller... Beuller.... 15% hydrogen peroxide does not seem to have made it to Mandurah. Funny, when you look around at the teenagers in the shops....

Anyway, needs must, and where there's Domestos there's hope.

So, I picked me a large, lidded specimen from Lyn's Tupperware addiction, separated the whites from the colours (See, ladies, men can do this. You just need to provide the proper motivation, is all.) and dropped the white pieces into 500 ml of Domestos and a quarter of a cup of Napisan.

Three days sitting on top of the kids' slide in the sun, and this was the result:

Before and after the bleach/oxy bath

I wouldn't try it on colours because, well, bleach is bleach, innit? But for whites that worked just fine thank'ee.