Trends for April 15, 2002

Lisa Ferguson

Monday, April 15, 2002 | 8:31 a.m.

It's in the air

We know, we know: Your nose is stuffy, your eyes are watering and you can't stop wheezing.

Welcome to allergy season. Here's your round-trip ticket to Miserableville.

There are ways to avoid this annual rite of spring. Thomas Ogren recommends starting in your back yard.

The author of "Allergy-Free Gardening: The Revolutionary Guide to Healthy Landscaping" (2000, Ten Speed Press) offers tips and advice to implement in an effort to beat next year's sneeze-fest. Among them:

For more information about Ogren and his book, visit allergyfree-gardening.com.

Lean, mean and clean

Or, maybe it's all of the dust that settled in your abode over the winter that's causing your sniffles.

That's our roundabout way of asking: Have you done your spring cleaning yet?

According to a recent survey sponsored by the Soap and Detergent Association, 66 percent of 1,000 Americans polled said they take part in spring cleaning, while 33 percent opt out. Women age 35 to 54, and men age 18 to 24 and 55 to 64 are the folks most likely to exert some elbow grease.

The room that takes top-cleaning priority is the kitchen (29 percent), followed by the living room (18 percent), master bedroom (16 percent), bathrooms (7 percent), family room/den (5 percent), closets/storage space (4 percent) and, finally, the basement (2 percent).

But it doesn't mean these neatniks enjoy doing the work. Cleaning the bathroom was ranked by 23 percent of respondents as the least-rewarding cleaning task (and men put it in last place), followed by tidying up the garage or basement (19 percent, and named the least-rewarding chore by women), dusting furniture (15 percent), washing windows (13 percent), doing dishes (8 percent), sweeping and/or mopping (6 percent) and cleaning the kitchen (3 percent).

Chewing the fat

Here are the results of another survey, which, (as we've learned today) similar to spring sounds pleasant, but is probably entails more work than it would seem.

Dairy-product maker Land O'Lakes recently released the results of its Simple Moments survey. (The company is encouraging people to take it easy more often ha!).

A survey of 1,000 Americans age 25 to 54 revealed that 99 percent of them "yearn for more of life's simple moments." Really who would have guessed?

How do the simplicity-starved masses define such moments? Conveniently for butter-maker Land O'Lakes, 77 percent said it was the scent of cookies baking in the oven, while 76 percent are in heaven with a piece of bread smeared with "delicious butter," and 69 percent pointed to fresh popcorn "with warm melted butter." Are you noticing the trend here?

Apparently life, like food, is yummier when its loaded with artery-clogging fat.

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