How many times can a company touch your life in a day? Look around your house and take an inventory of your consumables.

Wake up in the morning and brush your teeth: Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush, Crest Toothpaste, Glide Floss, and rinse with some Scope. Whitestrips, anyone? Or, are those not your teeth? Maybe you Fixodent and forget it.

Shaving time: The Braun Series 7 is a good choice if you’re going electric, but if you’re going to shave in the shower you might just stick with a Gillette. I have a Gillette Mach3 Power, which conveniently came with Duracell batteries. We’ll save the Old Spice for after the shower.

Speaking of showers: You can go with the Olay body wash, or just a regular bar of soap, like Ivory or Zest. Hopefully you don’t need Head & Shoulders, so you can go with Herbal Essences for the hair. If two steps is too much work Pantene puts the shampoo and conditioner in the same bottle.

You might need to use a different shampoo if you’ve colored your hair with Clairol – I’m not sure. Then again, if you’re using Clairol you might also be using Secret, CoverGirl, Max Factor, Always, Tampax, and Clearblue Easy.

That should wrap it up for the bathroom. Oh wait, one more thing – don’t squeeze the Charmin. And somewhere in this bathroom surely there’s a box of Puffs, although I hope it’s not the kind with lotion. They’re like pre-used tissues. And as if that’s not weird enough, you can get Puffs with Vicks, too!

If there’s a baby in the house you’ve probably already changed the Pampers or Luvs by now. And while we’re taking care of little creatures, Eukanuba makes 48 different kinds of dog food, and Iams makes 42 varieties of cat food.

Before we head to the kitchen we’ll start a load of laundry: I always buy Tide, but as near as I can tell it’s all the same thing – Cheer, Era, Gain… Well, maybe except for Dreft. I add some Downy with Febreze except when I’m washing towels. The Febreze is especially important when washing gis. In the dryer I add a sheet of Bounce, but have no idea why. It’s just part of the process.

Forgot to do the dishes last night. Just like the laundry detergent, I think Dawn and Joy are pretty much the same thing. Cascade Complete goes in the machine. Use the PUR filter to get the water you’ll need for your Fibersure or Metamucil. Now just wipe the counters down with some Mr. Clean and Bounty paper towels, and maybe hit the floors with the Swiffer real quick.

Finally, breakfast time! If you turn the TV on and see As the World Turns or Guiding Light, you may have taken too much NyQuil and overslept. Better just grab some Sour Cream and Onion Pringles and hit the road. Then again, if that’s your breakfast maybe you should grab some Pepto-Bismol and Prilosec, too.

Whew! That’s enough with the inventory for now. Counting up the products we’ve encountered so far, that’s 53 by my count.

So now the question is, how many companies make those 53 brands? Of course, people who know me or read this blog already know the answer – one. How many times can a company touch a person’s life? By their own count, Procter & Gamble says 3 billion per day.

I’ve never lived in a brick house, although for some reason I’ve always wanted to.  There’s just something about brick that makes a house seem more real.  A brick house just looks like something that is not going anywhere.  Kind of the opposite of a towable home, like those made by Forest River or the modular homes made by Clayton Homes.  When I do finally one day settle into a brick house, there’s a very good chance those bricks will have been made by the Acme Brick Company.  It sounds fake because of the Acme name’s use in cartoons, but in fact Acme is one of America’s oldest brick companies, founded in 1852.  I really don’t like the look of painted bricks, but on the interior a few coats of Benjamin Moore paints would be nice.

Speaking of the interior, I’ll need to furnish this new brick house.  Chrissy and I once rented every piece of furniture we had from Cort Furniture. That was fine at the time, but this time we’ll need to buy. I’m not sure where this house will be yet, so I don’t know if we’ll be near a Jordan’s Furniture, Nebraska Furniture Mart, Star Furniture, or an RC Willey Home Furnishings outlet. We’ll need a dresser in our bedroom to hold our Fruit of the Looms and BVDs.  But unless we have kids we won’t need any place to keep Underoos or Garanimals.

We’ll also need some flooring.  Shaw can provide us with carpeting and hardwood floors.  And we might as well keep those carpets clean with a Kirby vacuum.

In the garage I’ll finally get that air compressor I’ve been wanting. A Campbell Hausfeld should do.  As long we there’s enough room to keep our cars.  Does Geico give a discount if your cars are garage kept?

In the kitchen it might be funny to have some Ginsu Knives. Those things are practically indestructible, if the infomercials are to be believed.  And what foodie’s kitchen would be complete without some Pampered Chef gadgets? But all this house building is making me too tired to cook. I’d rather just drive through a Dairy Queen.

To finish off the house we should throw a set of encyclopedias on the shelf. I grew up with a set of World Books.

Chrissy recently asked me if I was interested in getting a pilot’s license.  I suppose, some day.  Maybe I’ll sign up for classes with FlightSafety.  If not, maybe we’ll just become partial owners of a NetJet. And if we have that much money, maybe Chrissy would like to celebrate our new home with some Helzberg Diamonds.  Me, I’d rather just get some new shoes, like a pair of Dexters.

So apparently in this little dream world we have a lot money, but not as much of Warren Buffett, largest shareholder and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, the company that owns every product I’ve mentioned and whole bunch more.

For the first time I can recall in the over 3 years I’ve lived down this gravel road, someone knocked on my door trying to sell me something.  Two women on my porch disturbed the dogs, so I looked out the window to find their car positioned at the end of the driveway, backed in, and running.  It looked like they planned a quick get away.

As I approached the door I saw the two women holding clipboards, and I thought, “Oh PLEASE be here to tell me about Jesus.  Please!”

Only one of them spoke.  She opened her pitch by telling me she was from ADT and was in the neighborhood for a huge ADT promotion due to the recent rash of break-ins in my zip code.  Interesting, since I don’t live in a neighborhood, and there are less than 5000 people in the whole 30 square mile zip code.

Then she went on with some nonsense about OnStar, but later explained what she’s selling has nothing to do with OnStar.  Apparently it was an attempt at an analogy, in case I had never heard of home alarm systems, but was familiar with OnStar.  I’m still a little confused about that part.

She asked to come in my house, and I told her I wasn’t interested a couple of times.  I’m thinking, if you’re concerned about home security, start by not letting strangers in your house.  And besides, I have an absolutely rock solid policy against buying anything offered to me through any sort of cold calling technique.  Knock on my door or call me on the phone and the answer is “No.” No exceptions, no matter how good the deal is.  If I want a new vacuum I will go to amazon.com and order one.  I don’t sit around waiting and thinking, “Man, I hope today is the day someone knocks on my door offering to sell me a vacuum.  The carpets look terrible!”

She made one more effort by mentioning that the system would protect my dog.  The other lady never said a word, and they left.

Some interesting things about this “sales call”

• She opened by trying to scare me
• The positioning of the car was weird, so I was freaked out from the start
• They never introduced the other lady
• Her business card says their office is in Fredricksburg, VA (that’s pretty far away)
• There is a handwritten Maryland phone number on the card (that’s really damn far)
• She asked me if I had an alarm.  I did not answer.

I microwaved her business card.