Miss Manners^®

DEAR MISS MANNERS: Please help my spouse and me with a disagreement.

Firstly, I believe that no one should have to walk into the bathroom to use the toilet and be confronted with the leftover “markings” of the previous user. I believe that it is both bad hygiene and terrible manners to leave signs of your waste for the next user. Each person should clean up after themselves!

Secondly, the toilet brush is for cleaning the toilet with cleaning products and for getting under the seat areas, not for cleaning your leftovers markings! If you use the toilet brush for that, you are basically leaving a brush full of poop particles to fester in that little holder in your bathroom! Personally, if leftovers do not fully flush, I take a wad of toilet paper and very carefully clean the mess myself, then drop it and flush it. I am very thorough about hand-washing, so feel this is the most hygienic option.

My spouse thinks it is perfectly fine to leave the leftover markings for days, and then once in a while, take the toilet brush and clean them all out with that. He says that using toilet paper instead of the toilet brush is unhygienic!

I have decided to use separate bathrooms for now, as I am getting pretty disgusted! It was not so bad pre-COVID, but we are sharing the house 24/7 now and I cannot take it!!!

Please! Tell us both the proper etiquette for toilet cleaning -- both when and how!!

GENTLE READER: Often and thoroughly. While glancing back at one’s expulsions is a disgusting affair, it is a necessary one to determine if they have been properly jettisoned. If it’s all the same, however, Miss Manners will stop short of recommending a particular method for cleaning it, as long as it is one where no excrement remains visible or odorous in any way. She will leave you to it.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: I have a wonderful stepdaughter. She lives with her mother and spends every other weekend with us, at which time we have other family members over for dinner.

Ashley has long, fine blond hair. She is an angel at 15, but has one habit that drives me crazy: She constantly braids, then undoes, then ponytails, then undoes, then puts her hair in a messy bun -- all in the kitchen, while we are having hors d’oeuvres, or cooking and eating our meal. She does it without thinking, and I’m guessing it is a coping mechanism.

I have asked her to please stop, as it is not good manners to do so in a kitchen or dining area.

Am I being unreasonable?

GENTLE READER: By not wanting long, fine blond hairs in your hummus? Miss Manners assures you, this is reasonable. She suggests saying, “Ashley, dear, please try not to fix your hair in the kitchen. While we may well need to floss our teeth after dinner, we’d rather not do it with one of your lovely strands.”

(Please send your questions to Miss Manners at her website, www.missmanners.com; to her email, dearmissmanners@gmail.com; or through postal mail to Miss Manners, Andrews McMeel Syndication, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106.)

DEAR MISS MANNERS: I have several friends who, in most ways, have good manners and consider themselves polite and refined. We all use cloth napkins, of course, when we dine at each others’ houses.

I was chagrined, however, to see that if they happen to sneeze during a meal at my house, they use the nicely starched and ironed napkins as a handkerchief, blowing their noses in them!

I am revolted by this, but feel uncomfortable asking them to refrain from doing so; nor am I inclined to place a box of tissues in the dining room in easy reach of the guests. What would you suggest?

GENTLE READER: Next time one of your well-mannered friends sneezes in the linen, give that person a fresh napkin. Miss Manners suggests this as the act of a good host, and therefore not one to be done with a grimace, or while holding the soiled napkin at arm’s length.

She may be vaguely aware that this will draw perhaps-unwelcome attention to the guest’s action, but that could never be your polite and refined intent.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: I’m friends with a neighbor who is retired and has a lot of time on his hands. He is friendly and accommodating, and has become protective of me, which I appreciate as I’m a woman who lives alone.

Many times, he’s generously taken in delivery packages for me while I’m at work, cut my grass, or offered to do simple repair jobs. He even knocks on my door to see if I’m all right if he hasn’t seen me for a while. In short, he’s a good neighbor.

However, whenever I have home projects that require experts, such as carpenters, plumbers or repair experts, he will appear and attempt to supervise them, always asking them about every detail of their work and interjecting with advice. In several instances, he’s given me detailed evaluations of their work within earshot of them, leading me to later to make excuses or apologize for his intervention.

I’m about to have my kitchen remodeled, and it will require many people from all trades working in my house for a prolonged period. Frankly, I don’t want my neighbor hanging around and engaging them or telling them how to do their jobs. How do I politely restrain him from meddling without alienating him or appearing unappreciative of the other good deeds that he does for me?

GENTLE READER: He sounds like a well-intentioned person in need of some boundaries. “You are such a wonderful neighbor and I depend on you for so much. Thank you,” is a good opening, as it should disarm the “but” that any sensible person will hear coming: “But this work is going to go on for some time, and I can supervise them myself.”

If he is the kindly neighbor you think he is, Miss Manners trusts that will solve the problem. If not, then you may have to manage not just the workers, but him, too -- distracting him with minor requests so that the professionals can get on with their jobs.

(Please send your questions to Miss Manners at her website, www.missmanners.com; to her email, dearmissmanners@gmail.com; or through postal mail to Miss Manners, Andrews McMeel Syndication, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106.)

DEAR MISS MANNERS: My father is an elderly man now, and his health, while quite good for his age, is nonetheless not what it once was. In this knowledge, my younger brother is agitating for information about Dad’s will (I have been named executor).

Our father is not a wealthy man, but he does have an amazing lifetime’s worth of goods, and there will probably be a modest estate.

I have no information about the contents of the will, and have not asked. (I figure if Dad wants me to know, he’ll tell me, since he’s been very matter-of-fact about the funeral he has planned and other arrangements he’s made.) Nor will I use the set of spare keys given to me to go snooping, as my brother suggested; I found the very idea outrageous.

My brother has also suggested that I start getting valuations on some items and asking directly about Dad’s will so that he can do “forward financial planning,” which I think is code for “figure out how much I’ll have when the old man pops his clogs.” He says he wants me to do this because I see Dad more often, whereas he is “too busy.”

He says that since I have a reasonably well-paid career and no children, whereas he has a girlfriend, an ex-wife, two children and a mortgage, that he deserves the lion’s share of any bequest. He says he “needs it more,” and expects me to “do the right thing by family” and hand over a goodly portion of anything that might be left to me.

I am utterly horrified by this idea that my father’s modest worldly goods are our ”property in waiting” by some divine right, and I told my brother so (Miss Manners would probably not have approved of the language I used).

Brother claims that he is being level-headed and sensible about a difficult topic, and that disposition of a deceased relative’s estate is a matter of business and there is no room for my soppy sentiment.

My own view is that this man has already spent a small fortune on raising us to adulthood, and that we should have no expectation of any post-mortem windfall. I feel that Dad should A) spend it all on himself before he dies; B) leave everything to the worthy medical charity in which he has been very active for the last two decades; or C) basically do whatever he wants, seeing as it’s his money.

I cannot believe that my brother’s self-proclaimed “hard-headed and practical business sense” is anything beyond the most ungrateful greed.

GENTLE READER: Many of Miss Manners’ Gentle Readers are confounded by the separation between personal and professional etiquette, but her sympathy is more engaged when the confusion is well-intentioned.

Your brother’s assertion that his interest in your father’s estate can be separated from your father’s death is not sanctioned by etiquette or decency. If family relationships are not the domain of sentiment, what is? The mortgage?

(Please send your questions to Miss Manners at her website, www.missmanners.com; to her email, dearmissmanners@gmail.com; or through postal mail to Miss Manners, Andrews McMeel Syndication, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106.)