I’ve finally managed to articulate what it is I love about Japanese shin hana and sosaku hanga prints. Looking at them induces (in me at least) that sense of being nostalgic for the very moment you’re in. Just like autumn.
In any case.
Picked this lovely Sekiguchi print.
I’ve had two colossal soap failures thus far. The first was Real Indian Chai, which used–you guessed it–real Indian chai that I made along with cinnamon, ginger, and clove oils. The milk curdled. The honey I added at trace didn’t mix in well enough, so it’s seeping out the sides. All in all, not good. Next time, I think I’ll use 1/2 chai, which I’ll add when I mix the lye water to the oils.
The other failure was more costly. It was a shea butter face soap with marsh mallow and licorice roots. I added the lye, and it seized. Immediately and irrevocably. I think it was the combo of the rather viscous decoction and the too-low temperature (90). Sigh.
I’m planning to meet my mother in Jordan in January, a trip I’m really looking forward to. I just got a very cryptic e-mail from my mother saying we should go to the Zara Spa while there. I don’t know if this is because she’s feeling the need for some pampering after the rigors of Iraq … but I am SO there.
Steve unwrapped a hunk of smoked aged gouda (that most delicious stuff) yesterday. He sniffed it; I looked at him questioningly.
“I don’t know whether it’s cheese or soap.”
… and i’b tired, with a stuffed up dose. I think I caught it frob Elizabeth who cabe over on Saturday.
Alice Brill wakes up one morning with a sense that something is terribly wrong — but she’s not sure what it is. Her marriage, with its bristling hostility? Her son who is constantly in trouble? Her father, who is dying? Her mother, who died years before from breast cancer? Or perhaps that loss of her job in publishing? It is, of course, all of these — and Wolitzer measures them each in turn. The result is a rich portrait of a typical woman.
The dust jacket copy says this is Wolitzer’s first work of fiction in more that a decade — and all I can say to that is that it’s a shame. This was an amazing novel, one of those books with lush interior landscapes that make you want to crack open every person you meet and see what their stories are.
Back to kiddie lit. Candy Quackenbush hates Chickentown, MN. From her deadbeat and abusive father to her venomous teachers, she can’t wait to get out. So when she helps John Mischief, a multi-headed thief, bring the sea to a lighthouse in the middle of a Minnesota field, she jumps at the chance to go with him. And she is transported into another world, where islands take on the hours of the day and there is a perpetual battle between the day and the night. The prince of the darkness wants her. So does the daylight industrialist bent on taking over the world. Fantastical and fun, Abarat is a modern-day Alice in Wonderland. My only complaint was that Candy seemed to be lacking any sort of purpose — which, if the end of the novel is any indication, should be rectified in the next volume.
I picked this up on the latest library jaunt, thinking it would be chick littish — you know, something light and engaging and fun to read. Oh horror of horrors, I was wrong. It was that very worst breed of book: chick lit purporting to be something more than it is. Katherine Miner is a washed-up actress whose husband has left her. She and her son live across the hall from a controlling mother, she teaches ESL to make ends meet, and her father (a spy who left his family when she was a child) reappears. But wait, you ask. Where’s the love interest? Oh he’s there all right, in the form of another CIA agent pretending to be from Iceland so he can take her ESL class and get close to her father.
Considering that my very first batch used the wrong oils (and is therefore much better suited to scrubbing dishes with than one’s delicate skin), did this one again:
16 oz coil
21 oz oo
14 oz palm
201 g lye
19 oz water
2.5 TB anise eo
3 TB lavender eo
**Update: HUGE winner. I don’t have any left.
21 oz oo
16 oz coil
14 oz palm
1 oz rose wax
3 tsp rose incense, powdered (seems to have been mainly glittery stuff with rose oil poured on, still had a nice musky fragrance to it)
201 g lye
19 oz water
3 TB rose FO
3 TB geranium EO
*** Update: This is a good basic recipe. Next time, scale back geranium (adds an edge) and maybe omit the incense altogether. Maybe make it a light pink?