So named for the combination of frankincense, myrrh, and patchouli.
7.5 oz coil
2.5 oz olive butter
1.5 oz shea
10.5 oz oo
3.75 oz lye
8 oz water
1 TB frankincense powder melted with oils.
2 TB patchouli
1 TB clary sage
1 tsp carrot seed oil
Topped with frankincense and myrrh tears.
There is a house across the street in the throes of repossession. Again.
The background is worthy of a soap opera, and has been dribbled in by various neighborhoodly sources. Laurie and her first husband lived there. They had a kid. Then they got divorced. Laurie kept the house,married Kevin, transferring the property into his name (probably because she doesn’t work), and had another kid.
Kevin then got another woman pregnant so Laurie kicked him out. About this time, he tried to sell the house for an inordinate sum of money–unsuccessfully, I might add, though this may have been because: a) Laurie didn’t want to move and is so strident and shrill that she puts a fishwife to shame; and b) he insisted on doing a “for sale by owner,” which consisted of a few cheesy signs.
Our friendly sources–including Kevin himself–claim that Kevin then told Laurie he would pay the mortgage for a year, at which point she would have to move out. He and the girlfriend planned on moving in. (Call me crazy, but the last place I would want to live with a current paramour is where I lived with the previous one. But that’s just me.)
She didn’t move.
He threatened her with eviction notices.
She didn’t move.
Finally, he stopped paying the mortgage altogether. He had a buddy repossess the house.
And then he had his new girlfriend buy it.
Should I mention that at some point in this saga he also filed bankruptcy? Does that explain why the notice on their front door states that Kevin and the gf are now 6 months behind on the mortgage payment? I don’t know–but what I do know is that their house has a sweeping vista of Lake Washington and despite various remodels and additions, still has good Craftsman bungalow bones.
And I’m thinking about buying it.
So there I am, on the phone with my bank, walking through the credit application. It takes me awhile to dig out my 2005 tax return, freaking out the whole time. Then I start looking for my 2006 tax return. Where is it? AHHHHH!!!!! The guy tells me I can call back. We hang up.
At which point I realize that my 2006 tax return is NOT missing. It doesn’t exist yet.
I despise patchouli. Or at least, I always thought I did. But when combined with other scents, it can actually be quite nice. So this is without the lime and spruce of Dave’s soap.
204g oo
218g coil
211g crisco
20g rosehip
27g cocoa butter
1 tb patchouli
1 tb bergamot
1 tb rosewood
2 tb lavender
It’s been a week since I made this, and while the scent seems to be fading, I think it’s going to be a very smooth-feeling soap.
All my essential oils are stored in an old file cabinet in the office, which doubles as a guest room. Dave was here when my new order came in. And every time we went out, Dave riffled through my supplies looking for something that smelled good. “Where’s the patchouli?” he’d ask. Or “Wow, rosewood smells good.” Then he’d dab himself behind the ears. When I said I was making soap, he thrust the spruce and lime at me. “These’ll smell good together.” And thus, a new soap was born.
280g oo
252g palm
252g coil
114g lye
197-295 water
I added some other stuff to the lime/spruce combo, so:
2 tb rosewood
1 tb lime
1 tb bergamot
1 tb spruce
2 tb lavender
It smells divine.
Charlotte’s excellent Green Meme.
1. What do you for the birds and the bees? According to the report, we need to plant a pollinator garden to counteract the effect pollution, pesticides and habitat destruction are having on birds, bees and insects. Bees, for instance, like yellow, blue and purple flowers. I attempt to do things, but I kill plants. Steve, on the other hand, has a lot of stuff in the garden that qualifies. I think.
2. Household products. Chemical or organic? Household chemicals contribute to indoor and outdoor pollution.
Whatever’s convenient, to be honest. However, my soapmaking has yielded a lot of green stuff to clean with. I use soap scraps and the soaps I don’t like to wash dishes, counters, the bathroom, and so on. Sadly, organic laundry and dishwasher detergents don’t work as well as their chemical counterparts. I keep trying, but end up going back to the polluting kind.
3. Do you junk?
I really hate all the junk mail we get. I’ve taken us off credit card offers, and as much junk mail as possible, but I really don’t think the “remove me from the list” services work all that well. We still get stuff.
4. Air-dry or tumble-dry? Line-drying saves money and stops carbon emissions.
Tumble, all the way. But I hate doing laundry and do my part by doing it as infrequently as possible.
5. Old gadgets. Recycle or toss ‘em? According to the report, we have to find a way not to fill up landfills with electronic objects. Charlotte says, “Here’s my current solution: fill up the cellar instead.” I concur wholeheartedly. I have good intentions.
6. Lightbulbs – incandescent or fluorescent? Fluorescent light bulbs use 70% less power and last ten times as long.I hate to admit this, but incandescent. I hate the light produced by fluorescent bulbs.
7. Meat or veg? Meat production is energy inefficient. It takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat. After about seven years of being a vegetarian, I’m a wholehearted meat eater now. My concession is that I try to buy meat that comes from local sources.
8. Loo paper. Virgin or recycled? The paper industry is the third largest contributor to global warming. If every U.S. household replaced one toilet-paper roll with a roll made from recycled paper, 424,000 trees would be saved. Recycled. Though it’s still bleached and all that. I do wish all those recycled TP companies would skip the bleach.
9. Tap or bottled water? According to Newsweek, it takes a lot of oil to make and ship water bottles, and most end up in landfills. Tap. This whole bottled water craze is one of my pet peeves. First, the materials and transportation that go into it. Second, the fact that most tap water is cleaner. Just get a Nalgene bottle and you’re good to do. And if you must distill, get a Britta. The exception is fizzy mineral water. We usually have a case of that stuff around.
10. Dating – metrosexual or ecosexual? Newsweek says two recyclers are better than one. Dating? What’s that?
Or rather, soapmaking is back.
After making 20 batches in a 2-month period, I got tired of it. But my soap stock has been severely depleted. My mother wanted soap to give away — so I sent her about 60 bars. I’ve given about 40 more bars away since then. And Geoff came over the other night to lend me a rolling pin, and I loaded him up with more. “I just love your soap,” he gushed.
Well, what’s a girl to do in the face of that fulsome praise?
Go back up to Zenith Supplies, that’s what. Last night I made a new batch of 60′s Porn Star — this time with nothing other than melted amber resin and a lot of it too.* (And by the way you sick folks, you may think that you and your little Google searches are alone in a dark room with the curtains drawn but my stats know who you are. That would be you, Mr. 76.1.200.154.)
The best thing is that I’m feeling inspired again. Ix-nay on the fragrance oils, nothing but pure essentials from here on out. And here’s my challenge: to come up with five new soaps using no other scents than my depleted essential oil stock. This should be interesting. Tonight? Lemon fennel.
* 252g oo, 252g palm, 252g coil, 108g lye, 8 oz water, 56g light amber melted with the oils
via pages turned
1. Egg Nog or Hot Chocolate? Hot chocolate. Egg nog is just gross.
2. Does Santa wrap presents or just set them under the tree? We don’t really do the present thing so much anymore, although the mothers do. When I was a kid, Santa wrapped. So did the cat, the dog, and whatever undead goldfish I had at the time. Strangely, the gift tags all bore my mother’s handwriting.
3. Colored lights on tree/house or white? Our neighbor Adam accused me not too long ago of “having to do everything differently.” It’s not intentional. We had white lights up last year, liked them so much we never took them down, and then they died. So no lights at all this year.
4. Do you hang mistletoe? I would if I weren’t so lazy. The thought of kissing Steve senseless under it appeals. He, no doubt, would shudder in horror.
5. When do you put your decorations up? What decorations?
6. What is your favorite holiday dish? Roast beef with yorkshire pudding.
7. Favorite Holiday memory as a child? Trimming the tree. Every year. I loved it. Taking the tree down? Not so much.
8. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa? It was more of a slow dawning realization. As I said, Santa’s writing resembled my mother’s.
9. Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve? No, but we always opened stocking presents before breakfast. My stocking was WONDERFUL. It was enormous. It finally broke under the accumulated weight of years of overloading. One of the great sadnesses of my life.
10. How do you decorate your Christmas Tree? I’m so proud; we managed to get a tree this year. No ornaments in sight; I stuck hair accoutrements on it instead.
11. Snow! Love it or Dread it? LOVE!
12. Can you ice skate? Not for years.
13. Do you remember your favorite gift? Hmmm. Not really.
14. What’s the most important thing about the Holidays for you? Staying away from families–always traumatic.
15. What is your favorite Holiday Dessert? I have no idea.
16. What is your favorite holiday tradition? The music
17. What tops your tree? This year? A big pink hair clampy thing. Hey, there was nothing else.
18. Which do you prefer: giving or receiving? I’ve been trying to get away from the holiday gift-giving for years. It all seems so silly; people rushing around buying crap that no one wants or needs. This year, I’m giving away soap (shock), and also flocks of geese to families in developing nations in person x’s name.
19. What is your favorite Christmas Song? Not really a song, but The Messiah. The whole darn thing. It’s just not Christmas unless you’re sick and tired of it.
20. Candy Canes! Yuck or Yum? It’s sugar, so yum.
Once again, it’s that time of year. Find the first entry of every month and post an excerpt. Tag, you’re it — consider yourself memed!
January:
Of COURSE I ignored rain warnings and left a day later than I should have. I-5 was closed between Yreka and somewhere in Oregon, and traffic was diverted through Route 97. Which goes over the mountains and into the woods and deep into a penetrating freeze.
February:
How does one broach the subject of e-mail forwards with very nice, sweet relatives and acquaintances of a certain age for whom e-mail is the best thing since sliced bread?
March:
From 1981 to 1983, we lived in Nigeria. Embassy housing put us in a three-unit complex, each of the identical apartments stacked on top of each other in a compound with a huge magnolia tree and a guard who spent most of his time napping under it. We lived in the middle unit; Nuel lived on the top floor and Laura lived on the bottom. Nuel just visited my mother in North Carolina, and strangely enough, Laura just retired to Bellingham and spent a long weekend with us.
April:
There is, of course, nothing quite so tiresome as someone explaining why she hasn’t been posting more regularly — so I won’t bother, except to say that it’s been a crazy week with no end in sight. But spring is really here!
May:
Pathetic! That’s what this is. I have stacks and stacks to write reviews, great visit with Pammy, lots of e-mails from my insane mother to share, and unfortunately, lots and lots of work to keep me from updating. One day I will return!
June:
It’s pouring, just a solid sheet of rain. The skylight over my desk is leaking once again, even though Steve has attempted to fix it three or four times.
July:
The anti-net neutrality Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) offers his own version of version of how the Internet works. Scary, huh?
August:
Steve is taking a two month sabbatical from work, and is dedicating himself to projects around the house. The problem is that he’s much more excited about destroying than rebuilding.
September:
“Can you think of a reason to come back to Long Beach?� asked Steve. We were hurtling down the 28-mile long peninsula back to the mainland.
“No.�
October:
Saturday night, Steve and I went to La Medusa for dinner — a restaurant in Columbia City that we’ve been meaning to try out for a long time. Every time we’ve gone in there on a whim, they’ve laughed when we say, “A reservation? No, we don’t have one.� So I finally made a reservation. It was worth it. We even splurged on dessert. We left fat and happy. On the way home, we passed our local Safeway and wondered why the street lights were out.
November:
I was probably a little hasty in creating an entire category dedicated to soapmaking. A better category probably would have been “passing fancies.� Or better yet, “passing fancies on which I spend tons of money and then get bored.�
December:
It’s been a loooonng week. S and I have decided to take up cross country skiing. First jaunt tomorrow.
I like to take Harry on his tromples late at night, usually around 9 or 10. We drive to different (read: better than ours) neighborhoods; I slip on my podcaster and away we go. Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of Here on Earth. And that’s where I heard an interview with Steven Rinella. He was so enthusiastic that I placed The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine on hold. I read it over the weekend, while we were in Soap Lake.
Basically, the premise is this: Rinella has always been what he calls a scavenger. He hunts, fishes, and lives pretty close to the land. He gets ahold of Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire, and decides to spend a year gathering the ingredients for a feast, which will be held on Thanksgiving. The book is the story of that year.
It was an entertaining read. Rinella writes as one would expect; his prose is vigorously and colloquially straightforward. He writes about trying to catch pigeons and sparrows, hunting for antelope and sheep, frog gigging, and, most of all, trying to convert his vegetarian girlfriend into a carnivore.
It was this last bit that finally did Rinella in for me. Because frankly, I liked his book just fine — but I thought he was a jerk. Like when he takes his girlfriend home to meet his folks for the first time and his father automatically takes them out fishing. Diana looks ill, but Rinella says nothing. She does it. She’s served up a huge plate of fish at dinner, and Rinella says nothing. She eats it. And all he says is, “Goodie, she’s changing her ways for me.” Finally, at the end of the book, he realizes that it’s fine if she’s a veggie. Of course, by the time he was on the radio, they had broken up altogether.
But jerkitude notwithstanding, I still enjoyed reading this.
Obviously, my soapmaking posts have gotten fewer and less frequent; I confess, my interest has waned. This is, in large part, due to the fact that my last three batches have used fragrance oils (sandalwood, some fresh linen thing, and honeysuckle). I don’t like them. At all. They smell cheap. I need to order more essential oils. And it’s probably a good thing, but no one surprised me with the still …