March 25, 1999

Yup. I know, it's been almost two months since I updated the diary. No excuses for it, either -- I'm just being a lazy bum. You know how when you first start doing something you're really serious about it and do it daily and what-have-you and then you slack off? Well, that's me. Slacker extraordinaire. :) I'm trying to get better about that sort of thing -- and not just this soap diary -- but we'll see. Leopards can't change their spots, or so they say. Well, I just spend some money a couple days ago over at amazon.com buying a intro to Yoga video set and (I admit it, I was sucked in by the hype) Billy Blanks' Tae-Bo intro videotapes. Oh, what the hell. Everyone says it is a lot of fun once you get to know the moves -- and one of the tapes is "how to do all the moves" -- and I'm sick of Sweatin to the Oldies (Sorry, Richard!). Besides, it's springtime and time for me to get off my fat butt and exercise more. Gotta take the bike in to get it tuned up at the Village Cycle Center and then take it out for a spin. One thing I well and truly don't like about living here is the fact that it's downright scary to ride a bike. In fact, I haven't ridden my bike in the city in about two and a half years. I hate drivers here -- I swear nobody gives a care about safety; they only care about forcing their way through that red light -- and I really, *really* don't like being balanced a wimpy little aluminum frame between the masses of road-rage addicted SUV soccer moms on smack. What am I talking about all this for? Something about amazon. Yeah, I placed a large order with them earlier this week. Then (like two days after) I found out I'm not going to get another paycheck until April 16th... a month away! Ugggh. Sigh. Fun with My New Job. The job is great... I just wish I was going to get paid tomorrow :P. Why did I start talking about exercise again? Oh yeah, I'm a slacker, with exercise as well as with my diary. Hmm. Well, I suppose that's tangentally related..... Kinda.

Soap! Yeah. I keep meaning to come up with some sort of request for Larisa (web designer extraordinaire) to work on my website for. I just keep... uh, slacking, basically. LOL. Yeah, so I haven't gotten my business license yet, which I was hoping to get last month. Ended up with the job change and all that I never had time to go stand in line at city hall. Hmm, I'm going to have to leave early one of these days and take the train downtown (I'm in the north burbs now) and stand in line. Have to get that time scheduled. In the meantime, it's just as well I haven't gotten the license yet, because I haven't soaped in about two weeks! Seriously. The kitchen was a mess, I was sickish, I was stressing about the old job, bla bla bla. I want to make some peppermint foot scrubby soap. Oh wait, I did make some M&P maybe two weeks ago. Made a batch of that and made small bars with it, then beveled them nicely and shrink wrapped them. It is pretty nice soap, actually. Here's the recipe:

For lack of a better name: Almond Goatsmilk Glycerin Soap

3 lbs. clear M&P base
5 Tbsp. Marcia's powdered goatsmilk
1 Tbsp. powdered oats
2 oz. Castor oil
TKB "Leaf Brown" gel colorant, as much (or as little) as desired
.6 oz. wt. Bitter Almond eo

Melted all the base down.... kept it warm. Here was mistake #1: I thought it would be a good idea to take a little bit of melted soap out to mix with the pwd gm and oats. Duh. That stuff isn't CP, it hardened up in the little bowl!! Doh! So I had that semi-hardened soap milk glop which I dumped back into the big bowl and used a whisk to try to mix in. Didn't work too well, so I dragged out another CP convention -- the stick blender. That worked great. :) Mixed in the goodies and poured the soap into half of Barry's mold. It did take a while to harden up -- Barry's mold is a really good insulator -- but eventually it did. I think I let it sit out overnight. It didn't want to come out of the mold, so I stuck it in the freezer for a few hours. I'm pretty impressed with the soap. :) Not bad for only my second M&P attempt. Oh, I forgot to say why I made it -- I'm hosting this milk soaps swap, only my own CP milk soap is, uh, well, I didn't really care for it. :) I made it with coconut milk and shredded coconut, with coconut monoi and no other scent. So it doesn't really smell like coconut because I didn't scent it enough, and the coconut milk resulted in a kind of papery texture. Plus, since I used the shredded coconut out of a bag (I rinsed it well to wash off all the sugar and goop), it has really large bits of coconut sticking out -- which results in the shreds drying out between uses of the soap bar and being REALLY scratchy when you first start to use the bar. It's a nice lathery soap, but it just hurts to use it! LOL So with the scratchiness and not very much nice smell, it's just not a very good soap, so I wasn't really pleased with it. So that's why I made the M&P, as sort of a "consolation soap" or a "soap that sucks less," LOL. Anyways, I'm hoping to get that swap all taken care of by this weekend. Still waiting on a couple boxes... I think there are a couple folks that haven't emailed me if they're still going to participate or not. Well, there is a box or two at the post office waiting to be picked up. So that brings it down to just a couple unaccounted for, which is good.

I'm going to try and add more recipes to the recipes page shortly. I noticed I've only got like 20 recipes on it, and I'm sure I've got lots more than that in my files. I think I need to find an easier way to add them to the page -- the way I have it now just makes it somewhat time-consuming to add them to this big ugly HTML page. If it were easier to do maybe I'd get my lazy self to do it more often. Yeah, I'll just keep telling myself that. LOL