September 13, 1999

Hi!

Long time, no diary. I know. Picture me holding out my hand and wincing in advance of the actual ruler slap. :-)

Anyways, work has been really busy lately. Summer vacation is not a vacation for us poor slobs left at school to fix things in anticipation of fall. I hardly made any soap at all, all summer long. Honest. Yeah, I made some, but not a whole lot. Now, this past weekend and last weekend, I made 8 separate batches. I think I was lucky if I made 4 batches all summer long. :) Oh well. Anyways, not a whole lot of new developments. I did try my first swirl in Barry's mold. It worked out pretty well, I was pleased. I used some Ultramarine Rose ("Lavender Fields" pigment from MMS) and mixed it up in some raw CP, then dumped that back into the bowl, then poured *that* into the mold. It turned out nicely! But next time I need more colored base; there wasn't really a whole lot of swirl, and I only used like 1/3 c. of colored base. Oh, it was Plum Spice soap... FO from Brambleberry -- which is to die for. It's the kind of soap where you just want to scotch tape it to your nose so you can smell it all day long. Mmmmmmmm.

I did learn to HP over the summer. Well, I learned how basically to HP...I'm not exactly a HP wizard. :-) My first batch was Honey & Oatmeal Soother...it went all weird on me, it was all crumbly and yet soft and squishy. So I let it sit, and meanwhile I made some other HP batches that worked out just right. Then I decided to rebatch the failed HP, and make a batch of HP at the same time, and combine the gelled rebatched soap with the gelled fresh HP soap. That actually worked pretty well. Unfortunately it lost most of its scent in the process, because I didn't scent the fresh HP. It is great soap though...and a good thing, too, because now I have 6 pounds of it. :-)

I also got to go to the New York State soaper's gathering, in Saratoga Springs, NY. I got to meet lots of folks from the lists! What a kick that was. It was great fun. We're doing it again next year and hopefully even more people will come. Rumor has it I won't be the only long-distance traveller, either. :-)

I ordered from Lebermuth for the first time over the summer. Actually, only a couple of weeks ago. Mmmmmmmmmm. Their Ginger Spice FO is to die for. YUMMMM. I'm trying to figure out what I should order from them next. I wish they provided descriptions of their FOs on the web page so it wasn't quite so much like ordering blind. I hate ordering FOs and then discovering that I really don't particularly like the scent. That happens to me with Rose FOs all the time... read a rave review of one, try it, and decide it smells nothing like the real thing. Yeuggh. Oh well.... I just wish their Bay Rum was available in less than 25 pound quantities. I can just imagine what Steve would say if I got a box from UPS with 25 lbs of fragrance oil in it... (Ha, ha, as if I could afford it...) Who cares if I'm a full grown adult, I'd be *grounded*! :-) Actually, I was thinking of running a quick buy on it once we get into the new house. I have to think hard on that one; I've never run a quick buy or a co-op before. I'll have much more space in the new house, but I still have to think on it.

Am I the only one who finds it ridiculously difficult to find useful information on NBC television shows on the nbc.com web site? Jeeeez. All I want to know is for sure what day the ER season premiere is. You'd think I wanted to know how to build a thermonuclear weapon from the way you have to sneak around and find secret underground locations to get the premiere date. The reason is, I scheduled a haircut and (shhhh) color (shhhh) for Thursday...then I realized I have a late meeting that day...then I rescheduled for the next Thursday...then I realized that that's Must-See-TV premiere night... but they can't make up their minds whether to premiere ER with all the other Must-See-TV stuff or not! Gaaaaaaaaah. My brain hurts. :( I just need my Emergency Room fix... The summer's so long and lonely without my friends in the boob tube...
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And, DON'T get me started on the X-Files hiatus length!!! Mr. Chris "Gee, the fans don't REALLY mind waiting 6 months between new episodes" Carter can bite me, November 7th premiere indeed, hmmph. Clearly Chris Carter has never been really addicted to a TV show where the production was out of his control... or he'd know what we go through every fall when he pulls this stunt. I think this qualifies as "cruel and unusual." :)

So anyways, the soaps I have curing now....OH! I have exciting news. Well, it's exciting for me. Someone actually wants to buy my soaps!! Woo woo woo! I'm psyched...I got an order for 24 bars of soap for gifts. How cool is that? Of course I can't get my tax info until after we move and I figure out what to do in the new town... but still... someone wants to buy my soaps!!!!!!! Zippadee-do-dah :)

So really, now, I have lots of soaps curing now. Well, OK, I have 4 batches that haven't been sliced into bars yet. But other than that, I have lots of soaps curing. I have some wonderful Almond & Aloe scented bars, which is a lovely green almond scent. Also some Sparkling Vanilla bars, which have long since turned a deep mahogany brown shade, against which the white mica sparkles nicely. I've also got some "mouse turd surprise" ... er .. ah .. it's actually Lavender soap, with whole lavender blossoms in it. That's the last time I'm going to do *that*. I've got another batch of Lavender, with *ground* lavender blossoms....which looks MUCH better! I've got some Jasmine soap that's several months old. Anyone want a bar? It's got a fabulous scent...it's too bad that I put in too much red sandalwood powder, though, because it's a little on the scratchy side. I mean, it's great when my back itches after I wake up in the morning... and it would probably be nice for my calloused feet... but the rest of my poor skin is not interested in being abused that way :-) I dunno, I might try a rebatch or something. I flubbed a batch last weekend -- MAJOR disappointment -- I mismeasured and shorted the 3 lb. batch by 6 oz. of oils. So I rebatched in the oven... readded the oil... molded it.. Discovered that not only was it not sticking to itself and basically crumbling all over the place, nearly all its scent -- my very favorite men's scent in the whole world, Bay Rum -- was lost. I almost cried. It smelled so wonderful when I removed it from the CP mold before chopping it for the rebatch... Unfortunately I realized almost immediately what I did wrong, but my mold holds two batches, and the other chamber was already full of traced raw soap, so I couldn't just dump it out. So I ended up rebatching that batch a second time! Used the crock pot method this time... Crumbled it up into little bits and dumped it in the crock pot on low... it took several hours to melt down. It seems like the crock pot loses a lot of heat through the lid. Next time I do a crock pot rebatch, I'm going to put foil over the top or something. All things considered, though, the crock pot is my favorite rebatch method. It didn't get all dry and take forever like the oven method, and I didn't have to pay any attention to it at all like the double-boiler method. Let's hear it for the crock pot!!

I got a printer for our iMac, which is cool. I got an HP DeskJet 695C, which is an inkjet, with a USB adapter doodad so it can hook into the iMac rather than using a PC parallel port. It can also hook up to an HP JetDirect thingy if I decide to convert it to a network printer. I was seriously, seriously miffed a couple weeks ago when I discovered my relatively new DeskJet 722C was a host-driven printer. What that means is that it *MUST* be connected to a Windows PC... Furthermore, it is *not* network capable. Oh, was I torqued off about that. None of the documentation I read *before* I bought it said anything about the host-driven-ness. The printer itself is basically an empty shell.. all it knows about is how to feed the paper through and how to move the ink cartridges around to form the dots on the paper. The computer actually tells it how to form the fonts, etc. Thus the Windows restriction. I was steamed about that... because I bought a (what I thought was a) nice color inkjet printer from a good company *specifically* so we could print to it from our myriad computers at home. I just never bothered to figure out how to set it up before that point. Grrr. So I got the 695C refurbished from HP's web site, for fairly cheap.. what the heck, it's got a 1 year warranty, same as my "new" printer did when I bought it. And now I can print from my iMac, by god.

So what that whole printer discussion was about.. I was going to say I liberated a 3-ring binder from its former duties holding misc Avon stuff from back when I was an Avon rep, and I started printing out all my recipes and interesting recipes that go out on the lists, and keeping them all organized in there. Which is a massive improvement on my former method -- which was, basically, write the recipe down on an index card and scotch tape it to the kitchen cabinets until Steve gets disgusted and moves it somewhere, at which point I promptly panic because that was my very favorite recipe ever and now it's lost forever, yadda yadda. Anyhoo, now I have my binder full of my recipes and my notes on them -- I started assigning batch numbers, how's that for organized -- and I shall never never lose my very favorite recipe ever, ever again.