May 12, 2000

It still feels strange to be writing the year as '2000.' One too many 'Yeah, that'll happen -- in the year 2000!' remarks while growing up, I guess. :-) At least I (mostly) write checks correctly.

So I changed the look of the main page. Hopefully it's pretty much the same. All I did was take out all of the images that were links. I used to have all the labels like "Recipes," "Tips and Tricks," etc. as transparent GIFs, so that I could use a font and not have the text underlined like regular links. But a week ago I loaded the page up and said to myself... "JEEZ, this is taking forever to load!" Then I thought about it and it clicked, so I decided to take down the GIFs and replace it with text. It took me a couple minutes to figure out how to not underline links, but once I got that done, I just rewrote all the links, and there you have it. For reference, the way that you do that is:

<a style="text-decoration: none" href="http://link.here.blah/">

Maybe it would've been easier if I use an HTML editor, but I do my HTML coding by hand... I always have, from my first web page when we didn't have WYSIWYG editors, and I probably always will. Editors annoy me (like word processors annoy me) because they do stuff that corrects me, like the program knows better than I what I wanted to type. No, I really did want the word 'cat' uncapitalised even though it's the start of a sentence; it's the name of a program. Ugh -- AutoCorrect drives me *batty*. The folks in my office can always tell when I'm stuck using Word to write some documentation because I get into conversations with the computer -- and not very complimentary ones, either.

So anyways, I'm excited because I got Catherine Failor's _Making Natural Liquid Soaps_ book the other day. If you have any interest in liquid soaps at all, I highly recommend it. It's got wonderful pictures showing the process. I noticed one thing that got me kind of confused, which on one page where she refers to "borax," "sodium borate," and "boric acid" all at once, and doesn't make it clear that while "borax" and "sodium borate" are the same thing, "boric acid" is definitively not the same thing. I mean, they sound so close together it's an easy mistake to make -- and I doubt that, if there hadn't been a huge discussion of this on the HotSoap list, I would have known the difference either.

Last Saturday was the second annual Chicagoland soaper's gathering. This year we had a lot more people -- maybe twice as many as last year. It was great! I had a blast. I did a demo of CSDBHP, which was really not difficult at all -- the demo, I mean -- because the soap is so *easy* to make. I mean, how exciting is a demo where you put soap on the stove, sit for 90 minutes, and then come back later? *grin* So we ate lunch in between "halves" of the demo, and it worked out alright, I think. I used Sweetcakes Vanilla Pear fragrance oil, and it smells *so* good. You know what's interesting is that I must not have stirred the fragrance in very well, because the curing soap is discoloring in stripes! It's actually really neat looking, and I might do that again, on purpose.

So the project for this weekend is beer soap. Miller Lite soap, to be precise. I have a friend who complained that I've never made him any soap, and he likes to drink Miller Lite, so I'm going to make some soap with Miller Lite for the liquid instead of water. This ought to be interesting. :) I don't think the beer smell will make it through saponification, but I'm kind of hoping that the alcohol in the soap will lend it some translucency. We'll see. :)