Intelligence is, at its bones, the ability to learn well. But cleverness is the ability to apply intelligence. Understanding alone is no help if one does not apply it.
My little Christmas gift bags. Each bag contains one of my cold-process soaps, peppermint lip balm and rosemary-mint massage oil – all home-made from natural oils and scented with essential oils. These were a lot of fun to put together. I found the gauze bags for the soap at Jo-Ann Fabric’s in the bridal section. The template for the lip balm label was found online and I made my own label for the massage oil. The absolutely adorable tiny bags were from Dollar Tree.
‘Tis the Season…of holiday parties and get-togethers – a time for sharing and fellowship with family and friends. It should be a joyous time, and often is, but I have to admit that sometimes hostessing one of these events stresses me out.
Hospitality is an important duty in Christianity, especially when offered to the traveller and stranger. I think about past times in human history when a stranger’s hospitality could have meant the difference between life and death. Offering food, shelter and drink was the moral thing to do. I’m sure it was also a source of pleasure, an opportunity for sharing news, stories, and experiences and meeting new people.
So why do I find offering hospitality so daunting? My mother-in-law blamed Martha Stewart! Martha’s brand is based on the illusion that the modern woman can be all things – career woman, brilliant hostess, accomplished cook, stunning decorator and creative homemaker. It’s impossible to live up to these glossy standards. Now, realistically, I know my guests probably aren’t judging my decorating, or running their fingers across my furniture checking for dust, but I still can’t help but see all the faults in my home when I am faced with the prospect of welcoming guests into it. The combination of an old house and two furry pets certainly makes spiffing up the house a big job.
The yard is also a big stressor. We love our screened in porch and have a nice deck in the back yard. So, every time we are going to host a dinner or party, we straighten up the yard, clean off the outdoor furniture, prepare mosquito repellant torches and set up lighting, etc. so that folks can enjoy the backyard. It can take me one to two weeks to clean up the yard, depending on the time of year. Ironically, during a party we hosted last month the weather was perfect, the yard was welcoming, and yet, not a single guest stepped outside! Everyone preferred to congregate inside.
All of this leads to a tiny bit of dread when it comes time to host — but I am working on controlling this reaction and trying to be more relaxed about entertaining. I know I always enjoy having guests over and I’m always glad in the end that we did it. I also really wish we had family in the area, as I would love to have my relatives over, and I wouldn’t care in the slightest if the the floor hadn’t been swept!
I’ve been feeling unsettled lately. Things in my life have been changing and I’ve been patiently waiting for a new normal to fall into place and that just hasn’t happened yet. See, I don’t have much contracting work at the moment. My main source of work has dried up, although I still have steady work one day a week. This leaves me with the dilemma of choosing between seeking a new full-time position and abandoning my “downshift” or waiting for another contracting opportunity to present itself. For the past few weeks I’ve been taking advantage of some extra work load from my remaining client and I’ve been working 3 days a week, on site. That’s been kind of cool, actually, because I’ve gotten back in touch with the co-workers that I’d been feeling distanced from. I’ve been working for that employer for four years, so it’s almost like stepping back in time to when I worked there every day. But eventually I may just have to start interviewing again if my budget can’t handle the lost income.
In the meantime, life continues… I’ve got my fall garden planted. Broccolis, cabbages, and kale all went in as transplants. The green onions are popping up and today I saw my first sprouts from the rows of lettuces that I planted. I’ve put in beet seeds, too, and prepped two of the beds for carrots and bulb onions.
My son Tristan is in the midst of college applications. I can’t help but nag. It’s my job 😉 and he has a tendency to procrastinate, but I don’t think he’s too happy with me right now. Tomorrow is the mid-semester break for my daughter Genevieve and she’ll be coming home from college. I’m looking forward to seeing her again and having the whole family together.
Have you wanted to try making your own soaps but you were intimidated by the process? I wanted to replace our commercial bath soap with hand made soap, but I was NOT keen on heated pots of oil and caustic lye. I also didn’t want to invest in a huge amount of soap, only to find out I didn’t like it. Luckily, I located a super easy method at www.diynatural.com that uses the microwave and makes nice small batches, and I’m going to share my experience with that today.
This recipe makes nice hard cream-colored bars with a creamy moisturizing lather. It’s great as guest soaps and really nice as a bath soap. The main ingredients are olive oil, coconut oil and grapeseed oil. The olive oil makes the soap harder, the coconut oil produces a great lather and grapeseed oil is a good conditioner.
Ingredients
- 2/3 cup coconut oil
- 2/3 cup olive oil
- 2/3 cup grapeseed oil (or almond oil)
- 1/4 cup lye 100% sodium hydroxide (available from Amazon here)
- 3/4 cup distilled or purified water
Materials
- soap molds (like these from Amazon guest-size, bath-size)
- a pint mason jar (from thrift store)
- a quart mason jar (from thrift store)
- 2 cheap thermometers (the one for the quart jar needs to be long, like a candy thermometer)
- a deep-sided mixing bowl made of Stainless steel, tempered glass or enamel, only to be used for soap making (I got a heavy glass bowl from a thrift store)
- two styrene plastic or silicone spoons
- a 1/4 cup measuring cup (stainless, plastic or glass, dedicated for lye only)
- long rubber gloves
- safety goggles (like these)
- hand blender (optional, but it is really helpful here, again dedicated only for soap-making)
- a spray bottle of vinegar – for neutralizing lye if some spills
- newspaper
Really most of the cost is in the lye (~$17), goggles (~$10), hand blender (~$15) and molds ($5-10). The rest of the materials you either probably already have or can get at your grocery store or thrift store.
Directions
Note: These are the instructions and techniques given at http://www.diynatural.com/how-to-make-soap-2/ but I have modified them slightly in places, expanded them with some of my own thoughts and added all of my own images.
- Cover your work area with newspaper and put on protective gear (goggles, gloves, long sleeved shirt, making sure legs and feet are covered). Have a spoon ready. Make sure the room has good ventilation (open a window, turn on kitchen fan) and keep children and pets away.
- Measure 3/4 cup cool water into the quart mason jar. Carefully measure exactly 1/4 cup of lye granules. Pour the lye slowly into the water, stirring as you go. Stand back while you stir to avoid fumes. When the water starts to clear, insert the candy thermometer, allowing it to sit, and move on to the next step. The lye may be around 150 degrees at this point.
Notice that the liquid level in the quart jar is low. You will need a long thermometer like the candy thermometer to be take the temperature of the lye/water. - In the pint jar, add your three oils together. If the coconut oil is somewhat solid heat it in the microwave for a few seconds until it is all liquid before measuring and combining with the other oils. You should have a pint of oils. Heat the jar of oil in a microwave for about a minute, or place the jar in a pan of water to heat. I find the oil is around 140 degrees after 1 minute. Put in the thermometer.
- After about 30 minutes or so both liquids will be approaching the right temperature. I periodically stir the liquids and check the temperature, being very careful not to spill the lye. Wait for both to cool between 95 and 105 degrees. Make sure the your molds are near by and have been greased. Ready your mixing bowl (I actually measure my lye inside the bowl to minimize the chance of lye getting on the work area and I store my mixing spoons in the bowl). Make sure your stick blender is near by.
- When the lye and the oils are at the right temperature, pour the oils into the mixing bowl. Slowly add the lye, stirring until it’s all mixed. Stir by hand for a full 5 minutes. It’s very important to get as much of the lye in contact with as much of the soap as possible. After about 5 minutes, you can keep stirring or you can use an immersion blender. Be cautious with the immersion blender so that it doesn’t spatter caustic material out of the bowl. The soap mixture will lighten in color and become thick. When it looks like vanilla pudding it’s at “trace” and you’re good to go.
1) Stirring lye and oil mixture 2) Reaching trace with the stick blender 3) soap into the molds - Add herbs or essential oils at the point, if desired. Stir thoroughly to combine. Pour the mixture into mold(s) and cover with plastic wrap. Set in an old towel and wrap it up. This will keep the residual heat in and start the saponification process, by which the base ingredients become soap. NOTE: if you are using really floppy molds like me, you’ll want to set the molds onto a hard surface, such as a cookie sheet or cardboard prior to filling. For my last batch of little hand soaps I put the molds into a cardboard box before filling, skipped the plastic wrap and towel and just closed up the box overnight as insulation.
- After 24 hours, check your soap. If it’s still warm or soft, allow it to sit for another 12-24 hours. When it is cold and firm, turn it out onto parchment paper or a baking rack. Allow the soap to cure for about 4 weeks, turning it over once a week to expose all sides to air.
My little guest soaps curing on parchment paper. - When your soap is fully cured, wrap it in wax paper or keep it in an airtight container to keep it from attracting dust and moisture.
Cleaning Up
I neutralize equipment that touched the lye by spraying it with white vinegar and then rinsing it out. For the bowl, spoons and hand mixer I set them aside for a day or two so that the soap mixture can fully saponify. At that point the soap residue will not be caustic any more and I just clean the equipment throughly in hot water.
More Resources
- Full post for this soap-making technique http://www.diynatural.com/how-to-make-soap-2/
- Rhonda Hetzel’s post on Cold Process Soap
It’s Back-to-School, yay! It’s great to get that school-year rhythm back. Genevieve’s back at college, no longer a Freshman, but a wiser Sophomore. Tristan’s beginning his Senior Year of high school with all the excitement that goes with that, and Rich is back teaching this semester. Alas, my schedule has changed too, because I don’t have much contract work at the moment. On the plus side this means I have lots of time to catch up on housework/yardwork and try some of those life experiments I’ve been wanting to do.
Yesterday I tried out making beeswax cloths as replacements for Saran Wrap. I’d been preparing for this little experiment for a while. I found some cute cupcake cotton cloth at Jo-Ann Fabrics earlier this summer and it had been set aside for this purpose. The ingredients are quite simple. Basically you need some thin cotton fabric, beeswax, pine gum rosin, jojoba oil, a baking sheet and parchment paper for lining the baking sheet. I followed these directions from Mommypotamus.
I already had beeswax (purchased on Amazon) and jojoba oil (from the grocery store) for making cosmetics so I just needed to get the pine gum rosin. It was much cheaper buying from here than Amazon. I have parchment paper in the kitchen, so the last tool I needed was a pastry brush for smoothing the wax/rosin/oil mixture after it has started to melt.
So basically after mixing up a mixture of the wax, rosin and oil you melt it onto the fabric in the oven and spread it around with a brush. It’s a little bit of a sticky job, but quick. This morning after I made one of my favorite new breakfast recipes (Breakfast Pumpkin Custard) I put my first wrap to use and it performed great!
I’ll see how these perform over the longer term. They have to be hand washed in cold water, but can be re-waxed as needed. These could make fun gifts!
Time to Snap out of the Doldrums
The summer is winding down finally and I’m looking forward to back-to-school. July was a tough slog. We started out the month taking Le Grand College Tour, visiting 3 schools with Tristan. First stop was Davidson College near Charlotte, NC, where we also got to visit with my sister Holly and her family. Then we drove through the Smoky Mountains to Sewanee, TN where we visited The University of the South. Finally we drove 11 hours up to Ohio, spent a day with my dad in Geneva, OH and toured Oberlin College. It was a good trip, but it left me playing catch up with work and so my pay for July was quite a bit short. The rest of the month was ho hum, coupled with car trouble and unexpected expenses.
The thing about July in Texas is that it is miserable. The rains stopped in May and it has been pretty much unrelentingly hot and dry ever since, except for two blessedly wet days. July is the month I always wish we lived in Vermont.
I was hoping that August would be my month to finally get working on this blog, but my work situation has changed enough to affect my plans. From here on out I don’t have steady work lined up, except for one day a week. I temporarily have some hours this month, so once again the blog will probably not get much attention. At a minimum, however, I wanted to give a few updates on previous posts.
My Baby Birdies (Final Update)
The day after I posted my last update on the babies (here) they were gone! Genevieve went out to check the nest and it was empty. There wasn’t any sign of trauma and all 4 birds were gone, so I optimistically take that to mean they fledged. I did some internet research and confirmed that that seemed plausible. They were 11 days old and weren’t fully feathered out yet, but apparently they often aren’t when they fledge. They’ll spend a few days in low bushes learning how to feed themselves and then it’s out in the cruel, cruel world.
Goodbye babies! We sure loved watching you.
We left the nest intact for a couple of weeks to see if mama would lay another brood, but nothing happened so the mailbox went back to its intended use by the USPS.
“Going Car-less” Update
Following up on this post about giving up my car.
Well…I had (have) good intentions and all, but we ended up buying a 3rd car in June. Genevieve wasn’t having any luck finding a job within walking distance and her old job wanted her back. With Tristan having the minivan out at camp all week we needed another vehicle. We ended up getting a new Mazda3 which is intended to be my vehicle (for the next 12 years maybe). It is very zippy and fuel efficient. I’m loving it.
Meanwhile the minivan needed thousands of dollars of repairs and after all the repairs were done it was still given a terminal diagnosis. Apparently it can’t maintain high enough oil pressure anymore because the engine is worn. So, Tristan is trying to eek out his final week at camp with it and then we’ll see what happens. At the moment we’re not intending to replace the minivan.
Looking Forward
This week I’m heading out to Pennsylvania to visit my mom, sister Sally and hopefully sister Becky too. Tristan has 1 week left working at camp and then he starts theatre practice and college applications and his final year of high school. Genevieve will be moving back to college August 20, while my husband’s stint as interim chairman of his department ends August 15th. It will be great to have everyone back to a standard routine.
I’m preparing for Fall in the garden. I’ve pulled out all the plants so I don’t have to worry about watering for a while and I’ve gotten rid of most of the weeds. It’s siesta time for Texas gardeners. I’ll be planting the winter crops in late-September.
I’m slowly working on some transformations around the house – getting rid of more plastics and using fewer disposables. This week I replaced two plastic hand soap bottles with repurposed glass bottles (beautiful cobalt blue one here). I’m filling them with hand soap that I make myself. I also bought 3 sets of new cloth napkins from a thrift store ($5/6 napkins) so that we will always have enough napkins available to use in place of paper. And, I’m looking into making beeswax cloth wraps to replace plastic wrap See post at mommypotomus.com.
Genevieve is giggling away in the other room, so life must be good.
Part of my intention in downshifting is to take better care of what we have. That means I need to have a schedule of daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly tasks that will help organize and maintain our home life.
One of the challenges that I face by working from home is creating a daily rhythm that allows me to fulfill my responsibilities to my employers and still have time for these household tasks. For example, I expect to put in about 6 hours of work daily. I know that if I don’t get started on my paid work by 9 or 10 every morning I’m not going to be able to fulfill my work obligations. So in general my daily rhythm includes working from approximately 9:30-4:30, but there are so many additional to-do’s, appointments, and activities to fit in that I need an easy way to manage these.
Some tasks have been slipping through the cracks for quite some time. Pet meds are given late every month; the kitty litter doesn’t get changed regularly; the compost isn’t getting turned. My house plants are pathetically ill-cared for. Case in point, I recently re-potted a rubber tree plant that hadn’t been transplanted since my daughter was one (she’s 19 now)!
Each one of these failures is like a little paper-cut. It is more annoying than painful because it is a small failure and the cure is simple. I just need a way to make the tasks a natural part of life, with a very small dedication of time.
To this end, I adopted a weekly rhythm worksheet from Brooke McAlary, author of the blog Slow Your Home. Her post on creating a rhythm is available here and really inspired me. I took a printout of her worksheet, put it in a plastic sleeve, used a dry erase maker to create a weekly rhythm, and hung it on a bulletin board near my desk.
Unfortunately, I have not successfully followed it. I think the main problem is that the worksheet is “analog” and I am “digital”. I am much more likely to follow and pay attention to something that is available to me on all of my laptops and devices. In particular, I have found that on weekends I use my iphone/ipad and don’t spend much time in my home “office”. If the rhythm isn’t in front of me I forget about it.
So I did some research and decided to try out the app 2Do (2Doapp.com). I’ve just finished a trial period of 2Do on my Mac and now I need to decide if I will buy it. Overall I like it, but I am bummed that I have to buy it twice, once for Mac, once for iOS. I almost never buy apps, preferring free ones, but I think I’m making an exception in this case because it is a really great productivity tool.
There are still some things I failed to do, even using the 2Do app. The main one is weekly menu planning – maybe I am just never going to get to the point where I do this. One of my least favorite things to do is pick out meals, so picking out a week’s worth of meals at once just seems too daunting. I also added a daily task called “decluttering”. That one needs to go too. It is too vague to be helpful.
I have been much more attentive to the following things: kitty litter (Mickey says ‘Thank you’), the compost (both emptying my kitchen bin and turning the piles), vacuuming (gah! 2 fur-shedding beasts), and laundry. I’ve added monthly tasks, such as washing the dog bed and administering pet meds, and quarterly tasks such as paying my self-employment taxes.
One big task yet to put into my rhythm is writing time for this blog. I have so many ideas started – with photos taken, resources gathered, just no words “put to paper” yet. Some changes are coming in August and with them I am hoping to really devote a lot of time to this blog and getting connected to a broader community. Meanwhile I intend to continue to fine-tune my rhythm and find more time for creating!
We’re having fun watching the babies grow. They have a lot more feathers now on their heads and wings, but still kind of naked on the backside. There are usually 3 poking their heads out of the nest. I’m really hoping the 4th one is still alive and just really shy. They still don’t make any peeps or cheeps, which is probably a good thing so that predators don’t know where they are.