Soap July '08

I've started making soap with organic ingredients again. I recently made some with palm oil that hasn't been bleached. So now I have peppermint soap that is orange :) it looks very interesting, I'll post pictures soon.

This week I'll make some household cleaning soap to grind up into laundry powder and also a powdered cleaner (like comet or ajax). I like this stuff, it's much more natural than the storebought stuff for cleaning, and with a little bit of elbow grease it works very well! As a laundry powder, it works well in my front-loading machine. I use vinegar in place of fabric softener and everything comes out nicely.

We're getting ready to spend a week at the beach in North Carolina. I'll post pictures when we get back... sooner if I have a connection there. My daughter will turn 15 while we are there... when did that happen? 15... my baby!!!!

The kids had a wonderful time visiting with my sister for 10 days... they got to see my father and his fiancee, and my aunt and uncle. My daughter got to go to her first Anime Convention while she was there. She said it was a lot of fun and can't wait to go to the next one in August.

We're watching my nephew's cat. Very sweet fluffy little guy, but he wants to be the top male in the house and my boys aren't having any part of it... and my little female says she's the boss... he ended up with a nice little scratch on his nose that got infected but it's healed up nicely. He gets his own space now. I am having to sit with him while reading email because he is alone all day. This seems to be settling him down. When my nephew gets a new apartment, he'll be getting his cat back. Rufus will be happy when that happens. But for now, this works. Like I said, he's a very sweet cat... I just wish he wouldn't pounce on my boys!

Our van is in the shop AGAIN. Something made the battery drain and it wouldn't start yesterday. So Darrin is working on it and we'll see if he can determine why we need to keep replacing batteries in that thing. It's 12 years old with about 150,000 miles on it. We've had it on the Autobahn quite a bit... so it's been well used. I just need it to survive two teenagers learning to drive and then we can let it sleep :) keep your fingers crossed for us! :) I think in the fall we'll be getting two Honda Fits (hybrids maybe?) in trade for our Accord. The Accord is a nice car, but we don't need that much power in traffic. And the Fits would get better gas mileage!

While we are at the beach, we're going to do some melt and pour soaping with the kids and put shells they find in there... and some candles too. Buddy candles is what my SIL called them. you use tuna cans and some cardboard rolled up but let loose to be the wicking. pour wax in there and burn. I have Citronella oil, so we're going to try to make our own mosquito repellent candles. I'll let you know how that works!