Homemade Soap

Joe's been experimenting with homemade soap for awhile now. His enthusiasm has sucked me in and I assist him most of the time. With ongoing experimentation, each batch gets better and better. He has tried many different oils and fats, molds, liquids and lye sources. The last few batches have resulted in better suds and scent. Most likely the change has been due to finding a better lye source. It has created quite an excitement in our house!

The most recent batches include a green bar with a scent of eucalyptus and exfoliate. Then Joe made a pink and white swirl bar that is unscented. Since he made it close the Christmas, we named it "candy cane". The latest large batch is a layered bar; the first layer is orange with white speckles and is apple scented, the other layer is white and unscented. It looks like cake so of course we call it "apple cake".

As a birthday present last year, my Mom and Dad gave Joe some soap making supplies. Among them was cocoa butter. We made a small batch combining the cocoa butter with peanut oil. Our hope is that it is soft, moisturizing and smells slightly of chocolate. It is still curing so we have to wait and see.

Joe refinishes the table

Thanks to some good friends we obtained a very nice, very large dining room table and six matching chairs for free (thanks Danny and Kate!). It is a solid wood German table that has some water stains and loose legs. Refinishing our table has been at the top of Joe's list of projects for some time now. With our move into a house with a two car garage, he has a great place to work on all these things in his man-cave. So far he has the table top and sides sanded clean of varnish. He just removed the legs and will be working on those next. Joe wants to stain the table a dark color and top it with a shine polyurethane finish. He hasn't picked out a stain yet; we will be visiting the hardware store soon for that.

Dylan helps us meet the neighbors

Early (3am early) this morning Dylan decided to talk a step outside while the dogs were out in the backyard and I was busy cleaning up after a sick Simon. It was dark and I didn't notice her leave the kitchen. When the dogs came back in I shut the door and went back to bed. I heard a cat crying for a while but thought it was She-ra in the basement. When Joe got up at 7am and let the dogs out he saw them chase something in the yard but since it was still dark out, he didn't see what. It wasn't until I got Dylan and the dog's breakfast ready that we noticed she was missing. She never misses a meal! We grabbed our shoes and dim flashlight to look for our little kitty outside. We combed the neighborhood, stooped in the mud to check culverts, walked through thorns along the field behind our house and yes, meet a few of our new neighbors. Several hours later we didn't know where else to look. It was light now and I was walking up and down our street realizing that I may never see our little kitty again when I decided to recheck our front yard. While it was still dark I had peeked my head under our low front deck. This time I pushed aside the bushes and called her name...her small meow answered me. I bent over and there she was looking out at me from under the deck! We were both so relieved to have found each other! She purred and rubbed her head into my hand; I coaxed her out, picked her up and took her into the house. She was so hungry that she ate all of her breakfast at once. The rest of the day she followed me around the house and I couldn't resist picking her up for extra hugs. From now on she will wear her collar and I.D. tags.