I can see, like, seriously, six sets of fireworks going off right now. (That's not including the neighbors two streets down letting off bottle rockets in their backyard.)
Happy Fourth, everyone!
I made soap today - from scratch! oil and lye and all!
At least, so far it appears to be soap. It has to sit for a couple of days to finish the saponification process, and I won't know till then for sure that it's worked, that it's actually transformed into soap and not curdled into a puddle of caustic goo. And then it'll have to cure for a few weeks before it can be used. But it has been getting nice and hot (which it's supposed to be doing) and the center has turned to gel (which is also what's it's supposed to be doing), so it looks to be on the right path.
The thing with soap is that you mix your lye and water, and then you mix that with your oils, and then you have to stir and stir and stir and stir and stir and stir and stir. These days, most people use stick blenders to facilitate the stir and stir and stir and stir and stir and stir and stir bit, but we ditched our stick blender when we moved, so I had to mix by hand. Which, frankly, didn't work very well - you have to stir till the mixture reaches what's called trace, which is when it starts to thicken/solidify, and you can tell you've reached trace when you drizzle some of the material from your spoon and you can see its shape sitting on the surface for a moment. After stirring for an hour, this got a bit old, so I googled around and found out that you can mix small batches in a blender, so that's what I did, and voila!, it reached trace and became a lovely thick cream-colored goo.
Despite the hour of stirring with little result, I found this immensely satisfying. I think it appealed to the same part of me that loves baking: both processes require precision and following recipes, and both suggest that if you do so things will turn out successfully, something I persist in wanting to believe, even though I know there's no way to control the universe. Sometimes the angel cake falls flat as a hockey puck, and sometimes the soap is going to seize into a lumpy coagulated mess. But at least with a recipe you know where you're trying to go and what you're supposed to do to get there - I think the reason I'm a better baker than a cook is that when presented with a set of ingredients, I want to follow a clear path to my goal, rather than meander off and see what happens along the way.
The glory of chemistry, of course, is that in both baking and soap making there are a gazillion different possible recipes, and moreover, the nice thing about soap making is that the resulting product doesn't make you fat, so now I'm utterly intrigued and am plotting more batches.
Although not until after NLLDH and I spend tomorrow making and eating cupcakes, which is our plan for Christmas. Have a happy holiday, those of you who celebrate it, and enjoy your day off, those who don't!
My toes, that is.
I actually did a ton of crap on my to-do list today: called Romrast (who actually sounded honestly apologetic about their failure to do anything about our problem and promised it would be resolved by the end of the day, which of course, it's not), called the apartment management company about various stuff, called the university HR about various stuff, called to register for skating lessons (yay, I'm going to take skating lessons! holy crap, I'm going to take skating lessons!), picked up a desk copy (so I can write my syllabus), got my university ID card, and got a parking permit (doesn't that all sound boring, run together in the longest sentence ever?). More importantly, I finished one of the interminable books I'm supposed to review, and drafted most of the review.
Yay! Accomplishment!
Which deserves a reward, of course, so I stopped in a little salon I walk by every day, where a cute plump girl with ponytails, tattoos, and a pink-and-gray camoflauge hat polished my toes a nice shiny shade of dark red.
If I continue rewarding myself along these lines, by the time I actually finish my book, I will look really really good. And the beauty professionals of (no longer LD)H City will be really, really happy.
Sadly, those aren't my toes, nor were there rose petals in my foot bath, but that is about the right color polish.
