Archive for the ‘home made soap’ Category

I Should Come with a Warning Sign – and Read it!

Friday, October 26th, 2007

I’ve never been accused of being graceful. In fact, I’m rather known for being clumsy. I try to be careful, but it just doesn’t seem to help all the time.

Tonight I was in the kitchen, excited to cut the soap I made two days ago and haven’t had time to take out of the molds yet. This is some Orange Cranberry soap that smells out of this world – and I made it extra moisturizing, which explains why it was so difficult to get out of the wooden mold I use. It will definitely harden up as it cures over the next few weeks, but right now it is still very soft – and it was sticking something fierce to the wooden mold. The mold comes completely apart – each side and piece of it is individually fitted together and held with bolts. Well, I removed all the bolts, but the sides were still all stuck to the mold. I pulled and tugged to no avail. Finally, I grasped one end with one hand and held it to the counter, and with the other hand I pulled like crazy on the top. And it came loose. With a bang. And as my hand snatched it upward, I managed a glancing blow to my right eyebrow with the edge of it.

I saw stars. I recollect that I calmly said “Oh my gosh.” Bernie recollects that I screamed “Sh*t!!!!!! At any rate, Bernie came walking in the kitchen and saw me grasping my eyebrow in pain. “Are you ok?” He looked pretty concerned. I was so stunned I could not reply. I removed my hand and grabbed a paper towel. He said “Wow. You got it good. Man! It’s already swollen. And now you’re bleeding!” I still couldn’t really speak, but I managed to mutter “hurts”. And then my loving, caring husband said “Thank goodness you don’t leave here much. People would think I hit you or something. You better plan to stay home a while.”

I managed to stumble to the bathroom and look at the damage I inflicted upon myself. I did a pretty good job. I’m fairly certain I’m going to end up with a black eye. I popped two ibuprofen, opened a beer, and went back in and finished up cutting the soap. It smells GREAT! And I look like crap. Lucky for Bernie I’m a recluse, I guess.

It’s gotten chilly here with all this rain and we started lighting the fire in the fireplace each day. The kittens are fascinated with it. We had a fire place in town, but since we got the kittens, we’ve owned the homestead and spent weekends here – so we never lit a fire in town and they’ve never seen one. I’m not sure what they think of it yet. They seem to like staring at it and that keeps them too busy to tear up the house for a few minutes, so I’m pleased with thier fascination.

It’s Friday and it’s pizza night at the homestead. There’s no delivery out here, so I make a nice pizza on Friday nights. Then Bernie and I drink a couple beers, eat our pizza on TV trays, and watch a movie from our DVD collection that we’ve seen three thousand times before. We are party animals on the homestead for sure.

Bee Free,
Penny

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Sunday, October 21st, 2007

Well, this has been a weekend full of just about everything. To make a long story short….

I got a lot of good stuff accomplished. I made two nice batches of cold processed soap – an Orange Cranberry Holiday soap and a Honey Oatmeal soap. Both turned out really nice and full of moisturizing oils. I also made lip balm and filled over 100 tubes. And I started a batch of prison wine.

The bad and the ugly stuff all happened today. We went down to winterize our bee hives and found that two of them had died within the past month. When I say “died”, I mean deader than a door nail. We were so shocked and disappointed. There were fine last month when we robbed honey and fine two months ago when the Dept. of Ag. guy came out to inspect them. I wrote all about it on The Bee Buzz if you are interested in reading about it. We are now down to three hives – half of what we started with this year. I could just cry.

So, in a nutshell, that was our weekend. I suppose we always have to take the good with the bad. Being out here on our homestead makes even the worse day a little more tolerable. We have so much to be thankful for that it’s really hard to throw a pity party when little things go wrong.

On the upside, while we were working in the apiary we had a couple neighbor ladies from down the road stop by. They were both very friendly and we stood and talked to them quite a while. They told us of a man down the road that also raises bees, and they’re going to hook us up with him. One of them owns the chicken farm across the street with her husband and she said they’ll certainly work out something with us so we can get chicken poop for fertilizer! The other one said her husband rides a motorcycle and they’d love to ride with us sometime.

There’s always a silver lining – even when you have to peel back a few layers to find it!

Bee Free,
Penny