Oatmeal, Clove, Milk, and Nutmeg Soap

I made soap on April 15th. It is made with coconut oil, shortening, olive oil, soybean oil, peanut oil, distilled water, lye, oatmeal, clove eo, milk powder, and nutmeg. The nutmeg was a last minute, spontaneous addition. Still not sure what drove me to do it but it felt like a good idea. I put them in my pipes (my molds) and then in the middle of the night I realized I did not line my molds. I waited 2 1/2 days and then tried to push them out. Even Victor couldn't get them out. So I looked up what to do. I tried freezing them for a few hours but it did nothing! I waited and pushed every so often. Finally today, 9 days later, I took a long, thin knife and ran it around the edges. Yes this means I lost more soap than I'd have liked but it saved me from having to rebatch. (from what I can tell rebatching is a total pain) And some of the individual bars got marred from the knife and had to be trimmed smaller than others. It's not a real loss anyway since I'll just dump my trimmings into my dish water. Cause this soap seems to be really, really good quality. When I washed my soap making stuff it made my dish water last so much longer than usual. As far as I can tell it does good on skin cause after I was done trimming it I washed my hands and they feel all soft right now.

First, please excuse the state of my floor it is mud season and kind of pointless to sweep and mop till after the cats are in for the night. Second, this is from the first pipe and the only one that's been trimmed is on the bottom right by the red knife.

This is all 16 soaps from both pipes. They are all trimmed up and ready to cure! To make the math simple on myself I prefer to wait a month before letting any of them be used. Even though I handle my soap bare handed (not recommended, btw, do as I say and not as a I do; wear gloves!) I'd like to be safe and not let any of them be actually used till they've cured a while. They're still soft right now too, anyway.

Review: Wolf's Lady

So I spent today and yesterday reading Wolf's Lady by Mary Butler. This is definitely one case where one must not judge the book by it's cover. At first I found it refreshing that it wasn't a typical romance (so far as the ones I've read go) and that there was much more story and plot than romance. But as the book wore on I got tired of it. Just get on with it already! I wanted to see some action or at least someone thinking about the topic. The cover promised it. The plot description on the back indicated that our lead female wanted nothing more than action. But yet she doesn't think anything of the sort. In fact we never see anything of interest in that regards. A few kisses finally happen in the last 50 pages or so and it's indicated more happens (after they run off for a quickie wedding), but it's all very business-like without any passion and apparently over the next few days/weeks their relationship becomes very old and they act like they've been married for years.

Other than a lack of passion if you can stand people looking at you askance (or with interest) for the steamy cover picture (false advertising!) it's not bad. If you go into it expecting a PG romance (or pg-13 for some parts) you won't be disappointed. It has a good plot, and is very interesting. But it's hardly a romance by first category.

The main spoiler is very obvious though, or maybe that's just me, and I had suspicions early on that were confirmed at the ball. I was wrong about one aspect but otherwise I was right.

I actually don't have a spoiler-full review. I've said all I think is necessary to be said.

Review: Tears of the Moon

I finished reading another book today. Tears of the Moon by Di Morrissey. First off I'd like to say that it was a long book at 652 pages. But it was a good read. It captured me. But not at first. The first 76 pages were dull and boring. Some of this is because I found that it takes place in Australia! My knowledge of Australia stops at Crocodile Dundee, LOTR/SW, and "wtf, mate?". So I had to go and look it up on Wikipedia. Pretty interesting. Anyway, there's a lot of bad things about this book, and I wonder why they have a label on the front "by international bestselling author" cause I doubt she's a bestseller. The writing is mediocre at best, and will probably be most likely to entertain older women. Which is another reason I nearly put the book down; because it's targeted to older women.

It starts off very, very slow and boring and dull and makes you want to put the book down. But if you can make it past the first 76 pages it's very entertaining till about page 564. Then it starts getting boring again. So I guess you could say the first 80 pages and the last 80 pages are pretty bad compared to the in-between stuff. But some authors just have trouble with beginnings and endings. And I understand that, I understand having a story you want to tell but not having any idea how to end or start it so you throw garbage at the pages till something sticks. Still, it's not really garbage, I guess that was a bit harsh. But the first 70 pages seriously took me like 5 hours to struggle through which is insanely slow. And I had to actually force myself to finish the book.

Oh, and the prologue? Pointless. Don't take it to have any meaning to anything that happens in the story, other than a "Hey look how dangerous pearling was" shove it in your face kinda thing cause I guess the author felt the rest of the book didn't get that through well enough.

Basically the story is about an older woman (in her 40s) who's mom has died and she finds hints to the past she never knew about and heads off to find her ancestors or something. She's apparently rich too, as she thinks nothing of just hopping on a plane spur of the moment, staying in the fanciest hotel in town, eating at restaurants, and renting cars. But, dunno, maybe money is different down there. Anyway, blah blah random stuff happens and she winds up with a few journals her great grandma wrote and the book moves on to the story in the journals. The journal portion takes up the vast majority of the book, lasting from page 77 to page 636. (which is why I wonder why the tagline reads "two unforgettable women" cause there's only one woman who matters in the story...) It is not written in journal format. It is written as though someone later took the journals and turned them into a book using details gained later on in the journal to supply sides of the story that are not seen by the journal writer's perspective. There's even some stuff that neither the journal writer or the story writer could have possibly known. (like the identity of one of the pilots towards the end) So that's one bad point for the book before I even get on to making my list of bad points! So she reads the journal and then angsts over her past a bit and understands why her mom never told her anything. And that's about all I can say without spoilers.

Spoilers behind the cut!

Books

We went into town yesterday for the semi-annual used book sale. A lot of what we got were kid books. Which is an especially good price cause kid books are thin and you're charged 1.50/inch.

Victor got....

• Fear by L. Ron Hubbard. Dunno what it's about but apparently some guy fights a dragon or snake or something, I see it on the cover.
• Complete and Unabridged Kurt Vonnegut collection. He writes humor, that's about all I know.
• Robotech: Battle Cry. Cause he's a fan.
• Love and Marriage by Bill Cosby, cause he likes Cosby books.

 I got...

• I got The Rope Dancer by Roberta Gellis cause it was slim pickings on the Romance table and this was about the only thing that seemed interesting. I dunno, a dancer and a bard. We'll see.
• Sanctuary by Faye Kellerman, I dunno, I picked up a few weird mystery books even though I don't really like them as much. Some weird craving or whim. This one's about jewelry people being killed and the answer being in the detective's back yard. It intrigued me.
• Fatal Burn by Lisa Jackson. Serial killer who's hunting down this one girl for vengeance for something she doesn't remember? *shrug*
• Gone by Jonathan Kellerman. Murders and investigations. Like I said, a lack of a lot of plain "fiction" books sent me to the overflowing loooong table's worth of mysteries and a whim made me get a few.

So, now we come to the kid books. There's a bunch but that's cause there were a ton of kid books there this time and a lot of good ones. We have been picking up a few kid books now and again if we happen to be skimming and see something we wanted. But this time we actually took a deeper look. And here's what we got...

• Living History's "Classical Rome". It has a bunch of pictures of people dressed up in roman gear and doing stuff with props and everyone looks photoshopped onto their backgrounds. But it looks fun.
•  Some Disney books I had as a kid. I might already have one of them but oh, well. Didn't wanna pass it up. I got Alphabet A-Z, it's Volume 1. I got Animals and their Babies, and it's Volume 5. I got Mickey's Birthday Surprise, which is also Volume 1, but on the Young Reader's group.
• A few The World Heritage books. They have better pictures than that Rome book up there but are thinner. They seem pretty good. There's the Mayan Civilization, Inca Civilization, Ancient Greece, and The Roman Empire.
• The Ancient Egyptians. Cause I realized all my Egypt books are archeological and more adult-themed books. This one is child-based with simple words and explanations. It's for even younger audiences than the Heritage books, or at least that's the feel I get at first glance.
• Robin Hood and the Great Coach Robbery. It's a Disney book, apparently Victor had it as a kid.
• Digging up Dinosaurs. It's a Reading Rainbow book! I loved that show!
• "I Can't Wait Until Christmas". It's a Big Bird little-golden-books book. I actually can't remember if I had this as a kid or not but I had others like it.
• Disney's "Ready For Bed, Pooh?" It's a short, little kid's book about Winnie the Pooh. Like really short and on those hard cardboard pages they make toddler books out of.
• Coroline. Like the movie. Victor picked it up. It was a pretty good movie.
• Tales of Ancient Egypt. It's as much for me as it is for the kids! It has a lot of the god stories and myths/legends in it.
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. We have the adult version but the kid version is, of course, a must-have! It's by Ryder Windham. They (cause really, ryder is not gender-specific that I know of) have written kiddie Star Wars books too so I know it'll be good.
• Amelia Bedelia Goes Camping. I liked the Amelia Bedelia books as a kid.
• 101 Wacky Kid Jokes. Cause I loved joke books as a kid.
• 101 Silly Monster Jokes. Same reason.

Review: Haunted

There were a handful of books sitting loose on the edges of the bookshelves so I put them away. All but one which caught my attention. Haunted, by James Herbert. I managed to read the whole thing in, like, 6-7 hours today and yesterday. So it was a really fast read. I'm still not sure if I actually liked it or not, though. The writing style was a little weird to get used to at first but once I adapted it was quick reading. It's a sort of present tense kind of writing, and very descriptive. The spoiler at the end was easily seen and I figured it out within the first 100 pages, to some extent. There was one side of it I didn't figure out but otherwise I got it right. The ending was a little too open. There should have been more closure, like an afterward. I mean, there was an afterward but it was miniscule and didn't show what I wanted to see. I wanted to see more of how the main characters move on.

Would I recommend it? Not sure. Maybe with the warning that the main spoiler is easily seen and that the ending isn't great.The biggest thing preventing me from giving this book a higher rating is the ending. It's too open. There needs to be an additional chapter, an afterward, like something that might happen a month later describing how everyone's doing, what they're up to. As is it leaves you to come to your own conclusions and ideals. If you don't mind that, yes, definitely look for it at the library. Otherwise only read if you can overlook that. I enjoyed it enough that I'm glad I read it.