(he did this of his own accord)

Still, it’s been an exercise in letting go – letting go of expectations, letting go of all the cooking, letting other people be involved.

Some things are harder than others, and I have a hard time sharing my kitchen. I think because I’m Queen of the Kitchen all the time, and am so used to juggling everything myself, it’s weird to have other people helping. Usually I get around this by assigning specific dishes to other people, so that it’s more “Mom is making mashed potatoes” than “Mom is helping me prep for the green beans”, even if Mom is in the kitchen with me for both scenarios.

It’s probably a pride thing, which means I should look a little deeper at why I want to have so much control over the kitchen, but I think I’m happy with the way things are going this year. Maybe next year I will be able to hand the whole thing over to someone instead.

Regardless, I hope you have a bountiful, blessing-ful holiday, filled with friends and family (whether family you are related to by blood or family you’ve chosen to enrich your life).

Today’s intended blogging time was taken up by an (unexpected) trip to the walk-in clinic for antibiotics. Not exactly how I’d hoped to spend my morning (or the next week), but there you go.

It’s not much of a post, but it’s something, and it’s not midnight yet. Take that, NaNoThing.

I’ve loved bunnies since I was very small, when I had an enormous collection of rabbit plushies, as well as a lop-eared rabbit named Buttercup.

Buttercup was half a house-rabbit, and she was pretty awesome. One of her favorite hobbies was stealing pencils from my desk and then running next to the railing with it, going THUMPATHUMPATHUMPATHUMPA up and down the hallway.

I’ve not had another rabbit since then, mostly because I have cats and I can’t really afford another pet, but someday I’d like to get another house rabbit.

The wiggly nose and the giant ears and the big furry feets just melt my heart.

Sometime around when I was five or six years old, though, I had two encounters with owls that secured them in my heart forever. First we had a Great Horned Owl in the woods behind my house. My dad and I used to sit outside at night and listen for him/her, and s/he hung around for quite awhile before moving on.

Because I’d showed interest, dad took me to a place nearby called the Raptor Trust, a local bird-of-prey rehabilitation center. Along with all the hawks and a bald eagle, the Trust had a large number of owls, several of whom were permanent residents due to injury. The Great Grey Owl took my interest first, because he was just so HUGE.

His look of perpetual surprise didn’t hurt anything either. These guys can get to be almost three feet tall (yes, three feet), and they’re one of, if not the, largest owls on the planet. The Great Grey at the Raptor Trust wasn’t very personable, but he’d been wild until he got hit by a car, so one of his wings didn’t work. Nobody blamed him for being a little depressed.

He was my first favorite, but then we met the Barn Owl.

The little Barn Owl at the Trust had been raised in captivity, a baby who had been raised improperly and wouldn’t be able to live around humans. However, her incredible curiosity and familiarity with humans made her pretty endearing, and she’d play a little owl version of “Simon Says” with visitors.

Those two owls remained my favorite for a long time, long after I’d moved to Texas (and stopped seeing and hearing owls, but contenting myself with identifying the various hawks in the Dallas area) and grown up and was no longer able to visit or donate to the Raptor Trust.

But one of the things about living in the swamp down here is that I live very close to several large nature preserves. These areas exist to protect the coastal and bayou landscapes and hopefully slow the loss of coastal wetlands.

And here in the swamp, I heard and fell in love with a new owl.

The Barred Owl.

I haven’t ever seen one in the wild, and I’ve only heard the one here a few times, but after listening to their call, I couldn’t help but be quite fond of them.

Why?

Well, different owls have different calls. The Great Horned Owl is the one with the typical “Hoo hoohoohoo” call that people associate with owls. The Barred Owl is similar, but the way you remember the barred owl call is to say, in a hooty voice, “HOO cooks for YOU? HOO cooks for YOOOOOOooooo?” and it’s AWESOME. (Great YouTube of a Barred Owl call)

Obviously I will never keep an owl myself – they are wild critters and don’t do well in captivity unless they can’t survive in the wild. They’re also notoriously hard to train (as are most raptors), making the Harry Potter series all that much more impressive.

And yes, I do audibly squee with each Harry Potter scene that involves the Owl Post, especially the ones with LOTS of owls. OWLS! (While the three pictured are my “favorites”, I love pretty much all owls. They’re so awesome!)

So those are my two favorite animals. I have them as pictures and figurines in my house wherever possible, and I’m hard to get out of the owl house at the zoo.

What are your favorite critters?

*For extra cute, have a look at this little owl, practicing his pouncing skills.

Back when I was in college, I decided to start growing out my hair. On a long hair care board, I ran across a discussion of something called a “shampoo bar”. My hair is somewhere between wavy and curly, extremely fine, and relatively thin, so I have to be pretty careful with what I wash it with – curly hair likes lots of moisture, and regular shampoos give me the bad aquanet frizz look. Not very attractive.

After a lot of forum reading, I started looking into shampoo bars, since I figured it was worth at least experimenting. I learned that some of them are essentially just solid state shampoo – a detergent with sulfates that had the exact same effect on my hair as regular bottled shampoo. Others, however, were made with super-fatted soaps and not detergents at all.

Brief Intro to Soap:

Soap happens when you mix oil/fat/butter with lye. The chemical reaction is called saponification, and when it’s completed and the soap has cured, you’re not actually left with any lye, just soap, glycerine, and water. People can make soap with animal fats (tallow) or vegetable oils and butters.

Tallow soaps are very hard and can be harsh – my grandmother made some tallow soap and while nobody uses it to clean their skin on a regular basis, it will get engine grease off your hands or pretty much any stain out of clothing. (It also smells vaguely like sausage.) Soap for your skin is usually made with vegetable fats and is much gentler. Super-fatted soap is soap made with more oils/fats/butters than the added lye can saponify into soap, leaving delicious skin conditioning oils and butters behind in the soap.

Natural and handmade soaps also still have all the glycerine – a saponification byproduct that draws and holds moisture (humectant). Most commercial soaps remove the glycerine because they can then sell it to you in more expensive stuff, resulting in a harsher soap for you and more money for them, when you buy their glycerine lotions.

ANYWAY.

After a bit of highly unfortunate experimenting, I saw a recommendation for shampoo bars made by a lady named Ida. Ida runs an online (and in person, if you live in Ohio) shop called Chagrin Valley Soap and Craft. Most of the reviews were highly favorable about her handmade soap as well.

I bought some samples – both of her shampoo bars and of her myriad soap offerings. It didn’t take long for me to get totally hooked. While my hair only needs to be scrubbed with shampoo about once a week (otherwise I just wash it with water and light conditioner), I use her soaps every day.

My skin is weird – my face is oily and acne prone, but also very sensitive to cleansers and most face washes will leave me with horrible pizza-like patches of acne after just a few days. The rest of my body, especially my arms and legs, gets dry, bumpy itchy patches all year long, worse in winter (even here in the swamp, where we only get quasi-winter-ish weather for a few short months).

I’ve tried going Soap Free, and had about as much failure as Haemonic has had success – I wouldn’t necessarily say I stunk, but my skin was VERY UNHAPPY, even if I did drastically cut down on how often I wash the not-dirty skin (like my upper arms). Also, I do a lot of gardening. At the end of a good afternoon of work in the garden, not only are my hands and feet dirty, my legs are dirty, my hair is dirty, my ears are dirty, I probably have dirt up my nose, and depending on the wind and how sweaty I get? I probably have dirt in my bra too.

Such occasions actually require soap.

Changing over to super-fatted natural soap instead of detergent-based cleansers (or bars! many “bar soaps” at the big box store are actually detergent) got rid of all but the worst winter itchies and calmed my skin so that I only use one acne related product and a light moisturizer all year long. Which is good, because if you’re used to buying a 12 pack of Big Box Brand Antibacterial Body Soap for $3, paying for individual bars of handcrafted soap will make you a little dizzy. Being able to cut down on all the other gunk I was using helped offset the price, and I was supporting an awesome small business at the same time.

Now, I’m not going to say that only Ida makes really great handmade soaps. In fact, I know she’s one of many awesome crafters who make amazing skincare products. But if you’ve never tried a handmade, super-fatted soap before, I highly recommend you try one. And if you don’t know which one to try, maybe try a sample bar or three from Ida.

Not sure where to start? Try the Chamomile and Calendula, Cucumber Lime Yogurt, or Lemon Lavender – they’re all wonderful. If you’ve got acne prone skin, the Neem and Tea Tree is good, and extremely sensitive skin will do well with the Aloe soap and the Olive and Shea.

My favorite shampoo bars are the Carrot Milk and Honey and the Butter Bar.

I put in my first order to Ida in 2004, back before she had a checkout cart and processed all her orders just by email. These days things are more automated, and Ida has a full checkout system on her site, but the soaps are still just as awesome.

And the best part of mail ordering your soap?

Your mailbox (and your bathroom cabinet) will smell AMAZING.

To get the most use out of your handmade soaps (of ANY variety), you should store them out of direct contact with water on a tray of some kind so that they can dry. Because of the glycerine in natural soap, it tends to absorb water and “melt” more easily than detergent soaps. I also cut my soap and shampoo bars into thirds, since that gives me a good hand-sized chunk to work with and keeps the rest of the bar out of the humid shower air until I need it.

That was the trip out. Trip back will probably look similar, actually. (Usually I fire up some podcasts too, but I forgot my iPod, so I’m actually listening to this stuff ON CD’s. GASP!)

What do you listen to on long trips?

I conduct orchestras with the music on full blast.

(Nothing like a little Stravinsky to get weird looks from the car full of guys next to you at the stop light.)

I should not, however, be allowed to listen to certain pieces of music, because I get too wrapped up in them, and forget to drive.

On that list?

Respighi’s Pines of Rome
Stravinsky’s Firebird
Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue
Aaron Copland … anything.
Bruckner’s 4th Symphony
Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique (bonus points for 4th/5th movement)
Just about anything by Beethoven

Movie soundtracks are just as, if not more susceptible, especially the good stuff – Hans Zimmer, Klaus Badelt, Howard Shore, Danny Elfman, even a little John Williams.

Today the culprit was the aforementioned Respighi, whereby I missed not one but TWO turns on the way home from the grocery store – a trip I make about once a week. Apparently where most people shouldn’t be allowed to have cell-phones in cars?

I need to un-install the speakers.