A Little Funny & a Little Soap

I need a little funny in my life. Okay, okay: I need A LOT of funny in my life right now. So I checked out, on a friend's suggestion, this very humourous blog http://www.theartofdoingstuff.com/stuff/kitchen

Besides funny, I also want some soap that won't give me itching skin-cancerous stenchy-ness, so I have decided to make my own. Unfortunately Karen can't help me out (well, she probably could if I gave her enough time but with this fast-paced "I want it NOW society" attitude of mine means the solution isn't already available on her site). So, soap and making my own...

But an aside: why the mention of "stenchy-ness", you ask? Yes, not a better word for it than that with a sweet nasal "ch" in the middle of its utter grotesque odour of a word...here's something from this past Valentine's Day to explain the smelly soap issue...

On Valentine’s Day night a state of panic ensued at our home. Nothing amiss in romanceland…no thorn-in-the-eye paramedic emergency or anything. No…this anxious chaos arose from a smell. From somewhere in the depths of our tiny bathroom, an odour…and not a dead-animal-in-the-wall or backing-up-sewer stink. Nope, this was the reek of toxic, burning plastic.

Let me first backtrack to a couple of days earlier when a toaster oven button had gone haywire, stayed on when no one was home, and melted our steak knives, handily childproofed in an old hand-me-down margarine tub above, right into the container itself. A unique piece of art, and, when combined with this newfound stench, a possible sign that God was going to burn down our house and it was just a matter of time as to when?

Could it be the new-fangled LED lights that seemed to have black patched on their toxic curls? A quick internet search determined a great likelikood for explosive stinks (oh, wonderful…mercury spewing everywhere!). A late night call to my overly handy father, just home from dancing the night away with mom, went something like this: “Do the walls around the outlets feel warm? Can you isolate the smell? It’s near the light fixture? You took the light bulbs out? The switch is turned off?” Me on all fours, precariously perched on the vanity in pitch black, sniffing the empty light sockets and wondering when I was going to have to make the 9-1-1 call. Endless private detective work seemed to narrow the problem to the light fixture – or so my nose was determining. We cranked open the window, revved up a small fan, and set about ridding the room of the noxious aroma.

The stench was still present the next morning. As we busied ourselves getting shrieking half-naked children ready for church my husband saddled up behind me, said “close your eyes”, and shoved the most rotten of smells under my nose. “Is this the smell?” Stepping back, I opened my eyes, watering from the very nearness of toxic burning plastic odour, to find a tangerine-coloured bar of soap. Carbolic soap. Recently purchased at the amazing Chicory Common in Durham because I wanted something that wasn’t only biodegradable but was eco-friendly and without nasty sulphates (and hey, being sold without packaging, it saves some landfill space as well). Soap! SOAP!?! All that fuss over soap? And to think that some claim it sweetly reminds them of childhood, their grandmother’s antiseptic cleaning agent, of hospital cleanliness…How it evokes anything but the deepest of gag reflexes is beyond me, but after a few days of hiding the all natural glob in a many-times-used Ziploc bag the smell mostly diffused. So don’t be surprised, when you’re initiating (here’s my plug:) body- and earth-friendly products from The Soap Works (a local, Ontario company) into your bathroom, to be entertaining a few days of “memories of Grandma” (or, in my case, toxic burning plastic)…

So, making my own soap - where to start?