[Gossamer's Scrapbook] The Ethereal Canyon I

[Accolade]

I believe it was Evalin

[Evalin]

Waaa? No no I saw Accolade say it first, and since Evil Witches are awesome I quickly agreed ^.^

[Banickle]

Well done, Goss, well done.

[Jaadis Sitai]

Really nice, Jen. I think Haeli is definitely going to like it.

[Gossamer]

. Apologies! I was absent yesterday. So the help desk is way behind. My pm's are unanswered. No one's gotten a post from me lately either. But I haven't died. I promise you this. I'll be back into the swing of things very soon. I got the one thing done today I've needed to get done all week and haven't had a chance - pming the featured character for next month. I'm excited about this interview too because its someone well deserving of the honor. I'm just really glad there's 31 days in August! So here's a blanket apology to everyone who's waiting on a response or taking the time to wonder where Goss is and why their PM/Ticket/Post/Grade hasn't been done. Yesterday was my 8th Wedding Anniversary. This year for the first time in ages both Gillar and I took it off. We also took both our birthdays off and any holiday that has any significance at all to us in our family. Then, we ran off to play newlyweds all day in a super human effort and crammed a whole lot of things into one short day. Along with the celebration, I squeezed in time to get my car to the mechanic (who isn't open the one day off a week I am), hugged and kissed and lavished love on my mother who has cancer and is scared out of her mind by it (she just found out this week which is doubly rough after loosing my dad several years ago to cancer in a ten day period of time from diagnosis to death), and then spending incredible amounts of wonderful time with my husband of 8 years who I couldn't live without. It was fantastic. I'm glad I took the time to take all the days off this year I have even if its just a singular block of a lone day in the middle of the otherwise busy week. I've been worried about my car too. It had a leaking tranny (no issues, just needed serviced and a new seal), a new thermostat (mine blew out last winter and I haven't managed to get it until now), and an oil change. The mechanic also found out what was wrong with my windshield wiper motor and fixed that free of charge - a kink in the hose anyone? I got the big truck in too and its oil changed.. so its all good to go for another three thousand miles. I'm not ready to talk about my mom yet. She's living alone. We had a fight about her health, house, and medical. And she's scared. I think she'll be fine. I honestly do. It's early, she was smart and talked to the doctor about it, and all we can do is hope and wait and see what's going on. No point in getting all upset right? Scary stuff... but I can't let it knock me on my ass. She's not going to let it knock her on her ass. Like she always tells me, we can't change life, we just have to enjoy it while its around. I'm glad I took those days off. My boss had to hostle for me last night. There was no one else. That was pretty interesting, I'm sure. But I'm glad I was not there. Anyhow, I'll get caught up later. HD by friday, PM's by the end of today. I hope I gave the FC winner enough time. If not, the post will be late.. my fault not theirs. And sorry for the rambling.. I'm hellishly hung over (and don't drink often) and feeling utterly scattered. .

[Alea Davenport]

Sounds like a fun party

I'm sure no one blames you for taking your anniversary off (and all those other days too!). You work too hard around here as it is; you deserve a vacation once in a while!

[Gossamer]

. Life and Other Things Isn't it funny how it gets in the way of Mizahar? I've started to post dozens of scraps and haven't finished them in the last few months. Namely, there's been a lot going on in my life and I haven't been sorting it out well or coping easily like I normally do. I think the main thing is that there has been a lot all at once after what I can only dub a period of really calm collected ease. There was smooth sailing, no bad winds, and then BOOM... a lot of shit happened at once. And like anything else in life, we can cope with this or that if they come through slowly, but when they come through in a shitstorm, its all you can do to take cover. My mom had her second biopsy on Wednesday and that didn't go well. You see, she had a liver spot on her face the size of a dime and has had one for years. Then, suddenly, it started to grow out of control. Soon it was the size of a large thumbprint, then the size of a plum, then apple sized.. and then the center turned black, it started bleeding, and all the usual stuff that points to nothing good. Well, she went to the doctor several times and he said 'oh, its your age... we'll just watch it'. She's 73. Finally after about the third visit he referred her to a dermatologist and he took a biopsy and told her it was cancer. Then she got a referral to a doctor way outside of town, down in Portland at Sunnyside and she had to go see him... meanwhile another month passed, it got bigger and bigger, and he did a biopsy. They need to operate immediately now. And now that its so huge, its like half her face, perhaps under and around her eye, part of her nose skin and subq tissue, all coming out. It's a major surgery for someone that age. She's going to be in the hospital for days. She's going to need lots of recovery. And all because a doc didn't want to do anything but 'watch it' and 'we'll see'. Screw You Kaiser Permanente. Seriously. Don't the elderly deserve better care? So that's been going on. Then, I had shit to deal with at work. We are so short on drivers, the current crop we have are behaving badly because they are overworked and underpaid, and they are acting out and being children. Week before last one blew his top in a very dramatic way, and I walked away from him and reported him, rather than stay, take the abuse, and attempt to help him while hes being a baby. He reported me as 'ignoring' him when he was broke down and unable to leave the yard with his load. Which guess what? I can. He's not my priority. The inside folks I run things for are. Well, the guy was screaming at the top of his head, throwing heavy equipment, and when a dispatcher who is in an authoritative position got on the phone with me and heard him screaming, she told me to get the hell away from him and stay away from him because he was batshit crazy and might kill someone. I was glad to comply. I'm the authority in my yard at night, but this guy was having none of it. So we had two writeups, and a dispatcher's writeup about this jackass... and guess what? We had to have a driver retention meeting because he claimed I lied and the dispatcher lied and we were having 'bad days' and he caught us at a bad time because we were FEMALE AND DIDNT UNDERSTAND DUDES. Unfortunately none of this was on a camera, but I have such a sexist workplace its ridiculous. We had to have a big meeting about it. The guys take? Women don't understand when men are talking like 'manly men' and get upset. The boys in the office agreed that both us ladies were probably over exaggerating. Why? Because it was so far fetched this story I reported that it coudln't possibly be true. Yet, it was. We normally have twenty drivers. We're down to six. He threatened to quit. What did I get? Not even an apology, just a 'good job jen, keep doing what your doing... hopefully this won't happen again.' Next time it happens I'm grabbing my smart phone, hitting record, and letting him blow. Why? Because hes so out of control its not even funny and he won't stop even if he knows I'm videoing him. Then I'm getting an apology for whatever time I'm videoing, and this last time, and all the other times before he's done it and everyone has witnessed it but no one has said anything. Yup. This guy has a track record of blowing his top and yet our testimony wasn't good enough for any sort of 'proof' to discipline this guy. So... that's going on. Plus I'm working like crazy... six days a week up to ten hours or longer sometimes.. and my schedule has changed. I don't go in at 2pm anymore, but rather at 430pm then I stay until one. That's nice. It gives me way more time in the afternoon to do stuff. Like, for instance, put up this huge basket of apples I have to put up. I mean that's a ton of apples, and a lot of work, but I'm going to do it. But maybe not today, because I'm still tired from yesterday where I did a ton of stuff and put up about 5 gallons of tomatoes in soup form which I have to tell you was amazingly delicious. Well this scrap was supposed to be about soap. But I think I'll save it until the next one and break it off here. So... that was extra time at work, extra meetings, extra BS that shouldn't have happened. And that's why I've been strangely absent. I'll be around more this week, and a lot on Wednesday since I took the entire day off to have some Jentime. .

[Gossamer]

. Soap Making and Perfume Yes, I played hookie on Saturday and did nothing at all Mizaharish but instead went crafty! So I don't know if you guys have ever had the opportunity to make your own soaps, but it is a whole lot of fun. And, honestly, its not as hard as you might think. First off, there are not a whole lot of ingredients in soap. You can make an awesome soap with just two or three ingredients in fact. The important thing to note is that you need to get your lye to fat ratio correct for the soap to firm up and set nicely. And thankfully we have the internet. So you can find tons of soapmaking calculators on the net and use just about any of them to get as complicated or as easy as you want in terms of the science. So here's the way of it. First you decide what oil you want to use. Lots of oils can be used, just about any of them in fact. But if you want a good quality soap, you need to make sure you are using a good quality oil. Some people use salvaged bacon fat, some people make soap from oil they throw out of their fryers regularly. And that oil you used to deep fry your crazy turkey at thanksgiving? Save it. You can make soap out of it. You just have to know what kind it is (Canola, peanut, vegetable) to know how much lye you need to add. Basically, all soap is made from is oil and lye and then with fragrance added. So I ran to a friends house on Saturday and spent the whole day taking pictures and making a record of our soup making endeavors. Here we go. First off, you assemble your ingredients. In this case we were making soap from Olive Oil (via Coscos) and Lye. Lye is very caustic so have some vinegar on the counter when you are making soap to splash onto anything and any body parts that might get lye on it. Where do you get the lye? Household drain cleaner that's 100% Lye in the hardware section of the store. You know, right next to the liquid plumber. So the things you see on the kitchen island there are a crappy mixer got at a garage sale for 3 bucks that can mix and mix and mix soap all day and if it dies, no one cries. Then you have a very accurate kitchen scale, Olive Oil, Lye in the drain cleaner form, and a big keg of coconut oil (it comes kinda hardened and has to be microwaved). There are some sample bars of soap sitting out on the counter two from the last batches. From left to right they are 100% coconut oil soap, half and half with olive oil soap, and 100% olive oil soap.. no colorings added, and each are scented. These are just half of a mold, not cut into bars yet. Oh and here's the drain cleaner I was talking about. So basically we made two batches. Each batch makes about twelve bars. You measure out your olive oil (these batches were 80% OO and 20% Coconut Oil), add in your lye, and let the mixer mix them for 45 minutes to an hour until the ingredients combine and the whole thing traces. Tracing is where you dip a spoon in, lift some out, and drizzle it across the surface and it stays in the drizzle for a little while before it melts back into the mixture. Cake mixes trace when they are ready too. Here we are measuring out more olive oil in beakers. So, once you get the olive oil mixed, you're going to need to add your lye. You need to liquify lye in order to get it into the soap and working. To do that you add the powder to the water. The lye calculators will help you decide how much lye you need (mixed with water) to add to whatever volume of oils and fats you have. So take the advice of the calculator and then take whatever that ounce amount of lye is and add it to a an almost two to one ratio of water... it will give you mL's or weight (I always use weight not volume) when doing complex science (which this is not). So anyhow, like I've said, Lye is caustic as hell, so you should have gloves, a face shield, etc on when working with this stuff. We didn't because we are adults and had someone there with vinegar to set anything to right that could have gone wrong. Remember, when doing exothermic reactions, always add the dry to the liquid, never add the liquid to the dry.. it can go badly. So we took the water outside, and added the lye to it and stirred rapidly. Lye stinks when put in water and the fumes can gag the whole room... so do it outside.. and stir until things calm down. What do I mean? That beaker got smoking hot, boiling hot, instantly and we had to wait until it cooled and the fumes were gone before we carried it inside. Here we are outside mixing lye with water. Whew its hot and stinky! So then what do you do? You have your pre-measured and weighed olive oil and coconut oil out in the blender bowls and you start them whirling. Then you slowly and gradually add the lye in. Then you go do something fun for like 45 minutes to an hour. Meanwhile the mixers in the kitchen where whirling away and not doing anything much. So what did we do? We decided to make fragrances. This is my friend and mentor Elwin making up fragrances and my other friend Kat hanging out being excited by sniffing said fragrances. Laugh, but its a lot of fun making custom scents. I got my own made up for me too and I love love loved it. So Elwin wanted to make a christmasish earthy type scent which she knew would be right up my alley. I'm big into the christmas flavors as we say.. citrus, cinnamon, evergreens, holly, etc. I love that stuff like a squirrel loves nuts. So in perfumes you have a base note, a middle note, and a high note. The base note to my scent was citrus, with a middle note of cinnamon, and a high note that stretches out as balsam which smells a heck of a lot like a forest just after its rained. This combination was divine. I wish I could post up a piece of blotter cloth so you guys can scratch and sniff, but that's not possible under current technology. Just know that we made scents... that's all thats important. Elwin perfecting her blend. Then Kat, who was also there making soap, wanted to make a custom blend for her soap, so Elwin asked her a few questions and then started mixing as well. Kat had lavender, patchouli, yang yang, Stridex (which is amber base), lavender, and some rose. It was a very earthy hippy smelling thing with a lot of happy notes which was perfect for Kat, who is crazy about rollerderby (and skates on a local team) and does all things simply in her life. So.. after we had fun smelling all the scents, putting combos together, and deciding what our soap would smell like, we made four ounces each of our chosen soap scent. Then, by this time an hour and passed, the soap was tracing, so we dumped the four ounce vials into each soap respectively and then let it spin for another ten minutes to get the scent well and blended. Then, we poured out the soap into molds and will let them set about a week, check on them, and then go from there. Those tins are the tins you'd find at a restaurant salad bar. They are stainless steel, and perfect for soap molds because when the soap shrinks enough to be released its ready to be unmolded. The final product of soap poured into molds. I'll take some pics in a week when we unmold and slice them into bars. I'll take pictures when we unmold them next weekend. I hope you liked seeing this. It was about an 8.5 on the Jen's Scale of Fun, especially since the guy in the photo - Tom, Elwin's Husband - is a lot like Bill Nye the Science Guy or Cisco if you know gardening and are out in Seattle. He is absolutely just as enthusiastic and fun to be around as those two celebrities and we had such an incredible time. .

[Wrenmae]

Mizahar says it's your birthday and thus.


HAPPY BIRTHDAY GOSSAMER!


Thanks for making Miz the awesome and fun place it is.

[Eida]

Happy Birthday Goss!!^^