El Gato

One of the benefits of having a house that isn't in a complete state of repair is being able to have a cat. My friend ended up with six cats and the others weren't treating this one very well and he never left the kitchen. As a result of that I've only heard this cat referred to as the kitchen kitty. He finally figured out that he is the only cat here and seems much happier. Those two things in the back are doors that need to be trimmed to deal with the carpet. It has been unusually cold lately though and I just can't bust out the circular saw in the living room any more. The other day I started throwing stuff on the floor and suddenly realized that there is some retraining that needs to be done.

Costume

Last night I found out that it is nearly impossible to take a decent picture of your self with arms out stretched. I made a bat costume for Halloween and it just isn't worth taking a picture of without the wings out. It is based on this link,

http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/UmbrellaBatCostume#comments

How can you go wrong with a name like evil mad scientist? Pretty simple to make once I realized that my sewing machine was threaded wrong. The total cost was about $18. Perhaps someone will take a picture this weekend that I can put up here.

Soap

So when I posted about making soap the other day I didn't really do it. Last night I finally found the motivation. The picture shows about a years worth of soap for me. I tried to make shampoo by adding water to the pan after pouring all the soap into molds and then heating the pan. The water never did mix with the soap though. I think one would have to do this by adding the water with the lye. It might be from going a little over board on the superfatting too though. I'll have to do some more reading though since I don't really want to ruin a whole batch when others have done the research for me. This might be the last batch though. I heard that the lye I buy is no longer available and the other ones on the market have added chemicals. A coworker bought a large amount of lye for making biodiesel so I might talk him out of some. The best thing about this round of making soap, no chemical burns! Yay!