Of Swords and Parasols

 

Then I thought I’d be clever and do “gold, frankincense and myrrh” soap but, in my infinite genius, forgot to take into account that myrrh often smells like cleaning products.  Not a bad smell, I just didn’t think it through.

 

Next and last for the soaps, snowflakes and embedded snow flakes.  like the swirls the first day, I know why the embeds didn’t turn out quite right (should have put a bit of the clear blue mixture in the mold before putting the embed in) but they still turned out good for my first try.  The scent for these is called “fresh snow” but it apparently smells different to everyone who tries it, but no one thinks it smells crisp and outdoors-y, which is what you’d think from the name.  (My take is a bag of mixed hard candy.)

 

 

The two non-soap things, though, I’m pretty much completely satisfied with.

Solid sugar scrub bars from a Brambleberry recipe that made me and my kitchen smell like homemade pecan pie (I woke up the next day to the cat sniffing my face)

 

And solid lotion bars, also from a Brambleberry recipe, but altered to be more seasonal with cinnamon cocoa fragrance and ground cinnamon.

 

 

Those made a lot more than I intended to make and I thought i was going to run out of small molds and freezer space before I ran out of the mixture for a bit.

Now to do something with all this before I try out anything else.  (I don’t know why the pictures came out wonky with some horizontal and some vertical but i got tired of fighting it.)

Berry is the best resource for supplies for both, at least in the US, probably with Candlescience as secondbest. They might just be the ones best at being affiliates for the various blogs and tutorials I’ve been reading, though the soapmakers forum I’ve been checking out seems to also hold to that.

Apparently if you give yourself a quarter inch cut along the knuckle of the thumb of your dominant hand (I lost a battle with sheet metal at work) the doctor gets REALLY serious about  not bending your thumb for at least 72 hours...

(no stitches, thankfully-just really painful glue-but then does kill my weekend packing/decluttering plans, and the next 2 weekends, I won’t be home...
 

 

By the time she worked her way around to the front, I could tell it was even shorter than I thought.  Her hands were also trembling.  Want thrills and chills?  Have open scissors being held by a trembling hand a few inches from your neck  while your feet are six inches from the ground.  Anyway at the end I went in with hair a few inches past my waist and, not by choice, ended up with hair only a couple inches past my shoulders.  As I was about to have a meltdown, and was about to have to drive,   I just left as fast as I could, hoping I could hold the meltdown in long enough to get lunch for 3 people and drive back to work.  A benefit to working for your parents is you can cry in the bathroom if needed.  My mother saw I was back and went "how did it-OOOOOOOOOOOH!" and when I dumped my purse at my desk my coworker did the same (but with a gasp instead of "OOOOOOOOOOOOOH!"  Anyway I had my cry in the bathroom and ate my lunch and was theoretically calm enough to deal with it. I called the corporate office so they could direct me wherever since, for obvious reasons, I didn't really want any contact with anyone at that particular franchise at the time.  As I got the to end the typing stopped and there was dead silence b/c the guy couldn't figure out how to reply beyond "I'm so sorry."  Anyway now I'm waiting for the local store owner to call me back.  (I have a suspicion that it was the woman who came in near the end and shot a couple confused looks our way but didn't say anything.) 

People who have known me for a long time know that this is the third time I’ve ended up with my hair cut much shorter than I wanted, but this is by far the worst.  The first was someone who was just clearly a bad stylist and not only cut it to short, but did so unevenly, and the day before a trip.  (Thankfully the friend I was staying with in Fort Worth set up and appointment for me with her stylist the next afternoon and he fixed it for free.)  The other was at the local commercial college, where at least there they’re still learning, so you know there’s a chance for error.  This was TWO TRIPS with someone else showing EXACTLY where to cut it.

My hair hasn’t been this short since I was 18, which was 20 years ago and cut that short deliberately b/c I was going to England and had just graduated high school.

My phone started blaring non-stop with warnings.  This...is not overly unusual.  We get tornado warnings a few times a year and a twister at least once a year most years, but usually the weather restricts itself  to thunderstorms and bad wind.  We do have smaller tornadoes every few years (including one that ripped half the roof off our house when I was a teenager) but usually smaller. (For context:  there have been 52 tornadoes in the county since 1950, though not all happen in towns.)   So I went out in my thin little jammies in the wind and rain to move my car closer to the house then went back to sleep because...I live in Texas and you can tell at my parent’s place when the wind reaches “things that shouldn’t be flying are flying” levels and you cannot sleep through that.  Bad weather is actually usually worse out in the country than inside so my parents and I weren't overly worried.*  Their power only went out for about half an hour  and we were talking about how I should stop by the shop to make sure no windows were broken and there wasn't any flooding inside when I came back to town.  Then the power came back and they said it was a tornado.

I came back to town and it started with the "normal" damage...flooding in some parts, leaves everywhere and tree branches and limbs on the side of the road.    As I got further into town there was more damage but still not extreme.  Then I got to work, saw everything was ok, and looked across the street to see this:

That sign has been there for ages.  About 2 blocks further down on our side of the street is this:

 

(across the street from there and not shown is a Mexican food restaurant missing a good chunk of the roof.  I have a suspicion that might be what happened to the sign across the street.)

A little bit further down the road is the local college.  The buildings looked fine but it has several fewer trees and the (many) remaining ones are a lot smaller now in some cases.  

I live several further miles down the street so you can imagine my relief when I stopped seeing bent metal and tarp-covered roofs.  My apartment complex, thankfully, escaped  damage.  I found out later that we lost power there when the storms started and it only came back on a little while before I got home.  (I did check my refrigerator when I got home and things were still cold.)

Unfortunately, they reported later that most of the damage was downtown and in the north part of town and a nearby community, largely residential.  Some people with businesses in the affected areas spent yesterday in lawn chairs in front of their businesses (or in shifts watching a neighbors’s business too) waiting for someone to come and board up the shattered storefronts.  No, really, lawn chairs and beer coolers.  For context, the 2 places combined have less than 105,000 residents.  Yesterday morning over 25k combined residents, a local school and multiple businesses had no power.  Today it’s down to somewhere  between 2500-3000 residences, plus businesses.  The elementary school that lost power was initially set up for people who had to leave their homes until the storm got it later.  The school won’t have power until late monday at the earliest and MOST places are expected to have power by late Monday, but some won’t.  Several areas of town have officially been declared disaster zones with multiple families ordered to evacuate because their homes are now uninhabitable.  People in those areas who didn’t  have to evacuate are under a police-enforced curfew because there’s so much dangerous stuff exposed and on the ground that will take weeks to clean up and they don’t want people wandering around after that.  (Human-shaped jackals are going there to look at the damage and see people try to pick pieces of their home off the street because people suck, requiring police to order bystanders to beat it in some places.)

This is our local river, which is usually half dry, and rarely even fills the banks after heavy rain:

 

This is the street right outside a nearby high school:

 

(I know this flooding is minor as compared to many other cases, but we spend the majority of most years in drought status.)

This is a 137 year old tree  at the courthouse (that my mother almost always parked under when she was a probation officer)before this weekend:

 

This is the same tree yesterday:

 

Most other pictures I’ve found are of the interiors and exteriors of houses, so I’ll spare you that.

Anyway, “Climate change isn’t real” but  at least 11 tornadoes ripped through 2 states  over a few hours and were strong enough to all but destroy urban areas BUILT SPECIFICALLY TO WITHSTAND HIGH WINDS.

*I would like to stress here that I did not sleep through a tornado.  I slept through a thunderstorm about 20 miles from a tornado.