2013!

In 2013 I'll

- move.
- publish two books.
- travel more.
- hopefully sell a house.
- finish reading Agatha Christie.
- hopefully get a bit of my old self back.

I'm also prepared to

- be broke as hell.
- work long nights.
- travel on a shoestring.
- rent the house.
- be too tired to read.
- stay miserable and tired, lack energy and motivation, and drown in self pity.

I'll let you know in a year's time.

Home-made soap

Inspired by my best friend, spurred by my financial situation, encouraged by the experimentalist inside me ... I decided to make some soap. Not only to use it but also because bars of natural home-made soap make a perfect Christmas present for all the women in my family. Although men would probably need it more :-)

I was quite busy while mixing the ingredients so I don't have any photos of the process. Which turns to be very simple. This is the recipe I used:

450 g olive oil
50 g coconut oil
63 g NaOH
95 g deionised water
four leaves of aloe vera

0. Prepare aloe vera. Just take the leaves and squeeze out the gel. It should look something like this:

1. Carefully dissolve NaOH in water. If you're have any idea about chemistry, you know how to do it. If you don't, google for safety instructions! Basically I took care that the kids were asleep, wore gloves, and put smaller amounts of NaOH into water under constant mixing. The reaction is so exotermic that the water can start to boil if too much sodium hydroxide is added at a time. Go slow, mix and let the solution cool to about 40 deg C. I mixed it in a plastic jar with a Teflon spoon.

2. Heat olive and coconut oil in a (stainless steel) pot to about 40 deg C.

3. Add the NaOH solution to the oils and mix. And mix. And mix. And mix... I used a hand blender and took care that the blender did not overheat (repeatedly switching it on/off) and of course took care that the mixture did not splash around. Mix until the famous "trace" appears: when you lift a spoon, the liquid leaves a trace on the surface. You'll know it once you see it, trust me. It took me about half an hour.

4. Add aloe vera. Now, maybe it was just me, maybe it was just the plant but as soon as I added that gel, the mixture thickened and changed colour from olive green to yellow.

5. Pour into a mould, cover it with blankets and let it dry for 24 hours.

6. Take the soap out, cut it into pieces and let it dry in a dry place for three to four weeks. Now - the friend of mine who was making it without aloe vera said that at this stage the soap is still soft, spongy and that indeed it took it a couple of weeks to harden. Well, mine was hard after the first 24 hours. I still let it dry for four weeks, just to be sure. After I cut it I also impressed the letter M :-)

7. After a month, I checked the pH of the soap. A test with pH indicator shows that pH was between 9 and 10, which is just perfect. The commercial soaps I had at home had exactly the same values.

8. And of course a present isn't a real present unless it is neatly wrapped.

Christmas cards

Now that the cards are already on their way I can finally publish this year's creations. Each year, I just have to make something new and so far I've been running out of Christmases, not of ideas :-)

So this year, the recipients are involved in card making! I started with decorated green and white paper and cut in a ... well ... certain shape.

You see where this is going, right?

To make things easier, I pre-folded the paper.

Some cards were white and some were dark green.

All the recipient had to do was to fold it again and glue the back sides together...

... and they have a special 3D Christmas-tree card. Merry Christmas!


Other ideas for Christmas cards.

At home

If you have the impression that I only read Agatha Christie's books, well, you're wrong.

It was brilliant reading At home by Bill Bryson just as I was watching Downton Abbey... it almost felt as the book was written to accompany the series!

Otherwise it's a typical Bryson book: lots of interesting stuff if you find it interesting. Not everything is 100% correct but that doesn't even matter because it is entertaining. Although in principle the book is about our homes and things that go on in specific parts of the house, you know how Bryson's mind works... From Crystal Palace to probability distributions in just a few pages. I learned that Norwegians renamed a lake to export more ice, that Black Adder's episode "Ink and Incapability" is based on a true story, that only aspidistra was immune to ill effects of the gas, who Jethro Tull and Palladio really were, what a ha-ha is etc.

In a book with almost 500 pages, of course plenty of interesting quotes can be found, here are a few:
- "... that's really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things."
- "We have no idea - or actually, we have lots of ideas, but we don't know if any of them are right."
- "Households had servants the way modern people have appliances."
- "... items of clothing made of different types of fabric - of velvet and lace, say - often had to be carefully taken apart, washed separately, then sewn back together again."
- "The invention of the light bulb was a wondrous thing but of not much practical use when no one had a socket to plug it into."
- "Columbus's real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions."
 -"... university courses in the history of marketing really ought to begin with British opium sales ..."
- "The Eiffel Tower wasn't just the largest thing that anyone had ever proposed to build, it was the largest completely useless thing."
- "... If you wash lousy clothing at low temperatures, all you get is cleaner lice."
- "... that among these new people [Cro-Magnons] was some ingenious soul who came up with one of the greatest, most underrated inventions in history: string."

And since we're talking about home, here's a quick update on our future home :-)