SpiderFarmer

It’s busy, busy, busy here today. Ton of EO sample orders…all out of nowhere…very strange, but Yay! Also some custom soaps and some formulations to help a friend’s baby who has excema. (Poor little angel!)

The weekend was a blast. Met up with bookpixie, her husband and her adorable children on Saturday. We had a quick dinner and play time here, then dressed the kids up and headed off to the Rockwall Halloween Festival. There were a ton of people there, many more than expected, but the lines for the games moved pretty quick, and my son has fallen in love with bounce houses. Especially bounce houses that have slides. Slides that terminate in a giant pit filled with balls. He did that slide over and over again. Then he went on the really high bouncy slide, which surprised me, as it looked very high from the ground, but he scooted right up it and giggled all the way down.

Once the boys got to the “I’m so tired I think I’ll start crying” stage, we all headed home, where I fed everyone my latest recipe: pumpkin cheesecake. Oh. My. God. It’s so good. So very good. However, note to self…when one doubles a cheesecake recipe, it will make a lot, A LOT, of cheesecake.

So, the quest began to find someplace that had pit o’ balls for Boy’s bday next month. And nobody I’ve called has them. WTH? Apparently, they were an insurance nightmare. Kids suffocating, people putting broken glass and rumor has it, snakes, in the pits…I dunno. It all sounds a little hyper-hysterical to me. I mean, I agree that children shouldn’t play with Bag of Broken Glass ^TM, but Pit o’ Cushy Balls is too dangerous? Really?

Man, in my day, we had to throw ourselves into the swamp and avoid the alligators if we wanted to dive into something….and now foam balls are too dangerous? Sheesh. Kids today…

Today, when Boy and I were coming home, I noticed a car follow us into the neighborhood. (Because I’m a paranoid freak ever since my stalker tried to kill me.)

Anyway, I noticed this car, and its rather large, sort of scary occupants. It made every turn I made, which is really freaking strange as our neighborhood is a serious maze, and getting to my street requires either a map or a Sherpa… and then it followed me down my street. Rather than stop at the house where there were not witnesses, I kept going around the curve, and took a couple of weird turns and it was still following, so I left the neighborhood and drove into the fire station on the same block.

One of the local cops there followed me home, just to make sure nothing was wrong…but I’ve been kinda spooked ever since. I made the dog stay inside until Man got home because frankly, a 90 pound Chow is a pretty good first line of defense.

I’m probably too paranoid for my own good.

LOLCODE is an humorous esoteric programming language heavily inspired by structures found in many common programing languages, as modified to be expressed via common terms, stylings and informal spellings found in Internet memes (primarily lolcats) and the communication style found in internet slang, instant messenger chat, and cellphone text messaging (”TXT”), rather than the numerically-based l33t. The name itself comes from the expression “LOL” [laugh out loud].

Rob Conery gives us some examples:

IM IN YR HUNTIN
GOT ANIMAL, WTF?
OMG “Hedgehog”
VISIBLE “Prickly!!” GTFO
OMG “Dog”
VISIBLE “Halp!!!” GTFO HUNTIN
OMG “Maus”
VISIBLE “NOM NOM NOM” GTFO
OMGWTF
VISIBLE “Wat iz Dat?”
OIC
VISIBLE “Still Huntin!!”
IM OUTA YR HUNTIN

Gods, I love geeks. I do.

So…we carved pumpkins last weekend. Apparently, because I’m an idiot. See, pumpkins do this amazing thing…mold. Oh yes, yes they do. Mold in no uncertain terms. Mold like a 7th grade gym sock. Mold. Green, scary mold with white tendrils reaching out to capture anything near it.

So…on one hand, I have some REALLY scary pumpkins…on the other hand, it’s not at all the scary I was shooting for. *Sigh*

So today while I was running around, I stopped by Micheal’s and picked up some craft pumpkins. (On huge discount…yay me!) But, because all the Halloween stuff has mostly been replaced by Xmas stuff everywhere, there were none of those little electric carvers left. I don’t know if any of y’all have ever tried to carve a craft pumpkin, but good gods in Valhalla, it’s a nightmare. They shred, they’re really hard to cut; it makes carving regular pumpkins look easy.

So, I asked one of the incredibly knowledgeable workers if she had any ideas, and she turned me on to this tool, which is so damn cool I’ll have to find other projects to play with it.

I replicated my goblin pattern on the craft pumpkin. Real pumpkin took about 2.5 hours all told. Craft pumpkin with hot knife…about an hour, and it looks even better because I could do all the tiny detailing that I couldn’t do on the real pumpkin because of planned shrinkage. Whoo hoo!

Note to self; do not ever try to do that in the house again. The fumes…well, lets just say that a more than about 5 minutes with those fumes and I might have started having flashbacks. Yeesh. Thank goodness Man left an extension cord outside, so I sat on the porch and fumed my neighborhood instead. Also, the warnings not to grab the metal parts while the knife is hot…they’re so not kidding. I think I’ve lost fingerprints on my index finger and thumb. I suppose it’s probably too late in life to take up safe cracking though, so…that’s kinda sad. Heh.

So, now I’ve got two craft pumpkins done; the goblin and a witch stirring a cauldron with a ghost coming out. I’ve got one left, and I’m going to let Boy decide what it should be. And we’ve got one real pumpkin, but it’s the right size for a jack o’ lantern, so I think I’ll help Boy carve that one himself a little closer to Halloween.

Thus, Halloween is saved, thanks to hot knife, a friendly sales clerk, and the miracle of orange styrofoam.

This week, I’m mostly working on product development. I’m trying to perfect a liquid soap that is both natural and pretty…harder than one might think. Hence the reason all commercial liquid “soaps” aren’t really soaps, they’re detergent based on sodium laurel sulfates. As to getting a transparent liquid…there I’ve had no luck at all. But still, the research continues.

I’ve been spending a lot of time working on a Body Caviar, which I’ll probably have to rename, to keep people from trying to eat it. The original formula is an anhydrous formulation with DC® 5562 Carbinol Fluid, but I’ve been trying to find a natural oil that I can use instead. Primarily to match the rest of the product line, although, carbinol is a great product for bath and skin applications. It’s a functional silicone fluid (Bis-Hydroxyethoxypropyl Dimethicone) that’s unique due to its polar organic substituents. The silicone and organic combination does really neat things on the skin, and it makes an outstanding suspension aid for pigments, salts, and sunscreens.

The “beads” that I’m using are spherical particles of trimethylated silica (Silica Silylate) that provide a vehicle for the absorption and delivery of lipophilic materials . I’m really happy with the performance of these small (1000 μm) ones. I use a larger bead with a much stronger shell for non body applications, such as certain aromatherapy modalities, but these smaller beads are performing very well in initial tests.

And I was just reminded by a phone call that I need to work on some formulations for a friend’s baby. Bless her heart, the poor little thing is just itchy all the time, so I’m working on some evening primrose oil based solutions that I hope will bring her some comfort. I’m going to finish up the carbinol experiments for the day, and get to work on excema solutions.

(You know, if I’m going to play Mad Scientist, I really need one of those machines that goes zzzzzzzpth!, and an Igor. Ooooh, and a basement with a platform that raises to the sky, so during lightning storms I can stand on it and curse the elements. Mwhahahahahaha! Erm. Sorry. I think perhaps the fumes in here are stronger than expected…)