Costume pictures will come later, sometime, really, they will

Cats:

*sigh* Always knocking us offline!

Isn't he so cute?

Awww!

Awwww!!

Soap Making:

I use this lye. I buy it at Ace Hardware for about 5 dollars a container.

I used about 5 or 6oz water.

About 2.34oz lye. Remember, the snow goes on the lake! If you pour the water onto the lye it goes kaboom.

8oz shortening, 5oz peanut oil, 3oz olive oil for 16oz fats. Oops, I had meant to go for 18oz total. I hope this doesn't mess anything up too bad. All recipes between 16-20oz seem to call for a little over 2oz lye and about 5oz water, so it'll be ok. I was going to do more olive oil but I ran out. You melt the fats.

I get both fats and lye around 100 degrees. Lye will quickly heat up to about 250-300 degrees within moments of hitting the water. To re-heat simply stir. The fats you'll want to heat up only briefly, especially olive oil, cause olive oil boils really fast. Then you combine. Here I am about to stir. I use a regular electric mixer with only one beater attached, because I mix in my glass pyrex off-brand and it's not wide enough for two and I don't have a stick blender. I have hand-stirred, but it takes forever.

Here I've been stirring for about 8 or 10 minutes. The mixer is on in this picture.

And here it is after about 15-20. I do it in 15-20 minute bursts resting about 10 minutes inbetween. Mainly because the vibration of my mixer starts irritating my hands and making them jumpy. In this picture the mixer is on.

You stir for as long as it takes to make it look like this. This is trace. This means you're done. Here the mixer is off. Before this stage if you take the beater and dip it into the soap and then hold it above the soap it will drip off the beater and hit the mixture leaving no trace. Thus, you can easily tell when trace is cause it, well, leaves a trace... Here I swirled the beater through the soap for the picture.

I took a half cup of oatmeal and put it into a plastic bag and used a rolling pin to grind it. I then sprinkled cinnamon and about a tablespoon of brown sugar into the soap. I got the idea to add a smidgen of imitation vanilla flavor. Here I have just begun to mix.

And here is the soap in my molds. In three days I can pop them out, shave off the rough spots, and set them up to dry. I got these molds off amazon: RECTANGLE/CIRCLE BAR Miscellaneous Candy Mold Chocolate There are several other kinds of molds you can get, but I chose these because it gave me four bars per mold. They're plastic, but the soap pops out without a whole lot of hassle. I wouldn't mind one of those square wooden box molds except I can't seem to cut soap right. I used to use an old bread pan and then just cut it into bars but I can't seem to cut without destroying. btw, they look yummy, don't they? I just want to eat them, lol.

Work:

The remodel is coming along. They took down the aisle with the chips on one side and the cookies/crackers on the other and split it into three sections. They squished nutrition together and stuck the snack aisle over there. And they took down the greeting cards, squished the magazines together and stuck the cards over there. Now we've got ziplocs and garbage backs where the cards used to be. All the dishes and cookware is on 18 where the baking stuff was and where some still is. I think it's stupid to play more to the outlier departments to try to draw more rich and upscale customers. That's what Rosaurs is for. They're the ones with the fantastic bakery and excellent meat dept. For example, we kept about 1/4 of our tea set. I got a whole milk crate of teas we marked down that were discontinued for our store, all of them marked to 50-70 cents. Nice. But I hear dairy is expanding. Wall Deli is moving down and butter and yogurt (!!!) is moving over and will be front fill. Great. As if I don't already have problems with no one rotating the yogurt. I hate front fill. It means taking a wheeler and trying to work around the customers. People asking you stuff. Getting in your way. It'll take twice as long to fill yogurt than it already does! Plus that gives me at least five doors to fill with... something. Nine or ten doors if we really do move yogurt. Which means they'll have to give us more hours. I'll need to either have someone else checking and offloading trucks or they'll just have to give me a third person even if it's only for four hours. And no more of this one person working 10:30-7:00 anymore, I will NEED at the very least two full 8 hour shifts a day. So glad I'm getting out of there. Dustin can have dairy, I don't want it.

I had a woman ask me to look in the back for more of our local eggs because she wanted a later date. The date on the shelf was November 29th. Our local eggs always come with the longest date. My Smith's brand right now has a date of the 17th at worst and 20th at best. Anyway. I went in back to look at what I already knew, that that was the only date I had.

Woman, "But I just bought some here the other day that were dated November 29th."

Me, "...yeah...?"

Woman, "That's kinda strange isn't it?"

Me, "No, that's about average for them."

Woman, "But I just bought some the other day with the same date."

Me, "Ok. They might deliver at other stores more often than ours so our date doesn't change as often as some other stores might."

Woman, "But I got them here."

Me, "Yeah. They only deliver here every other week."

Woman, "You don't understand what I'm saying. I bought them here. A few days ago. With the same date."

Me, "They only deliver every other week, and their next delivery date is later this week."

Woman, "Oh, ok."

She then picked one up and left. I'm not understanding her? What part of "every other week" didn't she get? Clearly this means a few days ago if the date was the same then you know, maybe she just got unlucky timing. And I'm being generous when I say every other week, sometimes we go two weeks without a delivery. Oh, and btw, if you're using up a dozen eggs within a few days of having bought them I doubt you need them to expire a month from now. They'd be ok for you to use if they expired in a week.

And then I had this conversation, which was fun. I always get a laugh out of this situation:

Woman, "Where's the lite kroger sour cream?"

Me, "We don't carry lite. We have low fat and fat free, though."

Woman, "But you used to carry a lite."

Me, "We have never carried a lite kroger sour cream. Maybe it's daisy brand? They have a lite."

Woman, "No, it was kroger. Well, what do you have that's similar?"

Me, "Low fat or fat free."

Woman, "Where's the low fat?"

Me, "The blue one. ...Next to the red ones?"

Woman, "Oh I see it, they changed the label. That's what threw me off."

Me, "Yeah, they did do that. About a year and a half or two years ago."

Shop here much? Like people who insist they just bought yogurt that was discontinued a year or more ago. I once had a woman insist she had been in "last week" and bought yogurt we hadn't carried in about three or four years. Which that one was yoplait so she might have got it at another store and forgot where she got it. But kroger brand is pretty specific to our store.

I had a guy tell me he was thankful that we carry the fruit on the bottom peach kroger yogurt now because he was having to make the 10 minute drive to the next town over to shop at the Smith's there in order to get his yogurt. Wow. Glad I'm not that obsessed with one particular kind. If we didn't carry fruit on the bottom I'd buy blended. There's no end-run difference. It's either premixed or you take a spoon and do it yourself. Maybe it tastes "fresher" or something, I dunno, I've eaten both blended and fruit on the bottom and the only difference I tasted was that sometimes I didn't do a good job of stirring and got a mouthful of plain yogurt in one bite and a mouthful of fruit in the next.