poisonous fudge

Made that green tea soap tonight. I should have taken pictures but I didn't feel like it. I liked watching how it changed color. The tea was a normal looking greenish/yellow I guess, then as I poured in the lye it gradually got more and more brown and weak coffee looking. As I stirred in the fats and kept stirring it started looking more and more dark, until it was finally a sort of brownish/black. After trace when I put it into the molds it was looking more like a dark chocolate fudge, it looks nummy. Also, when I first mixed the lye and tea the stench was horrible and I started coughing. But that passed, I had read that was normal. I really should start wearing gloves to do this. As usual I have specks all over my arms where I splattered myself. Nothing major, just irritation and itching. In fact I haven't been done a half hour and it's already gone. I used that new hand crank mixer (egg beater I suppose it's called) and it worked great. The grip started hurting my hands after a while and I kept switching hands. It took a little longer than the electric mixer but faster than a whisk. The grip was the only problem, and that's another reason I might start wearing gloves to do this, whenever I use this mixer. I guess I was also used to making oatmeal batches because I had cut the recipe to 16oz and I ended up with only enough for seven bars. Oops. Oatmeal adds a lot of bulk I guess. So next time I'll make 20oz. If you assume each bar is roughly 2oz in the 16oz batch and each bar is slightly smaller than I would have preferred... then 20oz would mean each bar would be 2.5oz, which is about right I guess. Of course I will keep one bar for myself. And if it works great I'll make another batch. But of course I won't be able to tell for some weeks, roughly a month in fact. In the meantime I'll make a batch of something else. But I'm done for now and it's well past bedtime.

There was nothing so very remarkable about work. Bonnie might be irritated with me but I'll act all confused and go, "Well how did THAT happen?" Coke delivered to the wrong store so I did a store transfer of the product and, well, basically Coke billed us for 1,200 and then we billed 168 for 1,400. And I honestly don't know how that happened. It shouldn't have. There's not really any reason for it to. Perhaps I should have done it by eaches instead of cases. But I didn't want to try that and have to void one of them. Besides I was rushing to get on a conference call I was 15 minutes late to. ...and Bret told me to transfer them anyway, so worse comes to worse I can tell her that I did it in cases cause that's how I always do it (which is true) and that Bret authorized the transfer. She probably won't get too mad, though.

We had tuna casserole for dinner yesterday and some of that ice cream. And Victor gave me my present yesterday too, a mortar and pestle. :) This makes me happy. After we've moved and I start collecting herbs it will be very useful. And for soaping too. Victor likes to tease me for having owned a black cat and said that "every witch needs one of these". lol You know, I really, really enjoy making soap and bath products. I can't wait to make more bath fizzies just because of how incredibly fun and relaxing it is. I don't quite understand how the chemicals work with each other on a scientific level, and while that information would be very interesting to know, for now it's enough to know that this mixed with this equals that.

Which brings me to my next thought: Strange as it is I would almost prefer using an abacus to a calculator because then I can SEE how we get to the answer. With a calculator it just tells you, with the other thing you can see how you get there and that helps you understand it better, which helps you learn how to do math better. You can count how many there are, find different combinations, and why is spell check marking "combinations" as wrong? It's right. huh. Well I am very sleepy and am going to go to bed now.
Edit: I would only use it for a learning tool, not in everyday life, I think.