windinthemaples

* I had an exhausting dream last night that George the Cat, a very skittish fellow, was actually George the Horse, a very skittish fellow, whom I had to load into a trailer. It was tight quarters, inside a house filled with furniture, and he was anxious. We circled the trailer over and over again, sometimes he got all worked up and reared, kicked, shoving and trampling me into furniture. He wasn't trying to hurt me but his nerves and fear of the trailer were getting the better of him. Pretty cute seeing a seal-point horse, though. :) I'm feeling unrested.

* I made some super pink and girly cotton candy bubble bath and pink sugar scrub last night. Both were a little disappointing. The texture of the scrub was perfect and it looked gorgeous, but the delicate cotton candy scent, no matter how heavy handed I was, couldn't mask some of the yeck clay-y scents of the oils and other unscented components. It smelled, as sort of an afternote, like all those natural unscented soap products Daniel's father insists upon. It worked awesome, in testing, but wasn't as candy!bath of an experience as I'd been angling for. The bubble bath, too, was a disappointment. There the fragrance worked out better, had less to compete with, but it didn't get as big and bubbly as I like bubble bath to be. It was more of a hyper-moisturizing foam. I'm out of bubble bath ingredients. It's just as well, I wasn't happy with the product. The scrub, which I have ingredients for a second batch, was pink and scarlet and silver and outrageously sparkly. I love it. I just need to figure out a new fragrance strategy. I don't want to abandon the candy!bath vibe I'm going for. Maybe a smidge of amber in the background would mask the ingredients' natural scent? For sure, I'll need something broader, fuller, more complex than that thin, thin cotton candy one-note. If I'd gone a different route, in terms of aesthetics, I'd have a broader range but pink rock candy looks limit the logical accompanying fragrances. I'm having fun, though. I'd packed all my soap and bath-product supplies two years ago, when we put our house for sale, so it'd been a long, long time since I could do any fun mad-scientist soapy projects. :)

* On radshaun's recommendation, I finally read Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games yesterday. Holy shit. I can see why he's compelled to buy copy after copy to hand out to people. It is a great weighty book. It has a lot of the underlying "our society is going to hell in a handbasket" themes as, say, Wall-E. Entertaining and disturbing. Genius, really.

* The grocery store here is selling used books to raise money for a variety of charities. I picked up a YA Arthurian twist, Lisa Ann Sandell's Song of the Sparrow on sight for $3. I'm only a few pages in but I'm horrified to see that the editors shrunk the margins of the page to use only the middle third for text, making the prose read like stilted poetry. 383 pages of this:

I hurry back to our tent,
eager for news from my brothers.
I pace the small room, the walls,
the thick folds of my
roughly woven dress
imprisoning me,
keeping me from the
affairs of men.

It may become the best book on earth for all I care but I will still resent everyone involved, and the inanimate book itself, for the pretentious, awkward, absurd format.

* After a week of working 8am-midnight, Daniel took off early yesterday, meeting me at the grocery store around five to walk home with my purchases. I tested my new bath stuff with a hot soak while he ran Graeme around outside for an hour and a half. We had avocados and cornbread and potato chips in a snack-dinner and watched back episodes of Survivor, House, and Top Chef. It was a very nice evening. :)

* Graeme's been talking up a storm after two years of almost no words. On the airplane, coming back from Florida, I buckled him into his seat and he said, "1,2,3....GO!". Ha! At the grocery store last night, he had fun driving the cart by telling me to go and then to stop. It took a lot longer to get down the aisles this way, but he was having such mischievous fun with it. I'd poise, stopped, waiting for the word "go". He'd slowly say "1..2...3...go!". Sometimes, to mess with me, he'd start grinning after three "four...five...six...seven...go!" I never knew how high he'd count (sometimes up to stuff like seventeen, which really got him laughing.) before the sudden go nor how long I'd get to go before he'd say, "Stop!". It was a laugh-riot. :D (And to my baby-hating readers, don't you worry, there was nobody around to be irritated by my cart start-and-stopping antics.)

He's also experimenting with sentences. Things like:

"Baby up!" (When he wants me to pick him up.)
"Baby go! Mama go! Baby and mama go!" (When I'm carrying him out somewhere.)
"More peas!"

It is simplistic, but fascinating to watch develop. Yesterday he was talking about his "Unka Woo", asking something that I couldn't decipher. He named his Uncle Shaun "Unka Hooray!" so I'm not sure if "Unka woo!" is another expression of that same name or someone different. He uses "mama" for all women and "baby" for all children, but "unka" is only used for his uncles. It was cute, though, him playing with toys and wanting to talk to me about someone who, whoever it was, wasn't there. Pretty cool. He's also starting to be interested in imaginative play, pretending that the remote control is a microphone or driving little trucks around with excited "Vroom! Truck go!" sorts of talking to himself. It opens up whole new worlds. :)