My New Favorite Website

I've just discovered a fantastic website. It's called Sprig, and they bill themselves as Your Daily Green Style Guide. If you want to learn more about living a healthier, greener lifestyle, then this is the place to go. Sprig features recommendations and helpful information on green fashions, accessories, beauty products, foods, and home and houseware products. They also profile celebrities at the forefront of the green movement (we're talkin' COOL celebrities, like Leonadro di Caprio or Kate Winslett, and definitely NOT Ed Begley Jr.).

The information on Sprig is offered in concise, encapsulated lists and columns to maximize absorption and minimize surf time (perfect if you surf the 'net at work). Their "Steal This Look" column tells you how to recreate a celebrity's interior, outfit, or makeup look, all green, of course. The "How to Eco-Chic" column offers green substitutions for things we use every day, like mascara or shower products. And their "Today's Products" gives you an at-a-glance fashion, home, and beauty product every day. My favorite feature is the "Best" list, in which they recommend several green products you can't live without, such as the Best Handbags for Fall or the Best Green Shampoos and Conditioners.

You can also sign up for the free Sprig.com email newsletters. Every Monday is the Fashion Newsletter, Tuesdays is the Beauty Newsletter, and Thursdays is the Home Newsletter. You can choose which ones you want to sign up for (I signed up for all three because I love fashion, beauty, and home ideas).

It's Halloween! It's Halloween!

"It's Halloween, it's Halloween. A time for tricks, a time for treats. It's Halloween, it's Halloween."
- It's Halloween - The Shaggs

Summer is barely a memory, but Salem is already gearing up for Halloween. There's a slight chill in the air here that makes it feel like autumn will soon be on its way. This is my favorite time of year. Even though one could argue that everyday is Halloween in Salem, the countdown has begun for Halloween Proper. Shops downtown are already decorated with ghosts and witches and tons of Halloween merchandise, and soon the leaves on the trees in Salem Common will change color.

In anticipation of Halloween, I'll soon be launching my limited edition Halloween Lip Bombs (TM). Flavors include:

Nightmare on Maple Street - Maple Candy
Shut Your Pie Hole - Pumpkin Pie
Big Apple - Caramel Apple
Trick or Treat - Candy Corn

With at least one or two more flavors to follow. I know it seems too early to start the Halloween festivites in early September, but I want it to be Halloween already! Which reminds me, it's almost time to watch my "Nightmare Before Christmas" DVD.

Taking Pleasure in Simple Things

My mother found this book recently when she was packing up her house to move. It dates from 1965, and since I was born, er, shortly thereafter, I can only surmise that this was one of my very first books ever. I have no recollection of it at all, but the worn-out spine and the paint stains on the inside front cover attest to the fact that it must have been read a lot. The little girl protagonist has red hair, just like me! - which I'm sure is why whoever bought it for me bought it for me.

The little red-haired girl finds happiness in the everyday things in her life, like swinging on a tree swing or raking leaves on a crisp autumn day. Forty-three years later, she still serves to remind us to take pleasure in the simple things in life. So go ahead. Put a few drops of lavender oil in your bath water and soak for an hour. Have that little piece of chocolate. Do whatever makes you happy. But most of all, just relax.

I'm out of work right now, and with the lack of responses to the resumes I'm sending out, I'm getting a little worried. But I'm going to follow the advice on page 16 of The Happy Book and buy some tulips, my favorite flower.

The Soap Opera Continues

Still trying to make a perfect batch of soap. I've gotten the basic techniques down, but I'm still having trouble with coloring. The most important lesson I've learned is that POWDER PIGMENTS SUCK. I made this batch with a powder pigment that was brick red. I mixed it with a little vegetable glycerin and added it to the soap, and it turned out this pale raspberry color. Pretty, but not the color I was aiming for. I also noticed that powder pigment colors look very dull and matte, not vibrant like the soaps I tried to make with liquid colors. I read on one soapmaking website that they recommended gel food coloring to color melt and pour soap. So I melted this batch down and added some gel food coloring with a little glycerin. There were some dregs of color left in the beaker, so I poured it into the soap after it was in the mold and swirled it in. This is the result: an interesting splatter effect. While it looks really cool and kinda punk, I can't use it because the splatters of darker color come off onto the skin. So I've melted this batch down again and didn't add any more color to it. It's hardening right now so I'll have to see if the batch turns out all right this time. This may delay the launch of my soaps, but I won't list any soaps until I'm completely satisfied with the end result.

In the meantime, I will be introducing three new flavors of my vegan Lip Bombs next week: Vaniller Instinct (Vanilla), God Save the Queen (English Trifle), and Riot Beer (root beer).

When Good Soaps Go Bad

I've been trying to make a successful batch of soap now for about a month. The picture above illustrates all of my failed attempts. The brown soap (hazelnut cappuccino) failed because I put way too much pigment in it. Thus, brown coloring gets all over me and my tub when I use it. The yellow soap was my lesson in using too much fragrance oil (my apartment STILL smells like bananas, two weeks after I made it!). The pink soap (birthday cake) was my most successful batch to date, but the loaf mold that I bought on ebay really isn't made for melt and pour soaps, despite what the seller said. With all of these batches, the soap leaked out of the bottom of the mold. Taping the bottom and side seams didn't work to prevent leakage. I lost about half of the soap from each batch, and the remaining soap only yielded a few bars. Not to mention the bright yellow blobs of soap that ended up on my white carpet. Thank God it was just soap - it lathered up when I scrubbed it with a wet paper towel and lots of water so it didn't stain the carpet. So I've got all of these soaps to use on myself. On the plus side, I've finally gotten the ratio of color and fragrance worked out. I've now purchased a tray mold, which works better with melt and pour soap. So in the very near future I can add my first soap to my Etsy shop. Does anyone else have any soap-making horror stories?

Living in Salem

This is a section of sidewalk in Salem. The graffitti reads "Be Happy Please," which is an odd thing for a person to write in wet cement. Usually you see things like "BB Was Here" or "BB ♥ DW." I've never seen a request in wet cement before. The word "please" makes it particularly poignant, as if it is a plea and not merely a "Don't Worry Be Happy" brand of optimistic sentiment. I first saw this eight years ago on my first visit to Salem as a tourist. I was in a major funk at the time, and even though I was thoroughly enjoying my vacation, I found myself sitting at a sidewalk cafe with a cup of coffee and crying for no reason. A few minutes later I walked along this sidewalk and found this message in cement. I had a friend in college who was really into psychic phenomena, and she believed that if she saw something like a motto on a billboard, or on the side of a truck, for example, and it was relevant to her situation, she took it as a sign. I couldn't help feeling that this message in cement was a sign to me. Being that I was in what is arguably the psychic capital of America made it seem even more significant. This message is still there, eight years later. When I first saw it, I would never have imagined that someday I'd be living in Salem. But here I am. My funk is long gone now, but this graffitti in cement still serves as a message of hope every time I walk past it. The unknown person who that particular day came across wet cement and decided to write those words to the people of Salem will probably never know that his or her message reached at least one person who really needed it at the time.

And this is the statue of Samantha Stephens from "Bewitched" that graces downtown Salem. When it was first installed two years ago, it caused a lot of controversy. The local witches loved it. So much so, in fact, that when they attended TVLand's official unveiling ceremony and chanted "All Hail Queen Samantha." But many of the residents who don't care for the witch stuff that goes on in Salem didn't want the statue. I'm somewhere in the middle. I agree, it doesn't relate to Salem, but I think it's cute and it doesn't bother me that it's downtown. It'll be gone in 8 years anyway (TV Land has an agreement with the city to install it for 10 years only). But what does a cult 60's sitcom really have to do with Salem? Apart from the fact that "Bewitched" filmed three episodes here in 1970, nothing, really. But the statue is fun, and tourists are constantly taking its photo, or putting their small children on it and taking their photo.