Okay, something else I'm learning about making fire cider.  Garlic-and-onion all over one's hands in the evening mellows to the scent of stale farts by morning.  I couldn't figure out why there was this perpetual fart smell in the bed and was all ready to start giving hubby a hard time, until I realized the smell was my yesterday's-garlic-and-onion hands.

Sometimes I, like so many others, wonder if garlic's powerful immune power comes from the fact that no one wants to come near you when you've been handling it.  I love the stuff as much as the next person, fresh and in cooking, but day-old...yuck.

So this morning I get to research my eo's some more to figure out what will do best for getting rid of the odor. My current fave (lavender, clary, lemon) comes to mind, since lemon is a great anti-anything and clary is good for removing odors--plus I already have some made.  But I won't just start there...I love doing research on the internet, so this gives me a reason to crawl around the web a bit more.:-)

Why do my shoulders hurt so much this morning?

peace,
Jem

Today I finally made more lotion; everything I had made so far kind of had that "okay, the oil isn't awful yet but it's starting to turn" odor under the pretty eo scents...

This time I went pretty far off-book, to the point where I'm not sure it qualifies even faintly as Rosemary Gladstar's recipe, although I have no doubt that hers is probably way better. I'm just thrilled that I found a way to make lotion that doesn't take 3 times as long to clean up as it does to actually make.  So, here's what I did:
( Read more for the full recipe... )

Okay, I've dealt with the flea thing before, last time much worse and with two dogs.

This time it's only one dog, small and short-haired with almost no hair on his underside, whom I snuggle and pet on a multi-daily basis.  So last night is the first time I find any of the little black crumbly flea sign on him, and I find exactly and only one flea on him, hanging out by his ear. (The bad news is, a kid jostles my elbow before I can nail the bouncy little sucker, so there is no documented demise on the lone sighted flea.)  If there were more, they'd be easy to spot on him, and if there's been flea sign yesterday, I'd've seen it then too. So I'm hoping this is a case of One Flea (or a couple of them) found before it went through a reproduction cycle, as opposed to a full-fledged infestation.  That's not to say there aren't now flea EGGS all over everything in my house, though.

Made up a bottle of anti-bugginess spray, out of "skeeter beater" oil blend (from www.naturesgift.com --after years of searching all over the place, Marge is my absolute bar none favorite vendor of essential oils and aromatherapy products in general.  Her site is an aromatherapy class itself, and she's unbelievably generous with her time in helping people figure out what they need.  Her oils are slightly more expensive than some other places--I admit that sometimes I'll get my more run-of-the-mill oils and stuff from www.mountainroseherbs.com --another site with unfailingly good products, at slightly lower prices--but Marge's stuff just seems to have that extra edge of excellence on it, and her oil blends are amazing.  Plus she doesn't just sell some general oils, she talks about this year's plants vs. last year's plants, and how the oil from this country differs from the oil from 300 miles away in a different altitude, and stuff like that...)

...but I digress.  Okay, skin spray, skeeter beater blend (lemon tea tree, atlas cedarwood, and a couple more good things), and neem oil dissolved in a little everclear. (I need to get more distilled water; I'm out.)  Tossed the dog into the tub, scrubbed all of him (starting with making the soapy barrier around his neck so the little shits wouldn't run for high ground as soon as he hit water), sprayed him with the spray, washed all our bedding, threw his favorite couch pillows into the big freezer, and will today finish vacuuming the entire house.  Probably least aggressive flea treatment I've ever tried, but it may be sufficient this go-round.  If it's not...well, we'll know soon enough. 

I hate fleas.

peace,
Jem
p.s. and in the meantime, the fence guys are here putting up our lovely cedar fence...I can't believe 3 guys can do this in just a day, but they say they can, so...

I have stinky armpits. I never used to, but since the hormonal stirs of childbirth things have changed, and now for the first time in my life there are some B.O. issues.  

I also don't like to use aluminum antiperspirants--the whole "well, maybe we shouldn't be smearing non-native metals onto freshly shaved skin that's really close to breasts and lymph nodes in this age of appallingly high cancer rates" thing sounds just a little sensible to me.  (So does the "isn't there a better way to detect cancer than giving yourself an annual dose of radiation?" question, but that's another post.)

So I've spent the past few years trying to find a stinkypit solution.  The "crystal" deodorant works pretty well, actually, although it's alum rather than aluminum, and I try not to use it right after shaving.  But it's good stuff, either in stone or spray form.  Then I experimented with some of the other deodorants--they either didn't work well enough for me or gave me a rash (whatever zinc product is in some of them doesn't agree with my skin.) Tom's of Maine Calendula has been my best bet.

So the other day when I made my last batch of diaper goo (too soft, for some reason) and lotion (absolute pure yumminess and perfection), I put aside some to try my own batch of deodorant solid, using a 2 oz used (okay, trashed) container. It is AMAZING--by the end of a 12 hour workday, I couldn't smell a trace of yuck--and even the next morning, the pits of the shirt I wore that whole day smell absolutely fine. So here's my recipe, if anyone is weird enough to want to try it:-)--

1 oz solid "oils"--half beezwax, half shea butter, cocoa butter, coconut oil, or what-have-you. (All beezwax would probably work too. Don't use coconut in warm climates or it'll melt.)
1 oz liquid oil--I used grapeseed
40 drops lavender eo
30 drops clary sage eo
10 drops lemon eo (note: it's widely believed that using citrus in body prep is not a good idea and can sensitize your skin.  Most reputable aromatherapists would say this is a no-no.  I use it anyway, in small amounts, and it hasn't given me trouble, but you are warned:-)

Melted the solid in the liquid, stirred the eo's into the warm liquid, poured it into the deodorant container, and refrigerated it till it was solid. GOOD stuff!
--J

I don't know exactly what's wrong with me...I'm at that place again where the eight-armed war-goddess inside me is beating the crap out of my insides trying to get out and find her place in the world.  Or perhaps she's already torn holes in me to get out and, once there, discovers the world she was battling for isn't quite what she had in mind, and she's not sure how to reshape it.

Someone I care about had a really awful experience with this drug, which is I think why I'm so freaked about SSRI's in general.  Which is odd, because probably 70% of the people I know and care about are on them in some way, and swear their lives are better for it...and I believe them, I really do.

Just feeling like I should explain my vehement suspicion of the things, after my last entry...