Well, that was harrowing.
It's winter in New England already, which means the start of power outage season. Oh, who am I kidding? That's year round.
If it rains, the power goes out. If it snows, the power goes out. If it's windy, the power goes out. If it's the nicest day you've ever seen, the power will probably go out.
It's not even that the power goes out, it's that it stays out for days and weeks. Season after season, massive power outages. You'd think they'd work harder to build a better infrastructure, but no.
Luckily, I live in a heavily populated area so we get priority- we were only without power for 17 hours. Some places mere miles from here are expected to be without power at least a week.
Last night we read scary stories by candlelight, and Anton only set himself on fire once.
And drank. Of course. Isn't that what everyone does when the power goes out?
I was resigning myself to weeks. months. years. without power and making plans on which cat would be eaten first when all the lights suddenly came on and I may or may not have yelped.
Anyway.
Before the six inches of heavy wet snow that brought down our power, I was sitting down to write a post about my newest obsession: homemade laundry detergent.
I'm not a fan of most commercial detergents- most conventional cleaning agents give me hives for some dumb reason; just walking down that aisle in the grocery store turns my skin red and blotchy. So, I usually use something like 7th Generation or Ecover and what ever granola crunching brands there are. They're great, but they are pricey.
Random clicking on Pinterest lead me to someone's fancy homemade laundry detergent, and more searching from there found the easiest recipe.
I knew that I've seen most of those ingridents at the grocery story- in the midwest at least. We went to Target, then Home Depot, then Lowes....without finding anything (well, except for the Oxyclean and Purex, but I didn't want those). Finally, the Ace down the street had the Fels Naptha soap and at least knew what Borax was, even if they didn't have it. Then, to the grocery story and sure enough- both washing soda and borax, side by side in the laundry aisle, and cheaper then I've seen anyone talk about. So hurrah.
The actual making of the soap was quick and relatively painless, with the exception of grating the soap- I made three batches so I wouldn't have to do that very often. Anton tried grating it with a hand grater for about 2 seconds before realizing how long it would take and we put it through the food processor. And that was it. Maybe five minutes all together.
I did a test load of laundry last night (pre-power outage) and...they were clean, albeit a bit soapy still- I have a HE washer and I think the tablespoon of this particular mix is still too much. I'm going to halve it next time and see what happens. Other than that- it's friggin awesome, and cheap, and my next goal is to perfect the dishwashing detergent recipe I found. Hurray frugality!
It's winter in New England already, which means the start of power outage season. Oh, who am I kidding? That's year round.
If it rains, the power goes out. If it snows, the power goes out. If it's windy, the power goes out. If it's the nicest day you've ever seen, the power will probably go out.
It's not even that the power goes out, it's that it stays out for days and weeks. Season after season, massive power outages. You'd think they'd work harder to build a better infrastructure, but no.
Luckily, I live in a heavily populated area so we get priority- we were only without power for 17 hours. Some places mere miles from here are expected to be without power at least a week.
Last night we read scary stories by candlelight, and Anton only set himself on fire once.
And drank. Of course. Isn't that what everyone does when the power goes out?
I was resigning myself to weeks. months. years. without power and making plans on which cat would be eaten first when all the lights suddenly came on and I may or may not have yelped.
Anyway.
Before the six inches of heavy wet snow that brought down our power, I was sitting down to write a post about my newest obsession: homemade laundry detergent.
I'm not a fan of most commercial detergents- most conventional cleaning agents give me hives for some dumb reason; just walking down that aisle in the grocery store turns my skin red and blotchy. So, I usually use something like 7th Generation or Ecover and what ever granola crunching brands there are. They're great, but they are pricey.
Random clicking on Pinterest lead me to someone's fancy homemade laundry detergent, and more searching from there found the easiest recipe.
I knew that I've seen most of those ingridents at the grocery story- in the midwest at least. We went to Target, then Home Depot, then Lowes....without finding anything (well, except for the Oxyclean and Purex, but I didn't want those). Finally, the Ace down the street had the Fels Naptha soap and at least knew what Borax was, even if they didn't have it. Then, to the grocery story and sure enough- both washing soda and borax, side by side in the laundry aisle, and cheaper then I've seen anyone talk about. So hurrah.
The actual making of the soap was quick and relatively painless, with the exception of grating the soap- I made three batches so I wouldn't have to do that very often. Anton tried grating it with a hand grater for about 2 seconds before realizing how long it would take and we put it through the food processor. And that was it. Maybe five minutes all together.
I did a test load of laundry last night (pre-power outage) and...they were clean, albeit a bit soapy still- I have a HE washer and I think the tablespoon of this particular mix is still too much. I'm going to halve it next time and see what happens. Other than that- it's friggin awesome, and cheap, and my next goal is to perfect the dishwashing detergent recipe I found. Hurray frugality!
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