making things and reading

i made soap yesterday. i took the easy route, buying a shea butter soap base at the craft store, but adding honey (from our own bees) and oatmeal and sprigs of lavender i picked last summer and dried. i'll make another run of it this evening at a "make things with honey" event at our local culture house. i'm also making all sorts of yummy honey-related things to eat. i convinced our local beekeeper's association to show people the wide variety of things you can make with honey! i love instigating such things. the soap was super easy and i'm going to tackle the more difficult cold process kind next time - using oils and lye and time. i like the idea of knowing exactly what's gone into the soap. husband wants me to get very ambitious and make shampoo as well. but one step at a time. he's done a marvelous job building a room that's made for such projects (he calls it the brewery), so once the sink is in out there, i will have a place to do such projects, conveniently located right next to the honey centrifuge.

thanks to faithful use of goodreads, i realized that i can manage to read at least 100 books before the year is out. my goodreads stands at 84, but i also did my annual reread of the harry potter series, so it's actually at 91. to round it out, i dug around in boxes and found my nabokov collection, as i've just read andrea pitzer's the secret history of vladimir nabokov and so i have a hankering to reread pale fire. the three hardbacks, i scored long ago in a used bookstore in scottsdale, arizona for a song. i've already delved into speak, memory, nabokov's autobiography, and i realized that tho' i've had it for years, i hadn't actually read it before now. i wonder how many more of those are on my shelves. maybe my goal for 2014 will be to read 100 books that i already own. most of this years reads have been from the library, as borrowing instead of buying fits my current lifestyle and philosophy much better anyway. tho' it remains hard for me not to write in the library's books. if i only read my own books, their loan rates are going to go down and we can't have that, so i guess it will have to be a mix.

* * *

if you love JFK (and i do), you have to see this collection of photos in the atlantic.