Dear PSS Prime

Every row on you takes forever and a day. I've been knitting on you for a hundred million years. Why aren't you done yet?

The Mad Soaper Rides Again!

I'm going to make soap this week. It's been too long, and I miss the smell of saponifying oils and the fun of playing with dangerous chemicals in my kitchen.

Tonight, I'm going to try melting some dragon's blood resin in a carrier oil, and see if the scent holds true. If it does, tomorrow I'm making dragon's blood soap. If not, well, at least I'll know!

Jesus fucking christ, HOUSEFIRE!

Today, I tried to make soup. Chicken and dumplings, to be exact, which I have made multiple times and always turns out delicious.

Today, it turned out ON FIRE.

I had the pot on the stove, as per usual, waiting for it to come to a boil. I was right next to it, making the dumplings. I noticed that the burner was smoking a little, but that happens sometimes so I didn’t worry about it (MISTAKE #1).

I figured I’d turn the fan on high, and walked over to the front door to open it, since it seemed like there was maybe a bit too much smoke (MISTAKE #2). By the time I’d opened the door and looked back, flames were coming up from the bottom of the pot.

I ran back over and turned off the burner. I remembered that I don’t own a fire extinguisher (MISTAKE #3), but since I wasn’t sure if this counted as an electrical fire figured I’d be better off not throwing water on it regardless.

MISTAKE #4 was forgetting that grease fires exist at all, luckily I still somehow did the right thing:

Baking soda to the rescue!

I always keep a big box in the kitchen for cleaning purposes, so I ripped open the top and started tossing it at the base of the fire (i.e. my stove). When the flames were small enough, I grabbed my potholders and moved the soup to the sink, so I could throw more handfuls of baking soda at the fire. It went out pretty quickly at that point, and things started to disperse, THEN the smoke alarm started going off (Yeah, thanks for the heads-up, smoke alarm, you did a bang-up job there).

Then, I decided to sit down quietly for a while, and order a pizza.

New Spinning Wheel!

These pictures are, of course, of the new wheel that I got this past weekend. It cost me $50 (I can never turn up a wheel for less than $100, I just can't), and all of the things I needed to spiff it up I already had, leftover from when I refinished Balthazar.


For this renovation, I decided to just go with a good coat of paste finishing wax. I had a whole jar of it, it doesn't require a tarp and a driveway, and this wheel didn't look like it was varnished anyway.


I thought about oiling it up first, but then decided against it. The only thing I had in the house was olive oil, and for something as nice as a new wheel I knew that was a bad damn idea.

From what I can tell, this is a handmade wheel, probably from some kind of a small manufacturer. There's a roman numeral 13 carved into the underside of the body of the wheel, so I'm going to go ahead and assume she's the 13th one made.

I'm thinking of calling her Hestia, as the 13th Olympian, or Ganymede, because he's just so pretty.