soap …well detergent more like

I've decided to follow in the steps of home DIYers and mommy bloggers and make my own laundry detergent.

This is an adaptation as found on many sites all over the web, like this one. I've changed it up a tad, mainly to experiment and also to give some variety and color to the stuff.

In my research (internet searching) it seems that 5.5oz of Fels-Naptha or other laundry (or even hand/body bar) soap is the main ingredient in this homemade melange. I was intrigued by Zote soap, but also liked the number of different recipes that used the Fels-Naptha brand …so I used both.

I've ended up with 19.6oz of soap in all, so I've more than quadrupled the recipe that uses that 4.5oz, so here it is:

• 4.333 cups Borax
• 4.333 cups Washing Soda
• 1 bar (5.5oz) Fels-Naptha soap
• 1 bar (14.1oz) Zote soap

I had some trouble grating up the Fels-Naptha soap because it acted a lot like a semi-hard cheese. It clogged up the parmesan grater surface so I switched to the smallest long-grate surface. I think in the end I'm going to have to run it through a blender/processor to break up the soap a lot more than it is now. The Zote soap, on the other hand, grated up quite nicely. When I do it again I definitely will use the Zote soap by itself, though it does take longer to grate up a 14oz block.

All in all, I'm intrigued to find out how this is going to perform. I debated on mixing in some perfume-free OxiClean in, but I'll try it at some point, but for the first batch, I want it to be original recipe.

Ok, here's the skinny on the results:

Worked great! No pieces of soap on my laundry, which I feared, but doing a really hot wash may have something to do with that.

As far as price

Most of the DIY recipes say that 1 TBSP = 1 "load"

A typical "Tide" container does about 26 loads, but it counts a single "load" as the bottom "Line 1" of the measuring device, which is about 1/8 Cup in liquid form (I know I'm comparing liquid to powder, but bear with me) as a "load" for the DIY stuff is 2 TBSP.

I used about 1/3 Cup (roughly 5 1/3 TBSP) for my homemade stuff and estimate it works great for small-medium, maybe even large loads, probably need 2/3 Cup for XL loads.

Worked out, the tide costs about 32¢ per "load" (that's 1/8 C)

The homemade stuff costs 13¢ per 1/8 C, so I figured 35¢ for a standard medium/large load of laundry - the tide would be 64¢ equiv. So just about 50% of the cost of the Tide, plus, most people say you don't need to add something like Oxiclean or other non-chlorine bleach to it when you use the DIY soap, so there's more savings there, too.

The Word

Can I just say as a creative that I have serious, vitriolic hatred of certain business-world conventions (no, not cons or gatherings!) particularly with business nomenclature. Let me be more specific:

Adding "e," "i," or "web" onto the beginning of a conventional business/colloquial term. I'm going to just say that I don't care about email, as it formed, as far as I can tell, without some idiotic, 100-person, board of directors meeting spanning three continents and costing millions of dollars simply in deliberation.

Case in point: webinar

I hate this word more than my logical argument for hating it is capable of enumerating. Firstly, my spellcheck puts a squiggly red line under it– so is it a word at all?

Secondly, it's a portmanteau of web, which is shortened from world-wide web, and seminar, which comes from the Latin seminarium, meaning nursery, but means more commonly, "a meeting for giving and discussing information." While one could call this argument moot, because I've already cited it as a portmanteau, I press on: webinar has completely corrupted the word to the point where it original meaning is lost- the word, seminar, is no longer present, and makes no sense.

A part of me feels that the addition of ginormous (a popular portmanteau) into our lexica is a step backward in vocabular evolution.

Thirdly, and most irritatingly, it is yet another venture by those in the business world to attempt to add value, appeal, or even commodity to something that already has or has no intrinsic nature! A seminar is a vital part of the business world where people come together and discuss new ideas pertaining to their industry. Use of a word like webinar is a prime example of forced value. One might argue at this point that it differentiates between a physical location and the new officeless or cloud meeting convention. I disagree. Whether a seminar is held in a hotel conference room, convention center, via Skype, iChat, Messenger, or even in an IHOP, the nature of the meeting itself is not changed. Just because a seminar is hosted over the Internet (the capitalization of Internet is another bone of contention with me) does not change the fact that it is still just another seminar! You could host it at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, but you wouldn't call it a snobinar, would you? It's still a gathering of minds to discuss new ideas. The medium should have no bearing on the nature of the thing itself.

You may view this as a "making mounds out of molehills" moment, but I submit that it's a byproduct of an unnecessary, and infantile business mindset: that their fellows, constituents, and clients need to have something as silly and next-gen as a naming convention in order to attract more traffic, sell more seats, recruit more eager grads, or whatever the goal is. Or better yet, don't even call it a seminar, call it a convention!

Think of a better way to accomplish something like this than a simple and nearly-plagiarizing convention of adding a letter, or creating compound word/portmanteau to further along your business affairs. With an equally as common business phrase, why not think outside the box and focus on your strategy rather than your business newspeak for solutions.

135 and Supermacro

Did some more 35mm stuff. This time I shot exclusively with my 135mm lens, which is quite nice and gives a good close view. Couple that with my close-up attachments, and you can get it crazy far- so far, in fact, that your depth of field is shrunk to next to nothing. Again, this was with expired Fujifilm stock (my last roll!).

Barbed

Bullets

The Danger Children (cool band name…)

Gas

Gated

Generator

Half Dollars

Linked Leaf

Pistola

Reflector

Rustease

Sixteen and a half Seconds

Stencil

TeeVee

Wood Protrusion

An Event of Note

While I don't normally post personal events beyond the excitement of new equipment or media, I think this exception is appropriate.

I'm getting married. True story.

My wife-to-be has a nicely documented account of what transpired over the Christmas weekend, so you can read it here, on her blog.

It was an enjoyable time, one I shan't forget. My only wish is that it could have been for longer! Pictures to follow. Sadly, I only took my digital camera along, so no grainy goodness this time around.

Here's a teaser pic of our niece "wearing" her new christmas present:

Exploration of Expiration

I didn't really do much with this roll, other than bracketing, to showcase the effects of color shift due to film expiration. As this "rotten" film phenomenon is most prominent in color films, even pros don't care about their b&w stock going off. Additionally, I only cited one example of drastic color shift in this post. If you go back to my previous post with Fujifilm Superia xTra 400 shots and see the first image of the jet trails, there was a second shot which also contained a massive shift in the color of the sky. I like the way this unpredictable fluctuation affects the negative.

In order to protect my "mystery lens" (probably a 20-25mm) (a Rollei Planar 50mm 1.8ƒ - because I'm a moron and didn't think to look everywhere on the lens) I had to append an extension in the shape of a "modified" effect filter (I broke the glass out...) which created or accentuated the vignette, as it's not flared. I used this generic, cheap lens enigma as I can squeeze that 1.8ƒ out of it.

A Metaphor

Boxen

I Don't Like Grocery Stores

Looming Lurk

Then Why are There Doors Here?

Fall's Fall

Tarred Rocks

Not an Original Idea

Morbid Curiosity

The Plus Signs

Spy Goat

Narrow Grove

Valvole

Old, Expired, Leaked, and Good

Some shots from an old roll of film. This one covers a wide range of time, from the trip to Uinta National Forest, to a show in the yard of the Corner House, and to the test shots for the guitars. This was all shot on Fujicolor 400 (which was expired) and processed at the last 1-hour photo in a grocery store in Provo.

Stray Birds

Danielle XI

Al Checks

Chillin'

Reaf

Tay Lore and His Amazing Lookaway!

Tay Lore Sends a Text!

Thom Gone Digital

When the Back Opens

Alubs Pagemaker

I thought of it, and I did it.
That is all.