Memorial Day highlights

A wet Memorial Day.

Sometimes life gives you opportunities that you never even thought possible. Like being able to spend a Sunday with both of your grandparents, decorating graves and hearing the family history one more time.

This is particularly miraculous because just two months ago, we thought we had lost my grandpa. And on Sunday he was walking around and cracking jokes and just having a good ol' time. I mean, whoa.

Actually, I guess that IS the highlight. We met my brother Tim and my parents and my grandparents' house, knocked out some rather eclectic bouquets assembly line style, and hit the road. We stopped at five different cemeteries, we saw where Gramps played high school football and where Gram lived when her family first came west from Wisconsin, and we heard all kinds of stories.

Like: My great great grandfather brought his family out west from Missouri, and then died less than a year later from pneumonia. His wife took the girls back home, but my great grandfather stayed.

It was fun.

Oh, and tangent alert, we had lunch at McDonalds, except I had packed a lunch for our little fam because I am kind of a poser when it comes to restaurants, plus I'm back on the no processed food train (unless you count that chocolate I recently purchased... but it's fair trade organic and high in cacao content, so it's basically a health food. Eric says it tastes like bark). My grandparents couldn't really understand why we would choose to eat sandwiches and carrot sticks instead of cheeseburgers and fries, but they think everything I do is awesome so it wasn't that big of a deal. And hey, McDonalds came through for me in a big way--they gave me a coffee in my reusable mug with steamed milk from their espresso bar and acted like it was no big deal when I was trying to explain my food allergies and how a Frappe wasn't really in my future. And since this was a small town with no other coffee options, I really appreciated this small act of kindness.

Johanna can make a bouquet out of anything.

And one more tangent except kind of not really, Johanna would pick whatever little flowers she could find growing up from the ground in every cemetery we visited and would place the little daisies or buttercups or dandelions or whatever on the graves near where we were, whether we knew who was buried there or not. Since these were fairly old cemeteries we were visiting for the most part, those were the only flowers some people got.

She's a sweetheart.

Monday "Art," as seen on the road edition

I thought this was a sign from God that it was time for more coffee, but Eric said
anything trucked in a vat with a flammable liquid warning is probably not
something I'd want to drink anyway. I don't think he knows me all that well.

P.S. Happy Memorial Day!

All Purpose Balm from Zero Waste Home

I haven't given up on my zero waste efforts; I just haven't written about it in a while. I get a little frustrated on this front because it's just so dang hard sometimes to find viable alternatives in our little town. It makes me want to give up, truth be told, but I can't. Because I am obsessed. And I will win.

The kitchen is the obvious place to start with this, and there I've made some good progress. One area that's proven a little more difficult is the bathroom. Specifically: My self care products.

I focus on myself, by the way, because Eric hasn't quite caught my mania yet. I'm a big fan of converting through example. Hey, it worked for minimalism. :)

All of that is to say: I've been making All Purpose Balm from Bea Johnson's Zero Waste Home for a couple of months now, and I am in love.

Figure 1: Melting! Turns out it's hard taking a clear picture at
this stage because of the steam. Who knew?

I purchased Bea's book the minute it came out. For my Kindle, because that's the way I roll. It looks beautiful on my iPad's Kindle app (because I am all kinds of pretentious). I follow her blog and have learned so much from reading about her experiences. She's the reason I take jars and reusable bags to the store. True story.

Anyway, a couple of the recipes caught my eye immediately, one of which is her All Purpose Balm. I'm not going to share the recipe because, hello, copyright. Although she does have kind of a similar recipe on her blog here... but it's not exact. Look, let's just say this: The whole ordeal involves a mason jar (I used a cutie four-ouncer), beeswax (yay bulk section!), and oil (I used organic olive). And that's it. You melt and mix and if you mess it up (i.e., it's too thick or too thin), you simply remelt and add a dash more of this or that and see what happens.

Here's what happened: Awesomeness. Of which I am a big fan.

Source
Figure 2: I love these jars. They're so cute.

Not on the first try, though. I didn't think it was going to be thick enough, so I added more beeswax. Alas and alack, I was wrong and it was then too thick. More melting, more oil, and perfection.

I'm on my second jar of this stuff now. It's just a delightful concoction that smells like honey that I can use on my face, lips and body in a general kind of way. I've even used a tiny bit in my hair as a leave-on conditioner. If I heat it momentarily in the microwave, it gets warm and lovely, and I can massage my feet and feel kind of like a princess, if princesses had to massage their own feet.

I'm exceedingly pleased with this as a face cream, by the way. I tend to break out a lot with commercial products, and my Adult Onset Acne (is that actually a thing? I may have just made that up. You're welcome, science) is so much better now.

Figure 3: Cooling on the counter. I reused a small tin
for easy lip balm access in my purse.

Pros: I enjoy smelling like honey; super easy to make; soft skin; all-natural; readily available bulk ingredients; inexpensive; zero waste!

Cons: Are you afraid of boiling hot oil? I'm not when it's only a few tablespoons. Just something to ponder.

P.S. Just in case you're wondering, this is not a paid endorsement of any kind. I mean, for one thing, my blog isn't big enough for anyone to think paying me is a decent financial investment, plus I wouldn't do that anyway. Take that, The Man! (But bribing me with coffee? That's an entirely different matter...)