Today I am spinning. Every job I’ve tried to do has thrown me up three other things which need doing first – and look, need is subjective, which is why I feel like all I’ve done is spun in one spot, feeling increasingly frustrated.
I started making soap, only to discover I am completely out of tea tree oil, which I needed for the batch I’d started. Somewhere in my subconscious I must have known I was out of tea tree, because when I placed an order for 1L of orange essential oil (which is yesterday’s spinny discovery), I also, on a whim, bought 500ml of tea tree oil.
Lucky really. Probably.
So. I was half way through a batch of Tea Tree and Mineral Mud soap, when I realised I was out of tea tree oil. And somehow, if your soap is called “TEA TREE and mineral mud”, you cannot substitute, say, eucalyptus oil on the fly, and then rename the entire batch. Especially not if the wholesale order you’re working to right now specifies TEA TREE SOAP.
Luckily (again), I had not yet added any of the ingredients specific to this soap, and I was able to turn the entire batch into plain Lavender on the fly.
I say on the fly, but what I mean was, I had to come inside, away from the studio, run my soapmaking program, check and find out why I was out of tea tree oil (no one knows, my stock keeping program thinks I have 37ml left. But it also thinks I have 300ml of orange oil and hahahah I DO NOT), then change the proportions of oils in my current lavender soap recipe to match the oils I had already poured, and the lye in water which was already mixed and cooling. Basically making the paperwork match what was brewing in the studio.
Again, not a problem, considering I’m changing all of my recipes over to my new base recipe (WHICH I ADORE, THANK YOU) and New Lavender was already going to be A Thing.
But because I am spinning, I found I absolutely could not tweak anything without music, and then there was an album which needed downloading, and my music player wasn’t seeing my folders and OH MY GOD FFS. FOCUS.
I just needed a new lavender soap recipe to print. A two minute job, maximum. Even when you count the time it took me to work out where the fuck the tea tree oil I have went. (Somewhere into magical Specific Gravity Land I suspect, which is where all my ingredients hide when I’ve got their SP set wrong whoops)
In any case, my music player now has all my assorted random folders of music, which is probably a good thing in the long run. Less great for today’s spoons, and definitely not great for my “feeling productive and getting shit done” headspace.
Mum has breast cancer. Most of you know this, because the only people still reading here are coming over from Facebook, where I share everything anyway. But I’m wondering if the ridiculous spinny today is linked, or related. The weather has cooled down, my body desperately wants to hibernate, June is still a rough month for me even now almost ten years after Nan died, and now Mum has breast cancer.
Surgery is later this month, all going well. Then more waiting for pathology, but they’re happy it’s been caught early, happy with the plan, happy happy happy.
I do not have breast cancer as well, which is nice. Another lump, another ultrasound, another sigh of relief. I’m not sure my mother would have coped well being Cancer Buddies with me. God knows I would not have.
Maybe I need to write more. Maybe it might help with reordering my brain back into some semblance of normality.
Maybe.
