Author Archives: Melissa

Potions, Unguents, and One Shot Wonders

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In the build up to our anticipated, if not yet celebrated, move aboard Galapagos this spring, I’ve been using some quiet time to think about how that’s going to change our lifestyle in terms of all the many consumer goods we use on a daily basis in the family home. We are really good consumers in our house, true Americans. I, in particular, am susceptible to marketing strategies that tell me that my hair will gleam blindingly and swing invitingly, my skin will make me look 25 again, and I will smell delicious and look good in a bikini if I use certain products. Yeah, hope springs eternal in the vast liminal space of middle age.

Am I looking younger yet?

This consumer blindness is encouraged by the ease with which we dispose of all the plastic bottles all this stuff comes in, a denial that disappears completely when anchored at a remote location for a month. Just where do I toss that plastic bottle now, hmmmm?  When you come back to port after a 4 week cruise with 4 large bags of  stinky trash, as happened on our last trip on Moonrise (our Cal 34), it really brings home how much we take for granted putting that large green trash container on the curb every week, the contents to be picked up and disposed of for us by kind strangers.

Boats the size of Galapagos are required to have a trash management plan documented on board the vessel. Part of that plan for us is not bringing a lot of trash on board in the first place. And part of this plan for me is discovering things that work well that also include minimal packaging. In a perfect world, I could find one product that would do the job of many.

So you can see why I would have been dead excited to discover, thanks to my daughter, Lush shampoo bars; little palm-sized bars of shampoo that don’t come in a plastic bottle! In fact, they have no packaging at all.  I bought some for her for Christmas and bought one to try myself. I tried the citrus variety, complete with a dried lemon rind in the bar. It smelled heavenly, lathered up nicely, and left my hair clean and shiny. Yay!

Everything looked hunky dory until I read the ingredients on their website. First ingredient: Sodium Laurel Sulphate. WHAATT? I was under the marketing illusion that these were ‘all natural’ or something equally organic with the prefix ‘eco’ firmly attached. I mean, when I went to their store they had huge, beautiful blocks of the stuff sitting out like large cheeses, and there’s nothing more natural that a large hunk of cheese, right? Dang it. And other strong words.

The Lush bar is the cute little round yellow one on the right. Little. Yellow. Different. Haven't I heard those words somewhere before, on some commercial or other?

The Lush bar is the cute little round yellow one on the right. Little. Yellow. Different. Haven’t I heard those words somewhere before, on some commercial or other?

Sodium laurel sulphate is ubiquitous in most shampoos and soaps. It is a surfactant and creates the lather consumers like me have come to expect. I don’t mind a little sodium laurel sulphate in my shower at home. I like a good sudsy lather as much as any other first world adult hooked up to municipal waste water treatment. But unfortunately, on a sailboat, there is no grey water treatment system, so everything that goes down my drain goes into the lives of all the aquatic organisms trying to innocently do things like reproduce. Apparently aquatic organisms are sensitive to sodium laurel sulphate, as are many people, I found out.  As much as my consumer brain likes the ‘Lush’ concept, I guess it’s a no go.

So I entered the rabbit hole of interweb searching and learning and I have learned more about soap making and shampoo bars than I ever intended. I also came across these other shampoo bars that actually ARE all natural, made with lye. They look like the soap my Grandmother White used to make, the stuff my mom always had for getting hard stains out of clothing.  J.R. Liggets makes a number of interesting looking shampoo bars with only paper packaging.

Three of 4 that I bought to try. These appeal to my inner hippie, the part of me that wants to build a straw bale house someday.

As an aside, I also discovered that there is a small movement by some to stop shampooing their hair altogether. This is called the ‘no poo’ method. I am averse to this not only on principle, but because of the name. ‘No poo’? Really? That doesn’t sound healthy. It sounds like a toddler who has decided to take a stand. Converts swear by it but I’m not even tempted.

I decided to experiment. I bought 4 bars of the J.R. Liggets, which, by the way, cost about the same as 2 of the bars from Lush, and chose a couple to try. Two days ago I washed my hair with the coconut oil variety. Results: not as many satisfying suds, but I did get that ‘squeeky clean’ feeling on my hair close to the scalp. I was able to easily comb tangles out while my hair was wet, and it looked good after using the blow dryer. However, my hair felt kind of heavy afterward. It also felt thicker when I pulled a brush through it. Two days later I was ready to wash it again because it felt dirty. I can usually go three days, sometimes 4 if I don’t have to be seen by others.

This makes some sense.  These soaps are all made with saponified natural oils. The lye reacts with the fats in the oils to create soap, but without the addition of the sodium laurel sulphate, the suds and lather just don’t appear. Still, my hair looked good and felt clean for two days.

Today I decided to do half my head with the peppermint/jojoba variety and the other half with the citrus bar from Lush. After ignoring the suds on the Lush side, I decided I can live with the kind of clean that the J.R. Liggets bars are offering. I understand from my research that these natural soaps without the added chemicals do not strip the natural oils from the hair and that after years of using more harsh products, it may take some time for my scalp to adjust. So fine. I’ll be okay with that because at the end of the day, having a little more oil on my hair is going to protect it against the harsh salt air environment I’m about to expose it to.  This just might end up being my one shot wonder: a bar that can be used as a body soap, a shampoo, and hair moisturizer all in one, at least until I learn to make my own (that’s known as ‘foreshadowing’).

Say ‘bye bye’ to all these bottles when we move aboard. There is no place for this kind of clutter on board Galapagos.

I figure I’ll have to store my one-shot-wonder soaps in a plastic snaplock container in the fridge to keep them from melting down in the warm and sunny parts of the world. Do you have any one-shot-wonder products that are environmentally friendly? Do tell!

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Sugar-Free Galley: Demon Free Chai

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Last year Mike and I discovered this lovely Indian restaurant right down the road from our house in Lakewood. Great Cuisine of India is one of those little low-key places where the food is so good it’s hard to know when to stop eating. It was there, at a nondescript table overlooking the parking lot, that I discovered how much I adore chai tea. The first time I had it, I could not stop thinking about it for weeks. In the dead of winter the aroma of cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, and cloves preached to me like a sermon at a Baptist tent revival.  It was so good I could have literally fallen to the floor in rapture if I didn’t have good manners. This is my clue that it likely has a load of added sugar and therefore it is a false prophet sent by the devil. I mean, anything that warm and creamy and soothing is probably evil of the worst kind. So I’ve avoided going back for more.

I banished this new flame of desire into the overcrowded prison of my brain’s ‘time out’ room. It was in good company.  Chocolate. Cookies. Ice Cream. Ginger candy. All the sugar demons welcomed their new friend, Chai. I knew they were planning their escape, but I ignored them.  You have to be tough with demons. They thrive on negative attention. Ignoring is the best solution. I would move forward into life acting as though that Chai tea was not, in fact, calling my name.

Weeks passed and then, this Christmas season I was shopping the gourmet food section of T.J. Maxx. As I was having a heated discussion with an extra-large and aggressive package of German gingerbread cookies that kept trying to jump into my cart, I noticed a coy, unassuming little box of Masala Spice Chai tea mix by Nature’s Guru. It was laying low during the altercation with the cookies, but when it saw me looking its way, it lifted its tiny little arms to me in a gesture of complete trust and surrender. Smitten, I reached for it to read its label. It was UNSWEETENED! Oh Happy Day!? Could it possibly be that someone had actually made a chai mix with no added sugar? 

I read the ingredients: milk powder, black tea extract, cardamom powder, spices. Yes!! Could I possibly get my chai fix without letting the army of sugar demons out of their room? Because, I mean, if I let one demon out, they all want to come out and play and it’s anarchy. It might start with an innocent chai tea, but pretty soon I’m sitting around in dirty sweatpants feeling bloated; scattered crumbs the only evidence of my sin. My little box of tea and I smiled at one another in mutual trust, and I placed it lovingly into the seat of my cart.

Tossing the cookies aside, (I win!) I searched frantically for another box of tea. Why buy one when there might be two? I  found another, albeit smashed, on the end cap. Two boxes. 10$. I did not care that they seemed pricey. I was, after all, smitten by the possibility of spicy goodness.

demon-stewie-3

Demon, trying his best to look cute and innocent. Do not be fooled. (Yeah, he’s from Family Guy, that’s why he looks like Stewie.)

On Christmas Day when we opened our stockings, somehow one of the boxes had ended up in my own stocking, and one in Mike’s. Whaattt? Santa! How did you know? Trusty water kettle always at the ready, I made short work of mixing up a cup of velvety chai and then added a packet of Stevia (my sweetner of choice) to the cup. Inhaling deeply, I sat with the fragrance for a minute. Lovely!  It looked actually creamy. I sipped and let it roll around in my mouth for a few seconds. It was delicious. This stuff was a winner. The demons cried with woe. This was not the key that would unlock their cell. Ha HAAAA! Take that! This tea is my new super-power, demons, so beware!

I began to see the possibilities of this tea. Vampire killers might wield a cross at their nemesis, but sugar killers everywhere could now hold their tiny packets of tea in front of them as they made their way boldly with heads erect through the bakeries of life.  I began to hoard the little packets of tea in my purse, even taking some with us to Tennessee so we would not go without. I sighed with relief when the TSA agent at the airport didn’t bat an eyelash at the little foil packets of powder in my purse.

To find something this delicious that doesn’t send me down to the corner sugar dealer for an illicit fix is almost too good to be true and as a ‘thank you’ to the Universe, I needed to use this new power for good, not evil. I would need to share this with others.  And I would need to create my own supply because at 6$ a box on Amazon, well, you get the idea.  I needed a more cost effective way to get my chai. Anyone who thinks ‘necessity’ is the mother of invention has never met ‘addiction’.

A long shallow dive into Google produced recipes for making your own chai tea mix and I got excited until I realized that they all call for at least 1 full cup of white sugar, and some actually have more sugar in them than milk. WTF? Why not just start an intravenous glucose drip and cut to the chase? They also all used nonfat dry milk (blech) and non-dairy creamer, as well as vanilla non-dairy creamer. I decided to make my own and make it sugar free. We can all add our own sweetener of choice to this mix and the cost savings to our bodies, souls, and wallets are significant.

That’s a large canning jar, plus the jar the tea came in, full of tea mix. Compare to those little packets in a nifty box.

The commercial brand I bought is $ .50- $.60 per serving, depending on whether you order from Amazon or happen to find it at the discount store.  My mixture comes out at just $.23/ serving of two tablespoons to 8 ounces of water. If you add more of the mix, then that cost goes up accordingly. Still, that’s a lot of wiggle room. Also, to be fair, I had all of these spices on hand. Even the cardamom and white pepper. If I had to buy all of them, the costs for my initial batch would go up. But you can make a lot of tea mix with a bottle of spice. Also, don’t buy your spices at the big grocery store in the spice section. They are WAY the heck overpriced. Look in the Hispanic foods section and then check the dollar store. Costco has great deals on many spices, as well.

I tweaked the recipes I found a bit. For instance I like full fat milk. Nonfat milk is a non-starter to me. So I bought the can of powdered whole milk in our local grocery store’s Hispanic section. It’s by Nestle, of course, and costs more than the non-fat variety. If you don’t mind non-fat, your costs will go down. I notice Amazon carries some other powdered whole milks as well. Maybe I’ll try one of those next time. 

I have never bought non-dairy creamers but because all the recipes I found had both the plain and the vanilla varieties, and the milk was expensive, I caved and bought some of the plain variety. After mixing this up I think I will forgo that next time I make the mix and just use all milk powder. I don’t need to be drinking ‘corn syrup solids’ on a regular basis because, hello, that’s basically dried processed sugar. Even with the creamer, however, there is very precious little sugar in my mixture except for what is naturally found in milk. It’s not enough to set me into a sugar spiral, and my demon is very sensitive.  Next time, no creamer. All milk.  Instead of using the vanilla flavored non-food creamer, I just add a couple of drops of pure vanilla to my cup if I want that flavoring. I like myself some real vanilla.

So here you go. Tweak the spices a bit if you want. This has a little gingery kick because I like that. I suggest starting with 1/2 the spice and then working up until you like what you smell.  You’re welcome.

Melissa’s Sugar-Free Chai Tea Mix

Makes 76 servings of 2 tablespoons per cup of hot water. Add stevia, honey, sugar, or whatever sweetener you like if you want it sweet. Add 2 drops of pure vanilla extract if you want vanilla flavoring.

3 cups powdered whole milk
2 cups non-dairy coffee creamer (or just use 5 cups of powdered milk)
3 1/2 cups instant, unsweetened black tea like Liptons
4 tsp ground ginger
4 tsp ground cinnamon
2 1/2 tsp ground cloves
2 1/2 tsp cardamom
2 1/2 tsp allspice
3 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp fine white pepper

Put ingredients in the food processor and process them until they become a uniform fine powder. You really don’t want to skip this step because the spices are going to be ground into a much finer powder by doing this. Store in an airtight container. Enjoy guilt free.

 

The Color of Blood: A Cautionary Tale

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Damn, I sure hope this works. As plans go, lately ours feels like it may not be quite so ‘cunning’, and it’s certainly not very ‘little’. In spite of these feelings, we move forward into the winter, anticipating the spring when we are hoping all these loose ends we’re dangling into the void of the Universe will coalesce into something solid. That ‘something’ will be living on the boat while our house pays for itself with renters. This is not a small endeavor. In the words of a certain infamous business man, ‘It’s ‘HUGE’.

Freshly graveled driveway and simplified gardens. Can’t wait to take a photo in the spring or summer, when things look better.

Pretty much the color of our blood right now is green. Having never gone this route with a house before, we didn’t anticipate how much it would cost to get things ready for someone else to live here. Dang! Some of these are big ticket items like having the old Douglas Fir trees thinned to reduce windage and yard debris. Most things, though, are small things like buying linens for beds and painting a room. At first, we didn’t really notice the expense of these things. But as we start adding it all up, we realize it’s like death from a thousand small cuts. The bloody green is just everywhere. If you are considering making this kind of move in your own life, you can consider this your cautionary tale.

It’s not just our current spending that makes money seem like it’s flying out the door. It’s also coming to terms with money we spent on stuff that is no longer useful for the life we will want to lead. Like the money I spent on my lovely turquoise velvet swing coat. And my vintage Frederick and Nelson raincoat that I bought years ago. I love these things, but there is no place for them on a boat and frankly I don’t wear them much. They didn’t sell at our garage sale, and I have been unsuccessful selling them on Ebay.

Mike’s working on repairing Puddler, hoping to sell it to a new home. We love this little dinghy. It has come along on many adventures. See that garage? Still a lot of work to be done there.

This brings up the concept of ‘sunk costs’, which is something we’ve written about before. I’ve held onto those two items, as just one example, because I know if I can find the right market for them, they will sell and I could recoup probably what I spent on them. But it takes a lot of time and energy trying to sell stuff. Craigslist was a dead end and I have better things to do than to field calls from people who will never follow through.  And even though Ebay makes it dead simple to list items to sell, you still have to photograph, figure out shipping, do the listing, then wait for things to sell. At this point I’ve decided my time is worth some money and could probably be better spent doing things like writing this blog post telling you to just cut to the chase and give most of the stuff away. Those costs are already sunk. Kiss them bye bye.

My favorite photo of Puddler, circa 2010 in Barkley Sound.

My favorite photo of Puddler, circa 2010 in Barkley Sound.

I’d like to say that money is coming in at the same rate it was before, but this would be a lie. At the same time that we’re spending so much money on the house (which, to be fair, we’d also have to do in order to sell the house), I’ve gone into semi-retirement from my practice as a psychotherapist. This has been in the works for over a year, but now that it’s happening it’s a very scary proposition.

I’ve begun seeing people on a cash-only basis, rather than continue to bear the responsibility of billing their insurance for them. I knew this would cause a decline in my client population because people would generally much rather feel as though they are getting something for nothing. And, after all, as a population we’ve been trained that the ‘doctor’s office’ will do that paperwork for us, especially as insurance is a complex dark hole into which most people don’t wish to wander. When clients have to pay up front and then send in a receipt for reimbursement, well, let’s just say that separates ‘the men from the boys’, as it were. Still, even though my salary is a fraction of what is was six months ago, letting go of all these kinds of land-based ‘contracts’ is required in order to move forward. Cutting back my practice may seem like the right thing to do overall, but it sure doesn’t feel right some days. It’s more like I’m hanging onto the end of a rope with one hand and have not yet located the net that is supposed to be under me.

Freshly painted second bedroom. Last year at this time it was my art studio. Kind of miss that.

We’re at the point where we can see the weather changing in the distance. The barometer is dropping in our comfortable middle-class suburban lives. I think we’re as ready as we can possibly be for the changes that are coming. We have a storage unit at the marina now. I finally found an insurance agent to help us with all of the new insurance needs we’ll have. I meet with him on Monday to look over the bid.  I met today with a friend who will do the gardening and housekeeping between renters. We’re working on a website for the house, and on a ‘users manual’ for the home systems. The next step is getting the house on the market, which will happen at the end of this month. After that, we wait to see if the booking calender will get filled. If and when that happens, it will be a wild flurry of activity. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

We gave Andrew an entire apartment of furniture. Where did we put it all when it was in our house? We like this room better now.