I blame my parents for everything.
My dad…arrowhead hunting, pinion nut hunting. Fishing. Tying lies for fishing. Making velveta cheese and worm sandwiches for catching fish. He owned and used a metal detector. He had a knob and tube radio and on a clear night we could hear Japan. He made a “gaaa-rooga” horn for his truck. He knew things. He was killed when I was nine…I would have learned so much.
My mom…crochet, softball, painting fabrics with little tubes of paint. Church and catechism (much to my chagrin then and now). Reading. She held her own against my dad’s hobbies, arrowheads were easy to find and she caught her fair share of fish and cooked them up in aluminum foil with butter with deliciously crispy skin, while we waited around the fire with starving tummies. She knew her own things. And I learned so much.
I really had no choice but to have a billion hobbies, a billion micro lives rolled up into a human, based on my parent’s genetics and predilections. No choice at all.
My latest addiction is soap making.
Oh my.
Any addiction sets itself up in a tiny neuron and soon the brain is afire with that addiction. I cannot tell you exactly how much of my brain is afire because there is so much smoke, and the flames are too hot. It is bad. I have told my friends I may need an intervention. Soon.
I read about soaping every day. I look at beautiful pictures of beautiful soaps. I am curtailing making a billion soaps a day. I limit myself to four individual soaps or a small loaf.
A day.
That is it.
I want more.
Homesteading after living aboard 