Snow in may, what is going on? and Mothers day weekend – part 1

Well, I awoke this morning to lots of fluffy white stuff falling and covering everything. We were foretasted for some thunderstorms last night and today. The possibility of snow was mentioned but no accumulation was expected. Here that means the snow melts as soon as it hits the ground.

Doesn’t look like that is the case today, the schools called a 2 hour snow delay and we had to scrape snow from the car before I could take N to work. I am sure it will melt away throughout the day. It is May for crying out loud, snow in May is not the norm!

We got back from visiting my mother yesterday and were exhausted. N had been on the road for 2 days prior to us visiting family then we stayed with my mom for 3 days.. Basically he was on the road for 5 days straight.

We always have some temperature shock and allergy issues when visiting family down in phoenix.. It is generally 30 degrees warmer where they live and about 6000 feet in elevation change.. it kicks our butts! So, when we got home in addition to being beat I had to put the house back together (the cats usually freak out when we are gone).. That is why I posted a meme yesterday instead of telling you all about our trip.

You guys know that my mom and I set out to make soap for mothers day, my mom was really excited about it. She saw this particular recipe on Martha Stuart for goat’s milk soap that was all natural. The one thing my mom was not able to pick up before we got to her home was the lye needed for the soap. We went on a quest for lye, which is said to be sold at any hardware store. We went by home depot, lowes, ace hardware and even frys.

After hitting every store we could think of we did not find the lye, we headed back home to make some phone calls to track down the lye.

Nobody knew what lye was or carried it and the process of trying to get help over the phone was enough to make your blood boil. One place had us on hold forever (6 minutes) and then it turned out the phone was in an employees locker, that is why it took so long for someone to help us!

Lye is sodium chloride which is used in pool chemicals, drain cleaner, to make soap and a number of other things. Apparently it is also used to make meth (seen the movie Fight Club?) so commercial sale has practically been stopped and sales associates have no clue what lye is or which products contain it.

Many products contain Lye (like Draino, which also contains metal shavings) but finding pure lye turned out to be impossible in Phoenix. You can buy lye online but that wasn’t going to help us to make the goats milk soap that day.. So we decided to make the soap another day, when we can order lye online and have it shipped in.

So, we weren’t able to make the soap but we had plenty to keep us busy! I’ll post more about the trip tomorrow, lets just say it involves snakes, chickens and baby chicks.. It is way too much for one post!