Lemon Sugar Hand Scrub

Today I tried out a sugar hand scrub recipe I have been meaning to try since I bought my mason jars a while ago. This would make for a great quick and simple gift! I love it! I think next time I might substitute sunflower oil or almond oil for olive oil, however, because those oils don't smell as strong as olive oil. I quartered the recipe so it would fit into an 8 oz jar, but I will provide the full recipe, which fills a 12 oz jar with a little left over to try out when you're done!

2 1/2 cups granulated white sugar

1 cup olive oil (or substitute)

4 tablespoons lemon juice

That's it!

Mix it together until you have a gritty paste, and store it in a jar with a sealing lid. Mason jars work perfectly, and they're really cute. Your hands feel kind of oily at first, but it all sinks in and they feel great when you go to wash it off. If you let your scrub sit in the jar for a while, you may need to re-stir it as the sugar may settle. I found a brown sugar body scrub recipe that I want to try, but I'm not sure how I feel about putting it down my shower drain--will it clog after a while? I think no, but I don't want to find out the hard way. Besides, my almond oil is still in shipping and it calls for something other than olive oil, which is all I have at present (only an ounce of almond oil left from the lotion bars, so...).

Today I went down to Harvard Sq. to get some small 4oz jam-sized mason jars and to see if they have jar lifters and other canning stuff (they sell a ton of mason jars and kitchen stuff so I'm sure they'll have something I can use). I got the idea to can a little bit ago and I really want to try it! There are recipes out there for homemade jam that goes in the fridge, but I really want to try the water bath and preserve it, both because that will be exciting and because we don't go through a lot of jam in a month and I don't want it to spoil. There is a way you can make a small batch of jam that doesn't require pectin and 15 million cups of sugar, and you can use an electric skillet to make it, too. I also found several different recipes for apple butter (such a fall-ish thing to make!) that I want to try, and those can be made in a crock pot and preserved as well. Apparently you can can all sorts of things, even meat. I just dont feel good about meat that comes from a can, though, so I have no plans to experiment down that avenue.  

In other news, yesterday evening Josh finally got the email he has been waiting for from the law school about his class schedule! He will be taking the typical 1L classes: Civil Procedure, Legislation and Regulation, Torts, First-year Legal Research and Writing, and Contracts. He doesn't get to choose from the "fun" classes until next year. I'm glad Josh thinks that this is fascinating and exciting because I might just be bored out of my mind. It's times like this that I am reminded of how deeply saddened I am that I couldn't attend the masters in counseling psych program I had gotten into. Masters students at Northeastern aren't funded at all, so it would've ended up costing $90,000 when all was said and done, on top of Josh's law school costs. The intensely practical part of me (which is most of me) just couldn't justify the cost when I knew that I could get the exact same degree back home for 1/4 of the price. In the end I know I made the right decision, as hard as it was to make. 

So here I am! Still looking for a job (I've decided to apply to at least two a day every day), and in the meantime I'm having fun making and doing whatever I want all day every day! After spending my first week here in Boston sitting in front of the TV, I decided I better learn to do something new before lobes of my brain start to rot off (I've already lost significant tissue sitting through BIO 100 last year--complete waste of time). I'm thinking after canning jam and apple butter my next project will be crocheting. I found a thing on Pinterest that is a detailed multi-page book on how to crochet. If I have the patience to learn complicated photo-editing software without guidance, I'm sure I can figure out how to crochet (although admittedly my spatial reasoning skills are nothing to write home about, so we'll see).