I'm thinking of selling my homemade lip balm. I would need to add preservative, just to be safe. I read a comparison of products for preserving homemade lotions and balms. The author makes and sells her own natural skincare products, and she basically uses the same techniques and ingredients as I use for mine. So it's the branding that makes you stand out.
My main reason for selling is that I made too much. I only need a couple of tubes for myself, so why not sell the extra? I have no desire to run a lip balm company, but extra money would be nice.
So I'll re-read that article about natural preservatives and choose one to try. Then I'll have to find a place that sells it. Then I'll order that plus more empty lip balm tubes. I couldn't find any tubes when I checked the store downtown last week.
The current batch is made with calendula-infused grapeseed oil, and the older batch contains comfrey-infused olive oil. I'm still trying to decide if one works better than the other. I use at least one of them every day. Oh, and I need to design a label. I know how to do that in Gimp. I might use different paper for printing. The label paper works fine for jars, but I don't know how well it would curl around a tube.
I was going to say a bunch of stuff about my year, provide a nice little summary. But here's the most important part: I wrote a list of things to do, and I'm doing them. That's a big deal for me. And I don't mean little things like "buy more soap." This is a list of the stuff I've procrastinated for the past 10 weeks or longer, according to my morning pages. This is stuff I do NOT feel like doing. Yet here I am doing one item each day, just a little bit, day after day until it is done. Then I move on to the next thing.
It is painful.
I still don't know WTF is wrong with me. Why do I get so stressed just from living life? I guess moving on from my old life is hard.
I keep having dreams about moving somewhere new. In one dream, I'm on an old, crowded bus. People I know from my childhood come and go. I don't know how much longer it will be to get to my stop. I'm on my way to look at a place I'm thinking of moving to. I know it won't be very nice, but I want to look anyway. The dream ends before I reach my stop.
In another dream, I'm in an apartment building. I'm in the hallway looking into a small, empty room with white walls. An old friend from university is standing there, showing it to me. I'm telling him that it's smaller than I thought. "I don't know why I thought this would be big enough for both me and H," I'm telling him. He nods in agreement, making it clear that he didn't know what I was thinking, either.
Some of my dreams have me trapped in a house or room that I'm trying to escape. In the latest one I remember, I'm in H's family's house. It's not their house in real life, but it is in the dream. I'm sneaking up and down the stairs and trying to get out without anyone seeing me. I feel dread. Nobody sees me, and I wake up before I find a way out.
My brain is telling me something. It's probably something obvious. Maybe that I need to keep moving forward, otherwise I'm stuck in limbo.
Okay, that's it. I don't know if this is depressing news or good news. A bit of both, I think. Thanks for reading.