I'm a very rational person; All my mental processes are mathematical.

Men in military uniform + babies and/or small animals = I die.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Of course this one always wins out as my favorite, with or without a kitten:

Some kind of perfect storm

So I may have been inspired to discover a great new thing. Here are the contributing factors:

1. When Charles' job doesn't have him in a coal mine, it has him in a man-run (ie, never thoroughly cleaned) metalworking shop. He comes home in varying degrees of filthy 5 -7 days a week.

2. Removing said filth requires lots of soap and lots of scrubbing

3. Ergo, in our house, we go through soap/bodywash like it's going out of style. Seriously.

Edit: 3a. Coal dust is so infectious that even the process of removing it turns bars of soap downright gross after just one use.

This leads to the first piece of inspiration:
4. It's a whole lot more cost efficient to turn bar soap into body wash than buying pre-liquified shower soap.

(I used the above-linked recipe for general proportions).

So I nab a bottle of glycerin & a bar of Yardley Oatmeal & Almond and get to making my giant pot of soap-snot. Using a food processor to grind up your soap makes the whole process take just a few minutes. Yay!

5. I could have quit at this point, but now the oatey-almondey smell has been diluted away (something to do with that 10 cups of water), and my finished product smells... not-that-great.

6. I found in my cabinets part of a container of rolled oats that was Best Before August 2011 and an open bag of almonds Best Before August 2010.

Clearly we're not doing much oatmeal or almond consumption round here.

Cut to the chase:

Ground up almonds, ground up rolled oats, some steel-cut oats for texture (they don't really grind), and a splash of homemade vanilla extract turned kind-of-gross feeling Soap-Snot into Aesthetically Appealing, Almond-Oatmeal Exfoliating Body Wash.

I figure this gallon-ish of soap will last us a few minutes.

In the meantime, I need to figure out how I'll spice up the next round I make with a bar of Yardley English Lavender....