(no subject)

Reading Material:	Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico by Stanley Crawford
	Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won't Eat Meat by Howard F. Lyman
	The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls by Joan Brumberg
	+ asst. romance novels and children's books

It's almost the new year and I'm... setting up a birth tub in Eureka. Poor lady, by the time I got there her labor had petered out again. She seemed rather frustrated with the business and I can't blame her. This is the lady that gave us a heads up a couple of weeks ago 'cause she thought she might be in labor. So far, my birth tub deliveries have made me grateful for my own birth experience. I wish someone had told these poor people to exercise. Real, weight-bearing exercise. No water maternity yoga. Labor is, well, labor. Of the physical variety.

I looked up some recipes for bathtub paint and found a few recipes that involved grating a bar of soap and adding water and food coloring to make 'soap paint'. I found this was a pain in the butt and ultimately ineffective for my purposes, though somewhat fun in a messy sort of way. I got the cheap stuff from Rite Aid for my experiment. Generally the generic brands don't test on animals. Then I was remembering something I read in the Mad Cowboy book about how the fat that is separated out at rendering plants is generally used in soaps and cosmetics among other things. I looked at the label and, sure enough, sodium tallowate. Ew. Nevertheless, I find it grotesquely appropriate that the average, oblivious Joe washes themselves 'clean' with the rendered flesh of their unwanted pets, road kills, worn out dairy cows, and the few diseased animals that were actually culled out of meat production.