Today is washing day.  I have a big pail full of gooey gloopy detergent.  It doesn't look smooth like the grocery store stuff.  But I hear that's normal.

I've been planning to make detergent for a couple of years.  This year I've easily spent over $40 for it in the store.  I kept not making my own because it seemed like trouble, I worried I couldn't do it right, and I didn't know how.   I can't tell you how easy it is.  Its moronically easy.  Its laughable.  And it makes me question, yet again, what other foolish things I've been doing, or not doing, my whole life just because that's the way its always been done.  (Always, meaning in the last two generations.)

It makes me question yet again, how many things I don't, haven't, and won't do just because I'm reflexively afraid to fail, learn, or try.  And this is laundry detergent.  Laundry detergent, Liz Lemmon!

For the last six months I've put off making my own detergent because I didn't have a nice five gallon bucket like all the successful detergent making people seem to have.   Please review:  I didn't make my own detergent because I didn't have The Right Bucket.  It was only after typing that out:  I'm waiting to make my own until I get The Right Bucket, that God or my psyche or basic common sense finally broke through my 13 years of school training, fear of failure, certainty that experts are important, perfectionism, and belief in expensive tools.

I have a laundry bucket.  I used that.  It worked fine.  I slapped a plastic plate on the top for a lid.  After I decant the soap back into all the plastic five dollar detergent jugs I've been saving, I'll fill the bucket with warm water and mop my floor.

My recycling bin will no longer house plastic laundry detergent containers.  Its getting lonely in there, what with all the missing plastic milk jugs.  Pretty soon there will only be wine bottles to recycle.   Hey....wait a minute...  Nah, I'll always shell out for a good spicy Shiraz or Cabernet.   Glass is perfectly recyclable, after all.