Day 1

Got in last night, blew up the air mattress, and slept on the floor in the living room. That's SOP for me, in Florida, since the business takes up the second bedroom of my mom's apartment.

The only problem with sleeping in the living room is that my mom gets up at 5am to walk her dog, and makes enough racket to wake up the corpses that live under the complex here. Remember Poltergeist? Yeah, this place used to be a cemetery, but they didn't move the bodies.

Woke up this morning and greeted a friend of my mom's, who was here for 4 hours to help wrap soap. We were making the Gift Baskets today... it's a lot of soap, a lot of wrapping. We were lucky to have her help.

So, here's what happens when we make baskets. First, we have these cute metal pails, and we fill them with some paper filler.



We did this while the soaps were getting wrapped.



After wrapping, my mom put in shred...



Then my mom started placing them in the buckets...



... and then wrapped them in colorful wrapping, with a ribbon.



That is the Gentlemen's Club gift basket. It has six different soaps, in brand new fragrances: Dragon's Blood, Cool Water, Indian Musk, Vetiver, Issey Miyake, Nag Champa.

Should be a great selection of soaps for the guy in your life!

We went to lunch shortly after, at Boston Market. Wow. I deal with food preparers RARELY in NYC. Karen and I try and cook as much as possible. The people at the Tampa Boston Market were simply awesome, and the manager was an amazing upseller. They even brought our food to our tables, which is brand new. The only issue I had was that they were basically serving food, and were not allowed to accept tips. That's not right. Shame, Boston Market. Those people were busting their ass BEFORE this new situation. Now you have them doing more work, for the same money. Not cool.

Back home. Doing a second gift basket... this time, Sugar Rush, the basket we made for kids, and, you know, everyone who loves sweets. Let's see...



Those are the bars. The fragrances coming from these bars was nuts.

Bubble Gum, Caramel Apple, Cherry Cola, Chocolate Chip Cookies, Snickerdoodle (cinnamon sugar cookie), Marshmallow. Yeah, they're as good as they sound.

Here's another angle, just cooler.



All in all, it was a good day. We did 16 of each basket. That's all we're making, this holiday season. Once they're gone, they're gone. The reason is, the molds for our sample sizes makes 16 bars.

That's about it, for today. Tomorrow I'm making a red, white, and blue soap to sell between now and Christmas. It will be called Soapert... for Colbert. $1 from each bar sold will be donated to donorschoose.org. I'll have pictures on Monday, once we fix it.

Oh, and it's gonna smell like apple pie. Yeah.