What soap/cream did you use today?

Oaken Lab - Far Afield

La Fougère Parfaite 2019 (Wholly Kaw) Brutish
Shave 29 ・ 45% left

Another perfect shave yesterday: no pain, no irritation, and the old wounds are healing. The Koolada synthetic menthol that I added to the lather did no damage, but I have to confess, it didn’t put on much of a chill.

Today I’ll stay with the same kit except for one change, a new brush. (HoosierShave, thanks for the tip.) The Zenith Big Boar is a very heavy instrument. The handle is chrome-plated copper, and the knot from the ferule to the top is 68 mm. It tips the scale at a whopping 121 grams. That’s enough mass to push three grams of stiff soap around the lather bowl without much effort on my part. The brush is new, so it’s still eating lather, but I’m expecting miracles once it’s broken in. And the best thing is, even though the bristles have been plucked from the skanky hide of a pig, the brush doesn’t stink.
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Preshave Ice cube ・ Brush Zenith Big Boar ・ Lather Sori Yanagi Martian bowl & left palm ・ Razor Blackland Blackbird Lite Ti ・ Blade Wizamet (day 4) ・ Passes WTG, XTG ・ Postshave La Fougère Parfaite Toner  ・ Hoard 20,971 g

Spitfire is one of my favorite scents. Leather, motor oil, tobacco, and it hit me that this is about as close a scent as I have to the old Quonset shop on the ranch.  The Quonset was the center of all ranch activity.  It’s where you fixed stuff and stored stuff, and built stuff to keep the wheels on the bus.  We had a lot of horses thus a lot of tack and the tack room was a log structure just north of the Quonset.  Between the leather and horse sweat of that structure and the oil of the shop it whipped me into memory lane.  Spitfire is a nod to the great fighter plane of the Brits. In ‘45 a B-28 Liberator crashed on Mt. Harrison http://www.minicassia.com/news/local/art...78c22.html and only missed clearing the mountain by a couple hundred feet.  Between Harrison, Cache, and Cassia peaks lots of folks have seen a lot of rough events.  I knew Wells Hepworth all my life and Arlo Lloyd was our business partner. His dad added the tobacco to my scent memory.  Anyway, this same country is where a lot of our cow/calves summered which meant we were horseback and in the hills often to keep tabs on them.  In the fall we would bring the cows and calve off the mountain to move to the ranch in Raft River to winter and calve there.  The calves were weaned and pastured/ fed as “feeder cattle” until they were about 600 to 800 lbs at which time they were sold to the feed lot guys to fatten and finish, but some stayed home, and went back to the mountain next summer to fatten not on corn but high meadow grass.  Even then some folks were itching for a grass fed steak and we made sure they had what they wanted.  Now gathering cow/calf pairs isn’t too hard most times.  They are herd animals and when the herd moves so do they but those two year old steers were different and sometimes would take a notion to stay up high.  This fall day was one of those.  We’d started the cows down the cannons but had a bunch of knot headed steers that wanted to stay high.  We were up in very rough country on a ridge between Dry and Green canyons, in among the slide rock fingers and the white pines.  There is a small springs up there and feed was easy, and the breeze kept the bugs off and those old steers would bust out and back around us thwarting our efforts.  So dad posted me on my steed to keep them from going up and around when they tried to drive them again.  Dad, Arlo Lloyd (guy in the article) and another cowboy that I don’t recall now went back to the springs to bunch the steers.  The plan was to get them moving, then get them running and force them down the ridge past the Forest Service Firebox (had tools and such in it) and we figured that once we got them lined out and away from their hidey hole they’d be prone to join the cows in the bottom.  My job was to not let them circle up and around.  I heard the whooping and brush popping and suddenly those nine or ten steers thundered into view.  Sure enough they tried to come up but I came down hard and turned them only to see those silly buggers dive off off the ridge and down a very steep loose slope headed for the bottom of Green canyon. All was not lost and the steers wouldn’t turn and come back up but someone had to get to the bottom so they couldn’t circle back to work up high again.  I’d never seen any cowboy ride that slope but that changed because right behind those steers was my dad. He saw what was happening, spurred his horse Sparky, and they both dove off that edge at a gallop.  He was whooping and throwing blue language at the sky but he wasn’t going to mess with those steers anymore.  It was probably 200 yards of steep, loose country before it met the bottom and I watched a real cowboy do that ride from Snowy River and when he and the steers got to the bottom they realized they were trail broke and started down the canyon with Big John driving them like nothing had happened at all.  The rest of us tipped off into   Dry canyon to drive cattle down to cross creek and out to Stinson.  We madeCross Creek about the time Dad and the steers got there and everything was trailing easy.  Sparky was lathered up for sure though.  After a couple of miles Arlo shouted “hell of a ride John”.  Dad acted like he hadn’t heard a thing.  Sparky got some good oats that evening.  Years later, Dad and I watched Snowy River and I brought up his ride.  He said “hell,, any good cowboy can do it”! But I grew up around a lot of tough cowboys and never saw a ride like that one.tough cowboys and had never, nor seen since, a ride like that one.

Ethos Colonia in F base.
Amazing scent and performance….but…worthy of being rereleased in the new F base.. Dragonsbeard ?

Ethos Colonia in F base.
Amazing scent and performance….but…worthy of being rereleased in the new F base.. Dragonsbeard ?

It's on the to do list my friend and it won't be long.