Two vexing problems:
1. I've produced lye (for soap) several times, the lye shows up in the stocks screen, but is not in my lye only stockpile. The latest attempt to produce lye resulted in 3 buckets inside the ashery that were TSK:ed, but are no longer. The soapery insists that it cannot make soap (red), but I have managed to actually produce two bars earlier (ran out of buckets in the lyemaking for more at that time), and I haven't rebuilt. Initially I also had problems getting the soap making task, but eventually I managed to get it going. I've got tallow, prohibited from cooking, and have set my food setting to not mix foods.
Is there any way I can find where the 18 units of lye not locked into the ashery are located? The stocks screen does not let me zoom to it, and the enhanced (DFHack enabled, I believe) one claims I only have 3 units (which should be the ones locked away in the ashery). Looking at every barrel in my regular food stockpiles (whose settings I've checked and rechecked) is not an enjoyable task, since I've seriously overproduced booze (more than 5000 units for a 50 dorf fortress. Note to self: DON'T mark the whole embark area for plant collection).
2. Half a year ago my dorf dropped his clothing on the building site for a door (as they tend to do), and I also relieved an undead invasion force of their belongings with mass pitting related dump orders (they were caught in cages) soon after that. Now I have finally reached the end of the dump list, EXCEPT this last infuriating item (well, actually another one as well, but that one is expendable [this one is as well. If there was a burn and destroy option I'd gladly use it]). The dorfs have removed all the other 8 articles of clothing dropped at the same time. It supposedly is possible to bump up job priorities with later DF versions (I'm on 0.40.23), but while I can look at the job, trying to set the priority to 'top' probably didn't do anything. I also had some building jobs that were abandoned, in that the dorfs rather did nothing than finishing them, but I've taken care of that by cancelling those jobs and replacing them with new ones, which were promptly acted upon (I had deliberately refrained from ordering anything else built, so the available queue was empty).