beetiger

I indulged in a bit of retail therapy today and bought myself an electric tart warmer today, because scented tarts seem to keep showing up at my house and I feel silly taking a piece of scented wax and melting it with a flame from a piece of unscented wax.

The unit, of course, came with instructions. They read like a mutant ee cummings poem. This is what they say:

HOW to Use

(at no time should water, chemicals, or oil ever be used),

and then turn on the switch, the scent will be emit from scent wax.

This appliance is intended to heat scent wax only. These can be used for a tart as well.

DO NOT PUT ANYTHING ELSE OTHER THAN

I was at my safe deposit box today, pulling some papers I'll need for renewing passports in order to take a trip to Florence this summer. There was an envelope in there which I'd kinda tossed in with my important papers, after my mother had tossed it at me at my father's funeral, a decade ago.

In it are a bunch of US savings bonds, mostly dated 1968 and 1969, totalling about $1000 face value. They're E bonds, with a seven-year maturity. (There's also a EE bond I seem to have won as a prize in high school, and one someone gave me as an engagement gift I think, but I'm pretty sure those keep earning interest for 30 years and I should leave them alone.) I kind of feel like I should cash the ones from the sixties out, as I've already managed to make my way through college, and although I'm sure that in some sense this is a very secure way to keep a little financial insurance pillow, it just seems kind of silly to have them sitting there.

So, how do I do this? Can I just take them to a local bank, endorse them, and have them figure out what kind of interest there may or may not have been accruing over the last 39 years or so? Do I need to go to some government office or other? Is there any chance that these have expired and are worthless or something?

I know, I know, I could probably just google this. But I feel like talking to you.

Could you please stop responding to the news that we are taking a trip to Orlando by immediately smiling at my son and asking him about seeing Mickey Mouse? I don't even know if we're going to the Magic Kingdom while we're out there. But even if we do, we're mostly going to Florida to see people we love, not a large corporate icon. And to enjoy weather more pleasant than the godawful howling wind freezy stuff we've got here right now.

You can ask him about the plane though. He's very excited about the plane.

Do any of you know of a facility where you can rent use of a hot tub for yourself and a few friends in the NYC metro area, something along the lines of Urban Oasis in Boston or East Heaven in Northhampton? It seems bizarre that that shouldn't exist around here, but I don't seem to be able to find anything.

There was a new update at Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab today, and I found myself with no desire to order any of the scents, or even to join any of the decant circles people are running. I don't know if this obsession is just running its cycle -- it's been just over a year since I got into perfume, and that's a typical range of time for me to run through an obsession like this -- or if I'm just overwhelmed with the amount of stuff I've already got here, and just don't want to spend money piling on top of it. I've not made my way through the samples from the last two large decant circles I ran, and I've got over 100 General Catalogue scents I need to work my way through. I have to admit that for the last two decant circles I ran, I was much more into physically doing the decants and making other people happy than I was into actually testing the perfumes myself. Or it may just be that I'm stuffy and hormonal, so it's kind of hard to smell things.

I'm still enjoying wearing the perfumes in general, though. Putting them on has become a regular part of my self-care routine that I enjoy a lot. I'm just finding myself dropping out of collector mode. On the other hand, I'm currently signed up for a birthday swap and a Switch Witch swap in the BPAL communities, so I suspect that I'll either get reinspired and/or the lucky ladies matched up to me will get big piles of stuff from my collection.

I tried on the scent Eden from the General Catalog today, since I've been pretty into fig scents lately. It went on very sweet, on the border of cloying, but settled into a nice brown fruit scent with a bit of toasted nut, which I guess I liked. I can't imagine choosing it over either Hetairae or cb i hate perfume's revelation, though.

What are your favorite and least favorite notes for perfume?
This one's easy, since I've been doing questionnaires for BPAL swaps recently. My favorite notes include amber, woods, brown spices, jasmine, honey, fig, smoke, grass, and rain. My dreaded notes include cherry/almond (though I love it in food), vetiver, most heavier florals, lotus, and lemon. The BPAL dragon's blood (see cherry) and ice/snow notes are hideous on me, though I've liked that kind of thing elsewhere.


Oh, and ambergris. I know, I know, both commercial amber and commercial ambergris are complex bouquets or synthetics, trying to approximate kind of similar things. Still, whenever something is billed as ambergris, it gives me a headache. This is actually pretty unfortunate as ambergris bouquet is a major component of a lot of the magical oils in the Tradition I belong to.


Is there any material you wish you could work with in incense, but can't?
Pretty much any floral ingredients. Generally, burning flowers does not equal something that smells like flowers. Some of them can be used in incense in essential oil, absolute, or concrete form, but it's expensive and not really a good use of the oils compared to throwing them in a oil burner or in perfume. And of course, some of the most beautiful flowers in the world, like lilacs, can't really be extracted well at all.


If you were given $10,000 and let loose in an typical art supplies store with the single restriction that everything you buy would have to be used in a single project, what project would you do?
Depends if I can cheat and only use some of the money for supplies, and some of the money to set up the rest of the project. :P I'd love to paint rocks along the coast of one of the Greek Islands, or to sponsor a one-shot art program for an underprivleged group of kids in New York City. And if the "typical" art store could instead be someplace like Metalliferous, I'd probably buy myself a metal kiln and somehow figure how to make myself some sort of an idol in semiprecious gems and silver. But if we're talking buy out A.C. Moore, don't get given a lot of extra resources elsewise, and go for it? Buy whatever the most expensive piece of equipment they had in stock was – a kiln, a lathe, whatever – and learn how to use it to make some kind of full-body adornment for myself.


If you had the option to live in a naturist colony, would you?
I think I would, if only because I'm actually really craving more of a communal living situation in general than I have right now. I'd like to live in a place where there was an opportunity to be social available just by walking into a shared space. I haven't had that since college, and I miss it a lot. I've hung out with a lot of nudists in the past year or so, and much as I really like running around without clothes, it still feels like a silly sort of thing to be passionate about. But if it were otherwise a functional community, it had a critical mass of kids in it, and if it could work with the rest of my life, it would definitely have some appeal.


In your opinion (not necessarily from experience) what is the single most important thing to keep in mind when dealing with nonhuman sentience?
I'd think that especially if you're talking about something limited in scope, like a spirit guide, dragon, faery, or angel, but even if you're dealing with something big like a godform or archetype, the most important thing to remember is that everyone has an agenda, and that their persepctive may be so different than yours that it may be really unclear to you what that agenda is. But you need to take information and advice or evaluate behavior from them through the same kind of filters you'd use when dealing with a human being, not take it as something somehow perfect or unbiased because it may come from a realm in which you don't live in the everyday.

(I'm not super into asking other people questions, but if you want some, please comment. I'm willing to do my part if you need the focus the way I do.)

( Body Heat (Day 8) ) We came home to a nonfunctional oil burner and a 37 degree house, right around bedtime. I cuddled my son to sleep in my bed, which took a long time.

Solar energy for the price of your regular utility bill?

-Ignoring for the moment the fact that this is a startup that may or may not be able to do what they promise,

-Understanding that if I actually put in my own solar panels, it would be free to get energy and I wouldn't be kind-of-arbitrarily paying the price my local utility charges,

-Acknowledging that this means I'm paying for the energy my house makes, semi-unrelated to the amount of energy I end up using,

-And recognizing that this would probably make my house uglier and harder to sell to a mainstream family, and not in fact save me money, just make me feel a little better about my footprint on the environment...

....am I missing something else, or does this look like it might be worth doing?