beetiger

I just finished packing off my contribution for the Holiday Sampler -- 105 candy cane ornaments made out of peppermint, amber, and sandalwood incense! (The red color in the stripes comes from hibiscus powder.) And I even made flaming elf clip art for the package! I'm trying to be good about documenting these things before they go out, so here:

Wind lifts leaves, red, yellow
Northeast living's best reward
Except it's damned cold.


Thank you thank you.

There's one more pot of ratty little apples from the tree in the yard boiling on the stove, while the little guy naps. He convinced me to let him take one more look in the yard for fallen apples from the tree that were worth keeping, though I was pretty sure they were all done. "Mama lookin' in the tree okay some apples maybe not too buggy yes okay?" We dug together in the pile of yellow wetness that our giant maple has strewn all over the lawn, and sure enough, some of the very nicest fruit, from the top of the tree where I couldn't even reach it with the apple pole and a ladder, had come down there. But most of what was there got left on the ground -- insect-eaten and deer-eaten or just beginning to rot. Winter has begun.

My little dragon/Godzilla will be waking up soon, and we'll be going raiding the neighbors' houses for sweets. I'm only taking him as far as he wants to walk on his own, so I suspect we won't get far past next door and across the street.

Many blessings on all of you.

I actually got organized this month and took a picture of my November Sampler contribution before it went out. Little incense leaves, made out of a wonderful blend that smells like baking indoors while burning a leaf pile in the backyard. It's got: cassia, nutmeg, red cedar, port orford cedar, clove, oak bark, dragon's blood, and sage. I ended up making nearly 100 of these, which makes me happy. I hope people burn them; the shapes are fun, but the real craft is in the scents.

I also threw a few packets of the loose incense I made for Mabon in there, because it was amazing and I had extra and I'm sure I'll want to experiment again when the time comes around next year rather than use this years stuff. It's got a lot of the ingredients above, plus a bunch of chamomile e.o. because that reminds me of apples, and the whole thing was aged with a little single-malt scotch in it. :) Rich!

( Picture! )

I'm a little nervous because I sent it to Marie Friday, and she hasn't got it yet, but the official deadline isn't until tomorrow.

I need to make some more of these, since it looks like I'll be doing a witchy show in November after all, as well as more of the incense snakes. Working on my top-secret 'trib for December/January too, but I'm not going to share until I am sure it will work, and it's not what I want in the first two rounds.

...is by taking one step away from the path you've been on. I just found exactly the kinds of incense charcoal tongs I've been looking for for the Mother's Hearth site. No one seemed to sell what I needed, even though it was a really obvious and practical tool. I found ones designed for incense ceremony, but those are gold plated and fancy and expensive.

I'm not sure how I came up with the idea to start looking at vendors of hookah supplies, but I've found what I want, together with a new source of saltpeter-free charcoal. Woo.

I think I've figured out what my parenting style is.

Wimptachment parenting.

Half the night fighting with the toddler bed, barring the door; half the night cuddled up with mom and dad.
I'm home all day with my little guy, but I've still developed a son who is obsessed with television.
I'm still thinking about kid-led weaning, but I kind of keep hoping he'll wean really soon now.
Some days, I serve organic vegetables from the farmshare with chicken nuggets from the freezer.

At least I still really like my cloth diapers.

These whining fits aren't really big. They're as small as peas.

There was a little "parents' night" at Rhys' preschool this evening, a chance to meet the teachers and hear the school's philosophy and review the kids' schedule and tell us how sweet the kids are and such.

A rather large part of the discussion centered around procedures should there be an emergency at Indian Point, our friendly neighborhood nuclear reactor. They handed us forms to fill out telling them whether or not they had permission to give our child potassium iodide.

Apparently the county's idiotic evacuation plan consists of sending buses from about half an hour south to pick up the kids, and then driving them to a school about another 20 minutes away in the other direction. The school plans to call us to get the kids in case of emergency and not use the official plan except if someone gets left behind.

I hate that I have to worry about this kind of thing. I hate that it's a sensible plan to just ignore the government plan. There's an "emergency evacuation" bus stop about a mile and a half from my house, on the route from there to most places. I laugh every time I notice it, because I can't imagine anyone in this suburban commuter town waiting for a bus there, while the sirens were blazing.

They do a test of the evacuation of the big building this preschool uses (not the one Rhys is in, the one where they hold the full-day program) every year, and apparently they can empty the place in 40 seconds. If they can teach Rhys to go anywhere with that kind of efficiency in the next few months, I'll be very impressed.

I need to start working on the chaos in my living room soon. One of the biggest lessons in preschool is how to clean up after yourself and put things away promptly, and I'm just not teaching that one at home right now.

I'm working with the fine folks over at Crafters United to offer a deluxe incense gift set for Hurricane relief. You can find it at this link.

If you're in the market for handcrafted items for holiday stuff, the selection at this benefit site is absolutely astounding, in pretty much every price range.

I just dropped Rhys off at his first day at preschool. It's only about an hour today, with half the kids and both the teachers. It's a bright little one-room schoolhouse in the back of the Quaker meeting. He looked at the hamsters and played with play-doh, and then I kissed him goodbye and headed off, and as I closed the door behind me he started wailing. It was the "this as not on my agenda" cry rather than the "I'm terrified" cry, so I think he'll be okay. I got weepy in the parking lot, though. The school's only about a 5 minute drive from here, so I think longer term this is going to be a good thing. Some structured stuff for him, a little chance for me to do some things.

I mailed out all of the scarves that people have ordered so far for the Katrina relief benefit. Apparently silk puffs up, and that made the envelopes "non-machinable", so they cost an extra 0.12 to mail.

(Still want one?)

I picked up a perfectly intact Little Tikes Coupe Car from the curb, on the way back from the school. Yay!

That's all, for now.

Usually people at the local playgrounds are civil, if vague to each other. The kids play, people come and go, they chat about the kids talking and walking and when they go to bed and things like that.

But yesterday I saw my first big fight between two moms. A stereotypical "soccer mom" type and her two boys were playing in the park with us, the usual, when a rambunctious clan of kids,all with long hair (boys and girls) some of which were really too old for that section of the park, came barreling in. The two moms nearby looked rather "not from around here": big bleached blond hair, tight T-shirts and shorts, a stereotypical "white trash" kind of look. The two and a half year old girl with them was topless.The first mom commented on it to me negatively, and I responded that sometimes we all wish we could get away with that, it this weather, but that I heard her on thinking it might not be appropriate.

They jumped around boisterously for a while, and then the large group of kids headed to the upper (big kids) section of the park. Rhys followed them, fascinated, even though we never go up there, and he jumped with them on the seesaws and climbed the way too big slide and was just enthralled. Turns out they were homeschooling families, and the kids were actually very sweet and careful with Rhys. But apparently, they'd "terrorrized" the two boys from the first family, and the mom had told them to "Get the hell away from my kids" and "Don't touch my boys".

Rhys chased them all around the tennis courts and the adult exercise bars too. The little girl nursed a lot, and never put her clothes back on, had lost the shirt somewhere earlier in the day. I liked them, even if I couldn't figure out whether they were fundamentalist homeschoolers or hippie ones. They were fun to talk to, though, and gentle. One of their shirts said "WISDOM" on it. (Rhys was wearing a Witchlet shirt.)

By the end of the afternoon, the older longhaired boys were growling playfully at the military-groomed ones, and the latter were mock screaming but not actually afraid anymore, while both sets of moms told them to get away from each other.

I'm not sure either of the families was really my style, but I found it really refreshing to see someone so different in style at our playground. We freaks are out there, somewhere.