theora

I don't remember how when I heard about Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab (aka BPAL). I've never been a perfume wearer; in fact I've been generally anti-fragrance for most of my life. But when you go to their website, everything sounds so interesting and mysterious and potentially delightful that you think (well, I think), "I want to smell like that," or even just, "I want to know what that smells like."

So last year, having finished up 7 or so years or so of being pregnant and/or nursing, I ordered a few imps (samples). And this is a thing that draws you in, not so much because everything smelled wonderful, but because most things *didn't*, but many had elements I liked, and one I loved but not for everyday wear, and it became a problem to be solved. Which are the elements that work for me, and which make me want to puke? What *is* that part of the scent that I like and can I find one that has more of it and less of the stuff I don't? WTF is orris root, anyway? Is there a 'perfect' scent out there for me and how do I find it? And because BPAL makes approximately eleventy billion different perfumes, not including the limited editions, it becomes a whole research project.

Which is how I've spent significant hours over the past few weeks reading people's descriptions of how things smell. Which is on the one hand fascinating in itself, how people perceive and/or manifest smells and the language they use to describe them, and what patterns of preference you can put together; but on the other hand, singularly useless, since people perceive the same scents wildly differently (even the same individual from day to day), and words proxy badly for sensory experiences, anyway. The only way to know is to smell it for yourself, on yourself.

But it's helped me put together a short(ish) list of the next things I want to try. I'm a bit bemused that this is something I'm putting effort into, but there it is.

I aten't dead, and all that. Think I last posted over a year ago. Was a difficult year and continues difficult. But the garden carries on.


Eastern red columbine. I look forward to this every year.
( More )

There's still snow in the garden (this time last year I was planting peas!), but but but...



( More under the cut )

Over Labor Day we visited my parents in Maine and I took some pictures of their garden.



( Several more under cut )

While we were visiting, I spotted a fritillary (butterfly) nectaring on some goldenrod, and my mom was pretty blasé about it. I couldn't afford to be: fritillaries don't visit our part of Massachusetts anymore. There were masses of bees, enough that you could hear a sort of group buzz from a good ways off - that is, a normal number of bees on a nectar-rich planting. At home, I'm pleased if I spot more than a couple of bees at a time, even though I've made a point of planting native plants that are especially attractive to them. I've planted three kinds of milkweed and never had a single monarch caterpillar; my parents let two self-seeded plants grow and had several (last year, not this year when the monarch numbers have crashed frighteningly). The only butterfly I see regularly is the (non-native) cabbage white.

Even though there is a lot I don't enjoy about visiting my parents, it is hard to come back here sometimes. I'm constantly aware of living in a degraded habitat, and that's no happy feeling.

Once again, come fall and back-to-school, I feel the pull to read Greek. Grabbed Selections from Herodotus off the shelf (with a glossary in the back, thank you very much), and we shall see how far I get with it.

Ἡροδότου Ἁλικαρνησσέος ἱστορίης ἀπόδεξις ἥδε, ὡς μήτε τὰ γενόμενα ἐξ ἀνθρώπων τῷ χρόνῳ ἐξίτηλα γένηται, μήτε ἔργα μεγάλα τε καὶ θωμαστά, τὰ μὲν Ἕλλησι τὰ δὲ βαρβάροισι ἀποδεχθέντα, ἀκλεᾶ γένηται, τά τε ἄλλα καὶ δι᾽ ἣν αἰτίην ἐπολέμησαν ἀλλήλοισι.[translation]

I recently had a chance to visit Bigelow Prairie Cemetery in central Ohio. It's an old pioneer cemetery where the indigenous prairie plants have survived. It's totally surrounded by farmland in cultivation since the 1800s, now corn and soy fields (I'm guessing GMO round-up ready stuff at that), so the cemetery is one of a very few places where the native vegetation survives.

The place was mad with life. Butterflies (sulphurs, painted ladies, pearl crescents, and several others I couldn't identify), bees and wasps, spiders, beetles, hummingbirds - wherever I walked I caused a commotion of living things. I wouldn't have thought that a half acre would be enough to sustain so much life, and maybe it doesn't. But I'm not sure where else they could be going for food in the surrounding ocean of monoculture fields.

Unfortunately my pictures don't do it justice; my camera likes to wash out detail in bright light. Such as they are:

( Bugs, butterflies, and prairie plants )

Flipping through yet another holiday catalog featuring festive fair isle sweaters modeled in snowy winter backdrops, it occurred to me that catalog makers must believe cold weather imagery has sufficient appeal all over the country that it's worth loading their Christmas catalogs up with picture after picture of it. Unless, of course, they send out different catalogs to the parts of the country where it doesn't really get cold or snow, which I doubt. I just don't get how pictures of weather which isn't yours would be appealing. But then I'm also bewildered by Christmas decorations involving fake snow and snowflakes in warm places, and actually find them rather upsetting. So this is probably just another way in which I am weird.

The further upsetting thing is that winters in New England are getting warmer and warmer. I don't know how much longer I'll be entitled to the wintry stuff myself.

Hah. Reading back, what I should really be grateful for is parentheses.

(Am keeping up with this offline, will catch up with the posting eventually.)

I am grateful for my house. First, for the most fundamental reason that it means I'm not homeless (something I've never experienced, not even the threat of it, which means I'm luckier than most people on the planet). But also, I love my house. I have very mixed feelings about its location and would prefer if it were sited in the middle of 100 acres of meadow and woods. But the house itself I really like. It's a cute house. It has a pink bathroom. It's a basic cape that's very much of its era (1949). It has the original kitchen, which, if we stay long term, we may someday replace for functionality's sake. But if we do, we'll try to retain the original feel. And keep the curly valance:

( curly valance )

I'm also very partial to this view:

( from the kitchen sink to the fireplace )

The house has a center stair, giving it a racetrack for rainy day toddler energy dissipation.

And, although I said I'd rather live in the middle of the woods, I'm still lucky to see this when I look up from my back door:

( trees )

I'm grateful for the Perseus Project, which is quite possibly the first website I ever visited. When I was in college circa 1995, one of my profs told us about this place you could find on the computer that had most/all Greek literature in the original - and most importantly, you could click on the words and get the definition! (Vocab was not and is not my strong suit.)

Nowadays I'm not reading Greek for grades. But still, a couple of times a year I'll get an urge to go read some Greek (usually the Iliad). Perseus makes that very easy, without having to manage both the text and the lexicon (remember, bad at vocab: I have to look up every other word). And one of these days maybe I'll manage to make a routine out of reading a few lines a day. Having Perseus available makes that far more likely than it otherwise would be.

(Though when I read on the computer, I miss the fonts. There are some really lovely Greek fonts.)