This ‘N That

First off, I can’t believe that it was the 10th Anniversary of 9/11 this week. I would love to visit the memorial at Ground Zero in New York; the pictures I saw of it were wonderful. It looks like a powerful reminder of the lives that were lost that day ten years ago.

I’m afraid that some of the other memorials out there aren’t as successful.

We had a dedication of our own 9/11 memorial that included a beam from the WTC. That beam is very moving: seeing solid steel twisted like taffy brings it home. Seeing lookouts on the (former) MCA Building across the street and sharpshooters on the roof of the library reminded me that it’s a post 9/11 world.

I lived in New York for a while and I could see the twin towers from my front windows. I remember that pretty much from any subway stop below 42nd street, I knew that I could find due South by looking for their mass. It’s still weird to go there and not see them.

I’ll talk more about them at my blog and not natter on here about them. If you’re interested, click through.

The weather: last week was beastly hot (and there’s going to be on more if history repeats itself) but we’ve tipped the scales and are into autumn. The days are getting shorter and the evenings cooler. I know, I know you’re all thinking “cry me a river, bub” since we’re rather lightly touched by winter. But I still find myself gravitating towards heavier scents. The Montales and the crazier Uncle Serges tend to come out. What are you reaching for these days?

Speaking of Uncle Serge, Octavian at 1000 Fragrances states that De Profundis is the swan song of the redoubtable Mssr. Lutens.

If that’s the truth, I don’t quite know what to do with that news. So many of his scents are ones that I never want to be without, yet I always thought that the treadmill of 4 new scents a year was crazy. While I don’t exactly mourn the idea that there will be no other Vitriol d’oeilett that fact there there might not be a new Serge Noire sucks..

(edit) a Facebook post by my scent twin, The Non-Blonde states that there will be a March release, as she was told by the manager of the Paris boutique. I’m glad that those two won’t be the coda..

And finally, my life is being controlled by a three dollar piece of plastic. If you have a Honda or Acura, yours might soon too. On Memorial Day Sunday I came home and parked the car and noticed that the brake lights were on. After much head-scratching I ended up pulling the fuse that controls those lights and hit the internets. Here’s how the brake lights work on Honda/Acura: when you’re driving the car the brake pedal compresses a small switch like a doorbell. When you press the brake pedal, the switch releases turning on the brake lights. For some reason only known to Honda, they decided that bare metal touching this switch is unacceptable.  They drilled it out, filling the hole with a plastic plug. One that fails. So I had to take time off from work and get the little plastic doohickey. After much swearing and straining, I managed to get it in.

But better yet, they also decided that they needed to have one on the clutch: basically the same idea in reverse.  when you depress the clutch the top of the pedal presses the doorbell switch that tells the car that it’s okay to to crank the starter.  The little annoying plastic bastage broke this weekend.  I found the corpse in the footwell and AAA had to push-start the car so I could get it home.  So it was another trip to Honda of Hollywood and now I’m going to have to figure out how to put it in without A) breaking fingers, B) entirely disassembling my dashboard or C) paying someone a few hundred bucks to disassemble my car to pop this G-D $3 piece of plastic in there.

Color me annoyed..