Frankincense and Myrrh Perfume winners!

The winners for the Frankincense and Myrrh perfume sample set from the Guide to Frankincense and Myrrh Perfumes are:

• Ninara Poll
• Bev Fredrickson

If you don’t know the drill, click on Drop Us a Line clear at the top of the page, send me your mailing address, remind me what you’ve won. I’ll send you a quick “got it” e-mail so you know you didn’t get caught in the spam filter, and I’ll get you shipping your sample set!  Congrats, and I hope you enjoy them when they show up.

Oh, hey, look!  Old comments are back!   Since the old-new theme blew up a few weeks ago – the thing causing the problem with the old commenting system that required the change to Disqus just so we had comments –  it’s been possible to revert, but I had to first take the required few hours to import all the Disqus stuff back in, catch it at a time when we didn’t have a big ongoing post with a lot of comments and I also had some time to pay attention to it, and then just do it.

But it’s back!!!!  Easy peazy commenting with notification sign-up, and you can still use your Facebook sign-in to comment if you like, or you don’t need to sign in at all, I hope this is a feature and not a bug for most of you.

Those of you super-happy with this change may go ahead and send me presents!  

It was a really crappy week.  Training all week, which is just hard because it exhausts me trying to transfer stuff I know to other people.  

My regular day job is working with television news, the company I work for provides closed captioning to television stations around the country. So when some shitstorm breaks out – hurricane, earthquake, war, snowstorm, kidnapping, buildings being blown up, compounds full of men, women and children being burned down – we wind up working around the clock to cover it.

I’ve done this job for over 20 years.  No matter how many tragedies I’ve worked, there is always a lower level of hell available for a news story to descend to.  Natural disasters are bad enough – listening for hours/days/weeks to misery, fear, loss and pain.  The man-made disasters are so much worse. We had to work 9/11 for weeks, listening over and over to unimaginable loss and grief.  You want to hide from it, steel yourself so it doesn’t get past your exterior, but if you’re ever successful at that, you will lose a part of your soul.

After Columbine, I didn’t think it could get worse, but, you know what?  It can.  Sandy Hook was something my mind wasn’t ready for, nor were the people I work with.  They are all struggling to work through listening to 6-year-olds describe the sounds they heard as those children were being slaughtered.  My heart goes out to those parents, all of the children, the community.  I’m not sure if having an entire nation grieve with you helps or not. I hope it does.  I know when Columbine happened here in Colorado, my kids were in junior high and high school, and I freaked out that day and for days after.  I didn’t know anyone from the Columbine community then.  I’ve since met people who were there that day. They still bear the scars of shocking loss and sorrow unique to survivors of random terror. As will the entire community of Sandy Hook.

Like Precious says, “Fuck this day, that’s why God gives you a new one.”

Now can we talk about knitting while I’m working on the next Guide that will go up Tuesday (psst, it’s Tea!)?  The bag? That was my birthday present to myself this year.  It’s a big old carpet bag, Mary Poppins bag, knitting bag, whatever. It’s HUGE and sturdy, and I can fit in about 4-5 knitting projects.  An excellent thing because I lost a knitting project I was well into when it fell out of my other bag in the parking lot last week – yeah, add it to the shit week list.  It did get found, yeah!!  Nevertheless, a great knitting bag went even higher on my list.  This came from Elsie Rose at Etsy. and it is amazing in person!  Yes, they are expensive for the great big ones, but if you have ever had a yearning for a Mary Poppins bag, just go get one.  The large one is big enough for a great carry-on for travel, and you can get everything into it.

Now, my knitting, what am I working on?  I’m a new knitter – well, I knitted when I was young, but had no one to teach me more than the basics.  If you can’t move beyond the basics, you eventually lose interest.  This was way before YouTube videos and thousands of GREAT knitting books.  I’m trying to limit myself to no more than three projects on the needles at a time.  If I want to start a new project, something has to come off the needles.  I’m only one project over now!  That’s because the project I thought I lost was a Christmas present, so I started another one. Then the lost one was found. Now I have two. One for me.  

I had no idea knitting was so zen.  Maybe I knew it back when I did it before.  Every time I sit down with something, I decide if I want something to focus on, and that requires a project where I am counting stitches and tracking patterns.  If I want mindless knitting, I grab a straight up knit until your fingers bleed project. These are, well, interesting.  When I am having a meltdown or am angry or sad or whatever, I pull one of those out and just knit furiously for hours with tears streaming down my face or raging about something.  A day later I pull it back out and wind up frogging more than a few rows.  

When you are disturbed, your mind doesn’t communicate well with the rest of your body. Missed stitches, weird stitches that I can’t even tell you what happened, holes.  None of these things I even noticed while I was working on it.  There you go.  A disturbed mind misses much and works not very well at all.  Now I use those times to knit until I work myself out of my upset, carefully tending what I’m doing until I let go.   Useful thing for personal development – who knew that about knitting?  What hobby do you use/like to distract you? Knitting is really helping with normalizing and restoring my sanity.