Snips and Snaps

  OMG!  It’s ANOTHER ‘Hibernation’ post!  Sorry.  But I, too, am in the scent doldrums; not the perfume per se, more my inability to focus long enough to do a perfume justice in any sort of review.  I’m sloooooowly coming out of those trials and tribs I’ve been hinting about – it’s still a bit dicey but some changes made allowed me to drop a boatload of stress.  Here’s hoping the rest of the summer turns around.  Seems the best I can do these days is use my phone (notes/alarm clock) and Google Alarm, to try to keep everything organized.   Otherwise I tend to just sit in my chair, watch hummingbirds…and miss meetings.  Which wouldn’t be a bad thing…if I had a hefty trust.  Alas,  those meetings must be attended to, so I set the alarums.

Patty already asked you guys about Summer Hibernation, so I won’t.  Instead I’ll ask what you’re doing/reading/eating/thinking about.

Here’s what’s going on with me:

Bees:  my bees seem to be doing okay.  Unlike El O (who would open the hive once a week if I let him) I tend to leave ’em alone, figuring they know what they’re doing.  I see them all over my buddleia  and buzzing through the bolted broccoli like they’re getting paid (and I suppose they are).  It’s too hot for  .  I have them in various states of growth.  The one that is 7′ high is in bloom and covered in bees (few butterflies, though – wonder if the excessive rain has anything to do with that?)

Japanese Beetles.  Abound!  I’ve been gathering them for my chickens who are just now, at 3mos old, learning how to eat bugs!  I didn’t know they had to ‘learn’.   Patty says we’ve been babying the girls, which is why they are so slow to pick up what should be a Natural Chicken Trait.  Right now they are a bit scared of the bugs – all except Leg (the Leghorn) – she has figured out that Bugs Is GOOD Eatin’.    So now I’m turning the goils out of their pen to start foraging.  Day One was hysterical, with these CAPs (Chicken-American Princesses) squawking and rushing back to the pen at every breeze that ruffled their feathers.  Locked ’em out of the pen.  Ha!  Get to work, you fowl things!  We’re on Day 4 and they’re starting to get the hang of it, especially as I’ve cut their feed rations.  As my dad used to say “root, hawg or die”.   I had some trouble with slugs on my outside broccoli – the girls quickly put a stop to that!  Hungry chickens wise up fast!  My friend’s flock is omnivorous – pretty much anything that doesn’t eat them, gets eaten.  They took out a pretty good-sized snake!

Peaches:  remember my lovely peaches?   All gone. Alas.  From succulent bits of promise to  little shriveled disasters.  Every stone fruit tree around, that wasn’t sprayed, succumbed to the dreaded fungus that attacks when there is too much water.  Tree will be fine but this year’s crop is gawn!  Sigh.   I’ve been having fun playing at homesteading but disasters like this bring to light just how fragile the balance must’ve been, back in the days before readily obtainable food. My bees, my chickens, my kitchen garden, my peaches…all that could mean a bountiful harvest or extreme deprivation, depending upon the vagaries of Nature.  The Watermelon Man will shortly drive back up from Southern IL , with sweeet watermelons, cantaloups and peaches.  For that alone, I’m grateful for the internal combustion engine.

Stress & Scent.  I think I might’ve mentioned this before but in case not, when I’m under what my friend Flora calls ‘crushing stress’, I tend to stay away from complex scents.  At those times, it seems soliflores work best for me.  If not a soliflore, then a lighter set of notes than I am usually wont to wear.  Marc Jacobs Lemon – the essence of ‘crisp and refreshing’ (TJ Maxx in Naperville for about $11.  Read it and weep, babydolls!)  It smells persackly like the lemon Italian ice I used to get on Armitage Avenue (around the corner, on Bissell), with the little bits of lemon.   In the summer, I could just live in their freezer and nosh until they hauled my frozen, sugared-slobbering self out of there (can you imagine the Health Dept Drama? LOL!)..another simple one – though ‘simple’ isn’t really the right word – what am I looking for….relaxed!  Yesh.  Relaxed.  It’s too hot and crazy for me to have to wrestle with any diva scents (oh, get up off the floor!  I’m coming around, I promise, and by August will be awash in Tribute and Epic and Fracas, just like the old days!).  Rosine’s Rose d’Ete has that sunny, relaxed feel of a day on a deep, cool front porch, surrounded by beds of linden/lemon-scented roses.  Coty Sand & Sable is a day at the beach.  I wore that to bed last night for dreamless, sound sleep.  Not ‘dreamless’ persackly – I dreamt of Ipanema and lying in a chaise longue under a blue umbrella.  Vintage Chanel No 5 perfume.  Heresy!  Simple?  No.  But there’s something about it that is just so simple, like those swans, whose webbed feet are viciously paddling under the surface.  Like Mme Chanel’s suits – there’s a whole lotta lotta going on underneath all that stunning simplicity.  Doubt it?  Deconstruct a vintage Chanel suit.  It’ll take you a week.

Are you all reading anything right now?  I’m reading such goofiness – it’s all I can manage right now (too hot/too busy/too nuts)…MaryJanice Davidson wore me out with the last few Vampire Queen books (I LOVED the early ones – the first book caused me to nearly miss a dinner in San Francisco!)…but she has redeemed herself with the perfect Summer trilogy – a multiple personality FBI agent.  Her partner is a sociopath.  I love them already!

Food.  Are you kidding me?  It’s too hot to eat.  If you are not a fish taco or a green smoothie, you are not in my kitchen!

So!  Whazzup wich YOUSE?   Tell Musette!