You know, I just read that title and thought  whoa!  That sounds yummy if you take the & out of it, and I just might.

We’ve been on a nut/hemp milk ice cream kick here. Why? Well, I learned how easy it is to make of course!  I’m lactose intolerant, and I don’t really care about dairy very much except for ice cream. I’d given it up as really bad for me health-wise and even worse for me and the people nearby intestine-wise.

The wonderful Starla showed me how to make a batch of raspberry chocolate ice cream out of coconut milk and almond milk, a little agave, and arrowroot to thicken it.  One dip of the finger in the gelato maker to sample it when it was frozen made a believer out of me.

Since then, we’ve made banana ice cream, vanilla bean, blackberry, raspberry.  Hey, it was a long Labor Day weekend.  My finest creation was the ginger-peach-lemon ice cream.  I was going to steep the ginger in the coconut milk, but then I just wasn’t sure if I had enough ginger flavor, so I threw it all in the blender without straining it out.  Well.  I mean, I love ginger, so a really pungent ginger ice cream is amazing for me.  Yes, there will be a pumpkin ice cream, but it’s going to involve some nutmeg, ginger and vanilla bean.  Then there is the fresh pumpkin pie I need to make first with a cashew cream and all of those spices to provide the filling.  No, I haven’t found that recipe yet, but I’m looking!  If anyone has a vegan gluten free pumpkin pie recipe for me, hit the Contact Us over on the left!!!

But let’s get back to ginger. I adore the smell of ginger. I happily will chop it forever, sometimes mincing it finely far longer than it needs to be minced just to get the smell of it on my hands so they can smell like that until I have to wash them again.  So not the least of my pleasure when I cook with ginger is the smell of it scenting my house. In the wintertime, I boil ginger to make ginger water, then add lemon and honey for the best hot drink in the world (hey, India, thanks for that!). I’m not sure whether it’s the smell or the taste or both.  And why did nobody ever tell me about a dark and stormy?  Ginger beer (basically ginger water, lemon and honey) and rum.

But where is all the ginger in perfume? I know a lot of scents have it in minor ways.   I’m thinking of a couple that have it fairly noticeably – Jo Malone Nutmeg & Ginger, which I forgot how much I liked until I drug it out to sniff it for this post and what?  Bois des Iles has some, but not enough to make me think ginger for long.  Serge Gingembre, yeah, but it’s a little dark for me, and I love that gut-punching spicy lightness of ginger.  I know there has to be more, so help a girl out. What are some really great ginger perfumes? I read Burberry Brit Red has ginger in it, along with Dzing, Tea for Two, and I know they do, but I need to go resniff because they don’t strike me as being ginger-dominant, which is what I want, a ginger-dominant perfume.

Ideas on ginger-prominent perfumes?  I’ll make it worth your while and will pull two commenters out, and will send them a sampler pack of the best recommendations of ginger perfumes that I actually have once I judge them to be ginger-worthy.

Patty

I missed you guys!!!  But I’m back from my Costa Rica Coma, rested, relaxed and trying to figure out when I can get away next and to where. Marrakesh sounds perfect.

First, I have a drawing I was behind naming the winners on. It’s for a random grab bag of samples. Winners are:  Maureen, sunnlitt and Leslie.  To collect, click on the Contact Us over there on the left, send me your address with a brief note of what you’ve won so I can keep it straight. I will respond to that e-mail, so if you don’t get a response from me in a day or two, send again. Sometimes mail from the contact us winds up in my spam filter, and I never see it, but enough come through that I don’t go digging through them unless prompted.

When I left, I asked about smells of a place or time of year.  Costa Rica has that amazing mix of almost rot with this breezy freshness. The air is perfumed by alternating whiffs of decaying fish and crabs and fruit, with the occasional wafting of the most lush white floral.  When those go by, my nose perks up, and I start sniffing it down, hunting for where it is coming from, and I almost never find it. That’s better, it leaves mystery in life.

On top of the smells are the sounds.  The place we stay in the Osa Peninsula is Pan Dulce, and the house is right off the beach, so you get surf sounds pounding at you second by second, minute by minute, hour after hour, day after day, and it takes you into this really deep place of presence. The absence of internet, phone, tv helps, along with living in a rustic cabin with a star bat sleeping above the stairs.  Oh, you get used to it.  I’m not one for creepy crawlies, but for some reason, I feel like that’s their place, and I’m the intruder. I don’t even kill insects while there.  And then there’s the 5 a.m. howler monkey wake-up call, the afternoon macau scream-fest, as they fight over some beach almonds, then go soaring into the air like the most vivid, elegant pair of Bickersons in the world.  And in the rainy season, every night brings the rain and Tink frogs (that’s the sound they make, loud, almost like a sonar).  Rain comes sometimes as the sun goes down or waking you up in the  middle of the night or as the accompaniment to the howlers as you open your eyes in the morning.

Every time I’m there, as I get to the last day, I’m shocked it is almost over and sad, and all I can do is cheer myself with the thought of planning another visit.  The Osa Peninsula is always described as one of the most ecologically intense places on the planet. I haven’t been everywhere on the planet, but I wouldn’t argue with that statement.  Everything about it is alive and immediate and real.  It talks to a place inside me that has always known life is short –  make it worth breathing, the future is no place to make a home to live in, and everything you have lived was completely necessary.  A lot of cliches?  Well, yeah!  Life is made of up cliches and catch-phrases, but it makes them no less true.  Getting to a place where you are rolliin’ in the deep present is a place to breathe from, inhaling all the broad spectrum of scent life puts out there.

What gets you there? Do you get there?  Do you not care if you get there?    Oh, listen I had a rolfing session right after acupuncture this morning, I’m so squishy right now, it’s ridiculous, so these platitudes will be like mother’s milk for another 18 hours, then I’ll go back to giggling surlishness.

Patty

Ever since I read Patty’s post yesterday, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about skank. Yeah, that’s the way my mind works. First, I’m totally not impressed with the price tag of that Petite Mort stuff – I wouldn’t care if it was multiple orgasms in a bottle. I don’t care that there are only 100 bottles, and if I had a grand to spend on a bottle of perfume right now, I’d want it in a vat as opposed to a teensy 10 ml bottle. The whole thing just adds up to a cheesy gimmick.

When I think about skanky as opposed to sexy, I have visuals in my head that might be a bit politically incorrect. Again, I’m in the mood to just let it fly, so think of me what you will. And please, comment away; I have a feeling I’ll still have enough piss and vinegar left over to answer all of them.

Skank immediately brings to my mind an image of Pamela Anderson. For me, she is just the epitome of skank. She was cute on “Home Improvement”, but I never watched an episode of “Baywatch”, partly because the concept just never interested me, and I was totally demoralized by how those girls looked in their bathing suits. I don’t know what happened to her her after that; the watermelon freak-show breast implants, the sex tape…she’s one big “eeeeewwww!!!!!” for me, and the older she gets, the skankier she becomes.

Runner ups in the skank category are those girls who starred in the Bret Michaels “Rock of Love” VH1 reality train wrecks. Particularly that Daisy De La Hoya chick. Yes, I watched those. Why? Because I was in desperate need of some “check your brain at the door” television and those shows fit the bill like nothing else. With all the Ed Hardy product placement in those shows, every time I smelled the scents, I couldn’t help thinking that all those girls smelled the same. Those were some nasty fruit cocktail smelling skanks. Not to mention puke, Doritos, and God only knows what else.

Before I get myself into serious trouble, I’m moving on to sexy. Here are my top 10: Elizabeth Taylor, Lauren Bacall, Ava Gardner, Ann Baxter, Faye Dunaway, Anne Bancroft, Catherine Zeta Jones, Salma Hayek, Anna Paquin and (please don’t hate me for this one) Kim Kardashian. Personally, I think sexy is much harder to pull off than skanky, because you really have to work at it. Skanky has become, um, ubiquitous; which is probably why that Petite Mort crap struck a nerve with me.

Sexy is a mindset, and I think, it comes naturally for the women I chose for my list. You can immediately tell when a woman is trying to hard; everything from her hair and makeup to her fragrance is attempting to evoke a certain image. And when you lump them all together it isn’t hard to imagine disaster.

I’ve never personally worn any fragrance because it’s sexy or skanky. I wear what I like. Yes, I’ll admit to being intrigued by the “schwetty balls” aspect of fragrance, but again, if it’s a scent that’s trying too hard, the sexiness is lost and the skank rears its ugly head. Etat Libre d’Orange’s infamous Secretions Magnifique got us all hot and bothered, and it definitely resides in the “trying too hard” category. Serge’s Muscs Koublai Kahn is a masterpiece. Some of you get “horse barn” from it, but I adore it. Bruno Acampora Musc is another underrated gem, and if your idea of sexy veers off into hippie territory, nothing is better than Kiehls Musk. I’m not even going to discuss patchouli.

The next time I hear about another one of these hyper-exclusive, super-expensive orgasmic scents, I’m plugging my ears and moving on. I don’t care who the perfumer is or what the angle is. And I believe this comment is apropos considering we’ve been talking skank for the past two days: Opinions are like assholes; everybody has one.

And on that note, I invite all who care to opine, to let ‘er rip.

March issued her challenge last week – take the consumer cure, stop buying anything that was not an essential for one week.  I’m thinking, how hard can that be?  It’s seven days. I just write the stuff down I want to buy that come up during that seven days, then buy them later.

I have to preface this with a little bit of background.  I have ADD/OCD. It’s not the light switch/hand washing OCD – I have some subjects or interests that flitter by like Butterflies that catch my attention, and once one has it, the attention that is so hard for me to focus at will turns into a laser, and all my energy goes into whatever it is that has captured me, and I bore into that subject for days, weeks, months, years, until I’ve gotten out of it what I wanted and my fascination is over. Some things stay with me the rest of my life, some just go into my knowledge bank that I use as I need, and others get forgotten entirely.  That’s the fun part of my OCD. The ADD component doesn’t really bother me, it just annoys everyone me because they’ll be talking to me, but if they can’t make whatever they’re talking about interesting to me, I wind up drifting off or suddenly changing the subject. Not because I”m rude, but because I just can’t focus and forget I’m supposed to be paying attention.  If people talk to me about emotional issues, things that I find compelling, then I can stay with them.  It’s difficult to be my friend and expect a lot out of me on that front, I dissapoint and annoy all of my closest friends.

It’s the ADD that leads to some of my more erratic shopping. I often just buy something out of boredom.  Something interesting flits by, I think it sounds cool, and I got find it on eBay or Amazon.  This happens most days. It distracts me enough from things that I usually don’t want to do for a little bit, but allows me to do that for a couple of minutes, then get back to work.  It’s a push-pull of attention that I’ve delicately worked out so I can be a gainfully employed, productive person.

The first two days were pretty much what I expected. Lots of opening my Amazon and eBay browser windows to snag small items, only to close them quickly because I remembered I couldn’t shop for a week.  That was Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.  It made me a little uncomfortable and left me feeling vaguely deprived on some way.  But not so much that I was squeamish about it, and I did get okay with feeling that.  By  Friday morning, I was confident as a cock (rooster for those of you that might be offended by the correct technical term) in a henhouse about my ability to have my way with this challenge.

I do a lot of yoga. It helps me cope with vague or strong emotions.  I’m not sure exactly the mechanics of how it works, except it gets me out of my head and into thinking about breathing.  So in my toughest times, I go to the mats (isn’t that a Godfather reference?), often finding the hardest yoga classes available.  Last week, for unshopping reasons, I found myself in an inversions class that was pretty amazing and has left me working on my handstand every day, along with wheel.  I need to have more emotional trauma, it’s healthy for me.

The downside of yoga is the cute little shop full of yoga togs in most of the studios I go to.  Because I do so much yoga and work at home, I pretty much live my daily life in yoga-type clothes – body hugging, breathable fabrics, move easily, colorful.  The first part of the Consumer Cure, I went to my teeny studio nearby, and their shopping area is small and varies little. Friday I went to the big yoga studio downtown that has an excellent retail manager who changes out their stuff every coupel of days, and they have this huge selection of some of the cutest things.  There on the rack, staring at me was this adorable long sleeve white shirt with a purple design in it. It cried at me and made eyes and moaned a little, I swear.  Then it was in my arms along with a cute little white top that I needed to go under it.  And then we were at the counter, buying it.  I had taken precautions, I didn’t take my purse in with me, but I never do.  Oddly enough, that doesn’t matter, they have my credit card on file for my monthly fees, so they can just charge it to that.  This is probably not the most helpful information I’ve ever been given.

I’m thinking, this is fine, it’s one little slip. the top was so cute, they just had one in my size, so I had to act quickly because it definitely would have been gone by the next day, not to mention the next week.  I’ll confess it, and it’s just not a really big thing, yes?

Apparently it opened the floodgates. What followed was not anything approaching a shopping binge at all, but it was a slow and steady slide right back into a little bit of my normal shopping patterns.  I snagged a full length mirror because, oddly enough, I don’t have one!  And then I needed an air purifier for my front room.

I did put off the champagne purchase of the very limited availability champagne that I adore and can only get rarely because they have almost 100 bottles, surely it will last until later this week?  I’m still crossing my fingers on that one. If it’s not, I’ll blame March.

Then it was Saturday.  My friend and I had to prepare for a wedding shower, and she needed to go down to Sol and pick up some lingerie as a present.  I got a little squirmy then, but thought, it’s lingerie, I can resist that, right?  We stopped and had a drink first, but it was just one drink, and we split a roasted artichoke to cut the hunger.  It occurred to me then that I was already outside of austerity eating with the champagne, not to mention the roasted artichoke.

Off we went to Sol, but only a little buzzed.  And the outfits.  Can I just say I haven’t bought lingerie in a really long time?  Can I skip the skanky details and mention that I now have two bad girl outfits and one good girl outfit, and I shouldnt’ have bought the velvet burnout black robe, but it really made the bad girl outfits so much better?

But that was it.  I haven’t made any cosmetics purchases – no lipsticks, no eyeshadows, not anything.  So far, just clothes, which isnt’ something I buy that much of anyway.  And I have today to get through, which will be over over soon.

Damn Chanel!!!  They sent me an e-mail about their new New Limited Edition gold and black nail polishes and eyeshadows.  Okay, so that was another oops.  I’m locking myself in and unplugging the internets and e-mail through tomorrow morning so no more accidents can happen.

Overall?  I think I did okay’ish.  Worse than I thought I would do, but not as bad as it could have been.  Anyone else care to confess how their week went, if you were playing the home game with us?

Patty

Note to anyone expecting a perfume post for today. This will touch on smell, but it’s mostly a Travelogue.

Our trip to Costa Rica was wondrous.  You never really believe a place can be that lush and almost untouched, until you drive down the backroads and see this simpler life unfolding around you.  Then all you feel is a wave of gratitude that it doesn’t look like Cancun and hope fervently that it never will.

The first part of our trip was up to Arenal to see the volcano.  Well, mission so not accomplished there.  The hotel, The Springs Resort and Lodge or Lodge and Resort, something like that, was gorgeous and wicked expensive.  Yeah, it had 18 hot springs to swim in, the hotel was immaculate and built in a way so every room had an amazing view, even when it was cloudy and misty for the four days we were there.  I’d recommend it if you have money to burn.

The driving!  I just can’t think about this too much without hyperventilating.  There are no road signs in Costa Rica, no highway signs.  It’s like the one-person transportation department made up a big game of travel checkers with the $1200 yearly budget and left no directions except the 12 road signs in the entire country – all of which poorly painted and come up about 100 feet before you might need to turn.

An argument broke out in the car over the No Hay Paso sign.  What do you think that means? I thought it meant I couldn’t pass, but it’s a wrong way sign of sorts, as I found out when the other cars coming right at me in my lane pointed out to me with their horns and some other visual cues with their hands and fingers.

Another good recommendation if you plan to drive in Costa Rica – just rent the GPS they offer at the car rental place.  With all the extra insurance you’re paying for – with great reason! – it’s a small amount, and apparently they have a monopoly on accurate GPS mapping, as we found out after we downloaded one that people raved about, only to find it had no idea where we were exactly most of the time and figured out how to take us on a longer route back to San Jose than the already convoluted way we had gone going in the other direction.

We returned the car, paid off the debt with my arm and leg and get a taxi to the teeny domestic airport, Bolanos, to catch our flight to the more remote Puerto Jimenez in the Osa Peninsula.  They weigh you before they let you on the plane. then they put you on a van to drive you to the teeny prop plane. It sets down in Puerto Jimenez, which is this sleepy little fishing village by the ocean, they clip the trees with the landing gear on the landing, wheel around and stop – right  next to a cemetery.  I was laughing too hard to remember to get a picture of it, and I was distracted, too, trying to figure out which person waiting at the gate (and I use that term exactly – it was a gate that swung back and forth exiting the landing field) was there to take us to our home for the next week. Ah, the guy that nods yes to “La Pina?”

No road we had taken up to this point prepared me for the road from Puerto Jimenez to Pan Dulce.  It was the worst road ever.  I have some authority in this because I grew up on a farm in Kansas, where we had to deal with narrow, washed-out bridges, sand roads, dirt roads that became mud pits when it rained. This road had a bridge that was made of rebar and just fit a vehicle on it.  Driving through water with lots of rock on the bottom made me a lot happier.

We finally got to La Pina, which is so darn cute.  It’s a bamboo house, all solar, with a huge porch to watch the monkeys, macaws, coatis, pizotes and butterflies from.  Which is what we pretty much did that whole first day. The monkeys were swinging by as we arrived, and 40 or 50 of their friends went back and forth through the trees like three times that afternoon. We were mesmerized.  The first howler monkey howling – more like a woofing roar – made me look in the trees for the dinosaurs.  Amazing beyond belief. Rugged, beautiful, untouched, pristine, where you feel like you are definitely not the one in charge of anything.

The beach we had all to ourselves most of the time, though we did share it with Ticos and pelicans fishing.  The pelicans would dive bomb right beside you in the water.  As remote as you can get, staring out at the waves and an old inactive volcano across the water.   I could happily spend my life just watching the waves come in.  It reminds me that I always need to live my life from my center – the part that knows who I am and needs no one or no thing to define me – and that we should all live like water, never resisting, just flowing.

We walked everywhere.  Down to Martina’s, the little dive by the side of the road 15 minutes’ walk away, for beer. We walked up the super-steep hill to Lapa Rios.  It’s perched in the hills up from the beach, surrounded completely by rainforest and has a view that almost makes you weep because it breaks your heart that you can’t hold that sight forever in your memory.

The smell?  Clean, lush, ripe, green, alive.  In our yard was a ylang tree that the caretaker, William, showed me.  I’d never smelled fresh ylang before, and it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting.  Yeah, it smells like Chanel No. 5, but lusher, overripe.  I went out and picked some every day and wore it in my swimsuit strap.  It was enchantingly perfect for where we were.
Then there were the bug wars.  The sun went down at 6 p.m. every night, so we’d turn on the lights so we could see a little to read on the deck.  The bugs didn’t bother you at all until the lights went on.  We quickly beat a retreat to our beds by 8, so we could crawl under the mosquito netting.  But then it would just get weird because we’d have the light on reading, and you’d look up and around the mosquito netting and see some scary things crawling ont he netting surrounding you. Some mornings there were strange bugs just hanging around, really BIG ones.  Normally spiders, bugs, snakes makes me scream and cry like a little girl, but for some reason they didn’t bother me there, they just don’t move fast, it’s like Jurassic park bugs, you don’t really believe the big ones are real.

Our alarm clock was the howlers.  4:30a on the dot, and it would go on for a couple of hours as they moved through the trees, on all sides.  Since we went to sleep at 8 most nights, the early wake-up call was pretty great.

All of that are just the things that we saw/experienced, but you can never really get a feel the Osa Peninsula by the details.  It is much more than that. It is a pacing, the attitude of manyana manyana – there’s time for that tomorrow.  It was perfect because it felt real – not a vacation spot, but a place where people live – really live.

Then it was time to go home, and I cried a little, and I miss it still.

Patty