The country cousins are in town and we are off Wednesday, I got us all tickets to the Lego monuments exhibition at the National Building Museum (which is a cool place to visit in its own right.)    I can’t wait to see the Lego St. Louis Arch and the rest of it!

I am wearing a special scent right now, it’s called … here, let me look at the label … Icy Hot.  That would sound so much more chic in French.  What would that be?   Chaud glacé? Is that correct?   I actually love the smell of Icy Hot, although it pretty much eliminates the perfume option.  Don’t worry, just some minor soreness in one shoulder, the body’s still adjusting to the yoga.  Oh!  I went to class (for a change) at lunchtime today instead of the morning class.  The studio’s located right over a Chinese restaurant and my mouth was watering the whole time.  I restrained myself and did not run downstairs and order; I came home and had tomatoes from a friend’s garden along with some cheese and was just as happy.

In comments today – if you’ve been waiting for weeks or months for me to get back to you regarding an unanswered question, or an issue I said I was going to address, or there’s one you want to raise – here’s your chance! Regarding the site errors – the reason some of these things still aren’t fixed is I can’t find a person who’s a genius at WordPress to fix them.  I don’t know why the emoticons don’t work in your comments any more, and the nice guy who moved our site and set it back up can’t modify the template so that, for instance, our names appear at the top of each post.  This is supposed to be an automatic feature, but it doesn’t work when we add the plugin widget or whatever it’s called.  Shrug.  I know as much about open source coding as I do about Urdu and astrophysics, so until we find that Special Someone, it’s going to stay broken.  I miss your deployment of the emoticons!

March

This is a post about how this is another post that is not about perfume.

I’m laying my cards on the table here.  I’m not going to pretend that maybe you haven’t noticed yet that I’m running a little dry in the perfume department.  But since this is allegedly a perfume blog, and since the idea of writing these posts without bringing to your attention – or reviewing – some fabulous find, old or new, is causing me a fair amount of discomfort, hey.  At least I’ll put on my hairshirt today and admit it.  (The hairshirt, if it existed, would be freshly washed in that Aqua Universalis laundry scent from Maison Francis Kurkdjian.)

I am spending a lot less time online.  I can waste time online like nobody’s business, but at some point comes the realization that my butt’s starting to resemble my comfy, sadly-discontinued rolling desk chair from IKEA, which I think was called Traktor.  (Here’s an image I swiped off eBay, does anyone remember it?)  Anyhow, for time-suck reduction purposes I’ve more or less abandoned my FaceBook account and placed a temporary moratorium on eBay.  I’m halfway through my impulse-buy of ten days of hot yoga for ten bucks (what could be better in August in Washington?) and getting out and doing stuff with – oh, those things!  Things one through four – the kids!  Thing one’s doing the yoga with me.  Today we took Hecate and Buckethead for the first time to the elusive, wildly under-promoted BrickFair out in East Jesus Chantilly at the Dulles Expo Center, billed as “the largest LEGO fan festival in the U.S.,” which…. can I just say?  How fricking amazing it was?

I am not particularly interested in Legos, except in terms of trying to keep them off the damn floor all over the house because they hurt like hell if you step on them barefoot in the dark.  I threaten to vacuum them all up periodically.  (I mostly buy them by the random bucketful on eBay, since those kits are like $80 or more).  The Dullas Expo Center was full of people who are somewhere between my knees and my chest in height.  If Legos themselves do not seem, technically, to have a smell, the giant expo hall certainly did, and I will leave it to your imagination.  (Okay – blend of sweat, sunscreen, heatlamp, plastic, electrical component, ozone, hot pretzel and random whiff of poopy diaper.)  However, BrickFair has the greatest sound ever – it’s a cavernous space filled with bazillions of little Lego bricks being assembled and whacked together in all their various displays – and the gentle click-snapping of a bazillion Lego bricks is – no, seriously – an excellent sound.  It’s ebullient and oddly soothing, simultaneously.  BrickFair has competition categories (e.g., Castle, Battlefield, Bionicle, Motorized, etc.) but no age categories – so there’s stuff there built by eight-year-olds and their grandparents.  I spent 20 minutes talking to a neat 15-year-old kid from California who’d built a great LOTR battlefield scene, and almost half an hour watching the Giant Robotic Lego Chess Game.  I would have loved to see the Lego Robot Sudden-Death Jousting but couldn’t shove enough rugrats out of my way to get a clear view.  Next year, maybe.  My kids had fun, but they didn’t have any more fun than I did.  Hot tip – wear something easy to find!   I loved the group of six boys wearing matching striped lime-green shirts.  I lost the Cheese and the twins for almost an hour.  Here’s the sad way my brain works:  oh, I’ll just look for the middle-aged white guy in the tee shirt with the two seven-year olds, how hard could that be? Uh.  Well… next year I’m painting everyone’s heads electric blue or something similar.

So, I am wearing perfume (although not to yoga, or the kids’ doctor, dentist or ortho checkups, or the speech therapist’s office.)   I’m wearing Eau de Merveilles, I think my bottle’s gotten skankier than it used to be?  I swear.  More cumin-y.  The temperature’s moderated, so I tried some Worth Courtesan, but it wasn’t love.  I’ve been pulling random bottles off the shelf with deliberate lack of thought and spraying them on, pretending I’ve never smelled them before, and just … enjoying them for the day.  Or until I scrub.  Whichever comes first.  (I admit: I have not worn Rush, Addict, Opium or Poison recently.  It just seems too cruel to those around me.)

So here we are, folks.  What should I do?  I have no desire or interest in giving the blog up (the Posse is, and remains, my favorite time-suck online.)   But what am I going to do if I can’t offer you some new perfumey inspiration?  When I started this in 2006 (?) I did it because it was supposed to be fun, and it is fun, but me guilt-tripping myself for not having a decent post featuring something new and wonderful/wretched, that part’s got to stop.   There isn’t a single scent in my regular rotation that I haven’t blogged on at least once, and I’m not going to repeat myself over and over.

It’s August, half of you are probably at the beach.  What do the rest of you think we should do about this no-new-perfume-inspiration situation?

image: I can’t find my camera connector cord, so here’s an image from (I believe) BrickFair 2009, from this website if you’d like to see some more amazing construction.  If you click on the image on here it should enlarge, btw.

March

I’m not ready to leave Santa Fe but that’s a good thing, right?   You should always leave the party before you’ve worn out your welcome.  That’s my motto.

The girls came with me this time – Diva and Enigma, age 16 and 14ish.  They were only 6 and 4 when we left, but I’ll always consider them citizens of Nuevo Mexico.  An amusing aside for those of you readers who reside outside the U.S. – it’s a long-running joke how many Americans don’t actually realize New Mexico is a gen-u-wine U.S. state.  Questions crop up periodically about the necessity for international shipping, passports, phone calls, etc.  There’s a column in New Mexico magazine called “One of our 50 is Missing,” devoted to this topic.  Other people think Santa Fe is in Arizona, right next to Phoenix.  You know, in that mashup of vague, saguaro-cactus-covered nothingness located between the Great Nation of Texas and the Fabulousness of California.   When we first moved to Santa Fe and we told people it snowed there, and that there was a ski basin just up the hill in the Sangre de Cristo mountains, against which the city is nestled at 7,000 feet, they thought we were joking.

But I digress.  As Enigma and I discussed on our many walks (Enigma turned out to be quite the fan of Santa Fe), one great thing about New Mexico in general and Santa Fe in particular is it’s like leaving the country without the actual hassle of doing so.  You’re surrounded by alien landscape – buttes, pinon-studded hills, and endless sky, and that’s before you fall in love with the adobe architecture.

And the pace is so much slower.  People are friendly.  This is hard for me to type because I don’t realize how much I miss it until I visit here.  No, it’s not all unicorns and rainbows, but my goodness, my fellow Washingtonions could …. take a few lessons.  The modus operandi here is strangers talk to each other – in the line at the grocery store, standing next to the fajita cart on the Plaza, at the playground, etc.  You know – the way people do in small towns.  Go on, try that in D.C.   Everyone assumes you want something (probably money, because you “just got robbed” but the real need is your crack habit.)  Talk to a stranger in D.C. and watch them either ignore you or back away in alarm.  And people kept stopping for us when we wanted to walk across the street!   That took some getting used to, let me tell you (I think they do this in CA as well.)  If you step in front of a car in D.C., even if you’re in a crosswalk, you better hope they’re only driving 10mph when they hit you.   Every day there I have to put on my protective carapace just to go out and deal with what jackasses people are, whether on the highway or at Trader Joe’s.

Trader Joe’s!   Fellow drinkers, it’s TRUE!   TRADER JOE’S IN NEW MEXICO HAS AMAZING HARD LIQUOR.   I hear this is only the case in NM and CA. They had two different Speyside single malts, and a buncho other stuff.  The Speyside whiskeys were I think $18!!!!!   And I didn’t get any!!! Because my extra suitcase is now completely full of Nuevomexicana, primarily frozen tubs of Bueno Green Chile (Autumn Roast and Extra Hot), so I can get some of that Santa Fe love back home.  Breakfast burritos, chicken enchiladas… I bet I gained five pounds on this trip, and it was totally worth it.  I won’t mention the tequila.

The girls got their Santa Fe on, which is not just broomstick skirts and turquoise necklaces, but (for the young and non-Texan tourists) a more multi-culti One-World blend – skirts from India, purses from Tibet, etc.  I think they each have a dreamcatcher; no howling coyotes, though.  I walked them through the local lexicon – coyote fence, viga, latilla, chamisa, camino, portal, ristra, and so on.  I have an agenda, no lie.  I secretly hope that one of them catches the bug and moves here as an adult, and then I can come visit.

The girls would like a dollar each for every time I said, “smell this!”  No wonder I love the smell of incense so much – Santa Fe air is clear and a combination of pitch and resin – pinon, juniper, larger evergreens, chamisa, and woodsmoke in the evenings.  It’s an astonishing smell.  We took several walks in the dry arroyo behind our old house, and up in the Santa Fe National Forest, and I could not get enough of it.  Right now it’s monsoon season and I do think it makes the resiny smells even more pronounced.

I wore no scent here at all.  How could I?  The are already roasting some of the early harvest chiles, a … well, a roasted-chile smell that makes my mouth water.  I went to the farmer’s market (let me recommend the Farmer’s Market, which is huge now) and bought a cake of stuff that is beeswax, honey, and a couple of oils – jojoba and something – and which I hope is going to be the perfect base for me to go home and sprinkle some drops of majmua essential oil on.  I also bought my Cedar Light spray, which I’ve mentioned on here before, because when I first moved here in 1990, the masseuses used to use it in their massage oils, plus up at Ten Thousand Waves, and to me it is essence of Santa Fe, of the most sybaritic kind.

Mmm, so.  I had a great time.  The house in D.C. appears to be still standing, and the Cheese, Hecate and Buckethead are happy to have us back.  I hope the dishwasher’s fixed (update: nope), and I’m going to try to hang on to some of that New Mexico attitude.

Link to the honeycake moisturizing salve, it’s on the can: secondbloomfarm.com

Link to Cedar Light

Link to Ten Thousand Waves, which, if you are not visiting with ooky, I-would-rather-gouge-an-eye-out-than-tub-with-you teenagers, you should definitely visit for a tub and/or massage

Link to some of the food:  Maria’s, home of excellent fajitas, salsa, and an entire menu of premium, no b.s. tequilas, and the Plaza Café, which looks touristy and is right on the Plaza and has surprisingly good food.

Culture: the Folk Art Museum is always a hit, folk art from all over the world, and we really loved the new (to us) SITE Santa Fe, which has the extremely cool 8th International Biennial 2010 right now, which is all video entries, including Lotte Reiniger’s astonishing Adventures of Prince Achmed, believed to be the oldest surviving feature-length animated film, based on episodes from The Arabian Nights.  For actual video snippets from each artist, click here.

Image: everyone and their grandma in Santa Fe has a tattoo.  We saw some gorgeous tribal ones.  So, we got fake tattoos at this joint that sold beeswax candles, Tibetan prayer flags and something else really random — roadrunner sculptures made out of nuts and bolts?  Anyhow, that’s me rocking my fake tat, to the amusement of the girls and the utter horror of a couple of old friends I met while there.  It’s a dragon, and it’s actually pretty real-looking (less day-glo) in person.   I am the whitest person, look at that foolishness.  Also,  I’m going to surprise the Cheese with it later.  Five bucks says he is not amused.

March

It’s Memorial Day weekend here and between today’s event at Art With Flowers (familiar and new faces there from the blog, so much fun!) and also Diva’s 16^th birthday today, and her party, and All That Entailed, including brunch for her and her friends and a shopping trip… I’m a bit tired.  But I smell amazing, if I do say so myself.  (Keiko Mecheri Paname on left arm, L’Artisan Nuit de Tubereuse on right arm, vintage Diorissimo EDT on back of right hand.)

This weekend my nephew, whom we all love very much, came home to us Saturday from his tour of duty in Afghanistan, and we are grateful to have him back, in a way I can’t put into words on here right now.  I’m grateful for all my family, from Hecate and Buckethead on up to my dad, who’ll be turning 88 in a couple of weeks.

When I was growing up, on Memorial Day we’d drive around the cemetery next door (as I’ve mentioned, it’s a literal stone’s throw from dad’s house) and put flowers on the graves of my mother’s family.  I never knew any of her people, but it always felt special and even a bit magical – our childhood wonderland/playground infused with a sense of mystery and responsibility.  In my memories, the sky was unfailingly blue.  My sister and I toted the water buckets from the pumps to fill up the flower vases.   My mom is right there in a shady part of the cemetery under a big old oak tree, next to her folks.   Some years the flowers were bought, and other years they’ve been cut from the huge wild rose bush that still grows next to the gravel driveway, with its prickly stems and fragrant open-faced white blooms that tend to open just in time for this weekend.  I have a cutting from that bush, which is growing like mad in my own back yard.

For me, cemeteries are for the living.  I’m glad I have a place to go and say hi, to sit on the grass and think, to pay my respects to ancestors I never met.   I also try, every day, to remember look up from the daily distractions and think of that cloudless sky, and to open my arms and my heart, even if it’s only a little (and sometimes that’s all I can manage) to those around me who are still here to be loved.   Right this second it’s those twins, who are giggling in their room way past their bedtime and arguing over which night light to use.  Everyone’s a little caked up (sugar!) and sunburned (pool!)   On another night I’d be cross and fuss at them.  But I’m going to go give them another hush, and then step outside and say hi to the fireflies.  It’s sultry out there, my favorite kind of summer evening.

PS  — I went into American Apparel at the mall for the first time in my life, with the teenagers, and up on the checkout counters they have some very cool nail polish colors — the bottles look sort of like the StrangeBeautiful ones.   They are all matte (I think), I didn’t have time to fully investigate.   I have no idea how they wear, but they’re 3 for $15.

March

Happy Mother’s Day, those of you who partake.  Those of you with mothers.  Those of you who are mothers — in all senses of the word… I’m enjoying the freakishly cold weather here in D.C. again, playing with the sprogs, and going to Diva’s belly dancing concert later.

Anyone get or give any good loot for Mother’s Day?   Hecate gave me a couple of cards she made herself, bless her.  She’s got her own terrarium of roly-polys she’s collected.  I hope she remembers to leave the lid on.  Anyhow, I think I might buy meself a wee bottle o’perrrrfume online.  I deserve it, yes?   Today’s scent was Eau des Merveilles, I haven’t worn it in forever and forgot how much I like it.

I got a call from the Big Cheese this morning — he’s in a place called Dali (?) which is in China, he’s hanging out with a couple from Amsterdam and having fun.  He’s been gone since April, coming home the end of this month, I think.  He’s talking about some train they can take to Tibet that goes through a pass so high each seat has its own oxygen mask.  Here’s a photo (up top) he took on his nine-hour bike ride in Yangshou.

Also, regular Posse commenter and D.C. friend Sariah took off on a year-long adventure around the world, here’s a link to her travel blog.  I love to travel, albeit less exotically, and I’m married to Mr. Travel himself.  I’m looking forward to following Sariah’s adventures and I thought you might be interested as well.

So, that’s it.  I’m offline today, living life rather than blogging about it.  Cheers.  See you tomorrow.

March