note to self

eucalyptus citriodora should be pretty much the last vial you open for the day, since after one drop of it hits the blotting paper, that's it for all other smells for a couple hours.

citronella, citronella, some more citronella, and not really campherous. i can think of worse scents surrounded by which to fall asleep. wow, what a room deodoriser. i should put some in my shoes tomorrow (i can see the paramour nod appreciatively).

is it very bad of me to want to build a still for herbs?

dies with laughter

there are undoubtedly many of you who don't read rick mercer's blog. which is ok, since you're not canadians. but what's going on there right now transcends national borders.

background:

ralph klein is the premier of alberta, and alberta has been a little, shall we say, reticent to jump on the same-sex marriage bandwagon as it's travelled across canada. at first he vowed to fight it with everything he's got, then he mumbled and grumbled about how his lawyers told him he couldn't actually do anything, and now he's said that he'll accept the idea of same-sex marriage licenses with chagrin, and work on some legislation to allow marriage commissioners to refuse if they have moral objections (why yes, he is a bigotted fuckwit, why do you ask?). he's also known for imbibing rather too much alcohol than he can hold without making a fool of himself in public (and yes, too many albertans continue to reelect him).

take note of the picture next to that article. it's a lovely catch all on its own.

then go here:

rick mercer has an unerring eye, and knows how to excite us.

a nation with too much free time on its hands.

Bush's 'brain' leaked: Did Bush know?

too delicious a headline to pass up. courtesy of the "asia times online".

so, the democrats are salivating over karl rove's possible indictment.

me, not so much. it's not that i wouldn't love to see the guy go down; i would. i think he's pretty much pure slime. but you know what? i don't think he will. i think he was careful enough to avoid using her name. he had to know how much he was playing with fire, and considering how this was orchestrated, he didn't need to use her name. and i don't know whether he got close enough to basically end up with the same effect, from the point of view of it being a crime. i just doubt it.

cooper is still mum about details: here's the transcript of matt cooper and his lawyer's interview with press after having testified before the grand jury. can't wait for cooper's next few articles.

but it's lovely to see the flames flicker under scott mcclellan in the last white house press briefing. "I think we've exhausted discussion on this the last couple of days," he said early on.

"You haven't even scratched the surface." said one reporter. "It hasn't started." said another.

damn straight. you've spun this every which way, and now the chickens are come home to roost, which means they're gonna poop on your head, scotty.

building a still?

i was joking about building a still, and lynn joked along, saying he was surprised i didn't start my exploration into natural perfumery with doing so.

*chuckle*. not that this really required thinking some more, but i did -- and i believe that this process is fairly typical: i get interested in something people are doing, i'll watch them for a while, and then i start several steps back from what they're doing, at a stage where i can understand how things fit together to produce the outcome that has others excited. i really do like to know how things work, and i like to make them work. i don't go all the way back to some semblance of first principles until much later, though, except that i might do a lot of reading on those principles fairly soon.

frex, i see and feel interesting textures and patterns, which leads to learning how to knit/crochet/needlecraft, which in turn leads to spinning/dying, which leads to growing dye plants, and might in the long run lead to me breeding sheep, alpaca, or silk worms (exposure to oakenking's endeavours in that area is very, very bad for me). :) i usually collect connected aspects of interest while moving backwards along the chain of production -- spinning and dyeing are separate subpaths, and i came to dyeing long before, and am just revisiting it lately, branching out from natural dyes into synthetic ones.

as regards the perfumery, i'd normally be some months from thinking of making my own extracts. but i am talking about the still already because i've basically been growing plants for fragrance for a long time since, and think that steam extraction of some of them ought to be fairly easy and give good yields (say, for lavender), and guess what time it is? right, harvest time for the first flush.

there is still a wee bit of neroli smell left on the paperstrip. alas, i have neither easy access to mass quantities of bitter orange blossoms, nor will simple steam extraction do the job.