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As much as I’d like to be posting new product offerings or at least pretty pictures for you to stare at, there’s a bit of a setback. My camera broke last week – an accident of my sweetie placing it on the balcony table and, well, missing. While I could amuse you with pictures off my Droid, they indeed have their limits.

I’ve also gotten really deep into the book on divorce and Wicca I’m writing (yes, I am a newlywed, irony noted.) I’m at 58K as of posting this, and then come the massive rewrites, survey postings, and agent hunt. While I’m trying to work the book in small segments some days are just more time consuming than others, and given that I have to prep and sterilize my kitchen as much as I can before mixing perfumed goodies, some days I can write OR I can play with my fragrances. Right now writing takes precedence.

It’s worth a mention that Vampire Groupie did get included in a Treasury East, which is lovely – I guess people are still looking.

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my macaronic flop - pic by Diana Rajchel

I attempted to make macarons the other night. I already knew they would be bastardized – I was just trying to find a way to use up the enormous bag of mixed nuts that I obtained from Sam’s Club who knows when – but the disaster that resulted? Hilarious. Anyone who bakes for a living may have a seizure at my list of conscious sins:

1. I used wax paper, not parchment paper.

2. Oh yeah – folding means that you turn off the mixer and stir it in.

3. I attempted to use a plastic bag with the edge cut off in lieu of a pastry bag.

4. Mixed nuts. Not almonds. Mixed nuts (I can hear the screams from here.)

I am totally unsurprised by my results.

So why did I do it,  you ask?

Because, when you rip away the surface reasons of curiosity, amusement and bemusement…

I just don’t care if I fail. I also don’t much care if I succeed. I count having the energy and patience to whip egg whites into a fluffy gelatinous froth with my low-rent Hamilton Beach mixer a win by itself. This may also explain to some people my frustrating behavior when playing sports. I never did feel incentive to win, mostly I just liked running around, to the frothing fury of the competitive types that got stuck with me.

Of course I’m going to try again, two or three times. This is my first excuse to play with food coloring in my adult life, and I also am curious about this thing with food called aesthetics. I generally try to make my food more tasty than pretty, but this idea of food as sculpture intrigues me.

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A colleague just asked me about 18th century herbs used to treat rather unpleasant disorders, and I thought it might make for a fun post. If you’re writing an Agatha Christie or Wilkie Collins style murder mystery, then you will want to cast the following herbs and potations:

Foxglove – i.e. digitalis officinalis. Pretty and pretty deadly unless you’re a heart patient.

Poppies – sort of the wonderdrug nightmare of the 19th century. Opium and laudanum circulated widely; while opium production has turned to the modern heroin, opium is still around in some places.

Absinthe – not as badass as rumored to be, which is why it’s re-legalized. What was blamed on the wormwood was mostly alcohol poisoning – which does cause hallucinations – but it had the woo-woo reputation with that creepy sounding herb. Let me put it to you this way: when was the last time you saw someone trip on absinthe? How much did they have? Did that person ever drink an equal amount of another alcoholic beverage? What happened when the alcohol poisoning set in?

Also, the little ritual with the glass is so much classier than Red Bull and vodka, and it shares a James Bond secret: shaken not stirred is a formula for dilution.

Belladonna – trippy stuff. I need not say more.

So if you want to write that steampunk mystery, go ahead and pack the above in your doctor’s kit, and maybe give him a little habit on the side (which could conceivably be a nun.)

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Google tasks.

It’s actually really nifty. You can keep multiple lists, switch between them, add, delete or recall – bunches of stuff. My only two kvetches are that when I use it online, I have to have my email program open (really Google? You can’t add that to your account page but you can the borderline irrelevant app engine?) There’s a handy free program in market that allows me to use my task lists independently on my Droid. My only frustration is that it’s not from Google itself, so there’s an ad offering an auto-sync in exchange for ransom.

Still, I love this program just as much I used to love Outlook tasks when that was the state of the art email program around. There’s just something so shudderingly satisfying to me about ticking a little check box and seeing the text struck through. Take that, TASKS! I SLAY you with my mighty strikethrough of accomplishment!

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The first person who signed up proceeded to order five. They were a basic package for a magic practitioner: love, protection, prosperity, healing and something else I don’t quite recall. Probably a fragrant representation of the moon. Whatever it was, what I’d planned to do with just the three essential oils I had on hand – rosemary, basil and jasmine – became a project where I constantly acquired more and more fragrances. I realize now I started badly, buying whatever essentials GNC had on hand, and moving on to Botanic Choice without fully understanding what “floral oil” didn’t mean.

For months I could reliably post my listing, and get bids. It didn’t stop until I left the auction thing for awhile because of jobs and graduate school.

I gave my initial business next to no planning or thought. I just up and did it. And the way the Internet worked back then, it worked. If I showed up at gothicauctions or ewitch someone would buy it, and I went about my merry way. Once in awhile I ran into stupid competitor tricks, but it was always one short-sighted jackass rather than several. This was the person who deliberately undercut my oil prices and who at one point directly copied from my listings, despite their money coming from other venues and my courteous behavior towards them. I called out on the copying, and rather than complaining about the undercutting I raised my prices as I recognized I was taking a loss. They did not follow, and I did not lose anything.

The business lost out in part to my inattention due to school and stressors at home, but mostly just due to my inattention. While I was away, other competitors came in and swooped up customers with me who needed reliable magical oil suppliers and who were around for the way the Internet went from 1.0 to 2.0. While the game was changing, I was off getting my MFA and my divorce.

I came back with no lingering clients, a magical oil market that was now completely glutted by any smartass with a few eyedroppers and some oils, and with the awareness that most of the people who did buy my oils were wearing them rather than using them for what I had designed.

A few friends coaxed me into coming back after realizing that somewhere between my life changes my palate graduated from simple odors to more complex creations. Not all were hits, of course – they never are – but I could perform consistently enough that friends would drop by when in need of the right fragrance for the right occasion. I started with my back catalog of recipes: all the magical oils, some renamed for commercial purposes. Most are simple and flat, as that’s usually what’s needed for magical work. Even now, I have perhaps twenty “modern” perfume only creations, and I slide by on old recipes for tonics and potions as that’s what people seem to know and want.

Perfuming these days calms me, most of the time. But I’m still learning the game, and dealing with attitudes towards me not necessarily founded in fact. There are the rules of the game, especially among perfume collectors who have this absurd idea every perfumer has an encyclopedic knowledge of perfumes (bitch, please) or that I am supposed to somehow feel ashamed and inferior when those who are ardently synthetic try to bully me into joining them or pointing out my problems with synthetics. Aside from FDA requirements and my personal practice of full disclosure, I’m still picking and choosing what rules I want to play along with. Just know that I’ve got nothing to prove and I won’t be very patient with you if you do have something to prove.

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As it is, writing the book is taking up a good chunk of my time. It’s even standing between me and my compulsive baking. So even though I have perfume ideas filling the air around my head, the book takes precedence right now. But it’s good. I have lots of pictures on flickr for you!

I also have to confess…I’ve gotten the fanfiction writing bug again. Especially with Daria at last coming out on DVD, although I’ll have to bribe someone to splice the original music back in DIY style.

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LEGAL NOTICE: If you are not of legal drinking age in your country of residence, this post is not intended to serve you in any way. Also, I am not a doctor or other such professional. If you try this stuff, do so at your own risk. I assume my readers are grown-ups and when dealing with unfamiliar substances will behave as law abiding grown-ups are supposed to around such things.

While the “horror theme” isn’t particularly salient there, they are one of the few bars in town that offer absinthe, a standing favorite of mine.¹ They also feature a “be your own bartender” attraction. They give their customers a long list of all the raw ingredients for a drink, and encourage you to make it up. I’ve never seen anyone use this while I’ve been there, but I did get a gander at their considerable collection of house-made bitters. They are awesome. My only big complaint is that they don’t make ginger bitters – and their “natural” gingerale is spiked with a whole lot of corn syrup, which I’m very allergic to. This deprives me of my beloved Jameson and gingers.

I am always seriously tempted to collect bitters wherever I see them – they work just as well as a fragrance agent as they do a flavoring one. But I know I don’t have to do it that way.

A bitter is nothing more than an edible tincture. Got cheesecloth? Soak the herb of your choice in a decent quality vodka. After a week, you’ll have your own bitter. It doesn’t have to involve orange rinds, although those are also awesome. Want a stronger flavor? Change out the old stuff for new material the following week. You can over time make yourself some complex and interesting stuff to add to your at-home drink mixes.

The best stuff to use in bitters are fruit rinds, leaves and edible flowers. I strongly advise against using seeds, barks or roots in tinctures – the oils in these are extra strong, and mixing them with alcohol can have some unintended effects. This is especially true of poppy seeds.

But if you want to add a little “something” to your standby martini, this will give it a fun diy touch!

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1. Diluted. Unlike certain post-adolescent teenagers, I’ve got nothing to prove.

While I can’t say every shot’s a raging success these days, I’ve gotten better over time. While last year was all about exposure and ISO, this year I’ll likely move up to aperture timers and working with the automatic pre-sets now that I fully understand manual. I know why pictures blur and grain. I even know why they come out too dark. And I understand both the importance of the tripod and how to innovate with it.

One of the skills I’m working on – in partnership with a goal I made in 2008 – is self portraits. In 2008, I decided to get used to how I look in pictures. I’m a fat girl. I exercise a lot, and I eat normally, and I accept that while my size might change from time to time, I will not suddenly be not fat. So I’m pushing myself to accept my own appearance and work with it. I got to that path by blogging Fat Chic. If art is about resisting conformity, and beauty is considered the penultimate in conformity, I choose creativity. In the long run, you’ll want the ugly and interesting person around a LOT longer, especially since even beauty that does not fade changes.

So here’s what I’ve learned about self portraits. First, they should speak to you – forget what anyone else says about it. I’ve seen people go to great pains and stress themselves out over self portraits. It’s a portrait of the self, a reflection of your inner voice…not a competition. If your inner voice is kind of quiet most of the time, join the club. Second, they aren’t that hard to take once you know your camera. In my case, I needed the light behind the camera, and found a spot on the Minneapolis skyway that was just about my height that allowed me enough space to back up and get my full frame into the picture. One shot turned out grainy – I set the ISO and exposure too low and didn’t get enough light. This one came out pretty well, considering I was in a public space and had no way to angle the camera. It was a rare moment where the skyway was empty save for me.  An hour later, I might have been flattened.

Most days just getting myself to really look at pictures of myself takes some work. So this one? Progress. What does it say to me?

… I like blue scarves? I don’t remember why I didn’t pop in contacts that day – my photos are usually way better with contacts than they are with glasses.

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