Headless Helen Models

I have been practicing taking better pictures. I have found something out: I do not have a steady hand. This must be why most people who take their blog pictures seriously use a tripod. I have always brushed this possibility aside because using a tripod shows a level of commitment to superb picture taking that I just haven't felt. Until now. The reason people take such care with their pictures is because good pictures are a pleasure to look at and if a blog or a website has beautiful images you will come back again and again like a crack whore looking to score.

Or, you know, like a person who appreciates really good images.

I've been discovering lots of things in the last couple of days, actually.

One of them being that while I (surprisingly) like ylang ylang scent, it also kind of makes me feel like a dark exotic suffocating six hundred ton pile of flowers has been dropped on my head and I will never crawl out again. I've been scenting bath salts for my craft fair booths and for my Etsy shop. So I've been playing apothecary with my little vials of pure scents and mixing up salt of the earth and sea to make bathing much nicer. I don't generally like any scent that is cloying, heavy, or sweet. Especially sweet scents. I also truly dislike almost all scents that can be described as "musky". Ylang ylang is an exotic, warm, sweet, cloying, heavy, tropical floral scent that is not only quite expensive- it's super potent.

I have devised bath salt scenting kits for my shop which come with one pound of salts (a mixture of Epsom and Dead Sea salts), a scent pack of four tiny vials of pure essential oils, two scent recipes, and instructions on how to blend the scent with the salts. I have come up with three scent themes: scents for lifting melancholy, scents for increasing pep, vim, and vigor, and scents for the relief of anxiety and hysteria.

This actually took a lot of researching because each scent collection needs to achieve a particular result (as in: mood enhancing) while also mixing well together. Even though I will be including two specific scent recipes for each scent collection, the idea is that you can mix and match to please your own nose, knowing that no matter how you mix them you will get a pleasing result and one that does what it claims.

Thank god I'm not claiming that they will increase penis size, that would be so hard to live up to. Although, judging by the number of e-mails I receive claiming that this can be achieved easily, and me without a penis to begin with, it can't be that hard...right? (I can only imagine that there are some desperate dupes out there responding to these ridiculous e-mails, otherwise why would they keep sending them out?)

If you haven't tried to be your own apothecary yet, I highly recommend it. Maybe there's no point to making your own aspirin from the bark of white willow trees, because Advil is so perfect already, but I'll tell you what is worth learning to make on your own: body products (lotions, salves, powders, scrubs, salts, balms, and shampoos.) You might not be able to cure cancer with a little dried root, but you sure can make excellent skin care and you sure can make wonderfully personal and soothing bath products.

I'm not a Wicca or a druid or a high priestess or anything. Just in case you were curious. I tend to imagine myself as a monk in a still house smack dab in the middle of a monastery garden, or an apothecary with no religious affiliation.

It was shocking to discover, this morning, that my child has the day off from school. Holy crap. So my plans to kick butt and clean the house and deal with piles of all sorts is kind of shot to hell. I wanted to clean up the studio and prepare for all kinds of work getting done in there. I'll be lucky if I get the dishes done now. Where's Max's rent-a-brother?!

I feel like I still have some ylang ylang up my nose.

I was uncomfortably reminded of the time my mother pulled out some chocolate teddy bear pops on an evening when we were desperate for a treat, many years ago. Remember how chocolate isn't something I particularly crave? Well, sugar sometimes is and I don't always argue with the form it is offered in. I bit into one of those chocolate teddy bears with a stick up it's bahookie and one bite confirmed that: essential oils and chocolate should not be stored together in the same cabinet. I retched, I gagged, I spat, I eventually really did hurl. And hurled some more. I am dreadfully afraid of vomiting and will do almost anything to avoid it. So you know it's bad if it's got me at the toilet bowl.

I have to stop talking about that now because I can still taste it in my mouth after ten years and it's making me woozy.

Meanwhile the fruit flies are still trying to take over our whole house. I have never experienced this before. My fruit fly experiences have always come with some kind of forgotten fruit in my house being left out to attract them and aid in their breeding programs or massive canning efforts in which every surface in my kitchen is sticky with fruit juice. And always they disappear as soon as the offending attractant disappears. These ones came from nowhere and seem to have no plans on leaving nor have the grace to die on their own, ever. Philip has declared fruit fly killing as my new hobby.

One last note before I face the long day ahead of me with hyper child...my smoke alarm keeps beeping at us. I can't tell which one it is and I'm afraid to change the batteries because in our last house all of the smoke alarms (and there were many after the fire, the insurance people insisted we have one about every two feet of ceiling space) they were all possessed. We had one alarm that kept on beeping even after I ripped it off the ceiling. The chirping is starting to make me go crazy, so obviously I'm going to have to deal with it. I had planned on making Philip do it but he's just as scared to touch those things. He hasn't forgotten the alarm that kept on beeping even after we had it disconnected from the wires and removed the old battery.

How is that even possible?