on collecting I: perfume

transitioning to fall

as regular readers of this blog are aware, i have long been struggling with trying to pare down and live a simpler life. i'd like to be less of a consumer or at the very least a more conscious one. but i struggle, because i worship at the altar of apple and i am an avid collector of many things...perfume, fabric, stamps, pretty paper, locks...i could go on.

and the rest of the week, i will go on. because i want to explore my need for collecting, what it is i like about it and hope to get to the bottom of what it is that drives me (or any of us, really) to collect. of course, this isn't the first time i've pondered this, but i want to do it again in the hope that i will begin to be more conscious about it and maybe also to remind me to actively enjoy these things i've so obsessively carefully chosen.

*  *  *

so to start this off, i got out my rather shockingly large box of perfume (to which, i am proud to say, i have not added any new ones during 2011) and changed out the summery scents for a selection of late summer/early autumn scents. i think that scent definitely can help you transition the seasons, so i chose some with darker, heavier undertones to carry me into fall.

i also kept a couple of the summer scents out (sarah jessica parker's lovely and the michael kors island) because i'm expecting that since we've had such a rotten sunless summer, we will actually get some sunny days here in august (so far, that's but a pipe dream).  for example, chanel no. 5 eau premiere is a great transition fragrance - a lighter version of the heavy, serious no. 5, it's perfect for these windy, changeable days where fall and even a few leaves are definitely in the air.  and for the truly blustery, autumn days where there's no hint of summer left, i'm ready with paul smith woman and the tom ford white patchouli.

even if i don't put on other makeup or do my hair, perfume is a part of my everyday. i keep several bottles on the shelf in the bathroom and several in the bedroom. i use scent to lift my mood or to underline it if i want to keep it dark. scent can trigger memories or just give flashes of a feeling you had when you wore it. i wear perfume every day - it's as essential as my glasses. sometimes i wear the same one for a week straight, but more often, a different one - one that somehow matches how i'm feeling or how i want to feel on that particular day.

aside:  what's interesting is that husband also wears cologne every day - he calls it "smell-good," which i find charming despite being dubbed that by a long-ago girlfriend. the difference is that he uses up a bottle before starting a new one, so he's content to wear the same one for several months at a time. he doesn't have the same need i do to collect a wide variety, tho' he doesn't buy the same one over and over again, when one bottle is gone, he buys something new.

but i suppose the moment i enjoyed most of all with my seasonal switch today was that the sun had come out all gloriously golden in the early evening sky and the perfumes looked just gorgeous all lined up on my scale in the evening sunlight.  enjoying the collection, in all its aspects - whether using it or just looking at it - is a big part of what collecting is about.

*  *  *

more collections coming soon...

on the ups and downs of flickr

just going through my draft posts...started this one clear back in march, but it actually still seems to ring true now...and i do still love the scarf.

on self-presents and belonging and not cleaning that mirror

i struggle with flickr. i go through periods of adoring it (usually in january, at the beginning of a new 365 project) and then i hit the doldrums and i begin to loathe it. there's so much pretense there. i saw someone one day who had commented on a photo, saying, "heartbreakingly beautiful, sympathetic DOF!" and i was like really? really? it was one of those rather prosaic photos of the aftermath of lunch at an outdoor café that are so in vogue. and how can depth of field possibly be sympathetic? and what purpose did that pretense really serve? but my impatience with it also tells me that i'm in one of those periods where i've gone off flickr.

i find flickr to be way more cliquish than blogging. groups there are much more defined (and by groups, i don't mean the ones you add your photos to) and it's so hard to break into them and i've tried with a couple of different circles that rejected me. i think that basically, i don't really feel that much at home on flickr. i'm just much more at home on blogger. but some part of you wants to break into certain groups and belong a little bit anyway. so i do things like buy myself this lovely scarf from the scarfshop as a little self-prezzie for my birthday, even tho' i'm not even recognized as a peripheral member of that particular flickr crowd (despite my best efforts). 

sometimes, you just want something that lets you feel you belong for a few minutes. even if only in your mind.

mushroom monday

all of the mushrooms in this post were seen and photographed on a single walk in the woods.

our property is 7+ hectars (17 acres) of land, divided into two - one of about 4 hectars where the house is and the other piece is a forest of mostly birches, but quite a few big pines, about 2 km down the road.

these mushrooms were all growing in our forest on saturday. so i guess the rain is good for something.

and what is it about a sense of ownership (tho' by rights, it's the bank that owns it) that somehow makes it even better?

are we programmed by our culture to think ownership adds an extra dimension?

or is it programmed in our very genetic makeup? a biology of ownership?

i don't have the answer.

but i will say that i felt these mushrooms, in their variety and number, were extra special because we found them in our own forest.

so they were OUR infinite variety of mushrooms. and that somehow adds an extra dimension.

i'd like to learn more about mushrooms. i mostly photographed them, tho' we brought a few home to try to identify them with our various mushroom books. (someone needs to invent one that lets you look things up by color.)

we're mostly too chicken to get very adventurous on eating just any old mushroom. which is probably also a biology of sorts - self-preservation.

so mostly, we just enjoyed the beauty of them.

and i enjoyed getting on the ground and getting up close and personal with the macro lens. devouring them with the camera, if not actually devouring them.

tho' these yellow swamp brittlegills are edible and we found enough of them (that we didn't have to share with bugs and slugs) to make an accompaniment to our pasta dinner.

they have the additional advantage of being difficult to mix up with other mushrooms,

so you can feel safe and secure in identifying them by their bright yellow tops.

they were delicious.

around the world in 60 seconds

 

i love this. 

thanks, sis, for sending it my way.

just another friday evening in the ER

late this afternoon, as i was pushing a wheelbarrow of bunny poo across the garden, husband came out and said, "wife, i think i need some help." he was very calm and so i didn't really think so much of it. then i realized he was holding his hand. he calmly said he needed some stitches and that we should probably go the ER. and i totally freaked out!! as one does.

he had a small piece of toilet paper wrapped around the thumb (which i most decidedly did NOT want to look at) and so in a flustered (to say the least) state, i ran and grabbed him a proper cloth to put around it. he strangely took off his shoes in the hallway and then he sort of swooned from the pain on the floor. i went into total panic then. i asked him if i should call an ambulance (i still hadn't seen the thumb). i'd not seen him so white and i was really worried.

he said, no, just find my wallet with my medical card in it and let's drive to the ER. we have a hospital locally, but it has no ER, so we had to drive 30 miles. behind a variety of slow combines, tractors, lorries filled with pigs and lost people from the netherlands pulling their caravans (and i've oddly gone british in my vocabulary). it seemed like the longest 30 minutes of my life.

when we'd barely gone 2 km from home, husband had some strange shock reaction (it's pretty intense to saw into your thumb with a band saw) - his eyes rolled back into his head, and he breathed very strangely and was white as a ghost. he recovered quickly and didn't seem to be aware it had even happened. that pretty much freaked me out.

we arrived at the ER (p.s. vejle - you need more signs directing people to your hospital), parked right outside (thank you for that, vejle hospital!) and went in. husband was seen immediately - a nurse ushered him in, asking me if i wanted to come in too (i said definitely not, please direct me to the waiting room). you see, i really can't stand the sight of things that are bleeding. it makes me feel faint.

so i settled into the waiting room with my P.D. james (which may explain the brit vocab above). i was totally impressed with how quickly husband's details were taken and he was seen by a doctor. we're talking within less than ten minutes of arrival.

i was sitting in the waiting room when i was approached by a doctor, asking, in danish, if i was swedish. in one of those moments where your brain tries to make sense of a situation by running through all the likely scenarios on fast forward, i concluded that husband, who spent his first five years in sweden and is half swedish, had had some kind of horrible shock fit, reverted to swedish and they were coming out to tell me that they'd lost him in some kind of freak stitching accident.

thankfully, that was not true and he came out, thumb bandaged, told me he only had two stitches and that he would like to go home now and eat our leftover pizza. but could we first stop and get him some chocolate and some cider.

and that was the beginning of our weekend. i hope the rest of it is a little bit more boring.

back to the caves

i get my news largely from the newspaper and from online news sources like the new york times, the guardian and the huffington post, but also from radio station P1, the danish answer to NPR. i am also a devoted fan of jon stewart's daily show, which we get here in denmark, only one day behind. so, like many, i get my news from sources where i am likely to agree with the slant that's presented. and that's a problem of this increasingly online world we live in...we can isolate ourselves in enclaves of people who share our beliefs and our interests. less and less do we challenge ourselves to listen to views not in line with our own. i'm as guilty of it as anyone.

and so views and the expression thereof become increasingly strident and dramatic (see the streets of london, the recent massacre in norway and the behavior of the so-called "tea party" members in the US congress). and i'll admit that as an educated, liberal-thinking, left-leaning sort of person, i continue to think that arguing with those extremes is still somehow not worth it. the beliefs they spout seem to be so ridiculous as to be beneath argument ("intelligent" design? a new knights templar? a congressional "super" committee? please.).

but those of us who are educated and have the power to reason and articulate good arguments are going to have to start arguing. because what a lot of these groups appear to want to do is to completely turn back modernism and possibly even all of the gains made after the enlightenment, taking us back to something resembling the dark ages, but with really cool electronics.  

take just the tea party conservatives....they're against abortion, homosexuality, humanitarianism, taxes, welfare, the environment. they're for the bible, guns, the death penalty, censorship and the general surveillance of society. what they preach is a fundamentalism not unlike the fundamentalism preached by breivik in norway and even members of al quaeda, who are also largely against that same list of things. and what's worrying is that, like al quaeda, the tea party appears to be shouting loudly and are well-funded.

if we're not careful, we'll find ourselves clubbed over the head and dragged back to the caves by our hair. i don't know about you, but i'm not keen on that...

thankful thursday

rainy days (yes, you got that right).

because with the rain comes mushrooms and that means dinner!

yellow swamp brittlegills (russula claroflava) - absolutely delicious with our pasta dinner. and absolutely free from our very own forest.

special black canary island potatoes - growing in OUR garden! now that's what i call well-irrigated joy!

happy visitors on a sunny day

rainbow fingernails

real rainbows (you need a little rain to have a rainbow)

for more thankfulness, check in with miss buckle.  and please do play along, it makes a nice change from the madness of the world...