Tales From a Blender's Life

Geesh, I've been busy.

Whoever would have thought that packaging up teeny, tiny sample vials could be so time-consuming? And boring.

This is the part of my work that I find so difficult -- packaging, marketing, selling, peddling, hawking, pushing -- all the 'money' aspects of this business just make my head spin. I suppose I should employ my children in these more menial* tasks, but any time two or more are in a room together a fight breaks out over, oh, I don't know, how close someone's foot was to someone else's foot, and something gets broken. Nine times out of ten, the broken item is mine, usually something precious to me or at least semi-expensive. It isn't a financially responsible idea to put them to work in the 'fume lab. I've already recently lost a considerable amount of vanilla eo to mechanical failure (see hole in bottom of aluminum container). Not a loss I'm willing to repeat if I can help it. So I trudge on alone.

The current bathroom reading materials are 'The Secret of Scent' by Luca Turin, which I read only when I want to pretend to learn something. I lost the flow of this book about 1/4 of the way in, right when Luca began the chemistry lessons with all the asides (sort of like what I do -- right here, in fact), the current issue of 'Rolling Stones' magazine for when I'm in a really big hurry and want to be disgusted or delighted by what the famous musically inclined folk are up to, and 'A Passage to India' for times when I know I'll be sitting a while and want to be enchanted instead of being smothered in chemistry or lashed with the thoughts and ideas of musical megalomaniacs.

I've been working on a humus accord. So far it's got a mushroom~y stank with a healthy dose of dirty angelica working for it. I'm seriously considering a drop, literally a drop, of valerian root tincture to give it the rot aspect. Scares the crap out of me. I'm afraid I'll end up with something so fetid and decomposed that it will be completely unusable. On the other hand, it could be the most wonderfully well blended 'rotted earth' accord ever.

*I really don't consider these tasks menial, per se, just boring to the point of procrastination.