No Bueno

I've been slipping snippets of the Advanced Perfumers / Master Perfumery course into the currently running September course to sort of test it out, and so far, it is working. I'm fielding questions left and right about those course additions, and it feels pretty good. Google Alerts picked up our CPD announcement, the first time we've ever been there in all of these years, for the subject 'natural perfumery'. I've had that alert on for at least 10 years, and I gotta say, most of those announcements or whatever they are, are not about natural perfume at all. Most of them are about some big synthetic perfume conglomerate utilizing the latest technology (like headspace) using raw materials to collect and duplicate the molecules, or whatever it is they do. Smoke and mirrors stuff. 

The new incense is rolled and dusted and currently sitting under the awning to get the last bit of warmth from this mini heatwave we've been experiencing. I'm a stickler for conformity for rolled incense, so each piece is weighed before rolling. These were at 5.4 to 5.9 grams each wet, so hopefully, they will weigh 4.5 grams each, or thereabouts when they dry. Except for the pinyon pine resin, everything in them is from within 25 miles from where I'm sitting right now, some were farmed, and some were wild harvested.

This past Saturday, because it was so lovely and unseasonably warm here, I drove up to the mountains to see what there was to see and got a little harvesting done. Mostly fallen stuff because I really don't like mangling plants to get what I want. This trip yielded a little bit of oakmoss and cedar leaf with a few bibs and bobs of other stuff. It wasn't a real harvesting trip, so I didn't get a lot, just enough to play with. The mountains have been devastated by drought and an opportunistic beetle, so the dense forest is no longer thick, and the woodsmen are well on their way to clearing all the dead trees out and are currently running controlled burns to clean up the forest floor. It will never look the same again in my lifetime, or even my children's children's lifetimes. There was no snow, and typically, there are a couple of feet this time of the year. California recorded its second driest January ever in 2022. Even though we got blasted in November and December, gaining 150% of the average snowpack for the whole season, nothing has fallen since then, which is slowly whittling away at that overage. If we don't get rain/snow soon, we will face another year of severe drought and out-of-control fires, and I will be looking to migrate away from the West Coast.