Spoilt for Choice: Perfumes

For my birthday I received two perfumes: Summer Hill (Crabtree & Evelyn) and Samsara (Guerlain). Summer Hill was not one I’d come across before but it was fresh and lovely. It reminds me of something I had a long time ago, which I can’t quite place.

Samsara was one I ‘tested’ months ago (that red bottle is a bit of a ‘come try me’!) I liked it enough to put it on my ‘would buy’ list (which I don’t think I kept updated on my blog! I’m sure I will eventually). It is quite musky but not overpowering or cloying.

Mum was right when she said they were starting to recognize us  in Boots, but they’ve decided I’m a customer and not a test bottle pest. On my birthday I opened a card to discover cash and a ‘receipt’ type voucher… £5 off certain lines of perfume if I bought one before July 5th.

When I finally finished with the cold I was given, I rolled in there with Bluebird, my shopping trolley, and tried about six different perfumes… started to forget which was which! Mum tried to convince me to buy Cool Water for Men, and when I pointed out there was a bottle of Cool Water for Women, she squirted it all over Bluebird (having run out of places to squirt anything). But I didn’t want to buy that… especially when you remember this whole perfume craze began when I thought about how for years I just wore whatever perfume Mum took it in her head to get me. I said, “Bluebird will smell for months like Bernard.”
“Bernard? Who’s that?”
“The fellow on Come Dine with Me who wore bright shirts. One of the women came in and said ‘you are wearing Cool Water.’”
“Oh.”

When I mentioned I was considering Samsara by Guerlain, Mum pricked up her ears… “oh, Guerlain is very good.” I kind of wished she hadn’t said that, as I was falling for a bottle of Diesel Fuel for Life. I was confused, though, as Fuel for Life seems to come in three different colours, and they didn’t have any clear titles to show if they were different or not. As everybody, including Bluebird, was already up to the eyebrows in perfume samples, there was no point trying them separately. Just for the record, the one I favoured was gold toned and wearing a white net!

You might think “what difference does it make? You know yourself which bottle you liked!” But you can’t just pick it up and buy it; you have to ask for it to be taken out of the cabinet. I didn’t want to have to say “no, not the black one… and absolutely not the pink one! I want that gold one!” (Stamp, pout, sulk).

And when Mum said “Guerlain is very good,” suddenly I felt as though I was about to choose a jumped-up T-shirt over a designer dress of time-honoured pedigree… which was bad of me, especially as I’m determined not to be swayed by external influences! I try to avoid saying things like “this is an old lady / little girl perfume,” although I’m certain to think it at times. But I’m the one who liked Tweed.

Fortunately Tweed wasn’t one of the ones I would get a discount on (actually, it might have been…) Anyway, I wasn’t looking at Tweed, and Mum would have rebelled if I’d suggested it! Bluebird too. Both would wheel out of Boots in high dudgeon.

It was my first time in town for ages (because of my cold), and I wasn’t feeling very happy… didn’t know if I had the stamina to stand there and point out the perfume I wanted, then wait while it was rung up at the till. I couldn’t stand still when sales people tried to talk to us… just wanted to end the conversation and run away! Perhaps there was a bit of flu left over, making me giddy. The assistant (or manager? I have a bad habit of not looking at name tags) who recognized us was trying to encourage me to go for the Samsara, and I wasn’t sure all of a sudden, so we went away and had lunch in the wee French place, giving me time to untangle the various perfumes on my hands. Mum popped in later to bag the Samsara for me, (£34 reduced to £29 with the voucher) and said “that was the last one!”

And it’s lovely. I put it on a few days later, and Mum came in sniffing, saying “I smelled it as soon as I opened the door.”
“It reminds me of J Lo Live,” I said… this is not something I thought before, but now it does seem to me to be a creamy, musky version of it. Perhaps Samsara is the night, and Live is the day? I imagined that Mum would say “never!” but she didn’t seem surprised at the comment. When I checked up on the base notes, was interested to see that both perfumes have the following in common:

tonka bean
vanilla
sandalwood

Added to which, J Lo Live has lemon, orange and pineapple, whereas Samsara is said to have ‘citrus notes’, whatever that includes!

I felt ‘all over the place’ some months ago; it seemed more or less random which perfumes I would go for… but now I see a pattern forming.

I noticed online just now… Diesel Fuel for Life says ‘Only the Brave.’ I obviously wasn’t brave enough that day.

If you’re wondering about the little perfume icons, I discovered them on Basenotes. They are copyright 2005-2008, Basenotes / Grant Osborne, but we are kindly allowed to use them non-commercially, giving credit. They are lovely, aren’t they? If there was an icon for every perfume in the world, I could show you my entire collection! As it is, I have the following:

(Euphoria, L’Aimant (Orchid), Light Blue, Charlie Red, J Lo Live)

We Certainly Have Quantity

Spent the last couple of days studying printers! Mum was complaining that her Canon printer was costly to maintain; it was always running out of this ink cartridge or that, and stopping her from printing (mostly plain text). The cartridges seem to have gone up in price. (Amusing to look at that old Amazon page… it still remembers the date I bought that item, in 2006!)

I suggested it might be better to get one mono laser printer between the two of us (using ethernet) — and maybe have a dedicated photo printer as well if we wanted.

I spent days searching… there are so many of them out there! It seems a little crazy; why? Especially when one printer doesn’t seem much of an improvement on the last. My priorities were Mac-friendly ethernet printers with low running costs — ones which aren’t running out of cartridges every other week. It was almost more important that it wasn’t constantly squeaking at us than that the ink was cheap!

While I searched, though, I started to realize that there’s nothing out there that’s very much better (in our price range) than the Canons we have. I also remembered the utter nightmare which was the non-Canon printer we had before… it was so lightweight it felt like a child’s toy. I wasn’t printing every day, and when I did print, it would do a bad job or produce a completely blank sheet because the ink had dried up. Or there would be gaps and lines because of the odd clogged nozzle. It had one big ink cartridge, which meant when one colour ran out, I had to replace the whole thing… and that wasn’t cheap either. Compared to that, I have nothing to complain about where my Canon is concerned. The ink is expensive and there’s always one running out, but the photo print quality is good and it doesn’t dry out or clog up on me the way my last two printers did. It doesn’t matter how long I leave it, it will print, and print well. Also it’s sturdy enough for Delilah to sleep on it!

I found some printers on the market right now which might work well for plain text, and not run out quite as frequently, but I didn’t see anything that was as far ahead as I’d hoped.

Meanwhile, Mum was talking to salesmen in town, one of whom pointed out that if we turn our settings to b/w, it should override the printers’ refusal to print when a colour cartridge runs out. Mum tried changing to greyscale, and it worked for her. I didn’t understand that, as I had been reading somewhere that greyscale doesn’t mean the colours aren’t being used… it still draws on cyan? Well, I don’t know if that’s true or not… complete mystery to me!

Having compared the likeliest printers with our Canons, we realized it was a bit like trading a pair of confident show ponies for a single pig in a poke.

I’m actually quite happy to be hanging onto mine, as it’s the first printer I’ve had in years that worked well. Still, I couldn’t help feeling a little glum… all that time I spent looking at innumerable grey boxes and getting the information together! But she said “your work wasn’t wasted — it helped us realize that there isn’t a magic printer out there.”

If you’re on the lookout for a personal-use non-photo printer yourself, I can suggest a few by email! They may not be magic and there are certainly no guarantees, but in my view they have potential.

Changing Lanes: Personal Risk

Watched Changing Lanes on DVD; this time with Mum. It was frightening how nervous I felt… I even considered ‘pulling the plug’ by saying “gah, let’s not watch this tonight!”

It’s not as if it’s a film that particularly means anything to me. I admired it and was relieved it ended well despite the rapid pace of disasters, but I remember how difficult it was to watch the first time.

It can be difficult to please Mum where films are concerned. She likes very light and funny things (The Ice Age and The Wind in the Willows); whodunnits (Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot); non-Hardy period drama if tastefully done (Larkrise to Candleford and Cranford); things we have read (Hornblower and Sharpe).

She’s less keen on anything ‘horrible’, ‘dreary’ or ‘boring’, though one day she put Die Hard II on and laughed at much of it! I’m inclined to think she is wary of anything she doesn’t normally watch, and would like some films better than she thinks she will. I had that kind of fear about Robocop, Terminator and Alien but finally watched and grew to respect them. There are still things I refuse to watch (Omen and Final Destination), but as I started watching both of them, I know for sure they’re not my cup of tea!

Tonight I suggested we watch a DVD, just for a change, and showed her our DVD collection (in about 5 boxes). Things like Johnny English, Robin Hood (Prince of Thieves), Legend, iRobot, Artificial Intellligence (AI), Emma, When Harry Met Sally, The Postman, Waterworld, The Hogfather… and she picked out something we have watched about three times very recently (National Treasure 2), saying “all the rest are boring.”

Since the whole point of watching a DVD tonight was because I was tired of sitting through repeats of repeats, I baulked. “You watch repeats of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? every night then call these boring? And we watched that one quite recently.”
She looked puzzled. “Did we?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Well, you pick one, then.”

Instead I found another box of DVDs. “That one in there, Changing Lanes, is quite good. I bought it recently.”
“Play that one.”

So we settled down to watch it, and my stomach was full of butterflies. What if she didn’t like it? It might be more violent or upsetting than I remember, and then I’d feel terrible for making us both watch it, especially as I had refused to accept her own choice. And though I find stuff hard to watch at times, I find them even harder to watch in company. Perhaps we should have gone with National Treasure 2 after all.

When I watch a film nobody else likes, I worry that it give away flaws in my character… “how could Diddums enjoy that?! It’s all explosions, aliens, bad jokes and drug dealers!”

I remember I wanted to watch a history thing when we were on holiday; I hoped it would be interesting and dramatic, but instead it was rather mean and horrible, and it got worse and worse… finally the others snapped at me and glared, as though to say “how could you want to watch this??” I felt betrayed by whoever made the thing! I didn’t like it either, but felt as though the producers had shown up my lack of judgement.

Wouldn’t it be safer to watch the films everybody else likes, and not suggest anything myself? But tonight it was too late; I’d tipped my hand.

Changing Lanes began, and the various characters were droning away about their own downbeat affairs, and all I could think was “this is boring. Do you think Mum is bored? Will they go on like that for the rest of the film? I don’t think they do, but what if I’ve forgotten how dull and gloomy it really is?”

I got so twitchy that I nearly said “this is depressing, don’t you think? Maybe we should just watch the other DVD.” But the film had only been running for two minutes! I asked myself how I would feel about the film if I was watching it on my own again… that was easy. I’d just settle down and watch it… quite happy. Give it time.

Mum seemed interested; even smiled when the two main characters ran into each other. I knew for sure she was enjoying it when she went out of the room and asked me to pause the DVD so that she wouldn’t miss any of it. (We were at the bit where the lawyer was having a heart to heart with his wife). We had a quick break and got something hot to drink, then finished watching it… it was good.

Great… but I’m going to have to stop hanging my own self-belief on whether or not other people like what I like… that’s daft! I know we couldn’t possibly like all the same things — and whether or not we do, it’s only because we see different things in the films. One person might see violence; another would see interesting characters or a vein of humour.

When we had finished Changing Lanes, we went back to Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, looked at each other scornfully, and said “that’s ridiculous, how can people not know that?” Secure (once again) in each other’s regard.

Focusing on Skills

When I was still at school, Mum (who liked to throw out random pieces of advice), said “if you see a word and you don’t know what it means, look it up in the dictionary.” Sometimes there’s something you’re too lazy or tired to check; it’s just one of those things. Other times you just assume a word means something that it doesn’t! But 3 times out of 4, remembering her advice, I would make myself look it up. I never regretted the few minutes spent.

I found myself thinking of that just now when I said to Pete that the reviewer of my new lens was correct about it being light and good (I’m happy with it), but at the same time having some focusing issues with my Canon 350D. I’m in my first few days of using this lens, and have noticed that already. It doesn’t happen a lot, only when focusing on certain things (like repeated patterns, I guess). It doesn’t know what to focus on the most, and it zooms in and out helplessly, and finally, when you think you’ve stopped in a good place and try to take the shot, the camera refuses, saying it can’t focus properly.

I rather wish it wouldn’t care…

But it does. The only way to overcome that is to focus manually. To embark on that, you switch from AF to MF on the lens. We’re not supposed to manually focus when it’s in autofocus, according to the instruction manual… it doesn’t say why not. Fortunately I never even thought of trying!

The first time I tried manual focus, it didn’t seem to work; nothing at all got sharp in the viewfinder. I grumbled about that, and thought “oh well,” and used a clumsy workaround, which was: using autofocus till it got to a place I was happy with, stopping, switching the lens to MF, and taking the shot.

I suppose it was good enough for the situation, as I didn’t want to step away from where I was, but am I going to use the workaround for the rest of my days? Or am I going to check the instruction manual and figure out what I did wrong?

The second option is the easiest and most time-saving in the long run, though sometimes you have to shame yourself into doing it! I have now confirmed what I was doing wrong when failing to focus manually (using the zoom ring instead of the focusing ring; talk about confused!) There was a time when I didn’t even know why my camera was refusing to take the shot, which it sometimes did with my old lens as well. For months and years I just muddled through and did what I could. But now I’ve looked it up and understand. It’s like a weight off my mind.

Meanwhile here’s another shot of Samson through the new lens. I was trying to underexpose so that the flowers (and other pretty things) weren’t quite so washed out, but as a result the grass looks a lot darker than I’m happy with. I could lighten it in Photoshop but can’t be bothered today.

Lazy Photographer Syndrome strikes again…

Poppa Sam

A rather shaky photo of Samson, as he was moving quickly, but a keeper, I think. Have also been trying out some Photoshop tips from camera magazines (my sister gave me a bundle of old ones for my birthday). The problem with it is that I keep seeing other cameras and wondering if they would be better than the one I have! Low priority, I would say…

PS: I was reading my camera instruction manual at bedtime (as one does) and found a bit where it says if a battery is running out too quickly, it might need to be replaced with a new…. battery! Not camera! I know, bang goes the excuse. In my case I think the battery is plenty good; it’s the way I autobracket everything and use RAW files as well as large JPEGs… the cards are hard-pushed to keep up, never mind the battery. On top of that, the new zoom len uses a lot of power in image stabilizing. It can be turned off if the camera is very steady and won’t shake, but today I was lazy and left the tripod indoors.

Zooming Ahead

I asked Birthday Claus for a telephoto zoom lens for my birthday, and got it! It’s for my Canon 350D, and is a Canon EFS 55-250mm with image stablizer. I don’t know very much about lenses but this looked as though it would extend what my camera can do, without breaking Birthday Claus’s bank (any more than it’s broken already, that is). All I’ve been using ever since I bought the Canon a while ago is the basic ‘kit lens’ (18-55mm).

The kit lens is actually fairly wide angle, isn’t it? You can cram a lot into one shot! I was trying to pull some leafy twigs out of the way of one timed shot (sideways on), and was way to the side, trying to melt into the tree (which was probably teeming with spiders and wasps)… but the camera still caught my shoulder. My interest is going more towards landscape now, away from cats and still life and things in the garden. I would really love a nice wide angle zoom lens but they seem to cost far more than the telephoto zooms.

Meanwhile the telephoto zoom does meet a need; I can get shots I wouldn’t have managed before. Clouds look much the same through zooms… though actually they look better in wide angle shots. This was probably taken at 55mm and then coloured up in Photoshop Elements — I can never resist!:

Below is Delilah… one of those cats who gets up and comes over to you if you approach too near with the camera. The zoom is a boon in these circumstances! She is keeping a wary eye on Cheeky, who is glowering at her from the background. Those two are like warring supermodels…

Something from the garden… that blue in the background really caught my attention; wouldn’t normally take a photo of the negative space between roses!

And Samson with his curly locks, sleeping like a baby.

You can take hand-held shots with this zoom because of the image stablizer. The close-up of Samson’s face was handheld indoors… I wouldn’t have been able to do that with my zoom on the old non-digital Nikon! A tripod was a must for that piece of kit.

Another thing I’m able to do that I wasn’t able to do with the Nikon’s zoom, is share the filters used by the basic lens. The Nikon’s basic lens took 55mm filters, and the zoom took 67mm filters. Both Canon lenses take 58mm filters, so I can use my new polarizing filter with either.

It’s a very light lens; doesn’t feel any heavier than the basic one, and I don’t notice that the camera is any more eager to overbalance on the tripod than it used to be!

Something does annoy me about the tripod itself; it’s an old one I used with the Nikon. It’s how the camera attaches to the tripod that vexes me… I don’t know if it has changed or improved in any way, but no matter how firmly I turn that screw, the camera works loose again. Taking ’sideways’ shots becomes a nightmare, with the camera eventually sagging. Maybe I should be looking at newer tripods to see if they handle that better, though the ones I’ve seen are so lightweight I don’t see that they’re any more stable than the one I have…. quite possibly less. Though it’s hardly the Rock of Gibraltar! I was taking some seascape shots the other day from a footpath, and the wind was so strong that it was causing the entire tripod to ‘thrum’. Some of the exposures were longer than they should have been, and I wasn’t surprised when I got home to find the pictures were less than sharp.

Such is life… and photography!

Vole in Our Kitchen

Delilah brought a vole in yesterday — it was lightning quick, but she was faster, and she was really beating it about (spots of blood here and there). I grabbed her and shut her in a room. I couldn’t think where it had gone meanwhile, and Mum said it had probably wriggled under my bedroom door. Looked under my bed (glad I hoovered out the dust bunnies…) saw a lurking vole shadow. Ah ha.

We hoped it might find its own way out when the coast was clear. Today we saw it running around downstairs, so I left two doors open so that it could run out the kitchen door into the garden… so it ran into the kitchen and then dived behind the boiler!

Sigh. Hopefully it’s just being cautious, and will go outside when it’s sure there isn’t something lurking just round the next corner.

Stories of Moonshine

Mum’s had a horrible cold for the past week. Yesterday I said “why do you keep clutching your face?”
“My nose is very sore,” she said. She was streaming; constantly blowing her nose and mopping her eyes. I considered myself lucky to have held out without falling prey to it myself. If this was how she reacted to a plain ordinary cold, goodness knows what would happen if she caught something worse.

Last night I was telling another mortal, tangled up herself in the coil of life, that teddy bears are good to have around — they can be counted on not to die of anything, and if you wake them up in the middle of the night to talk to them, they don’t yell at you. Well, not usually.

Only the night before, I had been talking to Stargazer the dragon. I said we could pretend we were on a beautiful ship of our very own. “Moonshine!” he said. Yes, piloted by Captain Stargazer with his cutthroat crew; First Mate Diddums (bucket’s over there) and Second Mate Magical Bear. With a motley crew of cook etc, but no doctors. Not needed.

Of course it would be night, with lots of stars visible overhead. The ship would be rocking gently, and all the crew would go to bed in the same hammock. No one would be on watch because the good ship Moonshine could be trusted to deal with whatever arose. Meanwhile, our great adventure was just to drift together on the waves, far away from the cares of civilization.

Nothing like it for sending one to sleep.

The next night I crawled back into bed, saying “what will we do this time? We could have something a little more exciting, like a hurricane?”
Captain Stargazer said “I dunno… it’s a bit too soon. Would a choppy night do instead?”
“OK, let’s get cracking, then. It was a dark night. Moonshine tossed restlessly and a cold breeze blew…”

First Mate Diddums couldn’t breathe. All she did was lie prone in the hammock, and her nose filled up. She had been perfectly fine right up till then. Cooked supper, washed dishes, made tea, did a jigsaw. And now this.

She couldn’t sleep. She mumbled, turned over, sneezed violently a multitude of times, and used lots of tissues. She even held her nose… it felt full of acid. All dreams of Moonshine and adventures flew out the porthole.

I got up at 5.30 in the morning. Mum said she could wake me early to do photographic mists and things, but outside it looked like noon already. We’re supposed to leave the photographic mists till later in the year. Instead I went and answered someone on the subject of Apophysis.

My stomach keeps being gripped by cramps, but when I asked Mum if she had that, she said ‘nope’. In fact today she’s quite chirpy and is beetling about washing clothes, making tea, and doing the next jigsaw on our list. So it’s just me, then. I expect I’ll be kicked out of the Moonshine’s hammock tonight.

Blanket Hogging

Samson and Delilah resting. But guess who’s hogging the blanket??
(Click photo to enlarge).

Dream Dish

Yesterday morning I woke from a dream in which two dark-haired waiters offered me baked fish. They gave me a choice… the fish could be in unbreaded cakes, or unbreaded fingers; both were deeply mired in a green parsley sauce. I’m not fond of fish, so I hesitated, and finally chose the fish fingers (they looked smaller).

I noted the dream in my journal but didn’t mention it to anyone. In the evening Mum said “I’m making baked salmon in parsley sauce. Do you want that, or would you prefer corn beef?”

I didn’t see any of the items in our shopping, and we haven’t had anything like that for months. I was silent for so long she gave me an enquiring glance, and I said “I dreamed last night I was offered this for supper!” and she said “harrumph.”

I chose the corn beef.