Wishes....

BPAL and Villainess and Conjure, oh MY!  In addition to my ongoing BPAL addiction, it looks like I've added Villainess and Conjure to the list.  Luckily for me, both of those places have smaller catalogues than BPAL.  I feel like I could go for years and not get through all the scents I want to try from Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs.

I think my next imp pack from BPAL will be:
 Bastet: "Luxuriant amber, warm Egyptian musk, fierce saffon and soft myrrh, almond, cardamom and golden lotus."
Brisingamen:  "A glittering mantle of rich golden notes: five ambers, soft myrtle and apple blossom, myrtle and carnation." (No, I don't know why myrtle is in there twice - it is that way on the site.)
Eat Me: (from the Mad Tea Party collection). "Three white cakes, vanilla, and red and black currants."
Eden: "This oil contains the innocence of the Garden, coupled with the Truth and Erudition found in the fruit of the Tree of Life: fig leaf, fig fruit, honeyed almond milk, toasted coconut, and sandalwood."
Obatala:  "Obatala's offrenda is soft, white, and pure: milk, coconut meat, shea butter and cool refreshing water."
Snake Oil: One of BPAL's cult favorites. "A blend of exotic Indonesian oils sugared with vanilla."
(All above scent descriptions courtesy of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab.)

As I've mentioned, I absolutely fell in love with the Leticia and Criminy oils I got from Villainess.  I was also highly impressed with their turnaround time.  They offer a sampler of six scents for $20.00, and it wasn't too hard to pick out six that I'd like to try.  So now I have a wishlist there for a sampler containing:
Blood:  "Our take on this very vital fluid is a full-bodied spiced Merlot grounded in dry fig and inspired by a ripe bouquet of berries"  I'm hoping the fig and berries overpower the Merlot, or that at the least, the Merlot isn't boozy smelling. Me and my oversensitive nose...
Decadence: "An indulgent vanilla - alcoholic, buttery and bittersweet with delightful undertones of tonka and coconut. Our favourite vice."  Are you seeing a trend in my scent picks lately? Yeah, me too. I seem to be really going for the vanilla and coconut.
Jai Mahal:  " A lesser palace infused with the sweet scent of victory. 4 rich vanillas and tonka, Mysore sandalwood, bourbon and coconut. Expensive woods, incense and imported spices - cedar, amber, myrrh, cardamom and nutmeg."   More coconut and vanilla...plus spices. Yum.
Killer Beez:" Sheer lethal cream and honey and a barely-there touch of nuts. Because you catch more bees with honey..."   Sounds good enough to eat. I'll settle for smelling, though.
Paradise Misplaced:  "Sweetly creamed coconut with touches of mango offset by crisp green tea."  And there's the coconut yet AGAIN.
Silk and Cyanide:  "Almond. Crisp, barely sweet, pervasive and altogether sinister."  Sometimes you feel like a nut...*grin*.
(Again, all the above scent descriptions obtained from Villainess.net.)

And then there's Conjure Oils. I haven't even received the Toby Daye sampler I ordered yet, and already I'm coming up with five new scents I want pips of.  (Pips are what Conjure calls the same 1/32 oz. glass vials that BPAL calls imps.)  I have it on good authority (Vajra, the owner's, via the company's Facebook page), that the Toby Daye oils should ship next week, though.
In addition to those, I've found:
The Light Queen:  "Her perfume is a love song to the Queendom and an ode to the simple things in life that make the ordinary extraordinary:  a long soak in a rose milk bath while sipping chilled champagne"  I'm hoping for light on the champagne and heavy on the milk...
Cyanide Crumpets and Nightshade Jam:  Now, who could possibly resist a name like that? Not me, especially when factoring in the scent description: "Toasted crumpets slathered in almond butter and seeded blackberry and nightshade berry jam."  
The Pernicious Parasol: "A cyanidic-inspired cocktail - cherry, plum and apricot are cloaked in black vanilla and slathered with bitter almond, tart green apple, d'anjou pear and the tiniest tinge of cassava."  I had to laugh reading this, it reminded me very strongly of Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate series.
 Bastet: "Egyptian red musk, catnip and warm amber create the perfect perfume for this playful diva"  According to Conjure, Bastet is not only the Cat Goddess, which persona I was familiar with, but also the Goddess of Perfumery. I can't wait to see what the cats do with an oil containing catnip....
Nuit: "She births the sun each morning and reabsorbs it again each night. She holds the souls of the departed as the night sky stars that she holds in her bosom. A blackberry sky sparkling with vanilla stars, a cup full of celestial milk from the Cow, and warm Egyptian musk."  While I'm not attracted to celestial cows,  I am attracted to every note listed for this.  
(And yet again, all above scent descriptions obtained from conjureoils.com.)

If nothing else, I'll be the best smelling customer service representative in town....

They DIDN'T.....

.....oh, yes, they DID.  *facepalm* .  Now I remember why I don't normally get hooked on TV shows. However, two years ago with Glee, and now with Smash, I am well and truly hooked.  Although at the moment, having JUST watched the season finale of Smash, I am ready to scream in frustration.  Don't get me wrong, I adore the show - and have had none of the quibbles a lot of the critics have complained about.  But at the moment my throat is sore from yelling at a screen - how could they leave me on such a cliffhanger??

I have yet to watch the season finale of Glee - but after the midseason cliffhanger they left us with on whether Quinn was dead or alive, I wouldn't put it past them to do something equally as frustrating to me....

If you haven't watched Smash and have no idea what I'm talking about feel free to disregard the previous rant.  The only other thing I have to say is thank  goodness for Hulu Plus - being able to watch the shows when I have time, rather than being limited to when they are aired on broadcast TV has been the only reason I've gotten to watch anything at all!

The Old Gray Mare....

...she ain't what she used to be.  Well, in this case the "old gray mare" is my memory.  I used to be able to keep up with all the authors I read on a regular basis, their series titles, the character's names, the plots, and most importantly: the series order.

I have noticed for a while now that I'm utilizing the Fantastic Fiction site a lot more often for series information.  But it really hit me last night when I inadvertently started the sixth book in a series. I got about 20 pages into it before I realized the author was referring to things I had no clue about and therefore those things had probably taken place in an earlier installment of the series.  Being tired enough to be frustrated, not able to remember the title of the first book in the series, and not willing to leave my comfy bed to go into the office and look it up,  I simply switched to another book that I knew was a stand-alone, but that's not going to be a solution all the time.  It probably doesn't help the problem that I've relatively recently (within the past two years) exponentially increased the amount of series books that I follow spanning three different genres.

This time I can't blame the sheer amount of books that I keep on the Sony - because I wasn't reading on the Sony, I was reading on my brand spanking new shiny (well, not really, it's a gray rubberized material) Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight that I got for Mother's Day. (Squeeee!!)  I've so far only loaded a tiny fraction of my library on it, so I didn't have a lot to keep up with.

Improving my memory at this late date probably isn't going to happen, not with the last semester of school breathing down my neck and increasing my brain's already overcrowded storage problem.  So I need a way to either sort the books by series order on the Nook, or...something.  I might try experimenting with the Shelves feature and load series by order into that, perhaps....

UPDATE: I realize that I have maybe three readers on a good day, but just perhaps if someone is looking for a solution to order series on their Nook - here is an insanely helpful link using regular expressions in Calibre:

http://bookclubs.barnesandnoble.com/t5/NOOK-First-Edition-General/Organizing-Books-In-a-Series/m-p/1149440/message-uid/1149440#U1149440

I can vouch for this, because I just tried it with the Tasha Alexander Emily Ashton series and it worked like a charm.  Now I'm really glad I didn't indulge my OCD and load *everything* from calibre onto my Nook last night, or I'd be spending a lot of time deleting it all and replacing it.

Also, another helpful hint if you use calibre: If you want covers to show up on the NST with Glow (and probably the NST as well),  be sure you get your cover and metadata the way you want it within calibre and then do an epub to epub conversion to make the cover "stick".

Labyrinth Scent Reviews - Fairy Bites.

"It bit me!"

"What did you expect fairies to do?"

"I thought they did nice things.

Like — like granting wishes."

"Shows what you know, don't it?"



 The above, of course, is Sara and Hoggle's conversation in the movie The Labyrinth when Sara meets her first fairy and finds out they're not nice at all. 


The Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs site lists the notes for Fairy Bites as: Osmanthus and raw honey with lavender, chamomile, white peppermint, raspberry, honeysuckle, thyme, bergamot, and Dracula orchid.


The white peppermint note in this concerned me, for mint and I are not usually best friends. The rest of the notes are all win on me though, and as it turns out, I shouldn't have worried. This is a very light, refreshing (probably due at least in part to the mint), blend. 


Usually, wet, I can pick out at least a few of the listed notes, even if they dry into such a well-blended medley that I can't do it after it dries.  This one is an exception - I can't pick out  ANYTHING - just a light, refreshing, maybe slightly fruity floral.  Very nice for hot summer days, when all you feel like doing is hanging out under a sprinkler.


This one may be a bottle purchase for me - I really am enjoying it.  Assuming, that is, that I don't end up with the whole collection in bottles simply for collection's sake.  I mean..it IS Labyrinth!


Also, the obligatory FTC disclosure: While I'm Facebook friends with Beth and hang out at the forums, I bought the decants of the scents from a fellow forumite, Beth has no idea I planned to review them, and I was not compensated in any way for this review.

Zoya Ruby and Zuza

Yes, I know most nail polish review posts have pictures.  Unfortunately, I am a lousy photographer with one hand, as demonstrated by the below photo:

That's Zoya Zuza, one of the Zoya haul I got with their Earth Day Promo.  It's a really pretty light turquoise metallic foil. Covers in two coats, and it's definitely a unique color in my collection.  Not that you can tell by the above photo...

The other color I've had the opportunity to wear is Zoya Ruby.  Just like it's name, it's a pinky-red, and it has silvery shimmer.  Basically, it really does look like melted rubies.  It is also one of the few nail polish jobs I've gotten compliments on at the store. Ruby nearly covers in one coat, which was a nice surprise.  Zoya, I have found is all over the place on coverage between colors. Some are one-coaters, others (especially their fleck finish like Ivanka and Crystal) take up to three coats to look good. I still say that the finish on those when done right is worth the extra time it takes to do the three full coats, though.

I still haven't even cracked the May Julep Maven colors...I've been too busy with the Zoya haul.

FTC  Disclosure: Zoya as a company has no clue who I am except for a random customer, and I was not compensated for the above review.

Labyrinth Scent Reviews - Jareth and 13 Hours

Beth from Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs had been dangling the possibility of a Labyrinth scent line over her adoring fans' heads for quite some time, as I understand it.  Since I'm a relative newcomer to the BPAL forums (October 2011), I think I missed out on the beginning speculation...but boy am I glad to have been there for the unveiling of the first five scents in the collection.

If you haven't seen Labyrinth - I have no words. Go find it, rent it, buy it, watch it...and get back to me.  It's a miracle of Jim Henson muppeteering and David Bowie as Jareth the Goblin King goodness, and it is a MUST watch for any female over the age of oh, say... 12. 

Beth worked closely with the Jim Henson company on this line, plus she's just a genius, so I had high hopes for this collection and as always, Beth never disappoints.

She started out the line (I expect there to be additions later, there's no Sara scent yet), with these five: Jareth, Hoggle, Goblin Cider, 13 Hours, and Fairy Bites.  I've only had time to skin test 13 Hours and Jareth, so those are the ones I'm reviewing here - expect more reviews from this line when I've had time to test the rest.

The BPAL site's description of 13 Hours is: "A scent of profound foreboding: dusty black stone, dried rosehips, black moss, and creeping ivy".   Stone in perfume form? Intriguing.  First whiff out of the imp I get the rosehips and ivy.  Slightly sweet and green, and lovely. Almost a wistful sort of scent.  Wet, on me, the stone comes out. Yep, that's dusty stone all right.  I have no idea how Beth pulled that off, but it is definitely a stone smell.  As it dries, it ends up being stone and rosehips and ivy with maybe a touch of the black moss.  It smells a lot more pleasant than it sounds, but it is a masculine-leaning scent. I'm going to have Chris try it and see what it does on him.

The reviews at the BPAL forums for Jareth had me worried.  A lot of the reviews, in fact, I'd say a majority of them, compare it to another BPAL scent, Dorian - which is one that not only did not work on me, it downright HATED me.  The description on the site reads: "Ethereal lilac fougere and gleaming leather with ti leaf, tonka absolute, white musk, and oudh".  From wikipedia, fougere is defined as "meaning "fern-like", and is one of the main families into which modern perfumes are classified, with the name derived from the perfume Fougère Royale for Houbigant formulated by the perfumer Paul Parquet. The class of fragrances have the basic accord with a top-note of lavender and base-notes of oakmoss and coumarin." Lilac is usually a big winner for me though, though lavender is not. This is also the first time I'd tried Beth's leather note.  White musk and tonka though, usually do work on me, so I was really anxious to give this a try.

In the imp, I don't get knocked down by Dorian, so I was relieved right off the bat.  I'm not sure I'm getting lilac, exactly, but I do get floral with something more masculine in the background.  Yes, Jareth is definitely a masculine scent (which I had actually hoped for).  When it dries, it's lilac and leather with a bit of sweetness from the tonka and white musk.  Delicious...but again, masculine.  Another one to have Chris try. 

Don't let my reviews scare you off trying these if you happen to be female, though - as I mention with every scent review I do,  everyone's skin chemistry is different, and your experience may be completely different than mine with a particular scent.

Also, the obligatory FTC disclosure: While I'm Facebook friends with Beth and hang out at the forums, I bought the decants of the scents from a fellow forumite, Beth has no idea I planned to review them, and I was not compensated in any way for this review.
 

Well, back to normal....

...or as normal as I ever get, anyway! Which basically means back to books for awhile.  I'm reading Jeanne Kalogridis' "The Devil's Queen: A Novel of Catherine de Medici".  And one throwaway line caught my eye, suggesting a link between Catherine de Medici and Lucrezia Borgia.  Now remember, I was raised in the Texas Panhandle, where they taught Texas history (which still fascinates me), not Italian history.  We may have touched on the Borgias long enough for me to figure out they ruled Italy or parts of Italy at one time, but that was about the extent of it. And that was back in the dark ages and 3 years of a Bachelor's degree ago - giving me plenty of time to forget anything I ever actually knew about them, and lots of other stuff I had to remember that may have pushed long ago Borgia/de Medici history out of my head. 
So today I'm researching the de Medicis and the Borgias and finding a whole lot of entertaining historic trivia and a whole lot of revisionist history writing.

Somewhere on that rabbit trail, I ran into a mention of Charlotte MacLeod/Alisa Craig, which reminded me that I REALLY need to re-collect all of her titles.  I'd love to have them in ebook formats, of course, but they don't seem to be available that way... I dimly remember finding an ebook copy of The Balloon Man a few years back, which I promptly bought, but a letter to the listed publisher went unanswered, and I am unsure how to find out who holds a deceased author's publication rights.  So if anyone has any thoughts on that, I'd love to hear them, so I can bug said rights-holders into getting those titles out in ebook. 

In news of my other obsessions, I lucked into a BPAL forumite who was selling a complete set of the Labyrinth decants!  I snapped those right up, and they should be getting here today or tomorrow. I'm very excited to try them, though some of the reviews for Jareth concern me, as it is compared to another scent, Dorian, that just doesn't work on me at all. 

My work schedule is a little different this week, and I'm actually looking forward to it. Only one Desk shift, which is tonight, and then two 8 - midnight shifts on Wed. and Fri.  Whew, a break from Desk! I love the night shifts, except for the thrice cursed floor buffer, anyway. 

So, all in all, it's looking like a good week here.  Hope yours is, as well!

I hope my words are tasty...

....because I keep having to EAT them!  A few posts back I mentioned that I had no idea what I'd do when/if my Sony 950 dies, because no one is making 7" e-ink devices.  Well, no one is STILL making 7" e-ink devices....but I did find a (hopefully) worthy replacement for the beloved 950.
Barnes and Noble gave me a very pleasant surprise with their new Nook model - the Glow.  The full name of it is Nook Simple Touch with Glow, but there is no way I'm going to type that over and over, so Glow it has been christened.
I got to see one up close and in person, and I love it.  Even with the smaller screen size (and compared to the 950, a Nook Simple Touch is TINY),  I think I could love one with the Glow.
The Glow is exactly what it says - a glow embedded above the e-ink layer of the device that emits a soft..well...dammit... GLOW.   No more booklights falling off and having to be aimed to avoid Chris's face at night.  No more angling the bedside light when I want to turn over.
The main feature I would miss is that the 950 has handwriting input via a stylus. This enables me to have authors autograph the device.  The Glow has no such thing.  So while the Glow wouldn't be a perfect replacement, that built in light sure goes a long way toward easing my pain.

Zoya Haul

I had mentioned in a previous post that I had taken advantage of the Zoya nail polish Earth Day promo.   So I practiced my mailperson stalking, and sure enough - they're here!
I got bottles of:
Zuza
Myrta
Kimber
Joy
Ruby
Crystal

Zuza, Myrta, and Kimber are all part of Zoya's Beach and Surf collection for Summer 2012.  They're bright metallic foils.  Kimber is a bright pink, Myrta is a blazing orange, and Zuza is a delightful light turquoise.  I'm very happy with all three of these, though possibly I should have gone with the darker purple metallic in the collection instead of bright pink Kimber.  But at the time, what was going through my head was, "I don't own any pink!"  Well,I definitely made up for it now.

Ruby has been on my wishlist for a long time now, and I'm very pleased to say that it not only met my expectations, it exceeded them.  It is an absolutely beautiful pinky-red with silver shimmer.  I can't wait to wear it.

Joy I bought because the description on the site said, "rose gold"  I am an absolute sucker for anything rose gold, so...yeah.  It's a very pretty vivacious pink with gold shimmer.

Crystal is the surprise hit of the bunch for me though.  I was expecting a lighter blue.  But it is a very very delightful marine blue, with gold and silver flecks.  It's not chunky enough to be glitter,(and it dries with a satin finish, unlike glitter) and it's not fine enough to be shimmer. I have no idea what they call this - but it reminds me of very tiny reptile scales.  I think I've found the perfect polish to complement my work outfit of khaki pants and denim shirt.  This finish (as with Zoya Ivanka) takes three coats to really look good, but the payoff in my opinion is worth the extra work.