Scent Diary, Jan. 3 – 9, 2011

Monday, Jan 3: Chilly again this morning. (Or have I just forgotten what it’s like in the morning, having been lazy and not arisen before 8am at any point over the last two weeks, while the children have been out of school?) In any case, brrr. Forgot to scent myself, in the rush to get out the door and drop the kids off at their respective schools on my way to work – and I had cleaned out my purse recently, so I didn’t even have any samples on hand.

Statement Day at work again. I hate Statement Day.

SOTEvening: Amouage Lyric Woman. Gorgeous stuff. Gaze’s comment was, after walking past me, “Hey, are you wearing perfume? That’s nice. It’s… woody, right? And vanilla. And something smoky – or is that the fireplace?” I let him sniff up close. “I like it. It’s… sort of weird. Not flowery. But I like it. A guy could wear that.” I told him there was rose in it, and he gave me the skeptical face. “No, really – rose. Imagine what cooked rose would smell like,” I said. He sniffed again. “Oh. That. It’s nice.”

The CEO and our offspring are right now glued to the TV, where they are watching Stanford whomp up on Virginia Tech in the Orange Bowl. This is Not Good… and then, after halftime, it got Worse. ‘Nuff said, I think.

Tuesday, Jan. 4: It was supposed to be sunny and in the mid-40s today, but it didn’t turn out that way. Instead, it was cloudy and only in the low 30s. SOTD: Parfumerie Generale Ilang Ivohibe. I should try more PGs, they’re good. Tuberose Couture was very good (though nothing touches Carnal Flower for tuberose, IMO). Iris Taizo/Orientale was very good too, and (again IMO) totally kicked the uber-pricey L’Artisan LE Iris Pallida in its pricey, unavailable butt. I’ve been wanting to try Rose Brulure and Aomassai for some time, too. Ilang Ivohibe is quite nice, all comfortable jammy ylang and vanilla for a couple of hours before making a final descent via that “amber” material that reads as shaving cream on me. It’s not just my nose, either. I stuck my wrist in front of all the males in this household, and their first comment was, “Vanilla,” and their second one was, “No, wait. Shaving cream.”

See? See? I’m not crazy.

SOTA was SSS Champagne de Bois. I’ve been waiting for the SSS website to come back online with things other than samples – I want a 5ml purse spray of CdB at least. Also, I’m getting really excited about Laurie’s new scents-in-progress: the white floral and the vintage-inspired one.

Wednesday, Jan. 5: Annoying day. Cold. SOTD: Dior New Look 1947 again, just to make sure I didn’t miss anything in my review. (Nope, it’s pretty dull, IMO.)

Thursday, Jan. 6: I meant to start back with testing various tuberose concoctions – samples mostly amassed last winter when I started the Tuberose Series reviews – so I picked up three out of my little box and took them to work: Creed Tubereuse Indiana, AG Gardenia Passion, which I have worn before and liked but never reviewed, and Il Profumo Gardenia Royale, which I’ve also worn before and liked but never reviewed. However, when it came right down to putting something on skin, I just rebelled. Nope, I said. No, I want Mary Greenwell Plum. Grabbed that decant out of my purse and spritzed away. It’s got white flowers in there, but also some other stuff going on too, and the tangy fruits and soft chypre angle just seemed right.

Tonight we started up the second semester’s practice for our community choir. Coming off a pretty decent concert (okay, okay, decent for a small-town volunteer group, anyway) of Vivaldi’s Gloria and some other middlebrow music, we picked up several new members, several of which are ditching the local Sweet Adelines to join us. Which is pretty gutsy of them. I’m not dissing the Adelines’ musical talent, but they do a very, very different style of music, much more oriented to popular music of the past, not your standard straight-up choral style. I mean, we have a lot of fun at practice, but our director’s something of a martinet: screw up in a dress rehearsal, or, God forbid, a concert, and you get the evil eye. (Maybe she reserves that for people who know better than to screw up? I don’t know.)

In other news: The CEO stepped in for a colleague who left the university suddenly last summer (got married and moved to be with her husband), for which he was told he’d be compensated $5000 to teach one class in the Agricultural and Applied Economics Department. When that cash didn’t show up in his pay packet at the end of the year, he went asking some questions, and it turns out that AgAppEcon did not have the budget to pay him cash. Instead, AgAppEcon transferred $5K to Agricultural Technology for “professional development,” and that money can only be used to reimburse The CEO, or someone else in AgTech, for continuing education, or a seminar, or something. He could buy new equipment, but of course that would remain property of Virginia Tech. Worse, he has to go and do whatever-it-is before June! He can’t apply the cash to a doctorate in the future.

And just as I was beginning to be appalled at this situation, The CEO told me he’d come up with a solution: He had found an international interdisciplinary seminar on Malta, held during Spring Break. And he intended to make plans to take me with him. Since most expenses would be borne by “his” $5K professional-development money, we’d only have to pay for my airfare and possibly some meals. He figures he’ll come out ahead, since he won’t have to pay taxes on cash income. Huh. I think he’s got a devious mind, but if it gets me to Malta, I might not complain. We’d have to fly into Italy to get there, so we might even stay in Rome a few days.

Quick, somebody tell me what the perfume shop landscape in Rome is like. And whether I’d need some Italian phrases, or if I need to just point and grunt and wave my credit card.

Friday, Jan. 7: Chilly. SOTD: Fifi Chachnil, which has been described to me as “girly.” Well, maybe it is, but if so, Fifi is a bad, bad girl. She starts off a little like Shalimar, all lemon and rose and vanilla powder, and then this sweet tobacco-leather thing comes in, like Fifi has been doing a raunchy mattress dance with a guy wearing English Leather. Dries down to Shaving Cream Amber, but for awhile it’s pretty sexy. I wasn’t embarrassed wearing it to work, because dabbed from the vial it’s not all that loud and I doubt I was scandalizing anyone but myself. Whooee…

Hey, it’s snowing. Little dry-ish flakes, coming straight down, with no wind. Huh. Wonder if it’s going to settle in, or just do what I call “spitting snow.”

Saturday, Jan. 8: It snowed a long time, but it was those little dry flakes, and it got windy, so the snow blew around a lot and not much stayed on the ground. The CEO came in from feeding cows this morning and glared out the window, muttering something about not knowing if he needed to put chains on the tractor or not.

SOTD: Tauer Eau d’Epices. This reminds me quite a bit of Orange Star, but without the Tang Dust (orange) and Soap (orange blossom) bits. I like it. I don’t need any, but it’s nice.

Bookworm’s indoor track meet went well – she came in fifth in the 3200 meters, earning points for her team, behind her teammate Grace, who came in third. She apparently had to fight for space, too: she passed a girl at the fourth turn on one lap, and then the competitor wanted her space back, and threw an elbow at Bookworm. (“Throwing an elbow” is using your natural arm movement while running to make or maintain personal space on the track by jostling another runner. The CEO tells me this is pretty standard practice, which I didn’t know. I was a swimmer. Swimmers stay in their own lanes.) So Bookworm threw an elbow in return, keeping the other girl from taking the inside lane back, and the two of them duked it out for a little while, until the other girl stumbled at some point and Bookworm took off and left her behind. The 3200m was the last event to finish, so she and Grace were last onto the bus, to be greeted with cheers and clapping for her toughness.

I’m so proud of her. She’s The Little Engine That Could, five-foot-nothin’ of grit and baling twine. (And dimples.)

Sunday, Jan. 9: It was 6°F when we got up at 7:30 this morning. That is darn cold, at least for here. But Gaze says, “There comes a point when you can’t tell the difference between ‘cold’ and ‘colder.’”

SOTMorning: Montale White Aoud. I have worn this sample before and was on the fence about it. I still am. I like the initial medicinal note, I like the rose, I like the woody vanilla. What I don’t like is that balsam-y Opium note that shows up after a couple of hours, before it finally leaves you floating in a cloud of sweet vanilla.

I haven’t tried many Montales; they’re hard for me to access and not many of them seem to appeal on the basis of notes. I have, however tried Oud Queen Roses and Aoud Roses Petals. And yes, the names are awkward. Why the different spellings of oud? Why the relentless plurals? I liked the rose oud ones but found them relentlessly rosy, with only a few moments of nice bandaid-y stuff in the beginning. Montale strikes me as being a relentless sort of house, judging by what other people have said about it, in terms of a “thisiswhatweDOhere, take it or leave it” mentality. For what it’s worth, I had a slight preference for Queen Roses. But I already have SSS Velvet Roses, so I consider my collection complete on the straightforward armful of roses type of scent.

(I quite like the bandaid-type oud accord, to be honest. Rubber and medicine? Cool, count me in. Balsams? No thanks, count me out. There’s just no telling about taste, is there?)

SOTAfternoon, as I’m helping Taz with his salt dough map of Virginia – topographical, delineated by geographical region and labeled with rivers, bodies of water, and several cities, with inset maps of Native American tribes and agricultural products by region – Le Labo for Anthropologie Poudre d’Orient. Hmm. No opinion yet, although early reports mention New-Barbie smell and, of all things, cucumbers. Later reports mention that this is a Heck, No choice.

Taz used to play with Bookworm’s Barbies: he would make them jump off the piano stool into the area-rug “ocean,” and then make his toy shark eat them, with sadistic glee apparent as he voiced the Barbies’ shrieks of alarm followed by drowning sounds. (If he weren’t such a gentle kid in real life, I’d worry about him.)

Photo of perfume collection from true68 at Fragrantica. Aren’t those Merveilles bottles pretty?  Mae West photo from mindspring.com.  Image of Virginia’s Indian tribes from Virginia’s First People site.