In Which Our Heroine Stinks Differently

7 December 2003

I got new stink yesterday. I'm not entirely satisfied with it, but it's the formulation I wanted, and the scent isn't too bad. Here are my rules: 1) I don't want to smell like food. The salesbeing looked taken aback when I said that. "When you put it that way, I don't think any of us does," she said. Maybe more people should put it like that to her corporation's management, then. For me, smelling like cucumber ginger salad is on the same level as smelling like bean soup. I like cucumber ginger salad, but smelling like it without having recently eaten any...no, not so much. 2) I don't want to smell like mulch. Several of the allegedly floral scents smelled like garden store to me: less floral, more composty. Need I explain the problem here? I think not. 3) I don't want to smell the wrong age. Some scents smell old ladyish to me: Emeraude, gardenias, some lavenders but not all, some lilacs but not all. And some of them smell teeny-boppery, like the plumeria they used to have at Bath and Body Works. They smell giggly. I should be able to be giggly sometimes without having to smell like it.

So that brought me down to three scents, one of which was just too sweet. And my mom uses the one I didn't pick, and it's not offensive to me, and I'll probably end up using it at some point because we always end up using each other's lotion at some point. But it smells more like the ways we're different than the ways we're the same. Flowering Herbs smelled like the ways we're the same. They discontinued Flowering Herbs. The fiends.

I only got one bottle of stink, because it's a perfectly reasonable Christmas present, but on the other hand, this is Minnesota, this is December, and I need a good, thick, non-greasy body lotion lest I go out of my mind. It's one of those middle-ground things. The perfectly new, perfectly good copy of The Fortunate Fall at Uncle Hugo's was something I definitely could not buy for myself in December, and shampoo was something I definitely could. Stink falls in the middle.

I also got a potato ricer and lo, these many Christmas presents. I am a present-buying fiend. Part of the deal is that I have thought about presents for at least a month now. In some cases, I still don't know what to get for the people in question. But in many, I can march right into the store: correct item, color, price? Good. All right then. I can still find surprises, and sometimes I'm looking for "something stunning in the category of [garment|book|music|household item|etc.]." And when I'm with a wanderer, I can enjoy wandering. But when I've been thinking about it for a month, I can get a lot done in a few hours at Southdale. (The only Minneapolis mall to be featured in "The Wabash Cannonball!")

We don't have any gift tags, though. I'll have to pick some up when I go running errands tomorrow. Today I'm alone in the house; Timprov is up at his folks' for awhile longer, and Mark has gone to take advantage of the 10% off sale at Uncle Hugo's without me. (Strategically without me, that is.) So I played the piano a bit. Since we have one and all. It's been way too long, and I'm very rusty, but it's starting to feel somewhat natural again.

I had coffee with Heathah and her kids at a little Swedish place in Farmington. It was good stuff. Siri informed me, however, that she is just like Cinderella, in that she cleans the whole house and her mommy never has to lift a finger to do a single thing and she never complains. The poor sweet little darling. I am sure that she is worked to the very bone, and that her mother merely fed her pumpkin pie yesterday in an attempt to keep her from telling me the sordid truth. But now I know all, and so do you.

Amused by Siri's Cinderella stories, I came home and wrote two pages of an entirely different fairy tale short story. Dagnabbit anyway. Just what I needed. Ah well. There are worse and more heartbreaking things in life than another fairy tale story. Still, I'm wondering: where is all this coming from? Why me, why now? I mean, the genie and the communists are each good fun, and I need some good fun in my edit-heavy writing life right now. But uff da. After this, I swear I need to write some really nuts-and-bolts hard-core SF just to balance out a bit. And editing Reprogramming doesn't count, because that's editing, not new stuff.

But whatever it is, it needs doing, and the Christmas tree needs lighting, and the clothes need washing, and none of these things, you will carefully note, is accomplished by a longer journal entry. So.

Back to Novel Gazing.

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