Of course, I know that the above is not a real saying. But "as far as the eye can see" is, and I thought my adaption of it quite fitting as the headline for this post, because it is about perfume.
Until not that long ago, although I was well aware of how scents can affect us (see this post about everyone's very own time machine), I did not know much about perfume. Since I often use scented shower gels and body lotions, I used to wear perfume very rarely, thinking the result of combining the two would be too strong. The only perfumes I owned were two tiny sample bottles which I had been given from a cosmetics supplier.
Then, RJ started to become interested in perfumes. Whenever something hits his curiosity button, he goes about it in a very thorough manner. Having a Ph.D. in natural sciences and a diploma in physics, he uses an almost scientific approach to all his favourite subjects, and perfumes are no exception.
From a mere two or three bottles of scent, he is now the proud owner of a collection of just over 300 perfumes, all stored in an in-built cupboard at his small bachelor pad - even his stock of food had to make room for that.
Apart from simply enjoying a well-composed perfume, RJ can tell you everything you want to know about what elements it is composed of and in what way the "scent pyramid" works, showing its head note in the first few seconds, and revealing its heart and base in the course of several hours.
He loves choosing his perfume for the day according to his outfit and matching the occasion. He can discern many different types of scent now, and many of the single elements a scent is composed of. Many perfumes have a history; some have been reformulated after their original recipe, such as "Bois du Portugal", which was apparently Napoleon's favourite scent.
Like clothes, food, hairstyles and a lot of other things, perfumes follow trends and fashions. The 1980s had very different popular perfumes from what most people prefer now. Sadly, many let themselves be fooled into buying a scent that does not fit them (and is not particularly well done) simply because some celebrity or other lend their faces (and bodies) to its promotional campaign.
There is a whole world of knowledge connected with perfumes, and of course I can only scratch the surface here. RJ has given talks about his scented hobby several times already, to different groups, from a semi-business environment to the totally private "Perfume Party" we threw the other Saturday:
We invited some of our friends, shared a meal with them, and RJ talked about perfumes. He had brought a small collection of scents from his vast stock, to illustrate the various types of scent and to advise our friends on what they should know before making an informed decision next time they intend to buy a bottle of perfume.
It was interesting and entertaining, and I think all our guests had as much fun as we did in preparing and hosting the event.
By the way, ever since RJ embarked on this new hobby of his, my meagre stock of perfumes has risen to about 7 or 8 normal sized bottles (not counting dozens of samples). Some of them are better suited for spring and summer, others are proper winter scents; I choose a different perfume for going out than for a day at the office. I will never spend as much money on them as RJ does, and don't want to give so much space over to hundreds of bottles, but it certainly is an interesting hobby, and well worth taking a closer look (or sniff?) at.
...of it being that time of the year again: Christmas is fast approaching. Dreaded, I guess, by just as many as welcomed. For me, Christmas has not lost its magic; I still am as excited about it all as when I was a little girl.
Tonight, the Christmas market starts in my hometown. It is famous for being very beautifully laid out, and busloads of tourists come visiting every year. Just look at the picture on the official website and tell me you don't agree!
Sunday will be the first of the four Advent Sundays. It will also be the day when I'll put the few bits of Christmas decoration up that I want to see for the next six weeks or so.
Other sure signs are:
My new boots! I finally found exactly what I wanted, after having looked around in two or three different shops, and then I couldn't decide on which pair - so I bought them both, something that would have been unthinkable only a year ago. But things have changed (for the better) since then, and so I walked out of the shop with two large boxes in bags, feeling like the proverbial shopaholic. My Mum was my good advisor, as usual.
The one pair is for every day wear, with a robust sole, and I chose them half a size larger than necessary, to be able to wear an extra pair of warm socks in them.
The other pair is obviously not made for snowy and very cold weather; it is very lightweight and feels as if you're not wearing any shoes at all. Inside their box, they came with an elegant satin bag to store them in, stating the manufacturer's name - a traditional company of over 175 years.
Last week, my Christmas parcel from England arrived! I was not going to open it until Christmas Day, but when I rang Mary to thank her, she asked me to open the parcel (just not the presents) beforehand, because she'd put Christmas cards inside for me, my parents and my sister. For now, it sits in the Third Room (which used to be Steve's bedroom).
I have almost all the presents ready that I want to give, except for a few things I hope to get maybe on Thursday at the Christmas market, and then I can wrap them all nicely and put those together that are going to be sent to England.
When I left work yesterday, it started to snow. I don't like winter and snow very much, but the first snow is always special, isn't it? Very fittingly, on the train I ended up standing next to an old man with a large white beard :-)
This morning, I woke up to these views which I will use to end today's post, wishing you all a happy, peaceful and stress-free (remember: that kind of stress is home-made!) three and a half weeks until Christmas!
PS: If you're looking for a small, individual present that is lightweight and unbreakable (and therefore easy to ship), have a look at my Mum's Etsy shop; the link is on the left side of my blog. There's still time enough for whatever you choose to arrive before Christmas.
The full title of this work by William M. (Makepeace) Thayer reads "From Boyhood to Manhood: Life of Benjamin Franklin", and - you guessed it - it was yet another free ebook I found on Amazon's Kindle shop.
The author lived from 1820 to 1898 and wrote the book long after its hero died. There is, of course, a lot about Franklin to be found on the internet; wikipedia is maybe the first stop if you want to know the basic facts about the man - or brush up on what you remember about him.
He lived from 1706 to 1790 and was - quoting wikipedia - "one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove, a carriage odometer, and the glass 'armonica'. He facilitated many civic organizations, including a fire department and a university."
Thayer's book makes mention of almost all of this, but its focus is on Franklin's childhood and youth, which was spent mainly in Boston and Philadelphia.
According to the book, he was a highly intelligent child, an eager learner, and although he had the chance of only two years of proper schooling due to his parents' precarious financial situation, he took to reading and writing like a fish to water. A lot of his time was spent studying a variety of subjects; he must have used every waking minute (and sacrificed many an hour of sleep) on that. In a rather glorifying manner (and maybe a bit unrealistically), the author claims that young Benjamin excelled at anything he undertook, be it swimming, or printing, or learning a foreign language.
After a short stint at learning the trade of candle-making, which he hated, Benjamin became a printer, being apprenticed with his older brother at the age of 12. Circumstances put him in charge of the entire business of printing and editing a weekly paper as well as writing articles for it at the age of 15 or 16.
As lucky (and industrious) he was in terms of career and business, as unlucky was his choice of friends. Twice he was severely disappointed by close friends, causing him to lose a considerable amount of money.
He fell in love with and finally was allowed to get engaged and later married to Deborah Read.
How he became a statesman and arrived at all the other achievements mentioned above is described well in the book, but I hesitate to really recommend it. To me, it made a welcome change after several novels (more or less shallow ones, as you know from my previous posts). But I felt my patience tested quite a lot with this book: Thayer has a way of telling his readers about some event or other that occurs in his subject's lives, and a few pages on, a detailed account of the event or development is repeated in conversation between the main character and another person.
That can get quite annoying, and I must confess that I did go very quickly over some pages.
Still, it was interesting to learn a lot more about Franklin, his life and times than what I had known up to then. Also, I learned a lot about what business - especially the printing business - was like back then.
So, not a waste of time, just... quite a bit longer than necessary.
You guessed it - "Cocktails for Three" by Sophie Kinsella (writing as Madeleine Wickham, her real name) came to me in a parcel from my mother-in-law. I would not buy any of her books for myself, but I do like some light reading in the evenings, as you know from my previous post.
Also, I do like cocktails very much (as you know from several posts already, such as this one or the ones about my own cocktail parties, such as this year's party post). Therefore, seeing the title of this book, I thought, yes, that one sounds like fun.
Well, it is not quite full of light-hearted fun as you'd think. Quite the contrary. The story deals with postnatal depression, bullying at the work place, cheating, a fatal disease and grief.
There is friendship in the book and love, but also hate and people deliberately hurting others by their actions. There is trust, but also deceit. There are secrets, which shall all be revealed in the end, but not everything turns out well for everyone in the end.
Three friends meet once a month for cocktails, always at the same bar. They think of each other as being close, but they all harbour secrets - BIG secrets, with big consequences - from the others, which makes them question their closeness.
Most of what goes on in the book is rather credible, but as is so often the case when I read this kind of "chick lit", I can't but wonder at the amount of alcohol consumed by young, professional women. At least, this time, there is none of the "waking up next morning besides a stranger and not remembering how they got there", which is something I have always found rather unrealistic. Does that kind of thing really happen in the lives of young, professional woman as often as books and films want us to believe? I doubt it.
So, what I had expected to be very light reading turned out to give me quite a few things to think about, and left me somewhat sad several times. I did not have any preferred character, and did not care deeply for any of them, but the overall "message" (if I perceived it right) is something to be mulled over when my mind is not occupied otherwise.
By the way, the quip printed on the back of the book, taken from a review in "Marie Claire", is total rubbish: "These three women fairly sashay - or should that be stagger - off the page." No, they don't sashay at all, and while one of the women staggers a bit in one scene, that certainly does not characterize the whole story.
For some strange reason, I can not see the search option for my own blog; it used to be visible in the top left corner, but has disappeared. Of course I have checked my blog settings and layout, and it should be there; I haven't yet figured out how to fix this. Also, I can not see search boxes on other people's blogs, which has lead me to contact some of you about a book review I have read on one of your blogs but can't remember which one.
Does anyone else have or had this problem, and has any idea for me how to remedy it? I am using Mozilla's Firefox as a browser.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now to the book review: "Village Fortunes" is the 17th installment of the Turnham Malpas series by Rebecca Shaw. Some years ago, my mother-in-law sent me the first three, and then kept sending them in small doses, until I was hooked and wanted to know what was happening in the village and to its inhabitants.
(You can find my review for book # 16 here.)
Some of you will probably shake your heads at my sometimes very simple literary taste, because not even the author's best friend could attribute a really good writing style to her. Usually, I appreciate books when the language is elegant without being too "artsy" in a forced manner. Well, the Turnham Malpas series is certainly neither elegant nor artsy - just cosy village stories that make you unwind when your brain has been very busy all day long with matters as dry as writing a manual for an insurance company's automatic document archivation system (one of my current projects).
An example of the sometimes "wooden" style (which, in my opinion, could have been edited to improve):
They spent a stormy Saturday, kind of speaking but not speaking all day, and Marie was glad when it was half past nine and she heard Barry tap softly on the back door. That was significant in itself coming to the back door as everyone used the front door because that was the easiest, seeing the way round the house was built.
That second sentence is, in my opinion, a misconstruction. It sounds like something a 6th-former would write. Or am I too picky?
In this book, Turnham Malpas' "big house" is inhabited by the young heir, his wife and their two babies. The heir's brother, who leads a hotel business in Brazil, comes visiting, and that visit is the cause for most of the drama in the story.
Also, a couple of former residents return to the village after a stint in prison, and opinions vary in the village as to whether that was a good idea or not. While generally, the couple are welcomed with open arms, there are still some who think that the prison sentence was deserved, and are quick to come to conclusions when the lead from the church roof is stolen.
The village shop owner's youngest daughter is torn between wanting to stay in the village and work at the shop and following her older siblings to university. Also, a secret love interest complicates matters, and eventually nearly puts her life in danger.
Another village character wants to find his now grown-up sons that were taken away by his ex-wife when they were little; after a life dedicated to business, he now feels he wants a proper family.
All these tales are intertwined because the characters know each other and live in the same village. There are many familiar faces, and a few new ones. It is a bit embarrassing, but I have to admit I can not remember the returning couple from previous books; I know I have read them all, but probably was not terribly interested in them the first time they appeared on the scene.
I must also admit that I enjoyed this book more than I remember having enjoyed the previous one. Be it that I was in the right mood, or that the writing was slightly better this time, I don't know. One thing I do know for sure, though: I will also make sure to get # 18.
I know, I know. It's a bit early yet to start on reading Christmas books, but this was in a parcel Mary sent me from England a week or so ago, and somehow it held the most appeal of the five or six books in there.
I have written about Debbie Macomber before on my blog; unfortunately, the "search" box on my blog seems to have disappeared, and I have unsuccessfully tried to get it back. Blogger keeps giving me server error messages this morning, so I can not link to my previous Debbie Macomber book reviews.
EDIT: By using the "search" option on my own "posts" page, I found my previous review of a book by the same author here.
"Falling for Christmas" contains two novels: "A Cedar Cove Christmas" and "Call Me Mrs. Miracle". Both are nice, cosy reads, just as you would expect from this author. I liked "Call Me Mrs. Miracle" more, maybe because "A Cedar Cove Christmas" was limited to only two days (Christmas Eve and Christmas Day) and one place (mainly one house in Cedar Cove), whereas the second story is set in New York and spans a slightly longer period.
Also, by starting "A Cedar Cove Christmas" with the main character looking back from a year's distance to the events of those two days spoils the fun a little, since you as the reader are told from the very first page who the main character, Mary Jo, is going to end up with.
Mary Jo is a young woman about to become a single mother. The father is an irresponsible man who has no interest whatsoever in settling down, and Mary Jo knows that when she sets out on Christmas Eve to find him and his family in Cedar Cove.
Her three brothers, worried about her, follow on the next day on what they think is going to be a rescue mission. But by the time they locate their little sister, she is in very good hands.
For me, it is a bit too loaden with Christmas clichées, but then again, I wasn't to expect anything else, and I did enjoy it in that it was very cosy and relaxing to read this tucked up in bed at night after a demanding day at the office.
The second story is also rather foreseeable, but not quite so much. Also, I can relate a bit more to its main character. Holly is a hard-working woman who has recently taken in her 8-year-old nephew to live with her while his father, her widowed brother, is in Afghanistan with the army. She has to adjust to living with a little boy, and troubles at work as well as a just finished relationship to a man.
All ends well, of course, and for Holly as well as for all the other characters in the book, this Christmas turns out to be "the best ever", and one none of those involved will forget.
I have never been to New York, but for me, the author has managed to convey the atmosphere of New York at Christmas time really well.
Read this if you want some light, unupsetting and cosy entertainment in theme with the upcoming season. Do not read this if you dislike happy endings and cheesy clichées.
In this post I told you about my shopping afternoon and showed you one of the spoils I brought home. I also mentioned that I was going to show you my other finds, and here they are:
This blue dress simply HAD to come home with me! It said "Meike" all over when I saw it at the shop, and although it does not look much on the hanger, I think it looks really good when worn. I have already worn it to work, but it is good enough for an evening out, too.
What you can't see properly in the picture are the earrings I am wearing. My Mum gave me these during our shopping trip, because they so perfectly match the dress: just one single glittery "stone" of exactly the same blue.
Here is how my dress is presented on the Hallhuber (the dresses' fashion label) website:
Even if I say so myself, I like it much better on me than on her! (She may be less than half my age, very pretty and with beautiful hair, but she is too skinny.)
Hallhuber is, by the way, a label where I almost always find something, and usually, those finds become firm favourites that stay with me for years, for instance the yellow dress.
My third new acquisition is the one I actually went shopping for: I wanted a simple, classic, no-nonsense grey pair of trousers fit for business, and I found this one at comma:
Comma is yet another one of those labels with a high potential for favourite pieces, such as the knit dress and this suit, or the silk skirt I wore to the Golden Wedding recently. With both comma and Hallhuber, I often browse their clothes racks at the shop and don't see anything I like - or if I do, it is too expensive -, but when I do find something, it seems as if it was made for me. And that is the only reason why I continue to look at their range of clothes; I don't mind at all what brand names I wear, but I simply know that some labels have just what I like (and I wear clothes found at the supermarket, too; that tells you something about how "label conscious" I am!).
Winter is my least favourite time of the year, but it is made a little easier and nicer if I know I have nice things to wear.
