What is the Perfume Project?

This blog is a constantly evolving forum for thoughts on perfume, perfume-making, plants (especially orchids and flora of the Pacific Northwest) and life in general. It started out chronicling the adventures of Olympic Orchids Perfumes, established in July 2010, and has expanded in other directions. A big part of the blog is thinking about the ongoing process of learning and experimentation that leads to new perfumes, the exploration of perfumery materials, the theory and practice of perfume making, the challenges of marketing perfumes and other fragrance products, and random observations on philosophy and society. Spam comments will be marked as such and deleted; any comments that go beyond the boundaries of civil discourse will also be deleted. I am grateful to all of you, the readers, who contribute to the blog by commenting and making this a truly interactive perfume project.

Thursday, January 31, 2019

No Excuses, No Resolutions

January is gone, so it’s just as well that I didn’t make any new year’s resolutions. I wouldn’t have kept them anyway, and it’s nice to just chug along keeping the day job and businesses going and enjoying the fact that we don’t have below zero weather as most of the US does today. 

Even though I have no real housecleaning or de-cluttering strategies, I still want to continue divesting myself of the enormous piles of perfume samples and other samples that have piled up in my studio, taking up space that should be used for work. I know other people can enjoy the samples, so will keep offering the now-traditional drawings for 100 g of samples, and occasionally other things. 

The one form of self-discipline that I will try to follow starting in February is to spend no more that one hour every morning on e-mails, social media, and reading the news, and no more than  another hour at night. I know that it’s all too easy to just sit at a screen for hours, idly surfing from one place to another. After a while it gets redundant, and not even enjoyable. I also know that it serves as a displacement activity that blocks my doing something more useful that takes more effort. 

Here goes with the first random drawing in a long time. Just leave a comment saying what activity you voluntarily do to such excess that it becomes unproductive and no longer enjoyable. 

The drawing will be held and the winner announced on Sunday, February 10. 

[Photos of snow on tree from several years ago, and photo of our cat spending time on my laptop are mine.]