WINNER OF COTTONWOOD DRAWING AND A NEW ONE

It’s been way too long and the cottonwood snow is long gone, but finally here is the winner of the drawing:

LORENZO

If you are the winner, please send me an e-mail (olympicorchids at gmail dot com) or a PM on the Olympic Orchids Facebook page.

I will need your full and correct name and shipping address. If I have not heard from you before I post the next drawing, the goodies will go into the jackpot for the next one. 

Now that the academic year is over, I will have time to get back to posting regularly, at least over the summer. 

Last weekend we were east of the Cascades, admiring the meadow full of wild iris flowers in the photo. 

There is a new drawing for 100 g of assorted samples, so leave a comment about your local wildflowers to enter. 

[Photo of Rocky Mountain iris flowers is mine]

SWITCHING TIME ZONES DRAWING WINNER AND A NEW GIVEAWAY

What with two orchid shows in April, it’s been crazy and I’ve let the blog go for a while. However, now that they’re over, I did get back on long enough to do the drawing for the last giveaway. 

The winner is ROBIN BRENNAN. 

To claim your goodies, please send your full shipping info to olympicorchids at gmail dot com or leave a PM on our Facebook page. 

I have so much stuff left to give away that this series of drawings will be going on for some time. I am just going to do the easy thing and say that anyone who leaves a comment and says they’re interested in getting some samples will be entered in the next drawing for 100 g of assorted fragrance samples and other stuff. No need to think!

[African violet photo is mine. The flowers sparkle like fine glitter in the sun]

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.]

COMPLETING CONSTRUCTION AND WINNER OF THE DRAWING

The winner of last week’s drawing is:

MARTIN

To claim your package of samples, send me an e-mail at olympicorchids at gmail dot com, or a PM on Facebook. 

Everything takes at least 3-4 times as long as you think it will. The reconstruction project that we started at the beginning of June is now complete except for staining the deck, which is not urgent. The best part is that I’m not the one who will be doing it. I spent the last few days painting walls that had been impacted by the construction, and the new trim that was put in. The ants are nearly gone, and at least the ones that are still around are living outside under a paving stone, where they belong. 

Last night I moved the first two racks of plants back into the space, and tomorrow will do more. It’s a relief to have the worst of the disruption over, but now my project is to clean, purge, and reorganize my perfume studio. Late last night I hauled out several big boxes of things I no longer want or need, and will try to find a home for the lot of it. Wish me luck!

WHY CAN WE NEVER CATCH UP? (AND A PERFUME GIVEAWAY)

Saturday a week ago  was commencement at the university – the usual herding of students, threat of rain alternating with sunshine (both prompting umbrellas to be hauled out), thousands (or millions?) of dendrobium flowers sacrificed for leis, the usual speeches complete with exhortations to conserve resources, and after it all, mounds of plastic trash littering the stadium. 

I was ecstatically happy to have another academic year over with, looking forward to getting caught up on deferred tasks related to orchid husbandry and perfume-making, but the following Monday the friend/contractor who is rebuilding the whole back deck area and floor and support structure for the warm grow area showed up to start demolition. We have been helping with the project, so spent most of last week removing rotted decking, replacing some bad joists, and replacing the surface of the deck. It’s finished, and it’s beautiful. 

This past week the really nasty job started. The back of the house has a semi-attached solarium that we use to grow Phalaenopsis and other warm-loving orchids, and that also serves as a work room and family gathering room. Last winter someone’s foot almost went through the floor, and at that time we discovered that the entire wooden structure under the tile was nearly destroyed by rot. We did an emergency fix and scheduled the real repair at that time, but it was a shock to actually have June roll around and to have to evacuate the plants and other items from the space so that it could happen. To my relief, it was not the plants that had caused the rot, but rather leaks in the outside flashing that allowed rain water to seep between the untreated wood base and the tile. 

The first bit of tear-out revealed that the entire structure had become a giant ant colony, so as a biologist, I was the only one other than the contractor who could deal with mass quantities of insects. I was told that I moved 1000 pounds of debris from the demolition site to the truck that would take it to the dump (they weigh material to be dumped). The flooring has all been replaced correctly, and the tile goes in tomorrow. The poor plants have been scattered outdoors where they’re getting too much light, and indoors where they get none. I expect to lose some – that’s just life. But at least we do not have ants any more. 

It seems that there’s always some crisis begging for our attention, so we can never get caught up on the things we want to do. I’m still plugging away on clearing out things that get in my way, giving away another batch of 100g of excess perfume samples, so please leave a comment on how you catch up on daily life and find time to do fun things and be entered in the drawing.

The winner will be posted at the end of next week. 

[Dendrobium photo from a retailer's website, deck corner and wood damage photos are mine, ant photos are from Wikimedia, but show ants that are half red and half black like the ones we had] 

MONDAY GIVEAWAY: PERFUME AND COSMETICS SAMPLES

OK, it's a day late, but at least here it is - the periodic giveaway.

I’m not only a perfume sample junkie, I’m also a cosmetics sample junkie. I love those little packets, tubes, and bottles, and will buy full sized things, usually things that I actually want, to get more of them even though I have enough. My cosmetics collection rivals my perfume collection, and I actually use both of these collections so little that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to keep them at their current size. I would like, at the very least, to create some sort of homeostasis so that things move out at the same rate they move in. 

This week’s exercise in elimination will include the usual 100 g of assorted fragrance samples, but it will also include a variety of mint-condition skin-care and skin-enhancement samples. I’m pretty particular (and lazy) about what I put on my face. I don’t use any sort of sunscreen product, and I never use any sort of foundation unless I’m going to engage in a major photo shoot. I won’t use lotions, moisturizers, serums, and other such things if I don’t like the smell, or if they’re strongly perfumed, even if it’s a scent that I might like in another context. I don’t use face primers, highlighters, contourers (is that a word?), or face powders. Nevertheless, I’m always receiving unsolicited samples of these things, and they just sit gathering dust. If you like face products, you’re in luck this week because the giveaway includes a goodie bag full of these things.

To enter the drawing, leave a comment about whether you use face products of any sort and, if so, what you like and/or dislike.

[Upper photo is mine, from our December trip to Vancouver Island. Lower photo is modified from a vendor's image]