WINNER OF SERVER FARM DRAWING AND A NEW ONE

The winner of the last drawing is:

PARROT

To claim your winnings, just send an e-mail with your full name and shipping address to olympicorchids at gmail dot com, or leave a message on our Facebook page. 

Yesterday I spent almost the entire day packing perfume to ship and supervising the new person who was packing orchid plants. Such a lot of busy work. I’m still trying to sell the orchid business, even as it grows, so that I can spend more time with the perfume and other creative activities. 

In the evening our neighbor invited us over to sit on her back deck and drink a bottle of prosecco. We made a fire in her clay chimenea using wood scraps picked up in the woods. The high point was when we burned parts of an old, decommissioned bird feeder that was so dry that the flames leaped up immediately, crackled, popped, and sent up showers of sparks. The fire eventually settled into a red glow that just took the chill off the night air. We watched the stars come out, and the moon come up. Everything was perfectly quiet. It was like sitting around a campfire, and about as relaxing as it gets. 

There’s something magical about watching a controlled open fire. It invites contemplation, clears the brain, and brings people together in a friendly way. The smell of the wood smoke is part of the magic. 

To enter this week’s drawing, leave any sort of comment about fire. The prize will be at least 100g of perfume samples. 

[Photos of chimenea fire and rising moon are from Wikimedia. We had no devices of any kind with us last night. Moon and campfire painting by Albert Bierstadt, 19th century.] 

WINNER OF IRIS DRAWING AND A NEW ONE

Finally, I’ve done the drawing, and the winner is 

JEN

To collect your goodies, just send your full name and shipping address to olympicorchids at gmail dot com or leave a message on our Facebook page. Facebook has been having some issues, so e-mail is probably more reliable. 

I was recently reading an article on the US obsession with air conditioning, which pointed out the obvious fact that running all those air conditioners to keep people refrigerated is a significant contributor to global warming, which would ultimately lead to a need for more air conditioning. What should be even more alarming, also pointed out in passing in the article, is that all of the server farms that store our data rely on air conditioning to dissipate the enormous amounts of heat generated by the servers. If the air conditioning should fail, the servers will go down, and who knows what will be lost. Any operations that depend on the server farms will come to a screeching halt. 

I’ve always had my doubts about keeping anything I valued on the “cloud”, so I have jpeg files of all my photos and mp3 files of my music library on my laptop, backed up on an external hard drive. All of my documents are backed up as well. 

It’s only a matter of time until some major server farm fails, either through hacking or through natural causes like a natural disaster and/or power failure. Luddite and jack-of-all-trades that I am, it should not affect me all that much. 

The next drawing will be for a massive haul of samples of all sorts, probably at least 200 g for US shipping, but 100 g international. To enter, just leave a comment about air conditioning, server farms, or how you back up your important data. 

[Fuschia photo is mine, freezing baby and server farm are from an internet search.] 

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]

WINNER OF LAST GIVEAWAY AND NEW COTTONWOOD GIVEAWAY

The winner of the last giveaway is:

NATHALIE MORIN

To claim your winnings just send me an e-mail: olympicorchids at gmail dot com or leave a PM on the Olympic Orchids Facebook page. 

As usual, when one giveaway ends another one begins. Right now I’m just trying to get through the last three weeks of spring quarter at the university, all the while keeping up with shipping out plants and perfumes.

This week the cottonwood trees are doing their thing, releasing flakes of white material that look just like snowflakes. The cottonwood snowstorm always reminds me of Fellini’s movie Amarcord, where the old man looks at the floating white particles from the trees and says, “vagano, vagano, vagano …” (they drift… and drift … and drift). Around where I live, there are so many cottonwood trees that the white fluff accumulates on the ground, just like snow. 

Do you have any similar phenomenon where you live? Leave a comment about it, or just leave a random comment to be entered in the next drawing for 100 g of perfume samples and anything else that I decide to throw in. 

[Photos of accumulated cottonwood "snow" in a local parking lot are 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]

WINTER FLOWERS WINNER, SWITCHING TIME ZONES, AND A NEW DRAWING

The winner of the winter flowers drawing has been randomly chosen, and the winner is:

GINA TABASSO

To claim your 100 g sample bag, please send an e-mail to olympicorchids at gmail dot com (quickest way) or leave a PM on Facebook. 

Well before the spring equinox, Big Brother dictated that we would once again switch time zones, from Pacific Standard Time to Mountain Time (one zone to the east). This arbitrary change is euphemistically known as “Daylight Saving Time”. Logically, nothing is saved by cutting a segment off on one end and adding it to the other. The amount of daylight is the same no matter what you call it. 

What the legislated time switch accomplishes is unclear, but to me it’s depressing to go from finally having it nice and light when I wake up to go to my “day job” to having it still dark. This is not quite accurate in my case because the cat usually wakes me up at dawn no matter what, but now that feline wake-up call comes an hour later in the official scheme of things, I’ve lost an hour of what could have otherwise been productive time in the morning before I have to be somewhere, and/or I’ve lost an hour of sleep. Do people really want to get up an hour earlier so that they can finish work an hour earlier? If so, then why don’t the morning people just do it without calling it something else? Why force everyone to do it?

Time zones were designed to coordinate with the daily cycle of the sun and, with a few exceptions, generally provide the best approximation to it. I know there are movements afoot to do away with changing the time twice a year, but please, let’s not have a permanent move into the wrong time zone!

This week I’m offering the usual 100 g of samples and whatever else I decide to throw in as extras. To enter the drawing, just leave a comment giving your thoughts on “daylight saving” time. 

[All photos are mine. The colors of the crocuses were especially bright this year, maybe because they bloomed a month late.]

WINTER FLOWERS DRAWING WINNER, REDUNDANT PERFUME

The drawing has been done, and the winner of the winter flowers drawing is: 

LEAH

If you’re the winner, please contact me by e-mail at olympicorchids at gmail dot com or PM on Facebook with your full name and shipping address. 

This past week we’ve had nothing but beautiful blue skies and sunshine during the day, but the down side is that it’s been horribly cold at night, in the 20s F (below 0 C), well below freezing. We still have snow on the ground in shaded areas, and the typical ugly piles of snow and sand on the sides of the roads and in the parking lots. This is completely abnormal for March, and all the plants are about a month behind schedule. We are still cleaning up broken branches and beaten-down bamboo canes from the heavy snow. I hope things will warm up as we get into what should be spring. 

As should be obvious from the giveaways, I always have a huge number of perfume samples on hand. I view sampling other companies’ perfumes as part of my continuing education as a perfumer, partly to learn what is possible, and partly to avoid duplicating what’s already available. I don’t know about you, but the more I sample, the more everything seems the same. These days it is rare that I experience that beautiful flash of discovery when something really new and surprising comes along. It’s all déjà vu (or rather déjà senti) I think part of the problem is that a huge number of new perfumes are released every year in a futile attempt to keep brands in the public eye, and this number seems to increase almost exponentially every year. It’s easier just to recycle the standard scents and try to push them on the public through advertising and gimmicks than it is to be innovative in terms of the perfumes themselves. It’s actually depressing to think of how superficial all of the marketing is and what a glut of products are sloshing around.  

This week there’s another giveaway of 100 g of samples plus whatever goodies I have sitting around that will fit in the box. Just leave a comment about your experiences with perfume sampling. Do they all start to smell the same after you’ve sampled a lot? 

[Pics are mine, all types of flowers that are blooming now, but should have bloomed a month ago.]