Thursday 17 November 2016

A brief Bonkers hiatus!


I am mindful that I have missed my usual posting day of Sunday by quite some margin. I have even missed the slightly slipped day of Monday, which I note was the date of the last post. I do hope to resume perfume-themed(!) blogging soon, as I have been trying a bunch of interesting and/or provocative things lately. I have, however, been overtaken by snagging issues on the ongoing bathroom refurbishment, compounded by problems with a leak downstairs and a faulty dishwasher, and topped off by two challenging work projects and the erroneous transfer of my electricity supply to a neighbour with an eerily similar address(!), which took me four hours to bottom out and resolve last night. Oh, and I have also been getting to grips with a new secondhand smartphone with a different operating system to my old one - working out the right way round to insert the SIM card (after watching a few YouTube videos) was a major challenge to a technical numpty like me. And I have even been exercised by the question of whether the leather case I bought to go with it smells sufficiently of leather to be the real deal. First world problems of the first water, as you can see!

Anyway, the cumulative impact of all these wayward occurrences has been to put paid to any proper blogging, and to throw me into a bit of a ball juggling tailspin, to mix my metaphors. I have been living off processed food for days, and the house is inexorably silting up with bits of fluff, scattered cat crunchies, and Truffle's not inconsiderable collection of abandoned grape and pear stalks. And when the Post-it notes proliferate to the extent pictured above, you just know something is up.




Hmm, yes, the fruit bowl is looking decidedly unlike a cornucopia. Speaking of loosely harvest festival-related matters, I was speaking to a friend the other day about past blog posts of mine for which I have a particular soft spot, and mentioned my review of ELDO's Like This from 2010, with its autumnal pumpkin theme. 'Ooh', he said, 'you should post it again, if you think some readers will have missed it.' To which I replied that normally I think it is the height of laziness by bloggers to regurgitate old copy in this way, but I promised to mull it over. The upshot of my cogitations is that I will insert a link to it at least. I am not entering the Jasmine Awards this year, for a number of reasons, not least the rather material fact that I don't believe I have written anything in 2016 that remotely approximates to what the judges are looking for. But if I had written my 'Like This' review this year, I might have taken a punt on it...

And finally, till I sort myself out and get back to perfume reviewing in earnest, here is a never seen before photo of my very own coach(!), captured on my travels, and earmarked for just such fallow occasions.



8 comments:

Angie Cox. said...

Be honest Vanessa ,I type badly and I am not the best at Grammar .I want to start a blog about bathing related items .Holly would edit it .

Vanessa said...

Hi Angie,

Bathing related items sounds interesting! Especially to me as the owner of a new bath.

Ingeborg said...

Ouch, this sounds terrible. I know far too well what leaks (and flooded basements) are like. I hope the bathroom refurbishment will leave you with a good result in the end, I think you have used a lot of time to look for the right fittings and bathroom porcelain?

I caved in and bought an iPhone just to get the same type of phone for work and home. It does help, but it feels a bit scary to carry two expensive phones most days.

Heeley Cardinal which I got for my birthday this year does not really fit me, so I have been using the few amber perfumes I own, plus older samples.I need warm perfumes now.


We have had the first snow,but then rain again. But I expect I will soon enough need the beanie you knitted for me, the colour is pretty perfect, as is the texture.

Vanessa said...

Hi Ingeborg,

Sorry you have first hand experience of leaks and flooded basements - I hope it is not current at least. I think the bathroom will all come together in the end, but it has been a long and bumpy road, no question!

I had an old iPhone but have gone over to the Android side now for cost reasons. It isn't so alien as I feared, and to my surprise, my old iPhone 4S, which only has a battery life of about 40 minutes now(!), still works as a tiny iPad, and camera of course, so am using the two phones in tandem. I did look at used iPhone 6s, but they were twice the price of the used Sony Xperia Z3 Compact I ended up buying on eBay.

I am also very drawn to amber scents at the moment and have been wearing By Kilian Amber Oud thanks to Undina, and Aroma M Geisha Noire thanks to Val the Cookie Queen!

Glad the beanie will come into service soon. It is getting chilly here too.

Tara said...

I feel anxiety rising just looking at all those Post-It notes, V! I hope you feel on top of things very soon. Then we can enjoy more of your excellent writing, whether you feel it Jasmine worthy or not!

Vanessa said...

Hi Tara,

I nearly did the whole block in an evening, hehe!

The Jasmines were on my mind as they wrote to me last week saying they were looking forward to my submissions, as though it were a foregone conclusion that people would enter every year...

Undina said...

I sympathize with all your troubles but hope you'll overcome them all soon (but, just in case you haven't heard it before: no remodeling can be ever completed, you can just halt ;)).

(just a rant, not directed at you - in case it's not clear from the text :))
I made a point of NEVER reading just re-published posts: if I want to read somebody's old review for a particular perfume, I'll find it on my own through Google. I come to read people's posts because I want to "talk" to them. I'm not desperate to read just anything, so there is no need for kiss-feeding me.

On the other hand, whenever my friends meaningfully link to their older posts, I make sure to go and check out whether I've read those before.

Speaking of that TS-LT post, before coming to that part, I thought that on the picture she was with her son ;)

Vanessa said...

Hi Undina,

You are so right about a remodelling never being completed. At some point you lose the will to keep tweaking and fixing the snagging issues. I think Christmas will be my cut off point, maybe sooner, haha.

I am of the same mind about republished posts, because people have so many options out there for reading matter - other blogs!, newspapers, Twitter, books - it can never be critical that they have a post to read from YOU. (Meaning 'me'.) I linked to the Like This one more because I was mulling over the business of not having copy to submit to the Jasmines - or not recent copy, at least.

LOL about TS and her apparent son. She knows how to pull 'em, all right!