«

Org!: Condimentia

February 15th, 2012 . Posted in Food, Next to godliness | No Comments »
Tags:

I was catching up on what amounts, at the moment, to kitchen errands: the Great Use-It-Up involves a lot of food, you see. This includes the Back-of-the-Cabinet Gang, the Recently Rediscovered Cache of Frozen Sausage, and the Hot-Chocolate Refugee Camp I’ve been running for years, since people who get cocoa in gift sets tend to pass it along to me. Why? Because I am a sucker—I mean, I hate wasting things. :-)

Cooking three unrelated things at once means you go into the fridge a lot…and when I picked out the salad dressing from behind my little squeeze bottle of grenadine, I made the mistake of looking at the latter’s best-by date.

 

IT WAS 2007!

 

Unnerved by the fact that a popular cocktail mixer was about to get registered for kindergarten, I had a moment of clarity/bravery/panic and cleaned a bunch of elderly condiments straight into the trash. This was clearly for the best—nobody’s looking for a fine, aged grenadine—but I feel so stupid for wasting these things in the first place.*

 

 

*Well, mostly. My life would be easier if, instead of inducing me to throw out mayonnaise periodically, someone would get the idea to sell just enough at a time to make the sauce for spicy crab rolls.

 

Org!: Meh de Cologne

January 31st, 2012 . Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

This is one of the hardest parts of the great Use-It-Up of 2012: the samples.

For those who might be unfamiliar with ordering personal grooming products online, one of the small delights to compensate for the fact that only Dr. Dermy Tologist’s Super Awesome Scrub for Delinquent Skin (not its real name) can clean your face without causing some sort of cataclysm is that you get free samples. In addition, by joining a mailing list or special club—and you might as well, at that point—you gain a chance to get even more samples. The psychological soundness of the idea is indisputable: the prices you pay for high-end skincare look much better at the end of a seven-item invoice than a two-item one. It also gives the recipient a chance to try new things at relatively little cost.

I can only assume that when obtained by someone who doesn’t need to title posts “Org!” from time to time, these samples are either used in a timely manner or thrown away if they don’t meet needs.

…and then there’s me.

I hate wasting things, so periodically I have to buckle down and grimly—yes, grimly—use up perfume samples, moisturizers, eye creams, etc. Today it’s Kat von D’s Adora perfume, which probably smells great on someone, but on me smells like science has finally created a generic flower. The good news is that I think it will be gone in one more day.

Org!

January 25th, 2012 . Posted in Next to godliness | No Comments »
Tags:

I’ve decided to use this site to record my progress over the year at finally getting a lot of things organized, starting with actual material things. (And yes, the post title should be read as an exclamation of pain!)

I have no system for this. What I do have is a list of moratoriums (moratoria)? on bringing more of the following into the house for a while:

  • Food, other than sandwich and fresh meat-type food; my cabinets are full of things I haven’t managed to try/make yet
  • Skin-care products
  • Hair-styling products
  • Lotion: I get some of this from somewhere every year for Christmas and my birthday. Odds are I will never actually run out
  • Makeup
  • Stationery of any kind

I’m also trying to get my closet organized enough to make similar bans on, say, black T-shirts (there is already a ban on new jeans).

The idea will be to check in once a week or so with any progress. Don’t even get me started on the Shelf of Infinite Cocoa.

Words Fail You

February 23rd, 2010 . Posted in Bookishness | No Comments »
Tags:

This is simultaneously the thing I hate and love about horror stories of a certain era, in this case as spoken by a character in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan.

She was sitting up in bed, and I listened to her as
she spoke in her beautiful voice, spoke of things which even now
I would not dare whisper in the blackest night, though I stood
in the midst of a wilderness.  You, Villiers, you may think you
know life, and London, and what goes on day and night in this
dreadful city; for all I can say you may have heard the talk of
the vilest, but I tell you you can have no conception of what I
know, not in your most fantastic, hideous dreams can you have
imaged forth the faintest shadow of what I have heard–and
seen. Yes, seen. I have seen the incredible, such horrors that
even I myself sometimes stop in the middle of the street and ask
whether it is possible for a man to behold such things and live.

The cheapest device in the proverbial book, the staple of early (and a lot of other) Lovecraft: The Unspeakable. But what on earth is it? In many of these tales, we are dealing with educated Englishmen who would certainly have the Greek and Latin to come to grips with what Plato thought about young boys, what horrors are perpetrated against women and children in war, and what sort of things Caligula got up to on his days off.  Popular fiction of the time had lots of bloodthirsty druids and opium fiends… so what’s so darned unspeakable?

I’m haunted by the paranoid idea that everyone who read that in 1894 knew exactly what Machen wasn’t saying, and that I don’t.