review-ish: bath and body works candles

So, I recently got kind of hooked on watching YouTube videos of, like, make-up how-to people and I guess, like, lifestyle vloggers? And by hooked I mean I watched like four or five which is an outstanding number for someone who normally won’t watch a video longer than thirty seconds, especially when you take into account that a lot of these clock in the 12-15 minutes range. My tv has a built in YouTube app that recommends things to me, I’m powerless against its inscrutable algorithm.

Anyway, these color-coordinated, put-together, spotless-apartment-living, spend-more-on-make-up-in-a-month-than-I-have-in-five-years ladies kept mentioning Bath and Body Works candles. And I guess it sort of stuck in my head and then Crystal and I had to go to an almost-city so she could see her dentist and there’s a Bath and Body Works in the mall there and then the next thing I know I was coming home with eight candles? I think I was drunk. Or maybe lightheaded from sniffing every single candle in the store. Repeatedly.

I like candles! They’re great. I don’t buy a ton, but we do have a mix of real and battery candles scattered around our place. They look pretty cool and all and Crystal is really into this thing where we have a little row of them in mason jars in a windowsill. And we buy the occasional scented candle — I just sent Crystal on a mission to buy one while she was at Walmart the other day in fact — but I’m not, like, crazy about candles. So, you know, I didn’t expect to come home with eight of them.

In our vegetable wax and lead-free wick induced haze, we bought:

Lemon Mint Leaf — Freshly cut lemon balm and spearmint leaves give a refreshing lift to a blend of vetiver and citrus — My girlfriend chose this one because it is eerily close to the basil-lime dish soap we use and love. Haven’t burned it yet, but has a good cold (what I learned on the internet is called) throw. The sales associate said it’s one of the most popular candles in their store. It’s too spring-y to burn now, but come March I think it’s going to be our go-to.

Sweater Weather — Cuddle up with an aromatic blend of eucalyptus, juniper berry, and fresh sage that celebrates the arrival of sweater weather — This is amazing. I smelled this one pretty much as soon as I set foot in the store and came back to it over and over again. We knew we wanted a big fall candle and it came down between this one and Leaves because despite having very different descriptions, they smell incredibly similar, but Sweater Weather just had something that Leaves was missing. I’ll definitely be buying Leaves eventually though.

Harvest Coffee — Relax with this rich, robust blend of roasted coffee beans topped off by creamy vanilla foam — I don’t like coffee at all unless it’s masked with a bucket of milk, sugar, and whipped cream, but I love the smell of it. This one gives off a great smell when it’s unlit, but once it gets warm it is way, way too sweet and caramel-y. I’m not really a sweet candle person (I learned in the Bath and Body Works yesterday) but if you are and you like coffee, you’ll probably love this one.

Bergamot Woods — An aromatic woodsy blend, highlighted by bright bergamot, fresh lavender, and deep green cypress — I love this one, love love love it. Like, can’t stop opening it and sniffing it and worrying about “wasting” it. It’s what fragrance people probably classify as a masculine scent and those are scents to which I am frequently drawn. I see it pop up alongside reviews of Flannel pretty often, but I did not like Flannel at all, so clearly this scent thing is weird and subjective. This has a good burn smell and a good, lingering throw.

Marshmallow Fireside — A sweet-toasty end to a snowy, fun-filled day — toasted marshmallows and sumptuous vanilla cream blend with the comforting aroma of rich smoldering woods — This was Crystal’s pick and I fought her on it in a lazy and unengaged way because I just thought it was way, way too sweet and was being obstinate about it, but now I can’t stop sniffing it. It’s got a nice sweet note that isn’t too cloying and there is that woodsy undertone that I think I was just missing in the store. Looking forward to burning this post-Halloween.*

Sparkling Icicles — As sparkling as the ice at the local skating pond, this fragrance features a citrus bouquet, bergamot, and a touch of holiday moss — Another one I love love love and another fairly masculine scent. I actually picked this one because it smells like the pine forest/river rafting section of Soarin’ Over California at Disney California Adventure and I plan to burn it and listen to the soundtrack and cry a lot. Just kidding. Kind of. Nice and woodsy.

Fresh Balsam — The invigorating aroma of evergreen woods on a clear, fall morning features crisp eucalyptus, fir needles, and cedarwood musk notes — Forget what the official descriptions says about fall, this is straight up Christmas, balsam is the smell of Christmas, and this one hits it just right. Not too woodsy, not too green, and it doesn’t smell like those little green Christmas tree car air fresheners.

Winter — A season full of fun in the snow is captured in notes of pine needles, clementine and winter woods — This one has some of the same initial scent as Sparkling Icicles, but it’s much less masculinely woodsy and much more cinnamon bark and pine. It’s more foody than floral, but not super sweet or sugary. I initially liked Snow Day better, but the more I smelled it, the sweeter it got, so Winter won out.

The big candles are $20. I still can’t get over that because it just seems absurd to me. I looked them up on the internet beforehand and I was like, “No, no way. $20 for a candle?! Who am I, Howard Hughes? I’m not lighting up the Spruce Goose over here!” And then I walked into the store and smelled them and just sort of stumbled from rack to rack, saying, “No, no, these are ridiculous. Twenty dollars!” until my arms were full and Crystal had to check us out and pull me bodily from the premises. To be fair, the little ones were 3 for $12 (3 for $10 online, but their shipping seems outrageous to me.) and that’s not terrible.

My official review is basically this: these things smell pretty great and there was an awesome variety of scents and even if I can’t get over their price — $20 dollars! — they’re pretty much worth it, especially if you’re not burning them all day, every day. Each is strongly scented but not in that chemical, headachy way and two of the three I’ve burned thus far have had an incredible range, smell great after being extinguished, and linger in a super pleasant, not overwhelming way. (And the third just isn’t my favorite personally, a ton of people probably love the crap out of it.) Plus, the labels peel off so easy, like, window-cling easy and if you care about that, you know exactly what a big deal that is.

Just give in and buy some already so we can, like, high-five about it or something. Jeez.

*: I think you should be aware at this point that I’ve been reading the official descriptions of these in Dana Carvey’s Church Lady voice. Important.

good shit: techy stuff i love

So I’m kind of anal retentive, you know? (Yes, yes you do.) And you’ve got to know by now that I have a deeply, deeply obsessive personality, yeah? (Of course you do.) and that I like techy things and gadget-y stuff? Okay, well, that all culminates pretty intensely on my computer and phone and, since I use lots of little things that make my life easier and am also driven to tweak how things look like a crazed monster, I thought I’d like, you know, share some of those things and tweaks.

So my desktop pretty much always looks something like this:

And right now it looks just like this except without all the writing and arrows showing you what’s what:


[click to embiggen]
So let’s start with Adium which I have been using as my chat client since I got my first Mac as a college graduation gift in July of 2007. It integrates pretty much every chat client* you could possibly want to use into a single interface so you don’t have to have a million things open and it does it while being extremely customizable.

I use Decay 2.0 which is an included theme and layout and just tweak it obsessively until I like the way it looks, including changing the font to Helvetica Neue to match the message style I use. I use the Minimal set of service icons, White Chat Bubbles status icons, and Flat Bubbles 2.0 for my dock icons. I don’t keep a menu bar icon active because i don’t like doubling up in my dock and menu bar. Redundancy is ugly! I’m c r a z e d about this.

My message style is Pretty Simple used pretty much as is. I set my background to gray and made it nicely transparent. There is also a nice matchy Pretty Simple contact layout and, though I like the font, the layout doesn’t work for me because I keep my list pretty narrow and it cannot display statuses below their contacts. I prefer Decay 2.0 solely for this reason and just changed the font to match my messages. I told you, I’m super intense.

My favorite tool by far is TinyAlarm which I’ve been using for approximately 1,000 years. It’s a little menu bar timer that lets you set alarms super quick. It’s tiny and effortless and I use it pretty much daily. I mostly set timers to remind myself to do things — usually to go upstairs and cook dinner or check a load of laundry, stuff like that — because I am unbelievably terrible at knowing what time it is and remembering that I have to do things. I also used to do it to set productivity windows but I’ve recently moved on to the next item on the list for that.

While writing this I realized I hadn’t updated the app in forever and when I did, it was new and ugly and also shareware that costs $7 after thirty days. I hate the new menu and was irritated with the whole thing in about a minute, so I downgraded via my Time Machine backup and am much happier again. Since it was free for such a long time and is no longer the same app, I’ve uploaded the old version so you can have it too.

My next favorite thing is Eggscellent which is a productivity app based on the Pomodoro Technique. I use thirty minute chunks and five minute short breaks and I love how easy the app makes it. Plus I can throw a bunch of things on my list and have them waiting when I’m finally ready to get to them. I’m still figuring out the right settings for everything and I wish the visual timer were more customizable — I’d like it to be significantly smaller and preferably square and definitely sleeker (Is that nest and egg situation really necessary?) or I’d like the internal/external distractions to be clickable in the drop down from the menu bar so that I could close out the visual timer entirely — but even with my complaints, I’ve already used it every single day since I installed it.

When I discovered If This Then That through Flickr last week I had one of those rare moments where my eyes went really wide and my mouth dropped open and I went, “Oh my god, how did I not know about this already?!”

Basically, IFTTT lets you create recipes for actions on the internet. I use mine to automatically upload Instagrams to my Tumblr and Flickr and also to automatically share new posts I make on all the various social media accounts I have. I am really, really bad at self-promotion and terrible at remembering to crosspost, so those recipes are incredibly useful to me.

I also have to throw out a recommendation for freethephotos which is a migration tool to get all of your Instagram pictures into your Flickr account. I tried Flickstagram with almost no success (It lagged like crazy and stalled halfway through and also added a bunch of unnecessary tags to my pictures.) and so I tried freethephotos instead and it was super simple, fast, and didn’t lag or over-tag. And since I set up an IFTTT recipe to do it automatically after I Instagram something, I don’t have to worry about using it again.

My phone is also, obviously, important to me too, but I am much less likely to use really useful things on it since I do most of my being productive stuff while at my desk. Most of my phone apps are for photography, including my most recent download InstaPlace. Because I live in the middle of nowhere, this is not yet all that useful to me, but I have a feeling that when my gf and I take a road trip later this year, it will be. It’s a fun one to play with anyway.

My last two recommendations are Hippo Remote Lite and Sleep Cycle. I’ve been using Sleep Cycle for a long time — on and off since I got my first iPhone in 2009 — and for the last 99 consecutive nights. I don’t know that the data it accumulates has any real value — most of the nights I wake up feeling the worst, the app tells me I’ve had a 90% or higher night of sleep — but the gentle alarm is great. Hippo Remote Lite, on the other hand, is very new to me and has already been super, super useful. The last three Monday nights we’ve had storms that interfered with our satellite and interrupted our recordings of Teen Wolf and we’ve had to resort to watching on the MTV website. My computer is pretty big, but we have an Apple TV and would much rather use AirPlay to watch it on our tv, so we do, but using the mouse from a distance is kind of weird and almost impossible depending on where we sit with it. Hippo Remote Lite solves that by letting me use my phone as a mouse right in front of the tv. Magical.

Now go forth and anal retentively organize, tweak, and time. You deserve it.

*: I know that it doesn’t integrate Skype (Although there is a plugin that will make Skype work with it) which is the chat client du jour but I won’t use Skype as a chat client because Microsoft has made it effortless to wiretap you with it. I only use Skype for vidchat when absolutely necessary.

totally top five 2k12: stuff

The sixth and final of my Totally Top Five 2k12 posts! And it’s all about the non-media things that I really, really loved this year! Let me show you how my materialism extends far beyond fiction!

5. Paper Mate Liquid Flair Medium Point Pens [amazon]

I have a Pen Problem. I am so, so picky about what kind of pens I’ll use and on what papers it’s acceptable to use them. I’ll buy a 12 pack and decide two pens in that they weren’t worth my time. I’ll steal pens from friends, family, and strangers alike. I’ll stand in an office supply store and try every single open stock pen available to me. It’s a search. It’s a quest. It’s a Problem.

I’ve got some favorite standbys: Staedtler Fineliners are great, have great flow, and I’m obsessed with having all those colors (I have the 20 pack.) at my beck and call. I’m partial to the Pilot Neo Gels. Sharpie Pens are awesome and I’ve gone back to them a lot recently. I love Pilot B2P pens for just about everything and are what I carry in my bag at all times.

But earlier this year I was looking for a new, thicker felt tip and the Paper Mate Liquid Flair line kept coming up in all my Google searches for the best felt tips. I ordered a box even though they were a little more expensive than I usually like to go — a buck a pen is my sweet spot — and I wasn’t disappointed. They have good flow, they’re great for lettering and doodling, they’re solid in my planner and notebook. My biggest complaint is that the tip breaks down a little faster than I like and they smear on Moleskine paper. I expected the second (Everything smears on Moleskine paper.), but not the first and considering how much I like writing with them, it’s not a big deal.

You didn’t know I could talk about pens for that long, did you? Yeah, well. I cut out three additional paragraphs.

4. iPhone & iPad apps — Tweetbot & Paper & Afterglow

I had been using the free version of Echofon for Twitter basically since I got my iPhone in 2009 and I had been pretty happy with it. Then the iOS 6 update happened and it totally lost its shit. Bridget recommended Tweetbot and I sucked it up and spent the three bucks and haven’t looked back since. Tweetbot is pretty and functional. It elegantly integrates lists. It lets you mute pretty much anything, quickly and painlessly, and also lets you choose the duration of the mute. I can mute #elementary for a week until I’ve caught up or I can mute #getglue forever so I never have to see those dumb automated tweets. My only complaint is that its native browser can be a little tetchy about how it displays certain links (Looking at you WhoSay!) but it’s not a big deal. Tweetbot is the bomb and every other client sucks.
Paper is a gorgeous notebook app for the iPad and the fact that I’m recommending it is kind of a big deal because I don’t even have an iPad. My girlfriend does, but I use it maybe an hour a week and that entire hour is spent using Paper. I’ve had this really intense delusional fantasy my entire life that if I just find the right pen or the right marker or the right paper or notebook that I’ll suddenly be good at art. Paper is the first thing to ever get close to making it a reality. It doesn’t make me good, but it does let me get something close to what I’m seeing in my head on to the paper. I like the watercolor brush and the felt tip pen/fine marker the best and I love the sort of inherently rough nature of the whole deal. It’s a little too expensive — you have to basically buy every in-app thing they offer to make it as useful as it should be — but it’s been pretty worth it so far. Sometimes you gotta spend some money to have some fun.

Afterglow is a photo editor for the iPhone that’s super useful. I have a 3GS, so my camera isn’t that great, and Afterglow gives me the ability to make the kind of tweaks and adjustments I’d make if I ran all my iPhone pictures through Photoshop. The filters aren’t particularly special — if I’m going to filter something I post to Instagram, I’m probably just going to use an Instagram filter — but being able to make adjustments to highlights, shadows, contrast, and brightness have made all the difference in how happy I am with my iPhone shots. I’m also a big fan of the frame options, even though I don’t use them very often. Sometimes you just need to make the picture of your mom shoveling snow into a circle, you know?

 

3. Kindle [amazon]I actually got my Kindle from my parents in June 2011, but I’m including it anyway. I read enough on it in 2011 including We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Hunger Games trilogy, and Everlost, but I didn’t really appreciate it until this year when I realized you can get e-books real cheap. They do 100 Kindle Books for $3.99 and Under and you can always find stuff if you poke around a little. I am broke 99% of the time, so pricing a book at $2.99 is an easy way to trick me into buying it. The Daily Deals are a particularly good way to snag stuff cheap. I literally just grabbed Stephen King’s Under the Dome because it popped up as a Daily Deal. That’s like $0.002 a page.

This year, I’ve carried my Kindle with me 90% of the time I leave the house and it’s usually sitting next to me at home. I like paper books still — I paused writing this to open an Amazon package full of books, actually — but the convenience of the Kindle is unbeatable. I can download a book anytime I want, almost anywhere. It rules.

2. Apple TV [apple | amazon]

We bought our Apple TV after I exchanged emails with LG and was informed that our beloved bluray player would probably never receive an app for Hulu+. I just wanted to watch Parks and Recreation on our TV! So we did about a day’s worth of research and my girlfriend ended up rushing to Walmart to buy the little black box that would improve the quality of our new North Dakota lives.

After a fight with it after its first update — never, ever update immediately following a release — and five-ish months with it, I still really love our Apple TV. I love it. I love the ease of it, I love that all of my streaming accounts are right there in one place, and I love that all of the apps are pretty and functional and easy to navigate. The Netflix app on our bluray was the worst because you could only access your queue and even then it was hit or miss if something was going to show up in the right place or sometimes at all. You couldn’t search or browse and it sucked a lot. We really only use Hulu and Netflix and I hate that there’ll probably never be an Amazon Instant app, but it’s still been well worth the cost.

I’m not going to lie to you though, you’re probably just as well off — if not better — buying a Roku. They have great reviews, offer mostly the same things including the Amazon Instant that the Apple TV lacks, and it’s about half the cost depending on which model you buy. We looked at the Roku long and hard and still decided to go with Apple TV instead, but you’re also probably not as picky and anal-retentive and annoying as me, so it won’t matter to you that the Apple TV is prettier, has a cleaner remote, and better menu design. I’m willing to pay more to appease those parts of me. Sometimes.

1. Hulu+ [referral link]

I feel like I’ve had Hulu+ forever, but mostly I think that’s because I feel like I could never again live without it. I think I got it in early 2011 so that I could watch Parks and Recreation (This is starting to sound like a theme in my life…) and I’ve had it on and off since. My life is always better during the on periods. My Hulu is like my child or like, I don’t know, my beloved bonsai tree. I love and care for it, trimming away episodes in a leisurely fashion and adding favorites to fill it out when it seems thin. I worry about ti when an expiration date nears.

My complaints about Hulu are not always small and there are many. I think they’re kind of shitty at consistency — 30 Rock has gone web only and back at least twice since — and they don’t communicate change well at all. There’s no rhyme or reason to what is available when and where which isn’t their fault — the network contracts are to blame for those details — but they don’t communicate them at all. Even though you pay $8 a month, you still have to watch commercials — this is still not totally their fault — and they never remember your commercial preferences even though they say they care. Their interfaces are pretty terrible on the web and their desktop app is abysmal.

But despite all of that, I still love Hulu the best and I still think $8 a month is a totally reasonable price to pay. I don’t have to fight with my dad over our one totally useless DVR drive (Don’t even get me started on Directv…), I get to watch Fox shows that I would otherwise not have access to (We don’t have a Fox affiliate here. I know.), I get to watch CW shows in HD (The affiliate here looks like they run their episodes through a shredder before they air them…), and I can curl up on my couch and marathon 10 episodes of a show without having to do anything. Seriously, it just plays the next episode in my queue as long as there are episodes to play.

Plus, if you sign up through this link we both get two weeks free. That’s rad. You won’t regret it.

not an ad, just an endorsement

My skin is stupid and fickle. It breaks out totally irregularly, it’s often dry enough to feel uncomfortable, it’s allergic to everything. It’s rosy and yellow and pale and freckled. It’s a pain in my ass. Add to that my lax skincare routine (What? I’m forgetful. Back off!) and everything above my neck is kind of a mess.

I recently said, “I am so sick of this shit” and threw away every face product I owned. EVERYTHING. Hundreds of dollars of stuff I’d used once or twice, stuff that worked, stuff that kind of seemed like it might have, stuff I ended up being allergic to. I trashed it all and said, “What is the one thing I’ve used that ever worked?”

And I remembered six months of 2006 where I used Clinique’s 3 Step and got tons of compliments on my skin. Every older woman in my college classes offered me unsolicited praise, telling me to keep up whatever I was doing.

So why didn’t I? Because the stuff is expensive! But so totally worth it. Now that I’m using it again, my skin is clearer and less erratic. I have less days where it feels miserably tight every time I frown or scowl in disbelief.

I use the mild liquid soap in the shower, whether it’s morning or night and extra mild bar at the sink the other time. I use Clarifying Lotion 1 and the Dramatically Different Moisturizing Lotion. The salicylic acid spot treatment is working out for the times when I still get zits, though next time I might switch to their benzoyl peroxide spot treatment instead. I’ve yet to figure out which one works better on my temperamental face.

I like that the entire system is simple. I love the clean lines of the packaging. I love that none of it smells weird or chemical. I’m only a third of the way into my first order, but I think it’s a keeper. Way to go, Clinique!

hell hath no fury like a lesbian under-represented or "am i an owl? or a rabbit?"

My girlfriend and I are not engaged, nor do we plan to be married anytime particularly soon. Nonetheless, I am currently infuriated/frustrated/banging-my-head-against-a-wall-repeatedly by/with/because-of the wedding industry.

I am in love with my wonderful girlfriend. I know how I want to propose and I know that, when the stars align and the wind blows right, I will do so. We have discussed marriage. It is something we want to do! And something we’re fairly enthusiastic about. When I realized this was the case, I started collecting bits and pieces of wedding inspiration, following wedding blogs, trying to find places that catered/leaned/considered-the-existence-of our unusual/unconventional/not-white-and-roses-and-parquet-dancefloor tastes.

There are some great blogs (Offbeat Bride and Halloweddings) that bend toward the non-traditional, but it’s still limited. I’m willing to go the extra mile and DIY the shit out of our future nuptial celebrations, but some more inspiration wouldn’t hurt!

But that’s not even the frustrating part, the frustrating part is how wildly hetero-normative the entire industry is! I’m a lady who loves another lady, there are a lot of us in the world, and we should be able to see some more of us out there, getting married, and doing it fabulously! (On a bright note see: So You’re Engayged)

Think of all the gendered aspects of weddings: the clothes, the cake topper, the invitations, the terminology; it’s all steeped in that “well this part is for boys and this part is for girls” attitude. Women are expected to care about the planning and the details, men are expected to shut up, roll over, and show up on time.

In thinking about some of this stuff, I actually found myself thinking, “Hmm, could my girlfriend and I be represented by animals?” so that I could build a theme on pairing two representative species or colors in a way that would suggest we were the same gender, but not identical. What kind of world is that?

All I want is representation.

Okay, that’s not true, all I want is the legal right to commit myself to my partner for the rest of my life, but representation in the industry would be a great second. There are same-sex couples getting married/committed/unioned all over the country, so why aren’t I seeing more of them?

This seems insane to me on a very base capitalist level: why isn’t someone making money off of it? I’m gay! I want to pay exorbitant prices for Jordan almonds and cake too!