Smells Like Stonehenge

The transformation of the second bedroom into the satellite office/personal writing sanctuary/craft room/Zen spa/yoga practice and meditation room continues apace. Make that semi-apace, two steps forward, one step backward. On the progress front: I've got a desk, a soothing mood light, and a rug.

On the lack-of-progress front: I've had to return the chair I bought. It was aggravating this mysterious intermittent hip pain problem I have. Rusty, by the way, is devastated by the sudden loss of the new chair. He started sleeping on it and bringing it "offerings"* as soon as it was delivered. Up until it arrived, he'd never shown the slightest interest in this room or anything in it. Now that the chair has been temporarily replaced by a chair from our set of patio furniture (ugh, I know!), he is mourning its loss by sleeping under the patio chair and acting very proprietary about the small rug that the chair used to be on.

Anyway, to return to the lack-of-progress catalog: I've not made a single move to put artwork in frames; there's a lampshade, two bulbless lamps, a Dustbuster, and some audiobooks, all stranded in limbo on the floor. Plus, I've brought the hideous paint besplattered kitchen stool that I previously condemned to the basement back up here to serve as a platform for a mushroom-spawning experiment.** (There's no other place for it!)

And the whole room smells like Stonehenge.

In case you didn't know, according to the Archipelago Candle Company, the scent of Stonehenge is a blend of smoked cedarwood, bergamot, and amber. I happened to purchased Stonehenge at the same time I purchased Joy (orange, cinnamon, and spice) and Dubai (undisclosed, but mustard yellow in color), and they were all sitting together in a bag fuming and offgassing, and it quite bowled me over--all those volatile essential oils. I don't quite know what I was thinking when I bought them. I guess I was really focusing on that sanctuary/Zen spa aspect, but I do believe I overdid it in the candle department. Anyway, slowly but surely the candles are beginning to mellow. I helps that I've banished Joy and Dubai to the back of a drawer until Stonehenge can be dispatched. It's only a votive—a black Halloweeny votive—but, wow, it really does pack quite a punch.

*Rusty has this thing he does with his two favorite toys (a really old ratty cat teaser and a slightly less ratty version of the same toy). We store them on top of a 6-foot-tall book case in the basement. After we've gone to bed, Rusty jumps up to the top of the book case and picks up one of the toys in his mouth. He jumps down with the thing still in his mouth and carries it all the way up the stairs to our closed bedroom door. He "announces" his offering outside our door with loud, insistent mewling. Then he goes back downstairs to get the other one and repeat the ritual. Every morning, both toys are outside the bedroom door. Until the new chair arrived, that is. Instead of bringing the toys to us, he suddenly started bringing them to the chair in the second bedroom. What the fuck? As I type this they are both here, leftover from last night's ritual. I cannot imagine what this is about or why the chair (and its memory) became so instantly important to him.

**More on the mushroom experiments later. I've decided to do NaBloPoMo again this year--one post a day for the entire month of November--so rest assured you'll hear plenty about the fungi I've got growing here in the Stonehenge room.