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finally! I am off for my holiday break and this blog is on vacation, too. Talk to you again in 2.5 weeks, fragrant greetings

I got my mobile treo phone thing that allows me to do quite a lot when the i-phone was not there yet. My treo comes with word, excel, pdf reader etc. and although not comfortable you can surf the wild wild web.
I was carrying my labtop with me during my last bike holiday in France. But not this time!
This time I got a foldaway, bluetooth, mini keyboard. It will be my companion for the next 2.5 weeks. Not that I plan to write a book, but….you never know!
  My newest gadget: Bluetooth keyboard for the Treo mobile phone. Unfolds, connects to the mobile phone and lets you write epics.

And here, dear readers, is another review on the vetiver dance from a fellow blogger…
Enjoy the details on Telesilla’s blog.

when my mom and my dad got together, moved in an apartment, without being married which was sacrilegious back then, they shared among other things their bank accounts. And they had lots of them. My dad did not trust the banks, Swiss banks, nor the government, and hence they distributed their money among the Swiss banking scene.

And when I called my local bank on Friday because I had a little online banking trouble the friendly operator told me that my bank account number cannot be right. “Oh…that’s a number with 74! That can’t be! Or…. are you a client with us since 1974?” she asked.
“Well… I am a client with you since 1974″, I replied. And she was almost speechless, murmured a “thank you so much ” and we went on solving my e-problems.

She asked about 1974 like 1974 was somewhere in the dark ages when popes ruled the world and not banks.  A client who stays with a bank for 30 years seems to be beyond this bank’s event horizon. It tells you something about this bank, I guess.

I think my dad was right.
Another number: 3 months= 90 days. And counting. This number tells you something about company xyz that is supposed to make my vetiver: Since 3 months I wait for a specific quotation to sign and give them the ok to engage in mixing. And since about 40 days I call them from time to time. Having learned my lessons in the past, I ordered my fragrant oils in order to mix the first lot myself, which I did a while ago. Back to field zero I guess.
After my vacation, it will be time to make myself heard. Until then, I watch the news about banks, mouth wide open.

Jogging on Saturday morning, watching the sun go up behind green mountains over wet luscious pastures with mountain flowers in full bloom, a wonderful (dry!) hike for 4 hours right into valley Fedox over Sils, compensated for a rainy Sunday.
The tree face you (picture below) I discovered on the way down from valley Fedox towards Maloja.

Plans for this week: Stock up Mr. shop owner in Zurich with fragrant liquids, telling you more about the latest developments in my desperate trials to get a company to send a quotation and a look at the newest small e-gadget…..and maybe a word on banks, if they still exist by then.
Picture: Tree face uploaded by Andy, seen in Sils 2008

Ok: Off for the hiking weekend, planned about 6 months ago, with friends… and it turns out to be a rather stormy weekend ….olala. We are in for some thunderstorms there.

When back (Monday) there will be 1, 2 more posts and then:Hitting the road with the bike (and red helmet) and pumping these muscles.

Until soon again, fragrant greetings
Picture uploaded by Andy, something like a daisy, picked this morning and placed on white paper.

Having packed and sent two big fat parcels off this morning, packed a few Le Maroc pour to cope with complete depletion of stocks, and worked on the bottle sticker for Vetiver dance: Need for something pumping …. Abacus Remix of “getting together” by Nigel Hayes in endless loop. Kind of reminds me in PhD days in a lab called E62; you know…the “good old days” with lots of bacteria swimming around, radioactive Sanger DNA sequencing and more life threatening goodies.

So here you see something like a prototype of the label for the Vetiver dance bottle. I will do some thinking on it while boxing more le Maroc….
(picture: Prototype of sticker going onto bottle of Vetiver dance)

In the mean time you may want to read Dimitri’s first impressions on his Sorcery of Scent blog.

And here you can listen to the Abacus remix (number six) for 30 seconds. Enjoy.

Yesterday, in light of an increasing number of mails in my inbox with red flags (which translates into “To Answer”) I went jogging in the woods, for 30 minutes or so. Because I did not do much more than writing on the computer keyboard in the office (2nd job) all day long and I felt for a change.

Back home I continued and decided to make it public today: No more samples left of the vetiver. Sorry. Mi dispiace. Can’t help it. Won’t help if you ask. ;-)
So I went jogging and still energized I went to bed, with not much more in mind than “vetiver” and suddenly I realized that I need to start putting bottles into boxes by early September to ship in the first half September to the US, which means I need to get labels by then. It takes a couple of weeks to get the labels, which means I have to prepare the layout tomorrow as this is the last day where I can get it done before my vacation. The few days before the holidays are booked out.
Which means: I have to decide on the name by ….tomorrow.

So I laid in bed, coming to the conclusion that (yes Mr. T. and others…… I know. Now you are disappointed !) this scent needs an unpretentious name, and that it does not really matter in the end ;-), and that Vetiver dance is my favorite, because it is simple , yet evocative, and that my vetiver fragrance is like a dance around and with vetiver, and that folks will talk about the “tauer vetiver (witout dance) “anyway like they talk about l’air and order air ….and I remembered the “vetiver dance” in AromaX’s post about the fragrance.
So here is the link to AromaX’s review of the vetiver scent on his blog. Enjoy.

I updated the sample discovery set flyer that goes on top of the white cardboard box, with a golden ribbon around it: getting there….

page 1 & 4 (front and back).
Click on here for picture in larger size image.
page 2 & 3 (inside)

Click on here for picture in larger size image.

For the time being, this sample discovery set  is not intended to become a product that we sell regularly from Zurich, Switzerland. (see 2 cm rule of the Swiss postal service). But it will make an excellent goody, present, PR etc. set.

I think I will get the English version printed after my vacation.

Until then: Time to read in “Beyond Beauty”, a shiny, glossy print product that landed in my letterbox, for free, larger than a news paper, featuring a special on perfumes….discovering sentences such as ” How -over and over again- do we win over consumers in search of the motional shock that will mark their encounter with the fragrance of their life?   How is the osmosis between a formula and the skin made accessible to the greatest number of people? ”

Cool.

Nothing exciting happening these pre-holiday days. Waiting for the sunblocker with SPF 50 being on sales, which happens never!, and buying a bicycle helmet. Not that I really thought I need one. I can’t remember me falling down or crashing with my bike since I was about 6…but the W.-factor insisted.

I spent my weekend wondering about the fact that the older you get, meaning the longer you have lived, meaning the more you can look back and say: Yep, I’ve had a good share of it! , or: the smaller the share is getting that is waiting for you,

the more you become worried about what is left.

Well, maybe it will turn again once you reach your 80-ies. Bottom line: I was asked to get a helmet for our biking holidays and got one. In red. To fit with my sneakers.  It felt great, running with the bike downtown, with the red shiny helmet, I went downhill faster than ever, not worrying about what share is left….
Picture: A yellow flower with little beagle, blooming in Zurich these days, uploaded by Andy