December 20, 2017

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Sun's up, in the darkest part of the year.

Speaking of the sun, the 2017 solar eclipse featured prominently in our holiday letter.  You can see envelopes, ready to go (successfully printed AND stamped).

I love the eclipse stamps.  The stamps were sort of 3D.  You can see the circles were a different level from the rest of the stamps -- see the raised (or lowered?) circles below, especially at the bottom of the next image.

Grateful for blue skies and sunshine in the dark of winter.

In the evening I went to a Smell & Tell at the library.  Michelle Krell Kydd is the only trained "nose" in Ann Arbor.  She has worked in the perfume industry, and knows a lot about smells and what people do (and have done) with them.

Once upon a time, lots of people thought disease came from bad smells.  This is perhaps not a totally unreasonable working hypothesis......  I expect it's probably true that things that smell really bad tend to be bad for you........ 

But.  Rather than cleaning things up so they didn't smell, people tried to counteract the bad smells with other smells.  This was a very common practice, but it didn't actually help fight disease............

The beaky mask held things that smelled good, so the "plague doctor" could breathe air with pleasanter smells on top of horrid ones, theoretically protecting the "doctor" from disease.........

This was another interesting Smell & Tell.  We smelled a lot of the things they used to "protect themselves from disease," like rose, mint, and holy chrism oil. 

If you live in these parts, and have never checked out a Smell & Tell, I encourage you to do so.  It's the kind of experience you're not likely to find elsewhere.


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