It may be a real estate cliché but some realtors swear by the practice of baking cookies before open houses and showings. They believe filling the house with a warm, welcoming scent makes it feel more inviting, comforting and homey. For many people the smell of fresh-baked cookies reminds them of happy memories from their childhood ― a nostalgic trigger realtors hope will entice prospective home buyers to stop and linger.
Is incense its own specific scent? Or can any smell be incense? I’d always assumed the former but, surprisingly, it’s actually both!
Despite spending considerable time in Southeast Asia, where burning incense is part of daily life for the majority of the population, I failed to take notice of this fascinating subject.
Who doesn’t love a good story? Good stories engage, entertain and educate. They spark our imaginations and create connections. Talented storytellers know the importance of setting a scene, breathing life into characters, creating the mood and building a strong storyline ― from introduction, through a plot of interconnected events, to climax and conclusion.
One tap on my mobile phone’s weather app and a comprehensive weather report, tailored to my specific location, is instantly revealed. Weather apps with their user-friendly, visual presentations of site-specific, real-time, always-on weather information have become so commonplace, it’s easy to take this technological innovation for granted. But they’ve only been around since about 2010 ― a time when television broadcasts and newspapers were the go-to source for weather forecasts.
Over 140 years ago, the most famous English language pangram appeared in the Boston Journal. Buried in the Current Events column on a page crammed with heavy text, a note read “A favorite copy set by writing teachers for their pupils is the following, because it contains every letter of the alphabet: ‘A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.’“
There’s lots of activity in my studio these days. I’m attempting my first quilt ― not a full-size quilt, just a table runner ― and it’s both stretching my skills and keeping things exciting.
