Confessions of a Smell Collector

I have a confession to make. I am a hoarder of good smells.

You know those jarred candles that people buy for other people as gifts? I have one of those. I received it around 7 years ago. I burn it, once in a blue moon, when I happen to notice it sitting on my shelf, but in all those seven years, I've been careful not to burn it too far too fast. I have collected scented candles from every imaginable source. All of them reside in a drawer in my living room, which I occasionally open up to gaze at them before closing it securely once again.

 

My boyfriend's mother seems to be fond of good smells. She used to regale us with scented lotions and shower gels, before graduating to Glade Plug-ins, and finally these little bags of air freshener that she gets in Indonesia. I still have a tube of body lotion that she must have given us the first year we were together. I love it, and I use it, but clearly I use it sparingly! The other tube she gave us that same year still hasn't even been opened!

The Glade Plug-ins were a lifesaver when I moved into a stinky apartment in 2015. But when I moved out again, all but one plug, and all of the scent vials, disappeared. I bought some half-off no-name replacements at a dollar store a year ago, but they now feel like such a precious commodity that I have never plugged one in!

The Indonesian air freshener? It has sat, helpfully, unopened on top of my dresser for the past 5 or 6 months! I'd like to use it, but it's the only one I have, and once it's opened and its scent depleted, it can never be restored!

 

When I was about 12 years old, my mother gifted me an aromatherapy kit called "Making Scents," which started me on a path of lifetime love for essential oils. I still have the notebook, hand-decorated by Yours Truly, containing all the instruction cards that came with the kit. I also have a few of the original, miniscule (5/8 a fluid dram, if that means anything to you!) vials of essential oil. Yes, in 23 years I still have not used 5/8 of a fluid dram, but I have to conserve them, because once they're gone, well, I can't even bear to think about it!

Several years ago, my then-boyfriend gave me a hand-me-down. It was an Americana-themed Scentsy wax burner and 3 or 4 packets of Scentsy wax. I don't know if you know (I didn't at the time), but a Scentsy is a totally cool little gadget that uses a light bulb to melt a puddle of scented wax in a dish above it. Because the wax doesn't actually burn off, it can be used over and over again and never run out! It sounds like a smell-hoarder's dream, right!? Unfortunately, my Scentsy fell on the floor and perished before I'd been able to use it even a handful of times, so for months I had all this Scentsy wax I was loath to part with. Fortunately, I saved the light bulb and cord, and before long, I had acquired a smaller potpourri burner from Freecycle that just managed to contain the light bulb and enable my wax-melting once again. Confident that I'd be able to use my new pseudo-Scentsy on the regular, I then proceeded to invest in a sizable collection of scented wax, in fits and starts over the past two years. But did I ever melt the wax? Not much. I put the burner in the basement as a deodorizing tool for my Airbnb guests last summer, and I haven't seen it since.

As you have probably ascertained, my smell-hoarding tendencies are a force to be reckoned with. Once I acquire something with a pleasant scent, I won't let it go without a fight! I could be proud of my unwavering tenacity, but let's be real—it's a little excessive. A whole drawer full of barely touched essential oils and unopened Scentsy packets, six scented candles in various degrees of un-use, some plumeria incense I bought in September but want to save for summer, an adorable garden-eel car freshener I bought in Japan and have now refused to open for the past year and a few months? What's the point of having all these scents around if I never actually smell them? This has to stop!

So I did something about it. I had eight unused Scentsy packets and nothing to melt them in. A lesser hoarder would throw those all away, but I am both hoardy and crafty! I went to the thrift store and found a bag of electric candles for $2. I disassembled one candle, replaced the bulb with a 40-watt globe, stuffed the whole shebang into a drinking glass, and then topped the contraption with a plate full of lavender wax. Soon I had a brand new, uber-ugly Scentsy burner ready for business! 

 

 

Since the scented wax lasts well nigh forever, I'll likely never actually deplete my supply, but at least it won't be gathering dust any more! And I can rest assured that if my new ghetto-Scentsy bites the dust, I have four more electric candles I can use to rebuild it.

Because I feel so confident that I'm in very little immediate danger of running out of good smells, I have made a promise to myself. When my banana-nut-bread candle starts to run low, I'll suppress my instincts to lid it and shelve it and pretend that it's a completely scentless piece of decor. Instead, I'll bravely soldier on, and keep the candle burning it until it burns out!

How to DIY a Picture Rail

 
If you're like me, you can't stand having the same pictures on your wall for very long before wanting to change them up for something completely new. You can't just keep hammering new nails into your wall to accommodate all the different sizes of art, because pretty soon your wall would be all holes and no art. That's where a picture rail comes in!

We've all seen it, mostly in restaurants: an unobtrusive rail on the wall, from which any number of pictures of all different sizes can be hung and switched out with ease. The picture rail allows you to slide the art along its length so you can position it anywhere on the wall, and you can use any length of wire to adjust the height. A picture rail sounds like your dream, right? But how do you get one?

Well, the cheapest and longest pre-made picture rail I could find was nothing more than a 95-inch strip of moulding, and cost 22.40 plus shipping. That doesn't cover the cost of hooks and wires and installation supplies. If you're still like me, you're thinking you could do better than that, and you're right!

Here's how I made a picture rail that extends the length of an entire wall of my living room, and cost me almost nothing!

Supplies

• Measuring and marking tools -- a tape measure and a pencil
• 1 piece of wood moulding cut to length
• A Dremel and cutting wheel (I'm open to suggestions on better tools for this process—basically you need something that can cut a groove down the length of your moulding. One alternative is to find a piece of moulding that already has a groove or lip you could hang a hook from!)
• A stud finder
• A drill (strongly recommended, but optional)
• Finishing nails
• A nail sink (optional)
• Paint to match your wall (optional)
• Several picture-hanging hooks (you'll need at least one hook for every picture, but two makes it easier)
• Wire to hang the pictures

If you have to buy all of these things, this won't be a cheap project, but if you have (or borrow) most of the tools and can repurpose materials you already have, you can do it all yourself, as I did, for under 10 dollars.

Directions

Step 1: Get thee some moulding

Because the shape and size of the wooden rail will advise the measurements of every other part of this project, you really need to choose it first. Determine the approximate size of piece you're looking for, based on the length of the wall or space you want to fill. If you don't yet know, overestimate, because you can always cut it down later.

I get all my materials for minor construction projects like this at Community Forklift, my local home improvement thrift store. If you don't have any place like that nearby, you can always go to a regular construction store, where simple moulding can be bought for a dollar or less per foot. If you're looking to do less work, you should look for a piece which already has a lip about 3/8-in. wide, or a groove about 3/8 inch from the outer edge. This lip or groove is what you'll eventually hook the hanging wires onto. I couldn't find anything like that at the Forklift, so I settled for a piece of  3/4-inch shoe moulding (I had to look up its name just for this post), which is one of the cheapest and most plentiful types out there. I can't remember how much it cost, but I'm pretty sure it was less than a dollar.

Step 2: Ready the rail

If you were not lucky enough to find a piece of moulding with a conveniently sized lip already, you will next have to cut a groove into which your picture hooks will later fit. On my shoe moulding, the best place for it was on the narrower flat side, slightly closer to the rounded side than the other flat side. 

Positioning of the groove.

 

As you can guess, I wasn't a real stickler about the measurement. I just wanted the space between the groove and the edge to be wide enough that the weight of a painting wouldn't cause the wood to break.

Mark the location of the groove the full length of the moulding.

Then dig in! Like I said above, I used a Dremel and a cutting wheel for this part of the project, but I'm not sure that was the most effective option out there. It didn't cut nearly as fast as I'd expected, it produced a ton of smoke, and if I accidentally dug too deep into the wood, it shattered the cutting wheel. I lost a couple of wheels before I learned to make delicate touch-and-go strokes that enabled me to cut the groove without getting the tool jammed. It was surprisingly difficult to carve the groove an even depth and width, but that fortunately wasn't too big of a concern because it would be hidden above eye level at the top of the picture rail. 

Another view of the groove

If you know of a better way to cut a groove into a length of wood, by all means go for it! But if you don't, then the Dremel and cutting wheel are good enough.

Last substep in this part of the project—painting the rail! This is optional. A bare wood picture rail can be elegant in some rooms, but in my case, I thought it would look out-of-place with my all white-painted everything, so I chose to paint it white as well. The only matching paint I had was a gallon of white primer, so that's what I used! I've had the rail up for a couple of months, and so far it looks fine even though I never painted over the primer.

Step 3: Measure twice (or thrice, or four times, or as many as it takes to get accurate results from your stud finder!)

Once the picture rail is ready, it's time to make a commitment: where do you actually want it to be?

The wall where I planned to place my picture rail had some thick ornamental crown moulding at the ceiling (a little too baroque for my taste, but it came with the house!). I could have installed the picture rail directly below the moulding (like, stuck to its bottom), but something told me that wouldn't look right. So I gave it a little breathing room and decided to install it a few inches below the moulding. The moulding inexplicably comes to an end a few inches before the wall does. Having the picture rail stick out past the bottom of the moulding would look silly, so I decided to line up the end of my picture rail with the vertical portion of the crown moulding.

Final endpoint of my picture rail

I marked, in pencil, a few spots to align to the top of the rail.

Because the picture rail could potentially support any amount of weight, you need to be assured that it is firmly attached to the wall. And this means you need to nail it to studs, not just the drywall. Ugh, stud-finding is the bane of my existence! We have an electronic stud finder that's supposed to make this work easy, but it never really is. Prepare to spend several frustrating sessions running the stud finder along your wall until you're reasonably confident you've found the position of the studs, then mark the position of a future nail so that it will be as close to the center of each stud as possible.  

HELPFUL TIP: Mark this nail hole exactly above where you want the top of your picture rail to be, because once the rail is on the wall, you still need to be able to see the markings.

If you want to be a renegade, I suppose you could do this part without the stud finder and just attach the rail to your drywall, but you might want to use more nails, and hammer them in at different angles so they're less likely to pull out by accident.

Step 4: Hammer Time

This was a frustrating part of the project for me. I don't know if the nails were too weak, or my form was too poor, or my studs were too tough, but I bent more nails than I ever imagined possible. Because I had so much trouble getting the nails into my wall, I recommend that you pre-drill the nail holes before even touching a hammer.

This means holding the rail to the wall wherever you want it to be (you might need a partner!), then drilling through both the rail and the wall to the depth of the nail (I used 2-inch finishing nails). Even drilling a hole was difficult and sometimes impossible, so good luck! Once you have a hole, it should theoretically be simple to hammer a nail into the same spot. But I still ruined plenty of nails that way.

While I'm usually a cheapskate, I invested in a nail sink just for this project, which is a metal tool that you use when the nail has already been hammered most of the way in,. The get the nail to sink all the way into the wood, you place the pointy end of the nail sink on the head of the nail, then hit the nail sink with the hammer instead of hammering the nailhead directly. The nail sink, with its tiny tip, will push the nail deeper into the wood, without running the risk of you smashing the hammer into the wood and leaving a dent.

If you succeed in attaching the rail at both of its ends, then you can release your partner from servitude, which is helpful because then he will be fresh when you inevitably call him back to help with the hammering after you have bent too many nails and need to take a mental health break. At some point, you will both be finished, both with the work, and probably in a figurative sense as well. Take that mental health break! I'll be here when you get back!

Step 5: Cleanup

There's no time like the present, so even though you're tempted to skip on to hanging your pictures, take a few moments to make this picture rail look its best. Erase any visible pencil marks, wipe the greasy-fingerprints from every surface you touched, and dab a dot of matching paint onto each nailhead.

Step 6: Get hooked

This part was my favorite part, because it involved converting some useless hanging hooks into the most versatile hanging hooks I've ever owned. 

The hanging hooks were these, which, ridiculously, had holes that were too small for the nails that came with them. Whenever you tried to hammer one into the wall, you'd end up bending the nail on the first stroke. Totally useless. Since I didn't have anything to lose, I decided to make them into hooks for my picture rail.

With a bolt cutter, I snipped the "collar" around each nail hole on the hanging hook. This broke it into two parts, and it then fell off, which is what I wanted. 

The hook on top is one that has had the collar removed.
The one at right still needs surgery.

 Using a pair of needle-nosed pliers, I bent the top end of each hook into another hook with a reversed direction and flat top. 

The top portion was meant to slot into the groove on the picture rail, while the intact original hook would hold the picture wire.

A hook in the groove of the picture rail

You can do the same, but if you're going to have to buy hooks anyway, you might as well save yourself the effort and just get some hooks that are designed for use on a picture rail. In fact, you might want to buy the hooks first, so you can customize the position of the groove to best fit them.

Next, you'll need to shape some wire to hang your pictures from. Picture hanging wire is expensive AF! But there's no reason you need to use that! Get creative—strip some old electrical cord (or don't, and just use it with the insulation still on!). Use ribbons or shoelaces or any other kind of long skinny stuff you might have lying around.

I myself still had quite a bit of that wire I found on the street and used for my rabbit-in-a-hat costume, and so far that has proved sufficient for hanging 4 pictures, with plenty more wire to go! I'd like to come up with a way to reuse one wire for multiple lengths, but so far I've been content to cut a new piece of wire every time I want to hang a new picture.

The way I use the wire is to form a smallish loop with needle-nosed pliers. I hang this loop from one of the hooks on the rail. 

At the other end of the wire, I thread a few inches through the hole in another hanging hook, then stop it from slipping out with a series of twists to form a plug. 

One coil keeps the wire from slipping back through the hole.
The second coil was a previous attempt that ended up being too low on the wall.

This hook attaches to the hanging hardware on the back of the painting.

Step 6: Arrange and rearrange

Congratulations! You are now an art curator! The only thing left to do is to acquire a sizable collection of pictures, so you can swap them out at your whim!

Since I have had my picture rail, I've used it to hold up four different art  arrangements. 

The first was a summery set of painted-metal art pieces, which I kept next to a couple of family photos of me and my boyfriend. Next, I replaced the summery art with a Chinese brush painting of goats on a hill. This painting is the first – and for over a decade, only – piece of real art I've owned (I got it free from a neighbor who was moving out), and I am still proud of it today. When Christmas rolled around, I swapped that out for a huge snowman painting, in a style I might describe as American folk. 

Now that it's January, I've returned to the goats, supplemented with a pair of Japanese minimalist watercolors, which were Freecycle acquisitions from last month. They were originally advertised as just frames (I guess the offerer didn't think the paintings themselves would get any takers), so I'm doubly glad that they just happened to have a similar starkness to my beloved goat painting.

Quite a few different looks for one living room! What's next? Well, I've been collecting art from Freecycle every chance I get, so ultimately my goal is to be able to decorate the living room with a different theme every season! Thanks to my picture rail, now my wall can change outfits almost as often as I do!

A list of pure goodness

Since my last list of pure grumpiness went public, I've planned to share its upbeat counterpart almost immediately. But somehow months have passed with no progress! We get it—I'm lazy—but that all ends now! And do you want to know why? It's all because I saw a picture of someone standing in front of a stream.

Once I saw that picture, I was instantly transported to a mental place that is some impossible combination of Iceland and New Zealand, where I had the fortune to get more or less up close and personal with the two glaciers I have encountered in my life. In this mental, impossible place, I realized in a flash of insight something I never knew before: I love glaciers! And now nothing can keep me from sharing that love with the world posthaste!

Glaciers

So, the secret is out—I love glaciers. This may sound strange coming from someone who has packed most of her dislikes lists with vitriol towards anything related to cold weather, but after having visited two glaciers, I am convinced that they are one of the planet's best features! 

Here I am about to meet Skaftafell glacier in Iceland

 Something about that vast outpouring of ice just warms my heart! Is it the way its edge is so strictly defined, like a massive, slow-motion amoeba of snow? Is it the fact that the landscape in front of a glacier is always uniformly barren and paved with a bed of millions of smoothly worn rocks, like a scene from a sci-fi movie? Is it the way the water that escapes from a glacier always has an opaque icy blue color, the way water looks in cartoons but never in real life? Are there more reasons? Probably. But my point is, if you have not had the chance to visit a glacier, I highly recommend you do so soon, because it is a magical experience that will probably never be had by future generations. And now back to our regularly scheduled climatic gloom and doom.

Or not! This is a happy list, so forget I said that!

Caffeine

I was a late convert to the fandom of America's most legal drug, but I have certainly come to appreciate caffeine in my middle years. It is true that I can still wake up in the morning just fine* without a cup of joe, and in fact, I still do not drink coffee. I no longer even struggle with staying awake in the afternoons. But I've learned that an occasional hit of caffeine is a delightful way to put a little more pep in my step and a positive outlook in my mind. One of my favorite weekend treats is a midday can of caffeinated soda, and if I have one at work, I am amazed at how productive and outgoing I can be! Of course, if I dare to consume this wonder drink past about 2 pm, I'm usually in for an entire night of restless sleep, so caffeine is probably always going to be a special treat for me and not a regular part of my diet.

Getting rid of old clothes

I don't know what happened between December and January, but all of a sudden the entire world seems to be obsessed with she-who-must-not-be-named (because I feel she's gotten more than enough publicity already, and I frankly can't take it any more!) and her method for tidying up. This whole frenzy for decluttering is kind of mystifying to me, because I declutter so continuously that I never feel like I have to read books and watch shows about it and pat myself on the back over my latest giant purge. But I can kind of understand the hype, because I know firsthand the rewarding feeling of getting rid of the stuff you don't really need. I love acquiring new things just as much as the next person, but what's more exciting than getting a new pair of shoes? Finding an old pair of shoes you won't feel sad to jettison, and subsequently ridding yourself of that dead weight! It helps that I sell most of my old stuff, so in addition to clearing up space in my living area and my life, I'm also earning a ... should I say it? tidy income!

Containers with perfectly parallel sides

While we're on the topic of home organization, I find there is much gratification in storing your stuff in containers of just the right shape. The right shape being, of course, one that has perfectly parallel vertical sides. You know, there are a lot of kinds of plastic storage tubs out there. Many of them have rounded edges and most of them have a narrower base than top. But the best kind of container is one that stays the same width all the way up. The kind of container you could load a collection of uniform cubes into and have them fit neatly end to end, top to bottom. The kind of container in which, if you had just the right size of cookies, you could assemble a perfect stack of them without a centimeter of wiggle room. 

Look at this beautiful empty gelato jar, which just happens to have perfectly parallel sides in a cylinder just the right diameter to hold a stack of my still-beloved Safeway candy cookies! Wow, I love this jar! If you happen to find a tub of the Talenti gelato at Costco (the normal-size Talenti jar is too small, and our Costco doesn't seem to sell it, and even if they did, sea salt caramel isn't really my flavor), save me the container!

Talking to myself

I will never forget** the day in first grade when I was holding my own personal Bob Ross show in art class, narrating every step out loud as I worked on my construction-paper masterpiece. A classmate turned to me and critically asked, "Why are you always talking to yourself?" Well, up until that point, I hadn't realized it was a problem, but I was duly humiliated into much more cautious self-regulation of my self-conversation. But I never stopped doing it completely! When I'm alone in the house, I take great joy in talking to myself. As a matter of fact, talking out loud helps me stay on-task, keeps my meandering mind from forgetting what I was about to do, and generally protects me from sometimes oppressive silence. Some people say talking to yourself means you're crazy... but quite to the contrary, I think it keeps me sane—even when I do, on occasion, start answering.

Footnotes

*OK, "just fine" is a bit of an overstatement. Most mornings when I wake up for work, it takes a superhuman effort to drag myself out of bed, and I usually feel sluggish and sometimes even dizzy for up to an hour after I am up and about. But I still don't depend on coffee!

**"Never forget" is probably a bit of an overstatement, too. Was I actually working with construction paper that day? Were those really my classmate's exact words? Probably not. I don't remember the details very well...but the embarrassment stays fresh in my mind forever!

The Hairy Eyeball

Lately, I've been having this problem with scratchiness in my eye. It's not dryness. It's not itchiness. It feels like something is stuck in it, but no matter what I do, I can't get it out! Rubbing it accomplishes nothing (I know I'm not supposed to do that anyway). Blinking just makes it worse. Dousing it with eyedrops doesn't help. I'm simply forced to deal with it, blinking uncomfortably and tossing my head around like I can maybe shake the irritant loose, for hours or days until it finally, miraculously, goes away.

I thought this was just another one of those weird malfunctions of my body, like eczema, an extreme reaction to an imagined slight (or maybe my mascara, though it never seemed to coincide with the relatively infrequent times I wore makeup). I put up with the phenomenon for months, getting annoyed every time it recurred, but figuring it was just the latest in a lifelong string of weird but minor health problems that can't be treated.

Then one day, during a particularly irritating bout of scratchy eye, I went in the bathroom and got up close and personal with my eyeball, pulling back the lids and scrutinizing the sclera for any signs of injury. I didn't see anything...until...there! The tiniest...something...that didn't look like it was part of my eye. It vanished when I blinked, and then it appeared again. I poked it with my finger, brushed sideways, pulled outward, and I had it!

It unraveled from my eye like a skein of thread. It was kinky and fine as silk, almost invisible but most definitely not imagined.

It was a dog hair. One of those tiny, twisty undercoat hairs that adhere to every soft surface in our house and refuse to come off again. This time, the surface it adhered to was my eyeball.

So you know what I'm talking about, here's an example hair,
which, fortunately, has never been stuck in my eye.

One more medical mystery, solved!

Since that moment, I've had two more cases of scratchy eye that have been successfully cured by close examination and subsequent removal of a dog hair.

If I had one of those automatic fur removers that hasn't been invented yet, it would sure save me a lot of literal tears. But at least I'm glad to know that there's a cause and a solution to one of the most infuriating maladies to affect me in recent history. And fellow dog owners, if you ever experience a scratchy eye for no apparent reason, perhaps you should look not to yourself for the cause, but to your pet!

The Notorious Biker

There's one thing about biking to work every day in rainbow hair, huge blue earmuffs, and bright green leggings—people notice you.

If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me, "Was that you I saw biking down Rhode Island Avenue this morning?" I would not be rich, but I could at least buy myself a new inner tube or two.

I've had people I know (and people I don't) honk at me at just about every point on my route. I've had absolute strangers flag me down mid-ride to let me know they see me every day and to ask for a date.

My biking habits become conversation fodder for anyone from perfect strangers to casually acquainted coworkers...which is actually a boon for an introvert who struggles with small talk. It's so much easier when we can just talk about me! We talk about how long the ride takes, where I live, how great a workout it is, what weather I won't bike in, and where all the good trails can be found.

It's always pretty weird when I meet someone new and they immediately recognize me from riding around the neighborhood all the time. I feel at a slight disadvantage when people know me before I know them, but on the other hand, it's also a little like being a minor celebrity!

I never wanted a life in the spotlight, but if I have to be notorious for something, I couldn't ask for it to be a better thing than my eco-friendly, uber-healthy commuting method.