✥ The super mundane: I made cauliflower au gratin for Easter and I didn't really want to eat it as leftovers as it was, so I whizzed it up in the food processor, added some milk to make it saucy and used it as a cheese sauce for a macaroni and cheese bake. This tip hinges on having leftover cauliflower au gratin just lying around, but who knows, you might one day! I also turned the leftover bits of prime rib and gravy into beef stroganoff a week later and that was pretty good, too. I think one of my favorite things in life is figuring out how to zhuzh up leftovers! 

 

✥  My skin has been super weird lately, lots of inflammation and pimples that I have been attributing to hormonal issues but which might be rosacea-related? I know I need to get into the dermatologist to talk about it --which I should have done last month, I was just there having two moles removed (they ended up being normal little guys and didn't even need removal!) but I forgot. Some folks have recommended the BHA Salicylic Acid stuff from Paula's Choice, and until I get back to the derm doc, I thought I would give it a try. There's still some redness, but the pimples cleared up almost immediately, overnight, and haven't been back.

✥  I've changed my routines a bit since the beginning of the year, and I am constantly on the move. I am getting sometimes up to 30K steps a day… although those are the days I am really anxious and can't stop pacing! As a result, my feet have been a bit sore. I started rubbing this Good Night Lavender and Geranium Beauty Oil on them when I go to bed at night and it feels so nice! This is rather a splurge, because shipping from Japan was stupid expensive.

 

✥ Today is Yvan's birthday and I always try to make a sweet treat for us to enjoy during the day when it falls during the week. He usually gives me zero input when I ask, so I end up making whatever I want. This year I had some Japanese sweet potatoes on hand and made these little…whatever they are. I found the recipe doing a search for “スイートポテト” (which I think is just “sweet potato") but it's basically baking it, peeling it, mashing it, mixing in some butter, cream, and sugar, then heating it back up on the stove to draw out the moisture and firm it up, and then letting it cool and shaping it…back into potato form and baking again! I shaped it into little balls because I did not want to say “hey here's a potato” to my sweetie for his birthday. Here's the recipe I used. 
 

✥ I saw La Luz while I was in Ashville last week and I have been listening to their dreamy, haunted surf rock nonstop ever since I returned!

✥ On the airplane ride, I read Oddbody by Rose Keating, a macabre carnival of tales occasionally stomach-turning but magnetic in its strangeness. Women lay eggs during breakfast shifts, fathers become worms in bathtubs, and ghosts become unwelcome third wheels in relationships - all described in sparse, matter-of-fact prose that makes the bizarre feel strangely normal. I'm usually pretty oblivious to metaphors, so while other readers point out heavy-handed symbolism about depression, relationships, and societal pressures, I just enjoyed each story at face value, letting the visceral imagery of consumption, transformation and rupture burrow under my skin like a grotesque parasite I'm both repulsed and transfixed by.  about their daily lives and it feels like witnessing ten different fever dreams in a row. 

 

✥ I also read The Compound by Aisling Rawle. Imagine waking up in a desert compound with nine other beautiful women, cameras tracking your every move for a reality TV show where contestants must couple up to avoid banishment while competing for increasingly lavish rewards - all while the outside world slowly burns. I've always felt smugly superior about not watching reality TV (what does that say about my cultural elitism? What an asshole I am. Sorry, guys.), I was completely hooked by this book from the first page. There's something so shitty about my willingness to consume the exact same content when it comes packaged as literature rather than television - as if the medium somehow legitimizes my guilty pleasure. It was perfect airplane reading - I was both literally and figuratively a captive audience for this fraught, escapist fantasy. Lily isn't particularly deep or likable, but I found myself weirdly invested in her journey as she navigates the show's manipulations, forming strategic alliances and pursuing diamond earrings with single-minded determination. The strange mix of boredom, forced intimacy, and manufactured drama created an oddly compelling world, while hints of environmental collapse and war in the background create an unsettling undercurrent. I blew through it in one sitting and finished feeling both thoroughly entertained and vaguely uncomfortable with how much I enjoyed it.

 Two perfumes I enjoyed this month…

✥ Diptyque Orphéon Cedar soda with juniper bitters. Water drawn from a limestone well surrounded by briar and bramble, thicket and thorn. Aerated ice chips that shatter between molars. A single cypress cone crushed between fingers. Cigarette ash that never quite made it to the tray. The condensation ring left on wood that won’t ever completely fade. Cold metal keys pressed against warm lips. The sharp intake of breath when the cosmic chords of Alice Coltrane’s harp arpeggios cascade through space, suspending time. Morning sky like a scrim of quartz; a little light, just enough to see by.

 

✥ Serviette Frisson D’Hiver A shriek, a howl, a prolonged tee hee hee hee; a pause, a champagne hiccup, and everything shatters. A tinkling cackle pealing and slivering like weaponized bells, crystal blades that split and splinter the night. A lake that holds more stars than the sky ever dreamed of possessing – celestial sparklers, myriad, multiplying before your feet, even as your eyes glance upward noting their absence in the sky. What lake reflects what cannot be seen? What ghost swallows its own echo before sound can escape? Scent as the most terrifying Sailor Moon villain who never existed: pale as bone, bright as a blade, each breath a shard of story where you are nothing more than a footnote. Pitliess – all razor citrus and winter’s exposed nerve. Each droplet a fragment flung from some terrible, glittering precipice. Mercy drowned long before you arrived. More stars than sky, more reflection than reality. You’re not getting out of this alive.  

 And in case you missed, it here's what I've been up to over on the Unquiet Things blog!

✥ Spring 2025 Stacked
✥ The Eternal Cocktail Hour & Midnight Splendor Of Federico Beltrán Masses
✥ Notes from an empty world: TANIS at 5AM
✥ Half Mile Down (A Visit to Asheville)
✥ Marie Laurencin’s Gauzy Macaron Dreamscapes: A Taurus Season Meditation
✥ April Perfume Reviews

Also! @eaulalabygenevieve over on Instagram very kindly featured me on her most excellent and fun Shelfie Sunday series and I had a blast waxing extremely, purple-y poetic and at great length (because this is the only way I know how hehehe) about my lifelong fascination with fragrance and perfume and my 20+ years of collecting.