---
title: Me Time
description: "Taking time off for the holiday, incense stuff, leisure, and displacement."
synopsis: "Taking time off for the holiday, incense stuff, leisure, and displacement."
date: 2025-11-28
---
Not much of tremendous interest has been going on lately; I took the week off because I forget to take time during the year, and thanksgiving is as good excuse as any to cram in some PTO at the end of the year. I've also been taking Fridays off lately. Sol and I had planned to spend thanksgiving day with their folks, but we unfortunately had to cancel the day before due to some medical stuff. Instead, we had a nice wee dinner just between the two of us: a [nut roast](https://lovingitvegan.com/vegan-nut-roast/), mashed potatoes, and gochujang-glazed carrots, all with lashings of gravy. Nut roasts are one of those foods that more people ought to eat. I think people avoid it because it sounds like too-healthy hippie food, but it's genuinely lovely. It's good hot as part of a roast dinner; it's also fantastic cold on sandwiches.

During this week off I've mostly been catching up on sleep debt, doing a little work on my website, and playing Far Cry 6, which I'm finally starting to get into. I've also plucked up the courage to start experimenting with absolutes in incense for certain notes that are difficult to impossible to achieve with whole-plants (at least by any method I'm aware of). I have started with Damask rose absolute; it's gorgeous, but not cheap by any means. This exercise is also helping me understand that when I eventually release a little incense for sale, it's likely going to have to be expensive. It's just a fact that in order to make high-quality natural incense, predominantly from whole-plant ingredients, you simply have to use baller aromatics. For instance, Damask rose absolute alone looks like it's going to add something like $0.50 *per gram* of incense, and that's not the half of it. I recently got my hands on some nice sandalwood (Santalum album) that costs just under $2.00 per gram. Of course, you can get a very nice Australian sandalwood (Santalum spicatum) for $0.03 per gram[^1], but that may or may not work for whatever fragrance you are trying to make. Don't get me started on agarwood. I was never going to be making commodity incense anyway, but this is a bit of a wake-up call. The experimentation was spurred by an extraordinary assortment of incense and aromatic samples kindly sent to me by Irene of [rauchfahne.de](https://blog.rauchfahne.de/en/) which included an oakmoss absolute alongside a sample of the lichen itself—very exciting as I've been dying to experiment with oakmoss. I also plan to mill some cultivated Cambodian agarwood "skins" into powder to see how it performs in combustible incense soon. I really hope this doesn't wind up being a waste of money!

I've been reading as well; I finally finished *The Peripheral,* which has taken me a very long time as I didn't find it to be the most engaging read. I found the oddly clipped dialogue for the American characters irritating, and the story hard to follow. Since, I've been reading an English translation of *From the New World*[^2] as I thought the anime was incredible. The prose isn't stunning, and it's an absolute exposition-fest, but I'm enjoying it anyway.

As my baseline level of anxiety has fallen a bit this week, I realize that I have really needed some time to just mill about: free of obligation (for the most part). Life has been stressful lately; among other things, the building I'm renting in is being sold, so I'm almost certainly going to be leaving within the next year. The indignity of having strangers traipse through your home oohing and aahing, hemming and hawing about the place where you live is pretty hard to bear, so I'm glad that's over at least. I really don't know how people can do it: walking through someone's space thinking about what you'll do with it once you displace them, or imagining how much of their income you can reasonably get away with skimming because you have more money than they do. It's disgusting, anti-human behavior, and I think of every single one of the people who set foot in this house for this reason as a villain. The new owner (providing the sale goes through) says she intends to continue to rent the place out, but I know that the current rental income from the place won't cover the mortgage, so rent is going to have to increase dramatically even if this is true. The reason I moved here in the first place was for the cheap rent, so that's out the window. Some of the people who live downstairs have been here for a decade; and now they're going to be forced to leave the neighborhood they've been a part of for all of that time. The neighbors are selling too, horrible grey-brick condos are being built, and what was once a lovely, affordable, largely Latine neighborhood by the river is losing its character piece by piece. How long before all of the friendly old ladies have to find somewhere else to go to every Sunday when their church is priced off of this street[^3]? How long before the cafe selling $6 empanadas is forced to relocate, close, or start selling $15 empanadas? It's too sad for words. The current landlord seemed delighted by this, however, referring to long-time residents of the neighborhood as "riffraff," before making out like a bandit with close to half a million dollars for a shit-hole house that she inherited, presumably did not pay a penny for, and certainly didn't maintain. Hell, the appraiser had to say something before she even thought to check that there were working carbon monoxide alarms downstairs. Anyway, as salty as I am about all of this, I'm slowly coming to terms with it and preparing to move on.


[^1]: None of these prices include tax, tariffs / duties, or shipping, by the way.
[^2]: The novel, not the deeply distateful manga.
[^3]: And how long before the residents of this house no longer receive a warm "bless you" from a passing abuelita as they enjoy a sunny Sunday morning on the porch?
