Stone-Age Marketing

One of the things about the West that charms me is the inventiveness of the people. Many people here xeriscape–no lawns, crushed granite and native plants dot the front yards. And there are people who happily market their services and products in that environment.

bags of stone with a message

They use small plastic bags, about 2-inches x 3 inches, put in a small card with a description of their product or service, put in a few chunks of granite, seal the bags and toss them onto your front yard. I see them when I walk in the morning, bags left by slow moving cars that could easily be mistaken as a hit-man cruising the neighborhood (if you’ve watched all seasons of the Sopranos). Well, not really. Mostly the cars are several years old. One person drives, the other one flings the marketing bags onto yards.

I’m not saying I love them, you have to go pick them up and dispose of them, but I do think the idea is clever. Never a loss for getting your name out there.

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Surprising, however, is how many people feel a need to tell you they are

Information side of bag o

Christian or love Jesus. (In the bag on the right, you can see the fish symbol.)  Again, it’s charming that the worker and his company love Jesus, but I don’t find that a deciding factor in landscaping, pool care or painting. Even if Jesus’s dad was a carpenter. I guess people do use that in the decision-making factor, or it wouldn’t be so prominent on the marketing material. And that opens up another whole line of thought. . . .

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and a certified creativity coach. She wonders about a lot of things and lives happily in ambiguity. See her work at QuinnCreative.com

Renewal

With the heat of summer gone, plants are waking up. There is a certain feel of Spring in our Autumn air. Many cultures celebrate the New Year in the time of harvest–fall. I’ve always loved fall for that fresh, renewal feeling you get in the air.

Texas sage in renewal

We had a large hedge of Texas Sage in the front yard. It was overgrown and woody, making the yard look scruffy and ready for the shootout at the OK Corral. So we cut them down—hard. I was a bit worried because I did the cutting in August. But I held out hope for renewal. Each bush we cut got a line from the drip irrigation, and it worked. You can see it on the left.

Even if you don’t do cutting, Fall brings renewal. This yucca is sending out a flower sprout that arcs into the sky. In the coming weeks, the stem will fill with flowers and then form seed puffs that blow easily in the wind, to find new homes. The yucca at the base will die and a new yucca will grow at the base, repeating the cycle of life and death.

Here is the base of the yucca:

Yucca sending out stem

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And the lovely arc or the stem into the sky:

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–Quinn McDonald is a writer whose morning walks help her pay attention to nature and the nature of time. Quinn is a certified creativity coach and workshop leader in journaling. See her work at QuinnCreative.com

(c) 2008 All rights reserved.

The Stubborn Plant

30 years ago, my son was just starting school. With his allowance, he purchased a plant for Mother’s Day and brought it home. It was a corn plant–a dracaena fragrans, growing in a small paper cup. My son handed it to me with a big, gap-toothed grin. Over the years, the plant grew, was trimmed, cut, re-potted and eventually it bloomed.  Some times I cut the top and replanted it; some times I cut off the top and let it grow another stem. For 30 years, I’ve moved the plant with me, and it has put out fat, cream-striped leaves.

So when we were ready to move across the country, I chose it as one of the three plants we were going to try to take with us. I gave my husband directions on topping it before I flew back to pack. When I arrived, I gasped. When I described topping it, I didn’t think he was going to leave a 10-inch stem and three ratty leaves. The bottom of a corn plant is never the best part. I thought the plant had come to the end of its life.

Corn plant peeking over the couch

A new stem poked out. It was the size of the tip of a lead pencil. The next day the plant went into the moving truck. In August. The truck would not be opened again for six days. It would have been a death sentence for most plants. When I unloaded the plant, the new stem was black. I decided to let nature take its course–what choice did I have? I kept it out of direct light, but the plant had to stay outside for two weeks while we unpacked and I had a chance to re-pot it. When I checked on it, the blackened stem had recuperated. It was pushing out. And there was another stem beginning.

After re-potting the plant, I placed it behind the couch and in front of a window that flooded it with light. This morning, I saw the top of the new branch poking up from behind the couch. In another week or so, the new leaves will be big enough for me to trim the old leaves off. With luck, the second branch will develop also, and for the first time in 30 years, the plant will have two branches. Maybe.

Corn plant, repotted

The other two plants also survived to thrive. Our miracle ficus, which had originally been used to prop open the door of a hardware store in a snowy December, made it through 6 days of a locked truck and dropped only about a dozen leaves. It is also in the living room, in front of a North-facing window, separating my studio from the front entrance.  The orchid found a home in the bathroom, under the skylight. The new branch is full-size, but I have yet to see the stem that will carry the blooms. The stem has developed as early as August and as late as October, and has bloomed as early as August and as late as December. It’s still an unknown, but it looks as if it made it through the move.

I gave away my other plants–some far more beautiful and exotic than the ones I took. I took these three because they have a history–the corn plant a 30-year history–and they proved they can put up with the most outrageous changes and still thrive. You can make up your own moral to the story. I have!

—Quinn McDonald is a writer and a certified creativity coach. You can see her work at QuinnCreative.com (c) 2008 All rights reserved.

The Multiple Cat Box

Veterinarians will tell you that each cat needs a kitty litter box. Some even recommend an extra box, so two cats need three boxes. I don’t know how big your house is, but mine will not hold four kitty litter boxes for my three cats. On the other hand, one of my cats, who was abandoned in a closet, will only use the cleanest box. If it’s not clean enough, he will find a clean spot on the floor. So I’ve had to keep the boxes meticulously clean.

kitty litter box for 3 cats

Now, once we moved, the boxes are lined up in the laundry room. I was using smaller boxes, the space is small. One of the cats, a hefty 20-pounder, can pee squatting down, but for some reason, he began to stand on his toes and pee over the edge of the box. I was lining the floor with painter’s tarpaulin to protect the floor. I could not move the boxes any place else–the guest bath didn’t have enough floor space, and the master bath is carpeted. Don’t ask.

I went to a local big-box (pun fully intended) pet store to find the solution. And there it was–a giant kitty litter box. With high sides. I decided that one box suited me, and if the cats could get used to it, it would be a big improvement. I purchased “World’s Best Kitty Litter,” although the name did not impress me. The litter is made of corn, is absorbent and has almost no dust.

World's Best Kitty Litter is just that

And I bought something that embarrassed even me–a box of kitty litter box wipes. They work. One of the things that makes a kitty litter box smell is the urine that dries on the side of the pan. Once a day, I use a wipe to clean around the walls of the kitty litter box, and toss the wipe out with the scooped material. Because the box is in the laundry room, it’s easy for me to scoop often, and important to keep the small room smelling clean. The combination of the litter, the big box and the wipes works.

I installed a cat-door on the door to the laundry room, and all three cats are learning how to use it. One big box is much easier to clean, and the World’s Best Kitty Litter doesn’t smell as much as the clumping stuff, doesn’t make nearly as much dust, and the cats don’t mind stepping into it as much as regular litter.

All of this seems trivial unless you own multiple cats. I’ll admit that three cats is the outer edge of sanity. One more, and I’ll have to grow my hair in a bun and line my hat with aluminum foil. But for now, for all three of them and one of me, we are happy. And that’s saying a lot.

—Quinn McDonald owns three cats who love living in the Phoenix area. She is a writer and a certified creativity coach. (c) 2008 All rights reserved.

Is It Fall Yet?

Here in Phoenix, monsoon season is officially over when the dewpoint is under 50 degrees for three days in a row. That hasn’t happened yet. But there are signs. It is no longer well over 100 degrees every day. And yesterday, the wind shifted to the West.

Approaching dust storm in Glendale, AZ

That shift came on the heels–or the grains–of a dust storm. It moved incredibly fast. One moment, there was a looming brown cloud and the next moment, the wind began to blow and visibility sank as dust blew across the road. Branches broke off my neighbor’s jujube tree and blew into the pool along with big swirls of dust.

There was a lot of pine straw on the patio, but we don’t have pine trees. At first I thought they came from some other yard, but then I realized that they are the dry parts of our Palo Verde tree. The tiny leaf-stems, which don’t have leaves yet, because it is too dry, look like pine straw. I’ll be raking it up for days.

The dust storm has odd effects–a bad one means you have to change the air filter in your car. Succulents that have cups in their leaves need to have the dirt rinsed off. The tops of trash cans have sand on them.

I wonder where the sand comes from–is it recently picked up from down the street, or is it sand from the Mojave, hundreds of miles away? It’s such an odd feeling to see something so new and see the results.

What I find so odd is that while we are having a dust storm, Texas is drowning in Hurricane Ike. It’s astonishing that these opposites can happen at the same time. Nature is amazing, and I’ll never live long enough to grasp it all.

–Quinn McDonald is a naturalist and a certified creativity coach. She firmly believes that there are lessons nature has to teach us if we will pay attention. See her work at QuinnCreative.com (c) 2008 All rights reserved.

Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs: What About the Mercury?

A lot more work needs to be done before the compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL) can be said to work. They are a great idea, yes. They save a lot of energy. Great. But almost no ones knows that they contain mercury, and can’t be thrown in the trash. The mercury will wind up in our landfills, and we will poison our earth and our groundwater.

Compact Fluorescent Bulb

The boxes they come in contain tiny print about the mercury, but offer no method of disposing the bulb. They tell you not to throw them in the trash. Ikea, who sells several varieties of these bulbs, tells you to bring them back to Ikea for disposal. Given that my closest Ikea is 30 miles from my house, I’m unlikely to use a gallon of gas to bring back one bulb.

I suspect most people will simply toss them in the trash. That’s what we do with burned out bulbs. I was at a celebration when a champagne cork broke a bulb. Two people at the party knew about the mercury, and no one believed us. The broken bulb was swept up and tossed in the trash. No one used tape to to pick up the tiny fragments from the rug, no one tried to separate the broken bulb from the rest of the trash that wound up in the alley dumpster.

The lightbulb companies need to start now, should have started before they introduced the bulbs, to educate the consumer. It might be easy to buy one kind of bulb instead of the other, it might even feel good to put up with the inconvenience of the older bulbs–slow lighting, unpleasant color–but no one cares about disposing of them.

Here’s a pdf with information of disposal.

—Quinn McDonald is a writer who has doubts about the experts who say that the amount of mercury won’t be a danger for many years. She remembers that the genome project scientists at first said that much of the DNA was “junk DNA” and only now, years later, are realizing that they missed some important information contained in the “junk.”

Legacy of Fear

You will never forget where you were on September 11, 2001. No one in America will. I was teaching in a suburb of Washington, D.C. and I can recall the exact words I was saying, the look of panic in the participants faces, and how I sat for hours, unable to get home because the Metro had stopped running.

Thousands of people died, and those of us who live have inherited a legacy of fear. On a large scale, we are at war with the country who didn’t produce the terrorists, and not at war with the country who did. But on a smaller scale, we have become a fearful nation, and that makes me sad beyond belief.

We automatically distrust women in headscarves and swarthy men. We look at a mosque and wonder what dangerous secrets are happening inside. If we force ourselves to admit that what happens in most mosques is what happens in most churches–prayer and concern for community, there is still the worm of doubt. Our God is better than their God.

We have willingly given up freedoms that our ancestors died for, and we have done it out of fear. We can’t bring sealed bottles of water past airport security, instead we pay twice as much to drink water that must be purchased past the security line. I was made to stand in one security line wearing only a sports bra because my blouse was taken for a jacket, and was ordered to remove it and send it through the X-ray machine. When I tried to point out that it was a blouse, not a jacket,  I was told I’d better obey or I could be detained in a jail with no right to call an attorney, or anyone else. I imagined myself sitting in a jail cell in a lime-green sports bra and shirt, waiting for a hearing for not wanting to remove my shirt at an airport security checkpoint. To protect America.

Your phone records aren’t private, and neither is what your read in the library, the books you buy in a bookstore, or what you download to your computer. Homeland security can show up at your door and ask why you are reading any book that is deemed subversive, including Catcher in the Rye.

In November after the planes, my brother visited from Switzerland. Neighbors noted the new guy and asked me about him. They asked if he was “foreign.” I told them my brother lives in Switzerland. “Isn’t America good enough for him?” one neighbor asked, as if it were a requirement of being a good citizen. As if it were any of their business. After that I was asked why I don’t fly a flag. I pointed to my neighbor’s flag, dirty and uncared for, ragged and torn,  left out in rain and snow. “Because I don’t think treating the flag like that makes me a patriot,” I said. Two neighbors stopped talking to me. I moved two years later, and they had never spoken to me again.

In the seven years since that terrible tragedy, we pulled together only to now be torn apart by suspicion and fear. It’s the small fears that make me saddest, the ones that are fueled by hatred and ignorance. There is a movement in Arizona to return all first-generation Americans–people born on American soil–to their parent’s homeland. I wonder how I would fare, now well past middle age, if I had to live in Germany or France. Well, I was told, that’s not about you, that’s about Mexicans. As if that were all right, a justification.

Right now there is a kerfluffle over the fact that Oprah Winfrey backed a Black Man instead of a Woman for President. The word being bandied about is she is a traitor. That’s pretty strong language. A traitor. For backing a candidate for President. Even Oprah, who runs a TV show, has freedom of speech. She is not a news commentator, she runs a show in which she gets to express her opinion. Calling her a traitor for backing one candidate over another is way out of bounds. It is fear-mongering of the meanest sort.

I’m sad for our country. Sad because we only want to talk to people who pray to our God, who behave in certain ways that we have deemed acceptable. Flying a flag doesn’t make you a patriot, praying to God doesn’t make you a saint. Put some action in your traction. Ask some questions that make you uncomfortable. Try to see someone else’s point of view.  Help your neighbor, even if you don’t know them. Even if they aren’t the same color you are. Even if they don’t put up a flag or lights and decorations in December.

Because we will never get over 9/11 until we put down our big burden of fear and use our hands and arms to help each other in peace and genuine freedom. Until we stop thinking there is a “them” and an “us” and realize we are one world. And that goes for everybody, everyday.

–Quinn McDonald is a certified creativity coach, a writer, and a first-generation America who knows that fear is the worst enemy we can let into our lives. It makes everyone else look wrong.

(c) 2008 All rights reserved

Summer Fragrance/Winter Fragrance

Another weakness: I love perfumes. Not all of them, but I love exploring them. Once I found out I wasn’t alone, that there were other bloggers who were addicted to perfumes, I was encouraged. I learned a lot–you can get samples from many places, there are online shops that specialize in niche fragrances, and there are a lot of people who like to collect samples, decants and full bottles and don’t feel bad about it.

For years, I’ve thought that summer fragrances were light and citrusy, and you wore the amber-laden perfumes in the winter. I thought this was common knowledge and at least true. Now I’m wondering about it.

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With the heat set high in the end of August, I’d quit wearing perfumes. I have almost no interest at all in popular perfumes, as they mix up too much fruit and too many ingredients. I’m not the department-store perfume demographic, which is considerably younger than I am. What sells in America to the younger demographic is a fruity-floral, often with oriental overtones. I respect fruity-florals, although I’m not drawn to many of them as the fruit is almost always berries, and florals are lost on me. I’m not a fan of jasmine, tuberose, iris and rose, although I love fragrances that contain some flowers. Orientals are heavier perfumes, and in my mind, when you mix too much, you get nothing at all wearable.

To me, many smell like too much and not much at the same time. In other words, many department store fragrances smell alike, in a generic, “you can wear it to the office” kind of way. They often are awash in the popular vanilla or the lasts-forever musk, neither of which do well with my body chemistry.

The scent I reach for most often in high heat is L’Artisan’s Ananas Fizz—a blend of pineapple, lychee,  a fragrance that starts with a sparkling citrus followed by a dry woody undertone. In the first half hour it smells like a fizzy, umbrella-topped tropical drink, but it is only slightly sweet, and the rum is drier, so there is no super-sweet kids’ drink smell. The bad news is that in the hot weather, the fragrance just doesn’t stay with me, and I don’t want to respray every 10 minutes. I have a bottle of Marc Jacob’s Ivy in the fridge for that purpose.

After a week without scent, I really wanted to wear something besides Dial soap. I reached for something I thought was a light fragrance and instead picked up Neil Morris’s Swoon, a blend of orange, tomato leaf, philodendron, jasmine sambac, oakmoss, black tea, agarwood and patchouli. Not what I would have classified as a summer scent. Tea, oakmoss, patcholi would have classified it as fall or winter. Lots of power and punch.

And then I realized that in many hot countries, powerful spices are used as much in summer as winter. Mexico’s cumin; Morocco’s cinnamon and clove; India’s garan masala, used in curry, are intoxicating spices used in the summer’s heat to great effect. Why should perfume be different than food?

Swoon went on fine, but I was shocked to discover I’d put on a “winter” perfume. No sense scrubbing it off, I liked the fragrance. I resigned to feeling hot and sticky. It didn’t happen. As I walked across the baking tarmac of a community college, I noticed a wonderful fragrance, not too heavy, not “warm.” I walked into the office, and stood in line. The woman ahead of me asked “What is that wonderful fragrance you have on?” The woman at the head of the line said, “You smell great!” Admittedly, I was grateful. I did not feel petal-fresh after the long walk.

What I noticed is that the spices lingered and hovered but not suffocatingly so. They smelled deep and interesting, but not “warm.” I was surprised. At the end of the day, I shed my damp clothing and forgot about the fragrance. The next morning, I gathered up the clothes to put in the hamper (I let clothes dry out overnight, having learned not to toss damp clothing into a hamper) and noticed a wonderful fragrance–Swoon. It smelled rich and wonderful, but not “hot” or “cold.” I’ve since tried some other traditionally “winter” fragrances–including Serge Lutens Arabie, which smells of candied fruits, dates, myrrh, and labdanum and reminds many people of winter holidays. While some of the fragrances are heavy, and some light, the major reason for choice is mood and not temperature.

It was a great discovery that lets me wear much more from my sample and decants according to what I want to surround myself with. I’m less concerned now about the ingredient list than I am about the feel of the fragrance. And that’s a good thing.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and a certified creativity coach who owns a very large collection of niche fragrances and is trying to find a place for them all in the new house. See her work at QuinnCreative.com (c) 2008 All rights reserved.

Hot Enough to Fry an Egg?

If you live in a hot climate, you begin to wonder if, indeed, it is hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. This week, despite the fact that autumn is on the way in most of the country, we were treated to a series of days over 100 degrees. About 109 degrees, in fact.

Plate sprayed with Pam

As a newcomer to the desert, I began to think about the egg and the sidewalk. Not wanting to smear butter on the sidewalk, I chose a plate instead and decided to see what would happen. Turns out it was not a “yes” or “no” question. I hadn’t given it much thought past seeing if the egg cooked. What I didn’t consider is that a slow-cooked egg might look a lot different than one fried in a pan.

I started by spraying a small plate with oil, so the egg would not stick and

Time: Minute 1. Egg on plate

make a mess. I then cracked an egg onto the plate, sat it on my patio, in direct sun at about noon on a day the temperature reached 109 at 4 p.m. That’s the time of day the air temperature is hottest; I chose noon because the sun was directly overhead.

First the edges of the egg began to crinkle and dry out. That was my biggest surprise. Clearly, the egg wasn’t going to cook like it would on a burner. But I saw the cooking process slowed down–first the edges dried and began to flake.

In the next step, the egg began to expand, as most things do when they get hot. Because the outer membrane of the egg had already “cooked” by drying and shrinking, the yolk broke. Nothing poked it, it simply broke because the expansion was more powerful than the shrinking and drying outer membrane.

Slow-cooking egg breaks the yolk

The third step was that the egg slowly began to dry and cook. After two hours I stopped the experiment because some adventurous ants had discovered it, and that is a separate adventure I didn’t want to experience. However, the egg is clearly “cooked” in that it is congealed into a solid mass. Not exactly ready for hash browns and bacon, but that wasn’t the point.

So the answer seems to be, yes you can cook an egg on a plate in the summer. You may not want to eat it, but given enough time in our summer heat, you can get both white and yolk to congeal and harden. Had I stored it in my car, parked in the sun, I’m sure I could have had faster results.

Sun-cooked egg after two hours

The temperature in the car was over 170 degrees, which explains how come we put towels over our steering wheels and those funny accordion-pleated shades in the windshield.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and curious about the world around her. Sometimes the edges of the world end at an egg on a plate, sometimes the horizon is a bit farther away. See her work at QuinnCreative.com

Starving for Content

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by a television producer who was looking for interesting information about dreams. Having done some dream work, and still engaged in research, I offered some information and some resources. The producer, to my amazement, said, “Thanks so much for giving me content, not marketing.”

That made me stop and think about how we market ourselves. Often when I contact a company for information, I am turned over to sales. The sales representative immediately tries to create a need for me that their product or service can fill.

cheap, starchy filler

This week I’m looking into using solar energy in my house. I live in the Sonoran desert, where the sun shines 322 days a year. I want to find out information on using solar energy to replace electricity and to heat my pool. I guarantee you that I will be swamped with sales pressure before I am given enough information to make an informed decision. I’m dreading the process because I’m sure that instead of facts, I’ll be given slanted information designed to make me into a consumer. Right now I don’t want to be a consumer, I want to be a researcher. I’ll become a consumer when I have enough information to make me an informed consumer. But it won’t be easy. I’ll have to listen to the information provided and then untangle the marketing message from the facts. I won’t have enough knowledge of solar power to do this. The sales person will get impatient with me because I am not behaving like a consumer. He (the person scheduled to visit is a man) may well make me feel like I have an intellectual agenda, which is a bad thing. I should not ask so many questions and buy, like a good consumer.

I don’t want to buy yet. I want facts. I want information. I’ll sort it through myself. We are a nation of consumers, we sell stuff to each other. And I’m getting a little tired of it. I’d like to be a nation of content first, then a nation who considers the facts and makes a decision. If we’d done that a bit earlier, we would not have a mortgage crisis.

So right now, I’m looking for content, not marketing. I don’t want to be pounced on like a chicken on a June bug just because I’m raising my hand and looking like a consumer. I think we are a nation starving for content, and being fed marketing. It’s cheap starchy filler. We need some protein-rich content in our lives. Facts without spin. information without bias. I’ll bet I’m not the only one who is starving for content.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer who owns QuinnCreative, a content-providing site for life- and creativity coaching, and business communication seminars. (c) 2008 All right reserved.