I have a question for my phone geek friends. My current workhorse phone is a well-loved and well-worn Nokia 6800.

It is a market anomaly: it is one of the few phones available that has a QWERTY keyboard. I have loved it because it has suited my needs well over the years. My phone tends to be used more for text messaging than phone calls, so I value ease of text input over most of the flashy functions that other people obsess over.

I was sitting to the right of Geof, enjoying an Over the Rhine concert that he'd talked me into attending, when I saw my silenced phone light up. The number implied Arkansas, and I had the familiar lump of dread that always came when a number starting with 501 showed up on caller ID.

It was my mother, and thanks to the ongoing performance, I had no way of answering it before the phone would go to voice mail. I watched, and waited, and saw no new voicemail notification pop up. No message.

When the musicians took a break, I called my mother back, and Geof was the only witness to the look on my face, whose look he told me later was quite priceless. The news? My mother's engagement.

My love of interesting perfumes came back to bite me last night. I joke at times that my sense of smell must have been intended to make up for my lackluster hearing and squinty vision, but it's a double-edged sword. Wear the wrong perfume on a day when my sense of smell is keener than normal (thirtysomething hormones are the gift that keeps on giving, sigh) and there's a very real possibility that I'll end up with at least a mild headache.

I came up with a disturbing, yet accurate, description for what the wrong perfume did to me last night. It felt like someone jammed a closed umbrella up my nose, and kept opening and closing it inside my skull. (This made it very difficult to focus on what was, otherwise, an extremely good dinner. Sorry, Jeff. Thanks for getting me home quickly.)

So what perfumes do you wear, you ask?

Old, odd, and unusual perfumes. Many modern-day perfumes smell one-dimensional and overly sweet to me. I think there's a trend now to create perfumes that are comprised of only perky and sweet ingredients, which I don't agree with. It's like smearing cake icing on your skin and calling it perfume.

It's hard to explain my idea that some parts of a perfume shouldn't necessarily smell yummy and edible on their own, because it seems contradictory -- you want the end result to smell good, right? There's a reason that strong, even animalic undertones work well in perfume: contrast, dimension, and balance.

(Someone said once that their perfect perfume would be one that made her smell like herself, only more so and awesome. I thought that was a great description.)

Me.

I use domesticat.net for thinking. I use solecist.net for short-form blogging. See the batch of chiclets on the lower right-hand side of the page to find me on a few of the other sites I frequent. I am domesticat on LiveJournal, where a significant subset of my friends write. My entries at solecist.net are syndicated on LiveJournal as amy_at_solecist. I am listed under my real name on facebook, as well.

The spouse.

Jeff is at slidingconstant.net.

I've been wrapped up in Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet for a few days now. I realized I was on to something unusual when I started flagging passages every few pages.

Comments from the narrator so far:

I'm wrestling with a tiny problem, but it's sticky and needs to get decided soon. Given that drupal allows me to create any URL alias that tickles my fancy, where do I place RSS feeds?

Current parameters:

Dad -

I didn't really call you that while you were alive, and it feels strange to call you that now, but I didn't know any other way to start this letter.

I've become a person who grumbles at roadside memorials for victims of traffic accidents but who writes something about you every year on the anniversary of your death. I wondered about that for a number of years before I realized that I was closer to your death than I was to your life, and I've spent the years since trying to come to terms with your absence.

This entry covers it better than most:

I just had a discussion with my fellow IT workers, and I just dropped a southernism they don't recognize. I stopped to think about it for a second or two, and realized that I don't know the 'real' name for what I'm describing.

Growing up in Arkansas, we were careful about where in the yard we went barefoot, because there was a certain type of grass we called 'stickers.' It was grass, but it has small but definite thornlike parts, and they stuck in your skin (thus the name) and made it very uncomfortable to walk barefoot on grass.

Anyone know the real name of what I'm describing?

"I think a lot of people who come to visit Mauna Kea come for a reason," said James Kimo Pihana, a ranger with the Office of Mauna Kea Management. "People challenge the mountain. The mountain always wins; it is people who lose. But the mountain accepts challenges."