My Monster Powers really are powers, in the sense that they are at least partly in my control. They are my Gila Lizard Powers (GLP-1) but they are not solely the effect of the medicine. I kind of knew that before, but I really know it now. 

It was clear that I could maintain my weight loss on my own last fall when I went without the medicine for a month due to the insurance company, and I did not regain the weight I had lost the month before. I was able to keep it steady because by then I had abandoned my old habit of spending an enormous amount of time planning, shopping for, growing, and cooking food, and started devoting that attention to perfume instead. I was able to keep doing that even without the medicine.

But now I really know it for sure. As I passed my personal goal weight of 150 and closed in on my doctor's goal weight for me of 140, I started thinking about slowing down a bit. Over the winter, I often struggled to drink enough water, especially on days 2, 3, and 4 of my weekly renewal of Powers. I often wondered if I was eating enough protein to maintain my muscle mass. And I was concerned about my electrolyte balance every day and night. When warmer weather returned, I knew my needs for water and electrolytes were going to be even greater soon. I wanted to be able to drink enough water and electrolyte drinks. I wanted to not get too full to finish a cup of tea anymore, because that could be dangerous in the summer heat of the Mojave Desert. 

And miraculously, I started getting hungry when my stomach was empty, even on days 1 through 5. I started being able to drink a whole glass of water at a time. I started to finish my tea at tea time every day. With no effort, just, I decided that was what I wanted now and it happened. 

Before, I had decided I wanted to lose as much weight as possible in the shortest time possible, and I lost the weight. Now, I wanted to be able to hydrate properly in the summer, and that's working too. My Monster Powers really are powers. I control them, to a certain extent. 

***

 I finished my Gila Monster tapestry. The image that accompanies this post is a photo of it. Because I made it, it has many technical flaws, but reflects my artistic vision and my intention to honor the Gila Monster.

The main way I honored the Gila Monster with my weaving was to make this. Once I have made a craft item, I am generally done with whatever intentions I had while making it. That is, when a craft item is complete, the spell is complete. The prayer is complete. The sacrifice is complete. Call it whatever, but it's finished. 

Making a thing and using or displaying it are separate activities. If I have made a scarf that honors a specific god, I am done when I'm done making it. Whoever wears  it can then wear it to honor that god. If I wear it, I honor the god whenever I wear it. If someone else wears it, they honor the god when they wear it. Each wearing is also separate, like each toast one makes at a sumbel or a series of sumbels over many years.

So my honoring of the Gila Monster is complete because the tapestry is finished. But, I also display the tapestry along with other animal related artworks. When I look at it, I am reminded of my friend the Gila Monster. This is also a form of honoring.

xxx

I hosted the Project Perfume Tray thread for April. When we were deciding who was going to host what month, I volunteered for April because I had thought of a great perfume related April Fools' Day prank post. The post, and the subsequent religious gnosis, appear in my post Happy Loki's Day, the Holiday of My People.

Here is my April tray. The April Fools Day post was a separate post, so it's not included in my April tray. A lot of the fragrances on this list are samples, lotions, body mists, travel spray decants, or otherwise not actual bottles of perfume. And of course I added things over the course of the month. And of course, I also wore things that were not on the tray. A preselect tray is a convenience, so one does not have to think about it every single time. But I might want to think, at any given time. And I also still have my Days of the Week tray. And this month I also had a preselect tray for 1930s fragrances because we were doing another time travel theme on the gourmand board.

April 2025 Tray

Flowers that don’t grow here:

 Carnation:

 L’huere bleue

 Brightest bloom

Nasturtium:

 Chat perche

Lilac:

 Fresh Cut Lilacs BBW

 Red Lilac Lentheric

Heliotrope:

 Heliotrope blanc l.t.piver

Gardenia:

 Rugir de Gardenia DS & Durga

Flowers Just Starting to Appear:

 Rose:

 Tea rose perfumer’s workshop

 Rose in wonderland Atkinson's

 Rose absolue goutal

 Rose flash tauerville

 Covered in Roses BBW

 Fruits I Can’t Buy Yet:

 Apricot

 Royal apricot demeter

Peach

 Pretty as a peach bbw

Fig

 Indigo nest

 Wulong cha nishane

Exotic Fruits that Don’t Grow Here:

 Guava:

 Fiji sunshine guava-tini

Dragonfruit:

 (I need to make something)

So, more about the time travel. As long time readers may know, time travel is one of my favorite sf topics, and I edited a series of 3 multi author anthologies in the Time Yarns Universe, to which I also contributed stories. I also filmed a live action book trailer, Time Yarns Universe Trailer, which you can watch on youtube. So when I discovered the gourmand board on the perfume forum was doing a series of deep dives, one a month, into each decade starting in 1900 in January and finishing in 2010 next December, of course I was excited.

The Celestial Admiral is our virtual yacht on the gourmand board, on which we go on our adventures. We were originally just going to do boat related posts the week we did the Bioluminescence theme but somehow I ended up making yacht related transition posts when we change themes, and now we've selected a name and also a ship's cat named Nemo who is probably a flerken.

I have not written any formal fiction with characters and character dialogue since my "neurological event" in 2021, except for finishing a story I had already started, and that required using the Lion's Mane Mushroom, which I can no longer do because I developed an allergy to mushrooms. I feel like I'm coming close to a something related to fiction when I do the yacht transition posts though. For example, when we went to the 1930s in April we had already just been time traveling, because we had just gone to the 1400s for a War of the Roses theme.

These are the transition post notes I wrote in advance in a Word document so I could just copy and paste them when it was time, in case I happened to be too busy or tired to think of what to write on the weekend:

Future yachting post for time travel to the 30s:

On old thread:

OK yachtsmen, tie your hats and clip onto a line, because the winds of time around nexus points in history can be fierce. Someone please help Nemo clip onto a line too. We’ll be serving a lovely vegetable feast followed by a berry trifle once we’re underway. Please secure any breakable souvenirs, and don’t let the boo hag ride ya.

On new thread:

Be wary of other time travelers. According to this documentary, there will be other time travelers here trying to change things, others trying to change them back, still others trying to change them more, and yet others trying to fix previous fixes by eliminating the fixers.

(link to Time Yarns trailer)

That's not a fiction story, but it's the closest I've come to writing one since I got sick after getting the c19 vax. It's an idea that could have sparked a story, anyway. 

It's not that I miss having characters hijack all my attention, I certainly don't. I wrote because I had to, otherwise the characters would have driven me up the wall with all their chatter. I don't want that back. At all.

But there were aspects of fiction writing that I did enjoy. Exploring ideas and learning random new things like the legend of the boo hag and that the flower emblem of York is not stylized but depicts how a specific flower actually looks is definitely something I enjoy, and I'm glad I'm now doing that on the gourmand board. What does that have to do with gourmand flavors and fragrances? Not much, but that's more than OK.

xxx

So as you see, I've been having a great time with my perfume journey. I volunteered to host 2 Weekly Topics on the Gourmand board, Other Worlds of Science Fiction in June, and Party Boat, focusing on our yacht, in July.

My first Product Party was a great success. I was ready to ramp up and get a website. And hit a bump in the road.

Another company was already using the name Magical Perfumes. I found out when I tried to register a domain name. Other companies were already using the names Magic Fragrances and Magical Fragrances too. I knew about the company named Magical but it was a software company so I figured that was OK, no one would get us confused. The other company named Magical Perfumes would be confusing if I was trying to use that name, though. 

I decided to go ahead and use my established business name Magicalrealistartist, which I should have just done from the beginning. I had been trying to drop the fine art reference for the perfumes and perfumed products line but it just was not going to work. I can still use the short version Magical for short, though. Official name Magicalrealistartist, or Magical for short. That works. And I can still use my sign that says Magical, because it's for short. 

It was the first day of 1930s theme week on the board, and I had already posted that my perfume selection for the day was Divine Folie, for surely it is a divine madness to time travel as we do. After finding out the name problem and coming up with a solution, I posted again: "In an ironic twist, I found out I have been engaging in a folly for the past few months: the folly of trying to officially shorten my business name Magicalrealistartist to just Magical." A brief explanation of the problem and its solution followed. It was off topic from the 30s theme but it was necessary to let everyone know and the Divine Folie comment was the most reasonable segue. 

When I first decided to use the name Magical Perfumes and Products I of course searched the name to see if anyone was using it. And found nothing but designer perfumes that were not made by a company named Magical. But I used a search engine. I realize now the search engine must have treated the words Magical and Perfumes as keywords instead of as a business name. I didn't find the company named Magical Perfumes until I was on a domain registration website and put in magicalperfumes dotcom. That's why I didn't know about them until now. 

Despite how much I really want to ditch the reference to magical realist art because I don't even make sunprints anymore, it looks like I need to keep that name, unless I want to go with something totally different that doesn't include the word magical at all, which will mean that it won't match my decades old eBay ID, decades old business credit card, or multiple decades old business accounts with suppliers. That would be way more trouble than it's worth. Especially since I really love the sign Charles painted for me and I want to use it. So I'm going to call it one of these variations: A. Magicalrealistartist Perfumes B. Magicalrealistartist Fragrances C. Magicalrealistartist Perfumes and Products D. Magicalrealist Perfumes and Products E. Magicalrealist Fragrances. And still call it Magical for short and keep Magical on my signage. I'm not changing existing labels either. When the name of a perfume house gets too long everybody refers to it by a short version of its name anyway, sometimes even an acronym (YSL, ELDO, BBW.) I will just have an official short version from the get-go so it will end up being the nice nickname Magical instead of something like Magicalrealistartist Fragrances = MRAF. Magical sounds much better.

xxx

Using Fragrances for Salting & Saging

There was a series of events that included things disappearing out of the fridge, which may have been things going into my housemate's "oubliette dimension" as I termed it when she first moved in. Specifically, four sealed new bottles of cream, for her coffee, in succession. She said she thought something might be taking it. It was not the gnome or the fairies; firstly that's not how they usually get things, and secondly I asked them and it was not them. So that left a potential being that didn't belong here, or just some bad energy of some kind. Either way it was time to do some banishing. 

There isn't really an Asatru specific method for getting rid of bad entities or bad energies. There undoubtedly was a heathen way of doing that once, but like many things typically done at the household level, routinely, by individuals, often women, the method was not recorded in a book so we don't know what it was. Just like earlier when I tried to find records about Germanic and Viking Age bathing habits and if they included any fragrances, there is just a whole lot of nothing in the records about that.

There are things recorded from later times: the medieval, renaissance, and folktale / fairytale periods. But those are all pan-European customs used by Christians. So they don't count as specifically heathen magical practices even if they have a large component of traditional heathen references. We can use those, or not. We can make our own, or adopt the ways of modern witchcraft, or whatever is most common in one's local area.

I decided to spray for bad spirits with Salt Air cologne by Demeter and follow it up with a spray of Palo Santo & Sage air freshener by White Barn / Bath & Body Works. Because I use fragrances for all kinds of religious and spiritual purposes, so why not that one?

I'm not even a modernist within Asatru. I'm a traditionalist who doesn't cut my hair and who wears special garb for public rituals. But that doesn't mean I don't or can't use modern equipment when it suits me. After all, I'm typing this on the internet.

So, I sprayed the fridge. And the rest of the kitchen for good measure. I told any bad entities and bad energy to get out. And shortly after that, I heard a sound from my room. The cat was playing with my missing backscratcher. It returned. It had been returned. 

"You found it! Good kitty!"

xxx

Perfume Making and Whiskey Making

In mid April a day came when conditions were perfect for harvesting flowers and herbs, so I started 3 new enfleurages: rose, lavender, and honeysuckle. I've made rose and lavender ones in many years because I use it for food and beverages, but I had not made a honeysuckle one before. 

The enfleurages are going to be for perfume making, but I also started some extracts for whiskey making. I am finally making my home made whiskey again! Just without growing and processing the wheat myself anymore.

The old whiskey was called Northern Lights Goddesses Brew. I wanted to shorten the name for the new whiskey. Goddess Whiskey has already been used. Northern Lights Whiskey and Northern Light Whiskey have also already been used. Northern Goddesses is available but google treats it as generic search terms.

That's the same problem with Magical Perfumes. The reason I didn't know Magical Perfumes was already in use until I tried to register a domain name was because the search term Magical Perfumes doesn't bring up that company name, because Google treats it as generic search terms and returns results for designer (shopping mall) perfumes described as magical.

The existence of another company named Magical Perfumes and the search term problem is the reason I went with the full business name magicalrealistartist for the perfumes. So in keeping with that, I've decided to name the whiskey Asatru Goddesses Whiskey. Because it is not only available, but it's a unique word that Google can find, unlike "northern."

After thinking about it for a few days, I've realized that it's actually great that I was not the one that ended up with the domain name of magical perfumes that no one could find using google because google treats those words as descriptive search terms and returns results from department store perfume counter brands. Some other company is saddled with that problem.

And I can still use Magical for short. Just like I call my book "my Asatru book" instead of saying "Asatru: A Beginner's Guide to the Heathen Path" out loud every time.

So, my new version of my whiskey is Asatru Goddesses Whiskey. I had not realized it when I was making the old version, but it's actually formulated like a perfume, with a balance of different notes. Putting in extracts of rose for Freya, lavender for Sigyn, linden for Frigga, and so on, is exactly like a perfume recipe. It sort of is a perfume, actually. All it would take for it to become an extrait de parfum is to be diluted enough.

You know what.

Haha I bet you guessed. Yeah. My whiskey is a perfume. It's a whiskey and a perfume. I can just bottle the full strength version as whiskey and a diluted version as perfume. Diluted with perfume base, I mean. Perfume is not supposed to be drinkable. Oh this means I need to make a big batch.

xxx

I tested some samples from Arcana Wildcraft. They were running a special in which the first people to order would win a bottle that was being discontinued and I won the Idun one. All the samples I ordered were heathen related.

Idun: Apple, but not sweet. Like an ancient apple variety not bred by humans. It's appropriate for her. I'm not sure I actually like this fragrance but I don't dislike it either. I want to like it because I won it. I might keep this bottle with which to honor Idun.

Gjarllarhorn: This is a Heimdall fragrance and I already have a Heimdall honoring perfume, the one I commissioned from Cherry-Ka's Trunk as a present for Tom, The Hornsman. I still wanted to try this one though, just like trying a new wine. Heimdall let me know he wants me to continue to use The Hornsman to honor him.

Jarnsaxa: Jarnsaxa is a Jotun by birth. As the mother of Magni by Thor, however, she became part of the Aesir gods' family. She is usually still considered a Jotun in Asatru but according to my novel gnosis that I received while writing Some Say Fire, giving birth to a god makes one a goddess. The fragrance? Oh, the fragrance smells pretty much like all of them. There is some common Arcana-ade that is stronger than most of the individual scents, with a few exceptions.

Frigga: This perfume smelled great on cloth, which is appropriate for the goddess of fiber arts. I already have a goddess honoring perfume that I made, Household Goddess, which is for all the goddesses but which started out as being especially for Frigga. I still wanted to try this though.

Sigyn: I don't know what is in this perfume but it's not lavender which is the scent I use to honor her. I will continue to honor Sigyn with lavender.

Ran: I detect the sea melon fragrance in this perfume. It smelled fine outside in the cool evening but when I came back inside the warm house it no longer smelled good on my skin. The goddess Ran let me know she would rather that I continue to honor her with sea salt.

 Hel: My skin ate it. I already have a Hel fragrance anyway, Hidden Goddess by Cherry-Ka's Trunk.

Eir: Medicinal in a good way. Eir indicated to me that she does not want me to honor her with it though.

Valkyrie: At first a nice palo santo but then it turned to gasoline. I wasn't going to keep this one anyway because I have the Valkyrie fragrance that Derin (of Cherry-Ka's Trunk) designed for me and gave me as a surprise gift. I still wanted to sniff this though.

Hlin: Too light for me to judge. This fragrance is supposed to be a gourmand perfume, according to the maker's website, but I'm just not getting much. The goddess Hlin is one of Frigga's handmaidens, meaning noble court ladies. Her name means Protector and she is the last line of defense bodyguard. If there is a fictional character who is like Hlin it would be Drou from the Vorkosigan Saga.

xxx

Some more personal gnosis to report here on Gnosis Diary: the goddess Frigga told me she approves of my soap making and related products and it is OK if I sell those instead of trying to sell my weaving. 

As I got closer to reaching my final form, I prayed to the Gila Monster to help me switch back from burning my fat for energy to getting energy from actual food, as the Gila Monster does every year in the spring. The Monster answered me in my mind. We spoke, discussing my goals and what sorts of offerings he would like, and in my mind's eye I saw him bless me by touching his blue tongue to my forehead. He told me I have the blessing of the Gila Monster for life regardless of whether I continue taking the medicine.

This concludes my Monster Powers post series. Thank you all for sharing this journey with me.