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With the early arrival of “magnolia season” here in town, I’m looking ahead to the year’s bounty in terms of things I can heat up a lot and force oil out of. Yep, it’s almost time to take the big ol’ Portuguese alembic copper pot still off of the shelf.

The great hurdle with distilling your own essential oils is obtaining knowledge.

This is unfortunate, because mistakes are not always benign in this craft and I could sure use a strong guiding hand. Distilling the wrong kind of cedar can make your lungs bleed. Being a doofus about your condenser setup can get you exploded.

Help me choose which of these photos from last weekend I should make a nice print of for the parents of this lovely young lady (my goddaughter). I’ll print and frame the winning photograph.

Choose from attentive and realistic, gleeful, LOG POND WITH FISH!!! or weird/blurry but cute.

Everyone knows that there is weird scummy stuff on the beach. Sometimes it gets opalescent and piles up in a way that looks like it might make a good desktop background for one’s computer.

It took me nearly a year to complete Borge’s collection of short stories called Ficciones. This compilation, cited often as the best introduction to the Argentinian writer’s oeuvre, has about 20 stories, written in the mid-20th century, that range between fantasy and satire, psychological thriller and eerie psychosis.

Borges thrives in describing off-kilter dream states. He explores sacred geometries—labyrinths, rhombuses—through which his characters move toward heroic or anti-heroic transformation. Weird stuff. Captivating, strange, difficult.

Last year around this time, optimistically and foolishly thinking it was nigh spring, I bought a light (read: in no way insulating) jacket in a color the clothing label called “wasabi,” which was pretty funny because, first, wasabi doesn’t have a color if it’s real (the bright green is food coloring) and secondly, the jacket was bright red-pink-something; perhaps they confused it with the color (again fake) of the pickled ginger they put next to your sushi at sushi bars. Yes, perhaps that’s it.

For several months I described this color as “hot red” or “rabid salmon.” But even the term “salmon” gives you the wrong idea. It doesn’t have that coppery, sunset glow of other things you might call salmon. It is, I realize, its own color, my personal color for 2010.