garnier!

I've been looking for weeks for, I admit, a product I became aware of via a television commercial - Garnier has an under-eye anti-dark-circle roller that seemed to me like it couldn't possibly be anything but good. (Other lines have sponge-tip things, which for some reason seemed less positive to me.) Couldn't find it, couldn't find it, sometimes forgot to look - but it turns out it's in skin care rather than in makeup, so yesterday I finally picked one up.

A genuinely translucent concealer (doesn't show up orange on my pale skin) in a roller ball that slathers caffeine on the bags under your eyes. Caffeine is a potent vasoconstrictor. What's not to love?

down to earth from heaven

One noticeable side effect of having had an earthquake in August is that the National Cathedral has special safety netting strung up halfway up the building, to catch any falling masonry rather than let it land on someone's head. (They don't think the masonry will fall on people's head, but you'd hate to have been wrong about that, wouldn't you?) It blocks the top tier of stained glass windows and, the reason I bring it up, the rose window, which would ordinarily be where they'd put someone - me! - to tell how once in royal David's city etc. "Yes, it is shrouded, isn't it," said Chorus Master T. "The whole place looks like Lent," said someone else. Whatever: no rose window for me.

So last year, I sang the apple-tree carol from the Rose window and then hurried down in the elevator and joined the procession at the end - chorus two by two, then me, then the conductor, which was kind of awesome. This year I am leading the procession, which ... is one way of solving the rose window problem. Heh. It is still preferable to the alternate arrangement that was suggested last year before the rose window thing worked out, whereby I began at the podium and the whole chorus processed toward me as though I were John the Baptist.