Sunday of yellows and golds

Powdery gold…
Our pre-Halloween snowstorm ended the saffron harvest. The bulbs are still growing, and the newly planted bulbs are starting to send up shoots, but there will be no more flowers this autumn. I had harvested 111 stigma, which gave me approximately 1/5 of a gram of dried and useful herb. I say approximately, because I do not have a scale that measures such small amounts.
By yesterday, it had dried and was smelling pretty intoxicating. (Between the saffron drying and the esrog sitting in a dish, my desk has become one major olfactory delight). It was time to make more incense. I have the proportions down, now I needed to work on form. For whatever reason (and I do not have a clue) the incense cones that I made last time, work perfectly well for me, but do not stay lit for anything, when DH attempts to use them. This time, I would try making sticks. Using a metal syringe (labeled on one side of the package as a clay gun, and on the other side as a dough gun), I rolled the incense dough and put it in the cylinder. All I needed to do now, was to press down on the handle and squeeze out a line of incense, right? Sure, if you don’t mind your incense sticks looking like crazy birthday cake candles. But I figured it out. And the incense dough is cohesive enough that if I don’t pipe out the sticks longer than then length of my hand, I can gently roll the sticks into a more uniform shape. The nice thing about the incense sticks is that they dry quickly. I made them late morning, and they were dry enough to use that night. They fit into the incense holders we have and yes, they even stayed lit for DH.

Gold, of a more liquid type…
On a paper plate, left at the crossroads near my home: Honey and bread, a fig and a section of a pomegranate. Also left with the plate were a couple of dog biscuits (You don’t think that Hecates hounds would like a snack?) and a pledge to make a contribution to a local food bank, a pledge that I fulfilled today.

And, yellow…
More turmeric capsules filled. I don’t really like the color that the turmeric dyes my hands, but the iridescent yellow gold that my fingernails end up is pretty cool, at least for a little while!