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 Shaping incense continues to vex me. Rolling it out by hand won’t work for mass production. I have these little sticks that I got from Essence of the Ages (which sells all sorts of natural incense, including some big American names like Fred Soll, Juniper Ridge, Ancient Forest, etc. (they also have a variety of east-Asian, Indian, Nepali, Japanese, etc.); these little sticks, maybe 3 inches long and 1/4 inch thick/wide/in-diameter, must have been made in a machine. The thing is I have no idea what sort of machine the company uses (these are from Ancient Forest). I found an electric pasta maker from a company called Lello; they have one disc for grissini, which are bread sticks. There are other discs too; I’d have to experiment with which disc produces an appropriate shape. Then Tami and I would have to cut the incense into correct lengths.
 These would be perfect, or I have to go back to where I started: making molds for cones. I couldn’t get that to work when I tried it about five years ago. I need to try a few more times. I’d have Pop make the molds for me. I really think the electric pasta extruder from Lello is the way to go. That’s guaranteed to produce uniform incense shapes and sizes. The only drawback is that it costs a couple of hundred dollars; if it works, it will be well worth that price. One other problem we ran into was that the joss sticks we made started developing mold! That was unheard of in the Pacific Northwest. I learned to line sticks touching each other, the idea being they wouldn’t warp, which I’d found, in the PNW anyway, they tended to do. I guess not only is that no longer necessary, it also can cause problems with mold and other unwanted effects. Nevertheless, I still need to discover the perfect way to dry any “finished” incense.
 Holly DeCarlo, who was my perfume assistant here in Florida for a short time, invited me to have a booth at Tampa Bay Fashion Week, an event she helps organize. For only $200, I can have my own booth with an eight-foot table–the possibilities of what I can do with that booth are limitless. Holly went to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, Manhattan, which is better respected than you might think. I’m having her help me with a bunch of PR stuff; if there’s one thing she knows about, it’s definitely PR, like how to get in touch with boutiques, magazines, and blogs, etc. The first thing we’ll do is come up with a wholesale price list based on my costs; we’ll also make a suggested-price list for retailers, which we have to be very careful with. I think we’ll have send a different suggested-retail list to each retailer, or maybe one for each kind. For example, Henri Bendel (Holly tells they’re to open a branch of Henri Bendel in Tampa) is a pricey department store, so they would get a list on the higher end; whereas, Whole Foods, should they have any interest at all in carrying my products, would get a list on the lower end.
 I recently bought an authentic Norman-Rockwell Jester from my brother-in-law, Brandon Kroll (married to my sister Leila). I had it reframed. It looks better than ever.