I have my little office set up in the sunroom, or solarium, as they call it around here. Its a nice little room, about 12'x5' with windows on all along three sides. There's plenty of room for a desk, printer, small work table and a set of shelves. The sunshine makes me happy. Its a good place for an office.

HOWEVER, there's no room for me to keep any stock. My henna is in a giant chest freezer in the garage. Everything else is in cabinets and old dressers in the basement. (BTW, this is not a wet, cave basement. Its the nice kind of dry cool basement that could be a game room with a sub floor and carpeting.)

My solution to this situation is to take my little shopping basket around the house to collect things for orders. I make a list from the orders and go about pulling the things I need. It works fine most of the time.

On light order days I prepare stock. Yesterday I thought I would decant some cajeput oil. I buy this in small, paint-can-ish drums that need to be decanted into amber glass as soon as I get it. (To any EO purists, I swear this is how your supplier does it too. The cans are lined and this is definitely the norm.) Anyway, I had already divided the can out into some 16 oz amber glass bottles. I went to the basement and got 1 16 oz bottle and a box of 8 ml vials to bring them to the work table in my office.

UNFORTUNATELY I fell up the last few stairs smashing the bottle between my calves and the step. Of course this was uncomfortable, but when I stood up I noticed the shard of glass sticking out of my jeans. Plucking the shard out produced a rather large amount of blood. I won't say it spurted, but the large bead of blood got from mid calf to my foot before I could bend over to investigate.

The wound kind of gaped open a bit, which is my mom's guideline for needing stitches. (She worked ER for a number of years, so I appreciate her judgment.) I couldn't clean up the mess because standing and bending produced more blood. Lots more blood. I started to try and get my husband on the phone to come home from work to help me, and gave my kids directions on how to safely clean up a puddle of cajeput and glass from the basement stairs. Now, it was 4 on a Friday afternoon, so getting Jon to come home wasn't hard. Of course by the time he arrived I didn't need much. After holding the wound closed with my fingers for 40 minutes or so, the bleeding had mostly stopped and I'd talked myself out of stitches. I did send him out to get me some butterflies. A bandaid wouldn't have held is shut and I don't want THAT ugly of a scar.

It was really tender all evening, and every time I stood it would produce a new few drops of blood, but after a good night's sleep it seems to be fine.

There is a large section of my third step from the top that no longer has paint.