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Mama Cat’s Pearls of Wisdom #13

If you find your charcoal disks for your incense burner are getting crumbly from damp weather there is a method to help preserve them. 🙂 I recommend putting them in a tupperware container to help protect against moisture to begin with, but if you get one of those silica-gel packets (like those packets that say “silica gel – do not eat,” that you find in boxes of new shoes,) and place it in the box with your charcoal, it will absorb the ambient moisture and prevent the humidity from breaking down your charcoal disks. 🙂

This is a pic of those disks I’m referencing (I believe its appearing on this blog for the third time, lol.)

~Cat

Censer-flash

6 responses

  1. Carmin Avatar
    Carmin

    That’s a great tip! I prefer the bamboo charcoal blocks (made by Shoyeido for kodo ceremonies). They tend to be a little more forgiving when you leave the package open, and don’t have the funk of Three Kings or Swift Lite .

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  2. Cat Avatar
    Cat

    LOL, I can never get the kodo blocks to light – can’t get why, but there must be some secret I don’t know there. 😉 I definitely have the cheapo roll of charcoals with the saltpeter in them most of the time. 😉

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  3. Carmin Avatar
    Carmin

    Hold the lighter or match to the block for a good long awhile, and if you are super impatient (like me, lol) blow on it a bit. They burn so slowly that you can prep the block, gather the rest of your ingredients for the spell, and still have a solid burn time left. I wish that there was a happy medium between the kodo blocks and the salt peter ones though. Le sigh 😉

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  4. Cat Avatar
    Cat

    I must have ordered a bunk-a-licious pack of them, seriously, because I once sat one on the Three Kings charcoal (lit,) and it still didn’t light. Then I held a lighter to it while holding it on my screen until I thought the lighter would blow up (like 2 minutes at least,) and still no dice. 😛 I thought there was something wrong with me, but apparently its just that I have to toss that box of rounds in the trash…which I believe I did a month or two after the “I’m too moronic to light these,” moment.
    I also wish there was a medium between the two. 😛 Le sigh right along with you.

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  5. Karma Zain Avatar
    Karma Zain

    Totally off topic, but I find it amusing that by the age of four, my daughter had managed to eat not only a chunk of Three Kings charcoal, but also a packet of silica gel.
    Anyway, the silica gel is a great idea. Just keep out of the reach of children 🙂 (She was fine, both times, even though both times I called poison control freaking out.)

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  6. Cat Avatar
    Cat

    LOL, its Murphy’s Law that if an item says “DO NOT EAT” on the package, a toddler will at the very least attempt to eat it. I’d question her choice on the charcoal (dusty, dry, not too tempting,) but I did once eat several red ants at a tender age before my mom saw me shovelling them in my mouth, so… To each her own. 😉

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