Vaping With Julia

Reporting from New Hampshire! (Always wanted to say that!) Hello from the land of cold!! And Snow!! And Ice!! And More Snow!!

Yes it’s been snowing off and on around here but nowhere near as much as Lil’ Mama out in Kansas City is telling me! Check out the photo below! I think I just missed a couple of storms like this right before I arrived in New England.

Lil’ Mama, co-owner of Big Daddy Vapor, and I are arranging a big review and interview. We’re going to be giving their new, gorgeous “Who’s Your Daddy” Anodized Aluminum 5ml and 3ml tanks, along with a couple of “Slap ya Momma” eLiquid refill tools a nice feature review. I don’t know about you, but these things look amazing in their product shots and they promise to be great tanks, so I’m excited about being able to use one. The whole staff is looking to use it! (I’m hoping they send a pink one and a blue one) They should be on the way to Spinfuel HQ by the time I return on…Sunday night!

Yep, I’m returning on Sunday night, cutting the trip short by almost 2 weeks. I’ll head up again at the end of March to finish up this stock photo shoot but right now things are happening so fast in Florida that my vanishing from the office was not, as Martha might say, “A good thing”. I am looking to get back home, I miss everybody and I am getting sick of being cold all the time. Wow, never in my life did I think I would say I was sick of being cold! I used to love the cold!

Spinfuel Stuff

The Forum Competition is going like gangbusters (?) with more than 50 new members the first week alone! I am thrilled about this sudden influx of new members and I hope they are having fun in the forum. We will pick the first Weekly Winner over the weekend; all I can say is thank god for databases!
The Forum Competition will have winners each week for 4 weeks, culminating in 2 Grand Prize winners at the end of March, plus some other winners I can’t really talk about right now. We have some cool surprises in store for this contest.
Vape The Planet – Boy did I think this contest was going to be big! Sadly, we’ve only had a handful of entries so far. I don’t understand this one, I thought there would be plenty of people wanting to send in photos of people vaping in the natural environments but apparently not. We really went out on a limb with this one and it just might turn around and bite us on the butt. I was so hoping to see a bunch of photos of people from all over the world, out in parks, streets, stores, and other locales just sitting around vaping away. Nothing much more to say about it right now though, hopefully that will change by next Friday.

The Spinfuel Toolkit

We came up with this project while on a video chat, and it could be a terrific resource for Vapers. The Spinfuel Toolkit is going to be a special section of Spinfuel where we are going to build the best, most useful, and most important toolbox of things every Vaper might need for everyday needs, emergencies, or any other scenario. The idea is to equip the toolbox with tools and products for every occasion. Once again, our buddies at MyVaporStore have graciously taken on the role of providing the initial, most important products and tools. Things like emergency cartomizers, clearomizers, atomizers, batteries, syringes and things of this nature. My buddy Jon at MyVaporStore is one of the kindest people on the planet, always looking to help people, and not only Vapers. He’s an amazing guy and someone I would trust completely.

The Spinfuel Toolkit is going to be an interactive page. As we add products and tools to the toolbox we’ll talk about them, write mini-reviews, and let you know why they are going into the toolbox, and why you should consider building your toolbox like ours, and hopefully you guys will get involved and let us know what you are adding to your toolbox or make suggestions on things we should add. This toolbox/toolkit should amount to something that, in case you ever had to leave your home or business without notice, this would be the thing you would make sure made it out with you. I think it’s going to be fun.

eLiquid News – We still have a few eLiquid reviews that are just about ready for publishing. We’re waiting on Mister E-Liquid to get the time to do the interview, we won’t publish a major eLiquid review without one, and to submit a few photos of their production facility, and then it will be ready to go. 777 eCigs has sent us a whole bunch of their new Shisha eLiquids, all extremely flavorful eLiquids. These eLiquids are made for their mini-eCigs and “bullet” size batteries, as well as their new eHookah. We wanted to try them in the eHookah before publishing the review, but we may have to publish without it. We also have a couple of sequel reviews in the works, and Totally Wicked eLiquid has their new Red Label line that some of our staff is vaping this week and they love it, so we’ll publish a review on those new flavors next week.

Talking about eLiquids I would like to say a couple of things that maybe I shouldn’t say, but that need to be said. This affects Vapers more than the vendors behind them, so to me it’s worth the risk.
After John published his article on eLiquid vendors and how we want to publish photos of their facilities so that our readers can trust the quality and safety of the juice they are vaping, the world of “viable” candidates for review got a whole lot smaller.
Spinfuel has been gaining a reputation for its reviews of eLiquids (thank you!) and we love doing them. But, if the majority of the companies out there that are selling you eLiquid that was made in the kitchen or bathroom, stored in the garage and basically handled like they would bottles of cleaning fluid, then we don’t want to review them. We’re not going to vape any eJuice that is made under less than pristine conditions, so why would we want you to? In the future we might only be able to do 1 large eLiquid review a month. We’ll make that up by doing smaller reviews of new eLiquid flavors from companies we know we can trust. Yesterday’s review of Mountain Oak Vapor’s Blue Drop was an example of what I mean.
Oh, and one more thing about eLiquid vendors; Ask yourself this: If you found a bottle of eJuice on the street, just laying there, would you pick it up and vape it? Neither would we, and without some proof that these vendors aren’t taking certain precautions with production, storage, and shipping, is there really a difference between them and a bottle you find in the street? I don’t think so.

Vaping!

The week started off with the last of the eLiquid I took with me, so I had to try and buy locally. A friend and I decided to drive up to Laconia New Hampshire, where the huge beautiful lakes are and drop in on a place on Elm Street. Actually, we went to visit the lake area because it has been so long as I’ve hung out there, and we discovered the store and decided to drop in. I’m not going to mention the name because, well, let’s just say there is a big difference between shops in Florida and shops in New Hampshire. There needs to be more investment in stores up here and hopefully once we know what the FDA is going to do it will free up a lot of people to make the investments they need to make in order to build a fully stocked retail store. In any case, I did pick up a couple of bottles of locally made eLiquid. I just don’t know if I’m going to vape them. I’m expecting a FedEx truck to arrive by 10:30AM today with a care package from Tom and Jason. Thank God!

I want to leave you with this. Do you guys buy locally? If you do, where do you go? How is the selection of products, the knowledge of the staff, and more importantly, the quality and price of their eLiquids? Are the local stores catching up to the online vendors, and are the local stores making good deals with good eLiquid vendors or are they trying to make the eLiquids themselves? What’s the local vaping scene like where you live? I’d really like to know, so leave your comments below.

Remember, tonight between 3PM (Pacific Time) and Midnight Pacific Time, we are urging every Vaper to get on Twitter to raise awareness for Vaping. Check out yesterday’s post on it if you haven’t already. This is important, we need to get #vapecommunity trending on twitter so that we can make our voices heard. Vaping needs to remain legal, including all the wonderful flavored eLiquids we love so much, so taking it to twitter is one sure fire way to get non-Vapers realizing that vaping is important to the goal of killing off tobacco related diseases.

Oh, and more thing. New Mexico is attempting to raise taxes on eCigarettes. Bill HB428 puts eCigarettes under the category of tobacco products and they want to kick the tax rate from 25% to 53%. This is a slap in the face to every Vaper. A sign of disrespect and the attitude that our needs are unjustified, HB428 should be stopped.

Have a safe weekend! I’ll be back in the office Monday morning!

Julia