hedgehog-moss - Tumblr blog

[hedgehog-moss]

thank you for the blueberry tart discourse :') even though i ultimately land on "this is just what being friends with weird contradictory humans is like!" it has been very thought provoking and encouraged a lot of reflection <3 that said. you are so lucky this did not happen on twitter or you would've been on the global news by this evening asdksadksjfjksdfkskfjsd

Please no one screenshot this on twitter or reddit 😭🙏 Tumblr is the better platform to have these debates on and I say this as someone currently being diagnosed with various mental disorders on anon due to my one-tarter stance.

I just made a blackberry tart for 6 people and I will be apportioning it with a goniometer in one hand and my copy of Nicomachean Ethics in the other.

Unless Morille solves this tart dilemma for us once and for all, in her amoral cat way.

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Easter postcards by Russian-Ukrainian artist Vladimir Kadulin

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honestly i can't see anything wrong with what she did. you cant live your life constantly analyzing the ethics of something as meaningless as wanting two desserts

I do spend my life constantly overanalysing everything unfortunately. I type sentences like "irreconcilable blueberry tart ethics" with derisive and mortified self-awareness

[hedgehog-moss]

Ill be honest I don't really understand the big deal. Your friend is within her right to have two slices. Sometimes one would like some extra blueberry tart because one deeply enjoys blueberry tart and while I think human beings owe a lot to each other I feel that judging a friend for having extra blueberry tart when no one in the restaurant is actually going hungry is a bit of an overreaction.

That's fine, we disagree! It happens. No one was going hungry but we were sitting by the entrance and kept hearing people walk in and see the desserts and go like oh great! and I didn't want these people to be disappointed. Also I think my friend would have been annoyed if she hadn't been able to have any tart because other people ordered two pieces each, but well. It's not a big deal which is why I said I felt embarrassed for being so bothered and sounding rigid about this. To me "Sometimes one would like some extra blueberry tart" is selfish when it means others won't get any at all, but I'm aware you don't really owe anything to strangers in a restaurant and no one ever died from a dessert shortage. I think it's the kind of very small no-stakes issue that might lead to disproportionate differences of opinion.

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I went to a restaurant with a friend yesterday and upon entering we saw these splendid blueberry tarts under bell jars on the counter and we made jokey small talk with the waitress like oh, people will fight over these if there's not enough for everyone, it'll tear families apart, are you making more later? and she said no, I'm afraid that's our entire stock for today, but there are 18 slices, it should be plenty! It was a small village restaurant with only one menu du jour so there weren't any other dessert options but they don't usually get that many customers—but then a couple of large groups arrived and most people noticed the tarts like we did, and went ohh blueberry tart, it's been a while, I can't wait, and it became clear that when we'd get to the end of our meal there would be winners and losers in the blueberry tart rush

But later as we were about to order dessert I wasn't hungry anymore and I was like well that's too bad but someone else will be glad to get 'my' slice of tart—and my friend said yeah, me :) You should order it anyway, I'll eat both! At first I thought she was joking, but no. I said, there's not enough for everyone, you can't take two, and she said, we were going to order two slices, what difference does it make? and I was baffled that she couldn't see the ethical difference between two people eating one slice of tart each vs. one person eating two, when there's a limited quantity of tart. I felt like we were in a simplistic social justice metaphor it was so obvious, but there was no changing her mind. When I said "it's just... not nice" she said "okay" with a shrug, and what can you say to that. She added, you don't know any of these people and I was like, why are we reverting to tribal dynamics in a non-apocalyptic setting, how would you feel if we'd arrived a bit later and seen others ordering two desserts knowing you'd get zero? And she said, I would think that's their right, and I felt kind of amazed.

I pointed out that if she didn't think it was a wee bit wrong, she wouldn't ask me to order her second piece as if it was for me, and she said yeah maybe we don't need to do that, there's no law preventing me from ordering two desserts. What about Kant's categorical imperative Okay I guess you're not breaking any laws by taking more than your fair share of a thing other people also want, just failing a kindergarten-level morality test. I felt embarrassed for sounding like an annoying preachy rigid person so I dropped the issue, and as she ate her two slices she'd smile at me every time we overheard someone order coffee without dessert—like "See? There'll be enough, no one will be deprived of tart because of me!" as if that cancelled the fact that she didn't care in the first place. I guess it was one of these tiny issues that can still significantly alter the way you perceive a person. I tried to tell myself not to be so bothered about this small thing but I was! so bothered. And I felt like writing a letter to some agony aunt like "should I end a friendship over irreconcilable blueberry tart ethics"

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The daffodils have finally bloomed! Entire fields are turning yellow <3

My mum pointed out I lose interest in the humble cowslip as soon as flashier spring flowers show up and I felt a bit bad, so I picked a little bunch of cowslips to let them add their own touch of yellow to Daffodil Day, in their unassuming way.

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i love when flowers close in the evening like good night girl i love you sleep tight

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x

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by fantastische_waldwesen

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In my neverending quest to keep Pampérigouste from achieving her dreams, I have launched a formal investigation into her last escape, which I had no explanations for at the time.

I figured it out! At the far far end of her pasture, near the road, a few fence posts have become more or less horizontal (the ground is quite wet / muddy there so they've never been very stable, especially with Pirlouit using them to scratch his forehead)—so instead of a high jump + long jump combo to get to the road, Pampe just had to clear the long jump over the ditch. Which is still impressive.

I also suspect that she chose to escape from this place near the road on a snowy morning as a deliberate strategy, knowing the snow plough would erase any traces of her jump, thus preventing me from discovering where the weak spot in the fence was. Well done.

You need 2 people to fix these fence posts so in the meantime I decided to kill two birds with one stone: cut all the broom and thorny bushes in this corner of the pasture and use them to form a discouraging barrier. I set to work earlier this week, and here's the same place as above, mid-process:

When I texted my mum to tell her about my new thorn-based anti-Pampe plan of action, she said "Like the Maasai who make fences with thorny acacia branches to keep out lions!" and it made me feel even more confident. I mean, I have neither acacia nor Maasai fencing techniques but my thorny shrubs are pretty aggressive, they pricked my fingers even through my thick work gloves—which felt satisfying in an anticipatory way. Excellent! prick Pampe's nose exactly like this. How could a llama not be deterred by a fence material that deters apex predators?

Vexingly enough, she seemed quite supportive of my efforts. At one point she breathed some warm air against my shoulder in a gentle, patronising way.

We were engaged in psychological warfare all afternoon—every time I stepped away from my vegetal fence, feeling like it was now good enough, Pampe would immediately come to inspect it, cheerful and impatient, which sapped my confidence so I would go and add a few more shrubs. (Note that I sort of plaited the first / biggest shrubs with the pre-existing fence so they don't go flying on the road, and so Pampe can't just push them aside.)

On the right: Poldine, looking for little fresh leaves to eat amidst the chaos. On the left: Pampérigouste, thinking.

(At this point the barrier was only 20% thorns, and 80% broom—the fact that she waded through it without a care and didn't prick her belly made me go and add more thorny shrubs, and pack them more densely)

It's kind of fun watching Pampe think, honestly. Can I jump over this? Do I have enough visibility? Can I eat my way to freedom (again)? But these shrubs are disgusting. Am I above exploiting my daughter's lack of culinary discernment to achieve my goals? Maybe I should go back to my calculations re: probability of wild boar destruction. I may have pincushions for hands after handling prickly bushes for two hours but I'm helping stimulate my llama's intellect and creativity and that's so important.

I tried to alternate broom and thorny branches so that the non-thorny broom became tangled up with thorns and brambles to form an impenetrable and incomprehensible wall. I will call it this method the salmagundi-fence.

Poldine is in awe of my vegetal installation.

Can I just say, compared to Pampérigouste who constantly has a devilish glint in her eye, Pampelune's face exudes wholesome politeness and moral goodness. It's still hard to believe they're mother and daughter.

I went home once my fence started looking like Maleficent's forest of thorns and Pampe had long stopped trying to wade through it, but I still felt antsy and ended up coming back one hour later to have my apéritif with the llamas so I could keep an eye on Pampe until nightfall.

... where is Pampe?

Oh. Here. No worries!

Still staring at the road. Still thinking.

...

With all that said, please admire my beautifully delirious Forest of Thorns-fence and let me know what you think.

[hedgehog-moss]

Jaguarundis (Herpailurus yagouaroundi), family Felidae, found widely across the Americas, from far South TX and SE Arizona, through Mexico, Central America, and much of South America

This cat is very secretive and elusive, and rarely seen.

While working in Ecuador, with the Quichua people, I was told that they use magical portals at the base of Kapok trees to travel from one tree to another... or to the other side.

photograph by @lucas.18photos

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Look at Pandolf’s scary crocodile face as he approaches this tiny kitten!

It looks like he’s going to devour her!!

But he just wants

to pull on her tail gently to attract her attention.

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frog chair

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That viral video from last month of a giraffe pushing a tortoise was interesting to me because I saw it in French & Spanish corners of the internet and everyone was referring to the animals in the video as 'she' since giraffe & tortoise are feminine words, meanwhile on the English-speaking internet I saw a minority of people referring to them as 'it' or 'they', an overwhelming majority using masculine words, and almost no one use 'she'

Similarly romance language speakers humanised these animals using women's names while English speakers used men's names:

And of course it would have been different had the giraffe been an elephant (masculine word) but yeah I find it interesting that when it comes to personifying animals and things, speakers of gendered languages will go 50% masculine 50% feminine due to grammatical gender, while speakers of a non-gendered language with a neutral pronoun will go like 80% masculine 18% neutral 2% feminine.

It must feel weird to learn a gendered language and have to accept that a door is 'she', but it also feels weird to learn a non-gendered language like English and then scroll down hundreds of comments under an animal video and all the animals are 'he'. I'm reminded of a cartoon I saw on tumblr once with a speaking lightbulb, and all the comments referred to it as 'he' and a 'guy' (in french & spanish, people would call it she.) I wonder how it affects the way you frame the world in your mind? you ask a French kid to personify a spoon or a mouse or a raindrop, it's going to be a female character by default. I feel like that's something English speakers rarely consider—that compared to languages that are 'visibly', officially gendered in a 50/50 way, English is less neutral, and more masculine-gendered. When anglophones learn about grammatical gender they tend to react like "why is a chair a 'she' that's absurd?", but when the context calls for it they'll call a lightbulb 'he' without thinking about it

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I like this time of year when the other trees are mostly leafless and you can see little white dots in the hills here and there—the wild cherry trees in bloom ♡

Also is there a softer light than April evening light.

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So far, only one kitten is bold enough to venture away from the house and meet the other animals. Morille prudently sticks to the rocking chair and chirps after her trailblazing sister with some alarm (then washes her paws of the matter).

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Two of our foremost experts conducted a careful examination of the available data, and pronounced spring to have sprung.