#Antoine did make us all a meal that one time but it was because he told me it was someone special to him’s birthday | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

masonsutd · 2 years

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Shhh review episode 4

We’re back. I’m gonna include @footballffbarbiex warning of the fact an anxiety attack is mentioned because I no doubt will talk about it. Find chapter 4 here.

I like how there’s no time jump and its right back with her trying in her relationship, including the fact she most likely feels hella uncomfortable with the fact the business colleague looked her up and down. So, her boyfriend goes home with her but would he have gone to her if she hadn’t gone to him first? Oh dear, the kisses that should do something for her don’t, but she goes past the spot her and Antoine fucked, and it does something… oh no. You should never be picture someone else when being intimate with your partner but yet she’s comparing how Antoine had made her feel earlier to how her boyfriend is making her feel. You most definitely should be picturing yourself cuddled up with your lover instead of your partner. That’s just asking for trouble especially when you’re picturing something you hadn’t done with your lover.

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At least she got to watch the movie in the end but let’s not skip past the part where he closed the deal and then decided to spend time with his girlfriend. Girlfriends aren’t part time douchbag, you can’t just pick her up and drop her because you can’t time manage. She claims she hadn’t thought of Antoine for a couple weeks, but we all know she was picturing him when next to her boyfriend. Maybe she means OTHER than that she hadn’t thought of him. The thoughts she’s having are thoughts you have for someone you have a relationship with not someone your just had a quick affair with. She’s literally thinking thoughts she should be thinking about her partner not her sister’s partner.

Oh no don’t do it through text that’s just scummy and doesn’t show emotions. He wants her to care, and he can’t tell she does through text. Okay so why is she ringing on a withheld number when three weeks before she tried to give him her number. Oh no she was almost sick just hearing his voice that’s not good, why does missing him scare her? Does missing him mean more than just missing him? Nah, she’s now going to places she knows he does to try and ‘bump’ into him. Is she trying to fool herself or us? If she wanted to know he was okay check his Facebook bro stop trying to run into him so that he has to talk to you. Also does she really think that if she see’s him SHE won’t want to start it back up, she’s acting like he’s the only one with no will power, HE GAVE HER AN OUT before they had sex and she didn’t take it.

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The fact she’s having to fight her instincts to contact him should probably mean she should contact him. Oh no, of course mum calls her out for not turning up to family meals. But it is funny that she blames her partner like she didn’t attend the first two on her own. Oh, mother you just had to say his name didn’t you. Of course, he looks lost without her there he doesn’t have his side piece to keep him entertained and bounce off of. Ooo, I love how the sister is making it all down on reader to make an effort like excuse me but why can’t you meet up for lunch or something. Also fuck her for saying Antoine needs a babysitter maybe he wouldn’t if you didn’t spend all your time on your phone. Oh, shit he’s there… what does he say about missing her? Surely, he has to react like no he doesn’t because otherwise she’d get suspicious if he reacted too much like he does. Or maybe he just doesn’t and that’s why he’s being grumpy. Is he in a mood because she was mentioned or did they have a falling out again?

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Do workplaces actually do this putting money in for a person’s birthday or is it just for big birthdays like a 50th? Because I’ve never heard of it before. ANYWAY, before I get side-tracked, has she left it last minute that she has to run around or are her shops just so shit? He’s giggling and now I need to hear him giggling everyday for the rest of my life. I love that even though she’d imagined bumping into him or purposefully brushing herself against him she now can’t even move. Seeing him look so carefree and be happy is more than likely making her think its because of what we did that he wasn’t like that around me before and that’s why she moves away from him even though for two months she’s been wanting to see him.

ANXIETY ATTACKS MENTIONED BELOW

Her turning away and having a anxiety attack after seeing him is something I can relate to because all she’d wanted to see was that he was okay and when she see’s him and he’s doing better than she thought he would and clearly better than she is, her mind is going to make her believe its her fault and that she made him unhappy and in a way having a anxiety attack is her bodies way of trying to get her to recognise that her feelings for him are more than just scratching a itch that only he can scratch. Her anxiety attack is a physical manifestation of the thoughts she’d have been having for the two months she didn’t see him, but the realisation that it was true would have bit her harder than she could have imagined. It’s also quite interesting that she’s thinking its him that’s the cause of it rather than it being her feelings.

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The fact that during month two of not seeing him the only stand out thing that happens is seeing him from a distance shows her that he’s becoming something important to her even when she’s trying to create that distance of it just being an affair that was easy to stop. I love how before going for her anniversary meal she meets up with her friends. Is she hoping to get drunk enough that she will forget she even has the meal? How overboard does he want to go with the flowers, I get its their anniversary but come on are you trying to mark your territory or something? One bunch of flowers would be more than enough. Why when she’s describing her anniversary dress does she describe it as being able to get a second glance? Like ma’am you shouldn’t be wanting a second glance you’re going for a meal with your boyfriend.

Okay so maybe wearing a pretty dress works when you don’t have to wait around at the bar, but my point about second glances still stands. At least we know that reader isn’t only with her boyfriend for the gifts he buys her aye. So, we find that month two/three of missing him still sees her walls up, is she worried that she’ll act a way to make her boyfriend suspicious? Because I’m sure ditching movie night with your sister’s boyfriend for however long is suspicious enough. Okay now I’m sad that she hasn’t laughed properly for a while, and I wonder if she thinks back to seeing him laughing so carefree when she realises.

Of course, she walks into him because how else would they meet again. Like is this their thing? At least he spills his drink this time last time it was her wine that got spilt. The fact he says she looks stunning not just nice makes me all emotional. It’s like he didn’t even think of what he was saying and just said it. Oh, I am so glad he asks about the withheld because I know full well it’s been playing on his mind even though she didn’t say anything. At least she’s honest that it was. Oh, his friends are there… bet she’s glad they don’t recognise her especially after her anxiety attack that they could have witnessed.

Is being alone with him a good idea? Okay so they’re just talking about why she rang that’s no bother. Oh, nope not just talking. Have they ever just talked? Again, I repeat she takes active part in this affair by pulling him closer, and this time she really doesn’t care about being caught even if it was his friends or hers that had come looking for them. Bro she feels weak after a kiss. He must be one amazing kisser. At least she says I miss you first especially with the fact he never got a chance to speak to her on the phone and tell her. Oh, we’re back to speaking his native language and I’m a puddle again but then again so is she.

Awh, he changes his mind and says beautiful rather than stunning. Why does she have to mention that she’s leaving? She could have just gone back to her friends and then gone to the damn meal. He’s have never known. And why the bloody heck does she say someone that gives him hope. Okay so he probably could have handled that information better but when you’re going on a date and just been fingered by someone else how does anyone expect him to act? Oh no she had to say anniversary didn’t she. I love how easy she can lie to everyone BUT Antoine. TELL HIM HAPPY ANNIVERSARY FROM ME, BRO I AM DEAD. Oh, now she’s the one claiming him, I mean it’s about time she realised but holy fuck could she have chosen ANY other day. We’ve gone from your mine to this is real and her stealing his torn knickers and her still going to her anniversary meal with another mans cum in her. Well so much for them ending.

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canyouhearthelight · 4 years

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The Miys, Ch. 105

I’ve managed to get slightly ahead on these, so: A belated thank you to @littleshydragon, @dark-chocolat-cupcake, @overusedblur, and @allegrochicken for all the love I have seen blowing up my notes recently (I’m queuing this on Aug 25, even if it won’t post until Sept 8).

Also, to the 30 new followers who I have somehow acquired: Welcome! Ask box is always open, and I don’t get nearly enough of them. I love to interact with y’all, so don’t be afraid to ask me every little question you think of as you read. Anon is on if you feel you need that.

Other than that, thanks for this chapter goes out to @baelpenrose for beta reading. Also @quantumizedinsanity, @charlylimph-blog, @wildforestferret, @creakingcryptid, for the characters you gave me to play with in chapters like this.

Later that same ‘day’, I was forcefully reminded of Noah’s observation regarding human communication. Things were generally calm, and an impromptu family meal-snack-thing was happening in my quarters. Antoine had been over to visit, as he seemed to be making up for lost time caused by infiltrating Jokul’s accidental cult. Zach and Hannah were over, as well, so when dinner time rolled around, I just threw together some small po-boy sandwiches and banh mi for us to snack on while we kept visiting, rather than making a full meal.

Hey, I was allowed lazy days, too.

As it happened sometimes, conversation turned to things we either did or didn’t miss from Before. Tonight was very firmly in the ‘do not miss’ category.

“Plagues started by dumb experiments,” Maverick pointed out, smirking.

Catching on, Conor swatted him playfully. “I said I was sorry about that! And Else is an alright person, turns out.”

Snorting, Hannah covered her face with one hand. “Tell that to Nixe.”

“Her new tail is gorgeous,” I gushed. “If I got reparations like that, I’d at least consider forgiving someone.”

“For almost killing you?”

“It was an accident,” I brushed the comment off, reminded of explaining that gesture to Noah. “Besides, there are a lot of other things I genuinely don’t miss.”

“Aunt Flo,” Hannah intoned seriously.

“Tyche and I already did that one, so it’s not admissible,” I admonished. “But spoiled food? Do not miss.”

Zach shuddered. “Hell, that’s not even from Before. I don’t miss that at all.”

Antoine lifted his coffee in a mock-toast. “To all the people we lost to antibiotics.” After a few confused looks banded around the room, I laughed and waved at him to clarify. Rolling his eyes dramatically, he sighed. “Bread mold. This is why people died in the After of antibiotic allergies: they didn’t know it was derived from bread mold.”

“Dude, that’s dark,” Zach whispered.

Clearing his throat, Conor soldiered on. “I never lived through one, but wildfires were pretty bad, yeah?”

Nodding seriously, Maverick - who had lived on the western coast of NorthAm - added “Yeah, fuck THOSE things. Australia had it worse, but still.”

Raising her hand and waving it, Hannah started making eager noises to ask for her turn. “Absolutely idiotic job requirements, am I right?” Nods abounded, and she took the opportunity to vent the spleen I hadn’t even guessed her to possess. “The number of jobs I didn’t get because I didn’t have a degree were absurd. I don’t even know why they even required them, for some! I’m sure most of you had that happen.”

I kept my silence, but Conor was right behind her. “A Master’s in Engineering, to be a foreman. You’re babysitting a bunch of knuckleheads pounding rebar and pouring concrete! And they’ve had a decade of learning to do it right, I would’ve just been there to make sure it was compliant. And they wanted a Master’s for that!”

Hannah took a sip of her drink and nodded eagerly. “That’s what I’m talking about! There was a job I qualified for that was basically a glorified secretary… They wanted a four-year degree and paid peanuts. Absurd. But I was unemployed for way more of my life than I should have been, because I didn’t have that piece of paper.”

Idly, Zach stared at his drink. Like me, he had one of said-degrees, so this was something of a conversation we couldn’t really take part in. “I wonder how many Councillors we would have if those kind of requirements were put in place here.” Arching an eyebrow, he glanced up at me and inclined his head knowingly.

“Well,” I exhaled. “It depends. If they asked for a Master’s degree of any kind, I wouldn’t be a Councillor.” A thought struck me. “Hey - “

“No, Sophia, you cannot recommend that as a way to retire from the Council,” Antoine scolded with a laugh. “You would be grandfathered in with everyone else.”

The laughter broke the serious tone that had descended, and led to everyone speculating jovially, starting with Conor. “Well, we know Grey would still be a Councillor in that case - they admitted they had a PhD when Else was still getting sorted, rather than an MD.”

“Pretty sure Eino has a Master’s, at least,” Zach pointed.

Maverick shook his head, firmly disagreeing. “Doctorate in Education. I saw it on his wall. Don’t sell that one short.”

“So that’s two.” Hannah leaned forward eagerly. “Conor, what about Huynh?”

“Masters in Engineering,” he confirmed ruefully. “But he’s no PhD.”

“Pranav,” Zach interjected. “Post grad in robotics. Even worked on some of the Padrugoi mission stuff, early on.”

A respectful murmur filled the room, accompanied by appropriately impressed nods. Maverick had to actually shake the starstruck look out of his eyes before he could speak. “So that’s three PhDs, one Master’s, and a Bachelor’s on the Council. Not bad, honestly.”

Antoine cleared his throat politely. “Grey actually has two doctorates, if I am recalling correctly.”

I shook my head firmly. “Three. Biochemistry, genetics, and molecular chemistry.”

With a low whistle, Conor shook his head. “So, we have a clear leader as far as ‘most degrees on the Council’. Would Eino or Pranav be second, though?”

An argument erupted, and when it looked like Zach was about to say something, I shook my head. I knew the same thing he was about to point out, as a by-blow of fixing some of Derek’s more… enthusiastic shenanigans, but I wanted to see if anyone would figure it out or even question it. A solid half-hour later, Tyche arrived and scooped up a mini-sandwich before she even registered the conversation/argument taking place.

Whirling to face me, she pointed at the rest of the room and glared at me disdainfully. “Seriously? How long has this been going on?”

“Forty five minutes?” I admitted sheepishly. “Maybe an hour if you include the ‘what we don’t miss’ portion of the conversation. But ‘degrees on the Council’ has been at least forty five minutes.”

“And you said fuck all?”

I shrugged. “I know it’s not me who has the most or even second most. I have the least formal education of any Councillor.”

Tyche pinched the bridge of her nose and blew out a long breath. “Okay, everyone. What do you know so far?”

Without hesitation, Maverick rattled it off. “Grey has three doctorates, Eino has one and a Master’s, it turns out. Pranav has one doctorate and a Bachelor’s. Huynh has a Master’s, and Sophia has a Bachelor’s.”

“And the Councillor you have left out?” she interrogated wearily, while Zach and I tried to restrain our laughter.

“Xiomara?” he asked, face scrunched in confusion. “She was career military, but I don’t know if she has any degrees. Maybe a Bachelor’s?”

Tyche shook her head, glaring again when I started gasping for breath. “Wrong. And you know what? Soph knew this, so I’m going to make her tell all of you. Like she should have. From the beginning.”

“Hey!” I cried, still giggling. “I was giving them a whole other 5 minutes before I broke the news. I just wanted to see if they would even question their reasoning.” Antoine’s eyes got wide, sending me into another giggling fit. “None of you even mentioned the idea of Xiomara having any degree,” I gasped, almost in hysterics. “Mav was in the military, so I get that he just assumed she was busy as fuck, but… et tu, everyone?”

Hannah’s head turned slowly to stare down Zach. In self defense, he held up both hands with one pointing at me. “She told me not to say anything.”

I nodded. “Yeah, I did!”

Carefully, Conor slowly asked the question that was on everyone else’s minds. “Sophie? What’s so funny?”

Tears were pouring down my face at this point - not because I thought the situation was funny, because it wasn’t. Not really. I was hysterical because I was so caught off guard that we still brought something like this with us. “I don’t know the real reason why nobody considered Xiomara, and I’m scared to ask at this point. I’m hoping it’s because she looks tough as hell and like the kind of person who would beat up highly educated people rather than be one.” Wiping a tear from my face, I glanced at Tyche. Her jaw was tight, clearly thinking the same things I was. “But the fact that she is the only other woman on the Council, that hurts, honestly.”

I took a few deep breaths to compose myself. “The fact is, Xiomara has five degrees. Five. Along with her military career. Tyche and I have to know this, since we handle staffing.” Counting on my fingers, I started ticking them off. “Two doctorates, one in international law and one in experimental economics - as in, yes, the calorie economy was her idea. A Master’s in military history, along with two Bachelor’s degrees: one in experimental chemistry and one in nuclear physics.” Shaking my head, I glanced at the shocked and guilty expressions in the room. “It isn’t three PhDs, but damn, y’all. The woman has five degrees!”

“How did she do that, and a military career, so young?” Maverick asked, his tone nothing but awed.

Antoine looked confused at the question. “My friend, how old do you think Xiomara is?”

He shrugged. “Sophie’s age? So, thirtyish?”

Conor poked him. “Mav. You know how old Sophie is.”

Maverick rolled his eyes. “Fine. So maybe forty? The whole healing stuff messes with me, I’ll be honest.”

Smiling, I cut him some slack. “Xiomara is just over ten years older than me,” I clarified.

Hannah’s eyes widened, and Zach looked like he had been punched in the gut. “So hot-scary-lady is fifty?” After Tyche and I nodded, he shook his head. “That’s still super-impressive for fifty. For seventy, even!” Zach shook his head. “Grey, I could understand. They seem like the type to just live for education, you know? But, Xio? I’ve known for a year and I still get dizzy thinking about it.”

“It does explain why she’s so intimidating,” Conor pointed out. When I opened my mouth to scold him, he held up one hand. “No! No. Doctorates have to be argued and defended, right? Plus one of those is in law. And she balanced a military career on top of all that. If I accomplished all that, people would look at me with respect and expect me to be a direct, take-no-prisoners kind of person.” He glanced at Antoine, who winced and nodded in confirmation.

“She isn’t though,” I complained. “She’s a leader.”

“Definitely not ruthless, but she is intimidating to the general population,” Hannah pointed out gently. “That’s part of what Jokul was talking about, right? The Ark, as a whole, doesn’t get to see her get excited over her favorite foods, or pictures of baby pandas, or…. Cherries? Is it cherries she’s crazy for?”

“Pomegranate,” I corrected, begrudgingly.

“Pomegranate,” Hannah asserted. “They don’t get to see that. They get to see ‘hot-scary-lady who lays down the law’. Not ‘Xiomara who gets googly eyed when Parvati Fletcher wears that one violet shirt’.”

“Or hates plantains,” Tyche pointed out. “Which never made sense to me, because fried plantains are basically dessert with dinner.”

I started to giggle a bit. “It makes even less sense when you’ve seen her order coffee.” Tyche groaned, but more confused looks bounded about the room. Full out laughing, I explained. “She… she puts… maybe three ounces of coffee? Not espresso, just regular coffee… with what looks like a gallon - “ I snorted so hard it hurt my nose, but couldn’t stop. “Of milk! And sugar! Oh gods, she must put a cup of sugar in her coffee, I swear!”

Hannah and Zach exchanged glances, as did Conor and Maverick. Within seconds, the entire room erupted in laughter. “That?” Conor gasped. “That is hilarious….”

“I...I always thought… she took her coffee blacker than sin….” Zach wheezed. “And baby pandas?”

Sobering suddenly, I straightened and glared at the entire room. “OI!” I shouted. “Baby pandas are fucking cute, and if you don’t think so, you aren’t human, and I will ask Noah to do genetic testing to prove that.”

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#the miys #science fiction #humans are weird #found family #humans are space orcs #earth is space australia #aliens #apocalypse #found family tropes #hfy #humans are awesome #humans are space fae

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desiraypark · 4 years

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Drawing New Lines (Final)

Previous Entire Series

Characters: Kylo Ren x Tiffany Palmer (OC - Blk/F) Setting: Modern/Current/Alternate Universe (I went ahead and set it in NYC/NJ lol) Content: Brief smut (possibly dub-con?); *plays “Freedom” by Beyoncé

“Do you think your brother would be willing to help me?”

“Of course. Even if he wasn’t, I’d make him anyway.”

“They drive around my building. They drive around here. They park outside of my clients’ house. I can’t get away from them.”

“Say no more. I know what you need.”

They waited for two weeks. Tiffany didn’t want to leave her co-workers scrambling. Even when in danger, she felt the need to think of others. Additionally, the plan needed to be well thought out. She needed to buy airline tickets. She needed to call her mother. If Kylo were just your average Joe, she could have just abandoned everything. But no…

Kylo was the son of Michael Ren--entrepreneurs with important affiliations. He was the wife of Chelsea Ren, born Chelsea Palpatine--protégé of her father. The Rens and the Palpatines had the city--the state, even--on lock. They had eyes and shooters everywhere. She couldn’t “just leave”.

“What are you thinking about?” Kylo asked at the dinner table.

Dinner was a bit more comforting tonight--breakfast for dinner. Shrimp and grits, bacon, and biscuits from scratch. The meal warmed her. Relaxed her. It eased a longing.

Tiffany shook out her head out of its haze. “What?”

“I said, what are you thinking about?”

She shook her head again. “Nothing.”

“That didn’t look like a nothin’ face,” Kylo pushed.

She thought quickly. “Thinking about a pushy client.”

Kylo raised an eyebrow. “A pushy client?”

Tiffany nodded with confidence. “They wanted me to decorate their living room but they micromanaged me. Now their shit is ugly.”

Kylo chuckled. “As long as they don’t give you any bad reviews or anything.”

Tiffany agreed with a forced smile, and returned her attention to her plate.

“You look beautiful tonight.”

“Thank you...”

Kylo stared at her. Suddenly, she became self-conscious. She didn’t look particularly different, or special. Did he suspect something? Was this a trick? He patted his lap.

“Come here,” he said.

Tiffany chuckled nervously. “For what?”

“For what?” he asked. “Just get over here.”

She cleared her throat and walked over to Kylo’s side of the table. He took her hand and gently pulled her down to his lap. His hand ran up and down her thigh, then he gave her ass a squeeze.

“Take your pants off.”

Tiffany’s heart skipped a beat. They’d done this before. “Kylo, this food is going to get cold.”

“And we can heat it back up.” He tugged at the band on her pants. “Take your pants off.”

Tiffany stood up and pulled down her slacks, revealing her luscious hips in boy shorts. Kylo bit his lip and ran his fingertips up her thighs. “Has it been long enough?”

Tiffany was being torn in three different directions. She could’ve lied--and said that her body needed more time (because he truly didn’t deserve to touch her). She could have told him the truth--yes, it had been long enough. He’d probably researched it, anyway. Or, she could have told him the truth because unfortunately, she needed him inside of her one more time.

She pulled down her underwear and Kylo ran his finger between her outer lips--feeling her warmth and gathering her wetness.

“Did she miss me?” he asked. He shoved a finger inside and met Tiffany’s eyes. Her jaw dropped. She could have slapped herself in the face. Kylo chuckled to himself, slid his chair back, then tapped the dining table.

Tiffany climbed onto the table, and Kylo slid his chair close. He pried her thighs apart, exposing her to him--her beautiful flower blossomed and ready for the taking. He leaned in and dragged his pointed tongue against her clit. Her eyes closed. She grabbed his hair and threw her head back.

____________________

“I texted him,” Tiffany said, walking through the parking garage with Adelle. She looked around and lowered her voice to a whisper. “I asked if he was planning on coming over.”

Adelle unlocked the doors to her Mercedes and they both climbed into the car.

“What did he say?”

“He said he was busy. Then asked why.”

Adelle started her car. “And what did you say?”

“I haven’t texted back yet.”

Adelle slowly backed out of her space. “Tell him where you’re going. If you don’t say anything he’s going to get suspicious. Just say a restaurant. Only tell him the name if he asks.”

“And if I lie, Black Car is going to tell him differently,” Tiffany thought out loud.

Tiffany texted Kylo, telling him that she would be dining with her boss. Of course, he asked where. And she told him: The Red House.

The black car was behind them the whole time--one, two, sometimes three cars away. But Adelle drove like a secret agent--unfathomed and in charge. Miraculously, she found a space not far from the restaurant. She grabbed her phone, ID, and credit card, and stuffed the items in her jacket pocket. Tiffany did practically the same--stuffing her wallet into her suit jacket. The ladies placed their handbags and laptops in the trunk of Adelle’s car, then walked just several yards to the restaurant’s door.

Chills went down Tiffany’s spine as they walked into The Red House. The air was palpable. Old images flashed in her mind--Kylo at the bar with another woman, many Decembers ago. She looked out at the dim hallway in the back, remembering when she came out of the restroom and he was standing there. The host sat them near the kitchen at a table with four seats.

“Your server will be right with you,” he said.

“Thank you. Could you tell Mr. Mason that Adelle is here?”

“Uh, yes ma’am,” the host said, nodding.

Tiffany feigned a search over the menu. Then, Antoine Mason came from the back, bent down, and hugged his twin sister.

“Hey, Sis,” he said.

“Hey, Honey.”

He looked at Tiffany. “How are you this evening?”

Tiffany shivered. “Excited. Scared.”

“No need to be scared,” he said. He looked at Adelle. “John?”

“All set,” Adelle said. Antoine returned his attention to Tiffany and smiled. “Your server will come soon. I told her all she needed to know.”

Tiffany nodded and Antoine smiled, then walked away. Then, a young lady walked to them. “Good evening, Ladies,” she said, pulling out her pad. “Can I start you off with something to drink?”

No alcohol. Adelle got a raspberry lemonade, Tiffany iced tea. Their minds needed to be clear. Rolls and salads came. House salads. Nothing that Antoine or the cook would be angry to see wasted. The server “took their orders”. Then, Adelle got up to grab something from her car. Moments later, she returned with a random bottle of hand sanitizer.

“Don’t panic,” Adelle said. “Where they’re parked, they can see right inside. They can see the kitchen.”

“Fuck,” Tiffany whispered. Her heart rate increased and she rested her elbow on the table.

“Don’t panic, don’t panic,” Adelle said.

“You telling me not to panic is making me panic,” Tiffany mumbled.

Tiffany and Adelle waited for their server to come back. She asked if they were okay, and needed refills. Adelle said “yes”, but said she would need to text her brother. Only two minutes passed, and Antoine instructed them to continue with their plan...

Tiffany got up to use the restroom. She stood in the bathroom, pacing the floor. Her breaths bounced off the linoleum and met her ears. Taunting her. She paced a couple of more minutes--as planned--then slowly opened the bathroom door. Standing by the kitchen door was Antoine, fiddling with an old rolling cart, covered in white linen.

“Stay right there,” he said, voice booming down the short hallway.

Tiffany kept her back to the door. Antoine shook his head and pushed the cart down the hallway and stopped in front of Tiffany.

“Climb in,” he said.

Tiffany shook her head and laughed.

Antoine lifted the linen that covered the cart and Tiffany climbed in. She sat in a tight ball as the rickety wheels rolled over the restaurant’s tile floor--the very tile that sat under her feet when Kylo invited her to his hotel room. The light outside of the linen brightened, and the cloth was lifted. Antoine held out his hand and helped Tiffany out of the cart. Unknowing cooks looked at the scene with knitted eyebrows, as Antoine led her out the back door and toward a blue car in the alley.

Antoine opened the back door and she climbed in his back seat, laid on the floor, and burst into tears.

“You take care, Sweetheart,” Antoine said. He closed the back door.

“Oh, don’t you start that now!” John joked. “Tears of joy?”

“Yes,” Tiffany whimpered.

There was a short silence, then John began to speak.

“Hey baby,” he said. “She’s in here...you in your car?...Alright. Stay on the phone with me.”

Tiffany wiped her tears.

“North Carolina, huh? My family’s from South Carolina…” John said. He started his engine.

“What?” Adelle said through the speakerphone.

“Talking to Tiffany.”

“Oh,” Adelle responded. She chuckled. “I don’t think this man is even paying attention to me...”

____________________

Two Days Later

Kylo’s fingers and ears were stuck to two phones--his personal phone and his business phone. He had his business phone to his ear, and his eyes trained on his personal phone. Suddenly, it lit up.

Cardo: Nothing, still. No sign, no trace.

Kylo balled his fist, imagining Cardo was in front of him so he could beat the shit out of him again.

“Yeah, do what the fuck you have to do,” Kylo said, rushing off his business phone. “Alright.”

Chelsea strolled around the corner, just in time to see Kylo hang up his flip phone and quickly look down at his desk.

Kylo rolled his eyes at the sight of Chelsea and her smirk, then took a swig of his drink. His smartphone went dim.

��What?” he asked.

Chelsea walked behind him and ran her fingers down his chest. She planted kisses on his cheek.

“Your boyfriend out of town?” His phone lit up.

“No, I’m actually going to see him tomorrow,” she said.

Cardo: So sorry Boss. Please forgive me.

Kylo grunted and took a sip of his drink. Chelsea kissed him on the neck, then nibbled on his ear.

“I know that you’ll probably be able to find her…” she mumbled into his canal. “But if you ever put your hands on her, or any other woman again…”

Kylo slowly put his drink down, as Chelsea sucked at his neck again.

“I will beat the shit out of myself…” Kiss. “Tell my father you did it…” Kiss. “…and let him chop you into tiny pieces and fry you up for breakfast.”

Chelsea licked a stripe up his neck and to his cheek. Then, planted another kiss. She walked out of the study and froze in the hallway. She put her hands on her hips and smiled.

“Come say goodnight to your father, my loves!” she said. ____________________ December 2020 (A Few Days Before Christmas)

Christmas in Charlotte was a world different from Christmas in New York. There was no need for central heat in Gina Palmer’s house in December. The air was warm and balmy. Tiffany sat on her full-sized bed, staring at the flip phone on her dresser. Finally, she stood up, walked to the dresser, and opened the phone. She called the Cannon Street Design Firm, and pressed 111--her desired party’s extension.

“Cannon Street Design Firm, this is Adelle Mason-Brooks speaking.”

“Hi, Adelle...it’s Tiffany...”

There was a brief pause. “Tiffany?”

“Yes...”

“How are you, Sweetie?” Adelle asked, joy in her voice.

“I’m fine. Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas to you. I’m so glad you’ve called me.”

“How’s everything?”

“Everything is everything,” Adelle said. She cleared her throat. “Mrs. Ren was here a few days ago.”

Tiffany swallowed.

“She just wanted to know if you were alright. I told the chick that I wouldn’t know.”

Tiffany chuckled. “Thanks.”

“A strange dynamic those two have, huh?”

“The whole thing was strange...” Tiffany responded with a grunt.

“Well. Yeah. That’s true. She gave me a message to pass on to you...”

Tiffany could hear Adelle shuffling around on her desk.

“She put it in a Christmas card and everything. Hold on...”

There was a long pause--paper rustling--and Adele cleared her throat. “The card just says Happy Holidays, blah blah. But she wrote, “I don’t know how you did it, but I’m happy you did it. You are my hero.” Signed, “CR”.”

Tiffany drew in a deep breath, smiled, and shook her head. “That was nice.”

“Yeah, it was...want me to hold on to it?”

Tiffany took another deep breath. “No. No need to.”

Suddenly, there was a knock at Tiffany’s door. Then, it opened. Gina Palmer peeped in and smile--the movement of her cheeks shifting the old scar that ran down her cheek.

“I made shrimp and grits,” Gina whispered.

Tiffany smiled and nodded at her mother. Gina smiled harder and slipped back out of the room.

“--but I’m so glad you called me. Should I save this number?” Adelle asked.

“Yes, I’d like for you to,” Tiffany replied.

“Alright.”

“Thank you for everything Adelle. I owe your whole family, pretty much.”

“You don’t owe us a thing, Honey. Not a thing.” Tiffany smiled to herself. “Merry Christmas, Adelle.”

“Merry Christmas, Tiffany.”

Tiffany closed her phone and walked out of her bedroom. She walked down the dim hallway--the wall’s wood paneling straight out of the 70s, and joined her mother in the kitchen for shrimp and grits, bacon, and homemade biscuits. ____________________

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petulantskeptic · 3 years

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Death of the calorie

For more than a century we’ve counted on calories to tell us what will make us fat. Peter Wilson says it’s time to bury the world’s most misleading measure BY PETER WILSON The first time that Salvador Camacho thought he was going to die he was sitting in his father’s Chrysler sedan with a friend listening to music. The 22-year-old engineering student was parked near his home in the central Mexican city of Toluca and in the fading evening light he didn’t notice two tattooed men approach. Tori Amos’s hit, “Bliss”, had just started playing when the gang members pointed guns at the young men. So began a 24-hour ordeal. Strong willed and solidly built, Camacho was singled out as the more stubborn of the pair. He was blindfolded and beaten. One robber eventually threw him to the ground, put a gun to the back of his head and told him it was time to die. He passed out, waking in a field with his hands tied behind his back, almost naked. Camacho survived but, traumatised, he sank into depression. Soon he was drinking heavily and binge eating. His weight ballooned from a trim 70kg to 103kg. That led to his second near-death experience, eight years later, in 2007. He remembers waking up and blinking at bright lights: he was being wheeled on a stretcher into a hospital emergency ward, with an attack of severe arrhythmia, or irregular heart beat. “A cardiologist told me that if I didn’t lose weight and get my health under control I would be dead in five years,” he says. That second crisis forced Camacho belatedly to deal with the trauma of the first. To help with what he now understands was post-traumatic stress disorder, he started having counselling and taking anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs. To address his physical health, he tried to lose weight. This effort propelled him to the centre of one of the most fraught scientific debates of our age: the calorie wars, a fierce disagreement about diet and weight control. Today, more than a decade after his cardiologist’s stark warning, Camacho lives in the Swiss city of Basel. He is relaxed and confident, except when two topics come up. When he recounts his kidnapping his gaze drops, his smile vanishes and he becomes noticeably quieter, although he says his panic attacks have virtually disappeared. The other touchy topic is weight control, which causes him to shake his head in anger at what he and millions of other dieters have gone through. “It’s just ridiculous,” he says with exasperation and a touch of venom. “People are living with real pain and guilt and all they get is advice that is confused or just plain wrong.” The guidance that Camacho’s doctors gave him, along with a string of nutritionists and his own online research, was unanimous. It would be familiar to the millions of people who have ever tried to diet. “Everybody tells you that to lose weight you have to eat less and move more,” he says, “and the way to do that is to count your calories.” At his heaviest, Camacho’s body-mass index – the ratio of his height to his weight – reached 35.6, well above the 30 mark that doctors define as clinically obese. Most government guidelines indicated that, as a man, he needed 2,500 calories a day to maintain his weight (the target for women is 2,000). Nutritionists told Camacho that if he ate fewer than 2,000 calories a day, a weekly “deficit” of 3,500 would mean that he would lose 0.5kg a week. With a desk job as a planning engineer in a Mexican hospital, he knew it would take real discipline to trim his pudgy frame. But as his kidnappers had quickly realised, he is an unusually determined character. He began getting up before dawn each day to run 10km. He also started accounting for every morsel of food he consumed. “I filled in Excel spreadsheets every night, every week and every month listing everything I ate. It became a real obsession for me,” says Camacho. Out went the Burger King Whoppers, fried tacos packed with pork and cheese, and tortas (Mexican sandwiches filled with meat, refried beans, avocado and peppers). Out too went his usual steady flow of beer and wine. In came carefully measured low-fat cheese and turkey sandwiches, salads, canned peach juice, Gatorade and Coke Zero, with three Special-K low-calorie diet bars a day. “I was always tired and hungry and I would get really moody and distracted,” he says. “I was thinking about food all the time.” He was constantly told that if he got the maths right – consuming fewer calories than he burned each day – the results would soon show. “I really did everything you are supposed to do,” he insists with the tone of a schoolboy who completed his homework yet still failed a big test. He bought a battery of exercise monitoring devices to measure how many calories he was expending on his runs. “I was told to exercise for at least 45 minutes at least four or five times a week. I actually ran for more than an hour every day.” He kept to low-fat, low-calorie food for three years. It simply didn’t work. At one point he lost about 10kg but his weight rebounded, though he still restricted his calories. Dieters the world over will be familiar with Camacho’s frustrations. Most studies show that more than 80% of people regain any lost weight in the long term. And like him, when we fail, most of us assume that we are too lazy or greedy – that we are at fault. As a general rule it is true that if you eat vastly fewer calories than you burn, you’ll get slimmer (and if you consume far more, you’ll get fatter). But the myriad faddy diets flogged to us each year belie the simplicity of the formula that Camacho was given. The calorie as a scientific measurement is not in dispute. But calculating the exact calorific content of food is far harder than the confidently precise numbers displayed on food packets suggest. Two items of food with identical calorific values may be digested in very different ways. Each body processes calories differently. Even for a single individual, the time of day that you eat matters. The more we probe, the more we realise that tallying calories will do little to help us control our weight or even maintain a healthy diet: the beguiling simplicity of counting calories in and calories out is dangerously flawed. The calorie is ubiquitous in daily life. It takes top billing on the information label of most packaged food and drinks. Ever more restaurants list the number of calories in each dish on their menus. Counting the calories we expend has become just as standard. Gym equipment, fitness devices around our wrists, even our phones tell us how many calories we have supposedly burned in a single exercise session or over the course of a day. It wasn’t always thus. For centuries, scientists assumed that it was the mass of food consumed that was significant. In the late 16th century an Italian physician named Santorio Sanctorius invented a “weighing chair”, dangling from a giant scale, in which he sat at regular intervals to weigh himself, everything he ate and drank, and all the faeces and urine he produced. Despite 30 years of compulsive chair dangling, Sanctorius answered few of his own questions about the impact that his consumption had on his body. Only later did the focus shift to the energy different foodstuffs contained. In the 18th century Antoine Lavoisier, a French aristocrat, worked out that burning a candle required a gas from the air – which he named oxygen – to fuel the flame and release heat and other gases. He applied the same principle to food, concluding that it fuels the body like a slow-burning fire. He built a calorimeter, a device big enough to hold a guinea pig, and measured the heat the creature generated to estimate how much energy it was producing. Unfortunately the French revolution – specifically the guillotine – cut short his thinking on the subject. But he had started something. Other scientists later constructed “bomb calorimeters” in which they burned food to measure the heat – and thus the potential energy – released from it. The calorie – which comes from “calor”, the Latin for “heat” – was originally used to measure the efficiency of steam engines: one calorie is the energy required to heat 1kg of water by one degree Celsius. Only in the 1860s did German scientists begin using it to calculate the energy in food. It was an American agricultural chemist, Wilbur Atwater, who popularised the idea that it could be used to measure both the energy contained in food and the energy the body expended on things like muscular work, tissue repair and powering the organs. In 1887, after a trip to Germany, he wrote a series of wildly popular articles in Century, an American magazine, suggesting that “food is to the body what fuel is to the fire.” He introduced the public to the notion of “macronutrients” – carbohydrates, protein and fat – so called because the body needs a lot of them. Today many of us want to monitor our calorie consumption in order to lose or maintain our weight. Atwater, the son of a Methodist minister, was motivated by the opposite concern: at a time when malnutrition was widespread, he sought to help poor people find the most cost-effective items to fill themselves up. To see how much energy different macronutrients provided to the body, he fed samples of an “average” American diet of that era – which he believed to be heavy in molasses cookies, barley meal and chicken gizzards – to a group of male students in a basement at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. For up to 12 days at a time a volunteer would eat, sleep and lift weights while sealed inside a six-foot-high chamber measuring four feet wide by seven feet deep. The energy in each meal was calculated by burning identical foods in a bomb calorimeter. The walls were filled with water, and changes in its temperature allowed Atwater to calculate how much energy the students’ bodies were generating. His team collected the students’ faeces and burned that too, to see how much energy had been left in the body in the digestion process. This was pioneering stuff for the 1890s. Atwater eventually concluded that a gram of either carbohydrate or protein made an average of four calories of energy available to the body, and a gram of fat offered an average of 8.9 calories, a figure later rounded up to nine calories for convenience. We now know far more about the workings of the human body: Atwater was right that some of a meal’s potential energy was excreted, but had no idea that some was also used to digest the meal itself, and that the body expends different amounts of energy depending on the food. Yet more than a century after igniting the faeces of Wesleyan students, the numbers Atwater calculated for each macronutrient remain the standard for measuring the calories in any given food stuff. Those experiments were the basis of Salvador Camacho’s daily calorific arithmetic. Atwater transformed the way the public thought about food, with his simple belief that “a calorie is a calorie”. He counselled the poor against eating too many leafy green vegetables because they weren’t sufficiently dense in energy. By his account, it made no difference whether calories came from chocolate or spinach: if the body absorbed more energy than it used, then it would store the excess as body fat, causing you to put on weight. That idea captured the public imagination. In 1918 the first book was published in America based on the notion that a healthy diet was no more complicated than the simple addition and subtraction of calories. “You may eat just what you like – candy, pie, cake, fat meat, butter, cream but count your calories!” wrote Lulu Hunt Peters in “Diet and Health”. “Now that you know you can have the things you like, proceed to make your menus containing very little of them.” The book sold millions. By the 1930s the calorie had become entrenched in both the public mind and government policy. Its exclusive focus on the energy content of food, rather than its vitamin content, say, went virtually unchallenged. Rising incomes and greater female participation in the workforce meant that by the 1960s people were eating out more often or buying prepared food, so they wanted more information about what they were consuming. Nutritional information on foodstuffs was widespread but haphazard; many items carried outlandish claims about their health benefits. Labelling became standardised and mandatory in America only in 1990. The emphasis and use of this information shifted too. By the late 1960s, obesity was becoming a pressing health concern as people became more sedentary and started eating highly processed foods and lots of sugar. As the number of people who needed to lose weight grew, changing diets became the focus of attention. So began the war on fat, in which Atwater’s calorie calculations were an unwitting ally. Because counting calories was seen as an objective arbiter of the health qualities of a foodstuff, it seemed logical that the most calorie-laden part of any food item – fat – must be bad for you. By this measure, dishes low in calories, but rich in sugar and carbohydrates, seemed healthier. People were increasingly willing to blame fat for many of the health ills of modern life, helped along by the sugar lobby: in 2016, a researcher at the University of California uncovered documents from 1967 showing that sugar companies secretly funded studies at Harvard University designed to blame fat for the growing obesity epidemic. That the dietary “fat” found in olive oil, bacon and butter is branded with the same word as the unwanted flesh around our middles made it all the easier to demonise. A us Senate committee report in 1977 recommended a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet for all, and other governments followed suit. The food industry responded with enthusiasm, removing fat, the most calorie-dense of macronutrients, from food items and replacing it with sugar, starch and salt. As a bonus, the thousands of new cheap and tasty “low-cal” and “low-fat” products which Camacho used to diet tended to have longer shelf lives and higher profit margins. But this didn’t lead to the expected improvements in public health. Instead, it coincided almost exactly with the most dramatic rise in obesity in human history. Between 1975 and 2016 obesity almost tripled worldwide, according to the World Health Organisation (who): nearly 40% of over-18s – some 1.9bn adults – are now overweight. That contributed to a rapid rise in cardiovascular diseases (mainly heart disease and stroke) which became the leading cause of death worldwide. Rates of type-2 diabetes, which is often linked to lifestyle and diet, have more than doubled since 1980. It wasn’t only wealthy countries that saw such trends. In Mexico, middle-class urban families such as Camacho’s got fatter too. As a child Camacho was fit and loved playing football. But at the age of ten, in 1988, he was one of many young Mexicans who started stacking on weight as increasing trade with America saw cheap sweets and fizzy drinks flood the shops, a process known as the “Coca-colonisation” of Mexico. “There were suddenly all these flavours you had never tasted, with chocolates, candies and Dr Pepper,” Camacho remembers: “Overnight I got fat.” When his uncles teased him about his bulging waistline, he cut back on sweets and stayed in good shape until his kidnapping 12 years later. Other Mexicans just kept bulking up. In 2013 Mexico overtook America as the most obese country in the world. To combat this trend, governments worldwide have enshrined calorie-counting in policy. The who attributes the “fundamental cause” of obesity worldwide to “an energy imbalance between calories consumed and calories expended”. Governments the world over persist in offering the same advice: count and cut calories. This has infiltrated ever more areas of life. In 2018 the American government ordered food chains and vending machines to provide calorie details on their menus, to help consumers make “informed and healthful decisions”. Australia and Britain are headed in similar directions. Government bodies advise dieters to record their meals in a calorie journal to lose weight. The experimental efforts of a 19th-century scientist stand barely changed – and are barely questioned. Millions of dieters give up when their calorie-counting is unsuccessful. Camacho was more stubborn than most. He took photos of his meals to record his intake more accurately, and would log into his calorie spreadsheets from his phone. He thought about every morsel he ate. And he bought a proliferation of gadgets to track his calorie output. But he still didn’t lose much weight. One problem was that his sums were based on the idea that calorie counts are accurate. Food producers give impressively specific readings: a slice of Camacho’s favourite Domino’s double pepperoni pizza is supposedly 248 calories (not 247 nor 249). Yet the number of calories listed on food packets and menus are routinely wrong. Susan Roberts, a nutritionist at Tufts University in Boston, has found that labels on American packaged foods miss their true calorie counts by an average of 8%. American government regulations allow such labels to understate calories by up to 20% (to ensure that consumers are not short-changed in terms of how much nutrition they receive). The information on some processed frozen foods misstates their calorific content by as much as 70%. That isn’t the only problem. Calorie counts are based on how much heat a foodstuff gives off when it burns in an oven. But the human body is far more complex than an oven. When food is burned in a laboratory it surrenders its calories within seconds. By contrast, the real-life journey from dinner plate to toilet bowl takes on average about a day, but can range from eight to 80 hours depending on the person. A calorie of carbohydrate and a calorie of protein both have the same amount of stored energy, so they perform identically in an oven. But put those calories into real bodies and they behave quite differently. And we are still learning new insights: American researchers discovered last year that, for more than a century, we’ve been exaggerating by about 20% the number of calories we absorb from almonds. The process of storing fat – the “weight” many people seek to lose – is influenced by dozens of other factors. Apart from calories, our genes, the trillions of bacteria that live in our gut, food preparation and sleep affect how we process food. Academic discussions of food and nutrition are littered with references to huge bodies of research that still need to be conducted. “No other field of science or medicine sees such a lack of rigorous studies,” says Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at Kings College in London. “We can create synthetic dna and clone animals but we still know incredibly little about the stuff that keeps us alive.” What we do know, however, suggests that counting calories is very crude and often misleading. Think of a burger, the kind of food that Camacho eschewed during his early efforts to lose weight. Take a bite and the saliva in your mouth starts to break it down, a process that continues when you swallow, transporting the morsel towards your stomach and beyond to be churned further. The digestive process transforms the protein, carbohydrates and fat in the burger into their basic compounds so that they are tiny enough to be absorbed into the bloodstream via the small intestine to fuel and repair the trillions of cells in the body. But the basic molecules from each macronutrient play very different roles within the body. All carbohydrates break down into sugars, which are the body’s main fuel source. But the speed at which your body gets its fuel from food can be as important as the amount of fuel. Simple carbohydrates are swiftly absorbed into the bloodstream, providing a fast shot of energy: the body absorbs the sugar from a can of fizzy drink at a rate of 30 calories a minute, compared with two calories a minute from complex carbohydrates such as potatoes or rice. That matters, because a sudden hit of sugar prompts the rapid release of insulin, a hormone that carries the sugar out of the bloodstream and into the body’s cells. Problems arise when there is too much sugar in the blood. The liver can store some of the excess, but any that remains is stashed as fat. So consuming large quantities of sugar is the fastest way to create body fat. And, once the insulin has done its work, blood-sugar levels slump, which tends to leave you hungry, as well as plumper. Getting fat is a consequence of civilisation. Our ancestors would have enjoyed a heavy hit of sugar perhaps four times a year, when a new season produced fresh fruit. Many now enjoy that kind of sugar kick every day. The average person in the developed world consumes 20 times as much sugar as people did even during Atwater’s time. But it is a different story when you eat complex carbohydrates such as cereals. These are strung together from simple carbohydrates, so they also break down into sugar, but because they do so more slowly, your blood-sugar levels remain steadier. The fruit juices that Camacho was encouraged to drink contained fewer calories than one of his wholegrain buns but the bread delivered less of a sugar hit and left him feeling satiated for longer. Other macronutrients have different functions. Protein, the dominant component of meat, fish and dairy products, acts as the main building block for bone, skin, hair and other body tissues. In the absence of sufficient quantities of carbohydrates it can also serve as fuel for the body. But since it is broken down more slowly than carbohydrates, protein is less likely to be converted to body fat. Fat is a different matter again. It should leave you feeling fuller for longer, because your body splits it into tiny fatty acids more slowly than it processes carbohydrates or protein. We all need fat to make hormones and to protect our nerves (a bit like plastic coating protects an electric wire). Over millennia, fat has also been a crucial way for humans to store energy, allowing us to survive periods of famine. Nowadays, even without the risk of starvation, our bodies are programmed to store excess fuel in case we run out of food. No wonder a single measure – the energy content – can’t capture such complexity. Our fixation with counting calories assumes both that all calories are equal and that all bodies respond to calories in identical ways: Camacho was told that, since he was a man, he needed 2,500 calories a day to maintain his weight. Yet a growing body of research shows that when different people consume the same meal, the impact on each person’s blood sugar and fat formation will vary according to their genes, lifestyles and unique mix of gut bacteria. Research published this year showed that a certain set of genes is found more often in overweight people than in skinny ones, suggesting that some people have to work harder than others to stay thin (a fact that many of us already felt intuitively to be true). Differences in gut microbiomes can alter how people process food. A study of 800 Israelis in 2015 found that the rise in their blood-sugar levels varied by a factor of four in response to identical food. Some people’s intestines are 50% longer than others: those with shorter ones absorb fewer calories, which means that they excrete more of the energy in food, putting on less weight. The response of your own body may also change depending on when you eat. Lose weight and your body will try to regain it, slowing down your metabolism and even reducing the energy you spend on fidgeting and twitching your muscles. Even your eating and sleeping schedules can be important. Going without a full night’s sleep may spur your body to create more fatty tissue, which casts a grim light on Camacho’s years of early-morning exertion. You may put on more weight eating small amounts over 12-15 hours than eating the same food in three distinct meals over a shorter period. There’s a further weakness in the calorie-counting system: the amount of energy we absorb from food depends on how we prepare it. Chopping and grinding food essentially does part of the work of digestion, making more calories available to your body by ripping apart cell walls before you eat it. That effect is magnified when you add heat: cooking increases the proportion of food digested in the stomach and small intestine, from 50% to 95%. The digestible calories in beef rises by 15% on cooking, and in sweet potato some 40% (the exact change depends on whether it is boiled, roasted or microwaved). So significant is this impact that Richard Wrangham, a primatologist at Harvard University, reckons that cooking was necessary for human evolution. It enabled the neurological expansion that created Homo sapiens: powering the brain consumes about a fifth of a person’s metabolic energy each day (cooking also means we didn’t need to spend all day chewing, unlike chimps). The difficulty in counting accurately doesn’t stop there. The calorie load of carbohydrate-heavy items such as rice, pasta, bread and potatoes can be slashed simply by cooking, chilling and reheating them. As starch molecules cool they form new structures that are harder to digest. You absorb fewer calories eating toast that has been left to go cold, or leftover spaghetti, than if they were freshly made. Scientists in Sri Lanka discovered in 2015 that they could more than halve the calories potentially absorbed from rice by adding coconut oil during cooking and then cooling the rice. This made the starch less digestible so the body may take on fewer calories (they have yet to test on human beings the precise effects of rice cooked in this way). That’s a bad thing if you’re malnourished, but a boon if you’re trying to lose weight. Different parts of a vegetable or fruit may be absorbed differently too: older leaves are tougher, for example. The starchy interior of sweetcorn kernels is easily digested but the cellulose husk is impossible to break down and passes through the body untouched. Just think about that moment when you look into the toilet bowl after eating sweetcorn. As with so many dieters, Camacho’s efforts to accurately track his calories “in” were doomed. But so too were his attempts to track his calories “out”. The message from many public authorities and food producers, especially fast-food companies that sponsor sports events, is that even the unhealthiest foods will not make you fat if you do your part by taking plenty of exercise. Exercise does, of course, have clear health benefits. But unless you’re a professional athlete, it plays a smaller part in weight control than most people believe. As much as 75% of the average person’s daily energy expenditure comes not through exercise but from ordinary daily activities and from keeping your body functioning by digesting food, powering organs and maintaining a regular body temperature. Even drinking iced water – which delivers no energy – forces the body to burn calories to maintain its preferred temperature, making it the only known case of consuming something with “negative” calories. A popular expression in English tells us not to “compare apples and oranges” and assume them to be the same: yet calories put pizzas and oranges, or apples and ice cream, on the same scale, and deems them equal. After three years of dedicated calorie-counting Camacho changed tack. While recovering from running the 2010 marathon in San Diego he took up Crossfit training, an exercise regime that includes high-intensity training and weightlifting. There he met people using a very different method to control their weight. Like him, they exercised regularly. But rather than limiting their calories, they ate natural foods, what Camacho calls “stuff from a real plant, not an industrial plant”. Fed up with feeling like a hungry failure, he decided to give it a go. He ditched his heavily processed low-calorie products and focused on the quality of his food rather than quantity. He stopped feeling ravenous all the time. “It sounds simple but I decided to listen to my body and eat whenever I was hungry but only when I was hungry, and to eat real food, not food ‘products’,” he says. He went back to items that he’d long banned himself from eating. He had his first rasher of bacon in three years and enjoyed cheese, whole-fat milk and steaks. He immediately felt less hungry and happier. More surprising, he quickly began to lose his extra fat. “I was sleeping so much better and within a couple of months I stopped the depression and anxiety medication,” he says. “I went from always feeling guilty and angry and afraid to feeling in control of myself and actually proud of my own body. Suddenly I could enjoy eating and drinking again.” The weight stayed off and in 2012 he moved to Heidelberg in Germany, a world away from the hectic streets of Mexico, to study for a masters degree in public health. “The idea hit me that I could combine my own experience with academic work to try to help other people overcome these various barriers that I had found.” After his masters he embarked on a doctorate on how to tackle obesity in Mexico. Today he is married to a German scholar, Erica Gunther, who has studied food systems around the world. Their diet includes things he used to shun, such as egg yolks, olive oil and nuts. Two days a week the couple stick to vegetarian meals but otherwise he devours steak, kidneys, liver and some of his favourite Mexican dishes – barbacoa (lamb), carnitas (pork) and tacos with grilled meat. His wife enjoys making a traditional Mexican sweet pastry called pan de muerto (bread of death). “Before I would have run an extra two hours to compensate for eating that but now I don’t care, I just make sure it is a treat, not an everyday thing.” Having spent years trying to forgo alcohol, he has a glass or two of wine several times a week, and goes for a beer with friends from his gym. Sweating through three or four workouts a week, he is as well-muscled as a professional rugby player. A stable 80kg, he has very little body fat, though he is still considered overweight by the body-mass-index charts, which rate many beefed-up professional athletes as too heavy. The only relapse of anxiety he suffers nowadays happens when he hears Tori Amos singing “Bliss” – the song playing when he was kidnapped – which he says “is a real pity because it’s a great song”. Today Camacho could be described as a calorie dissident, one of a small but growing number of academics and scientists who say that the persistence of calorie-counting compounds the obesity epidemic, rather than remedying it. Counting calories has disrupted our ability to eat the right amount of food, he says, and has steered us towards poor choices. In 2017 he wrote an academic paper that was one of the most savage attacks on the calorie system published in a peer-reviewed journal. “I’m actually embarrassed at what I used to believe,” he says. “I was doing everything I could to follow the official advice but it was totally wrong and I feel stupid for never even questioning it.” Given the vast evidence that calorie-counting is imprecise at best, and contributes to rising obesity at worst, why has it persisted? The simplicity of calorie-counting explains its appeal. Metrics that tell consumers the extent to which foods have been processed, or whether they will suppress hunger, are harder to understand. Faced with the calorie juggernaut, none has gained wide acceptance. The scientific and health establishment knows that the current system is flawed. A senior adviser to the un’s Food and Agriculture Organisation warned in 2002 that the Atwater “factors” of 4-4-9 at the heart of the calorie-counting system were “a gross oversimplification” and so inaccurate that they could mislead consumers into choosing unhealthy products because they understate the calories in some carbohydrates. The organisation said it would give “further consideration” to overhauling the system but 17 years later there is little momentum for change. It even rejected the idea of harmonising the many methods that are used in different countries – a label in Australia can give a different count from one in America for the same product. Officials at the who also acknowledge the problems of the current system, but say it is so entrenched in consumer behaviour, public policy and industry standards that it would be too expensive and disruptive to make big changes. The experiments that Atwater conducted a century ago, without calculators or computers, have never been repeated even though our understanding of how our bodies work is vastly improved. There is little funding or enthusiasm for such work. As Susan Roberts at Tufts University says, collecting and analysing faeces “is the worst research job in the world”. The calorie system, says Camacho, lets food producers off the hook: “They can say, ‘We’re not responsible for the unhealthy products we sell, we just have to list the calories and leave it to you to manage your own weight’.” Camacho and other calorie dissidents argue that sugar and highly processed carbohydrates play havoc with people’s hormonal systems. Higher insulin levels mean more energy is converted into fat tissues leaving less available to fuel the rest of the body. That in turn drives hunger and overeating. In other words the constant hunger and fatigue suffered by Camacho and other dieters may be symptoms of being overweight, rather than the cause of the problem. Yet much of the food industry defends the status quo too. To change how we assess the energy and health values of food would undermine the business model of many companies. The only major organisation to shift the emphasis beyond calories is one dedicated to helping its customers slim down: Weight Watchers. In 2001 the world’s best-known dieting firm introduced a points system that moved away from focusing exclusively on calories to also classifying foods according to their sugar and saturated fat content, and their impact on appetite. Chris Stirk, the firm’s general manager in Britain, says the organisation made the change because relying on calories to lose weight is “outdated”: “Science evolves daily, monthly, yearly, let alone since the 1800s.” Many of us know instinctively that not all calories are the same. A lollipop and an apple may contain similar numbers of calories but the apple is clearly better for us. But after a lifetime of hearing about the calorie and its role in supposedly foolproof diet advice we could be forgiven for being confused about how best to eat. It’s time to lay it to rest.

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ninjakasuga · 4 years

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Sonal Celebration: Day 5

Day 5 of the Sonic & Sally celebration hosted by @boundforfreedomsonsal and here is my contribution to the ‘Alternative Universe’ prompt, ENJOY!!

Alternative Universe:

[Author’s notes: Gonna be using the Reboot Archive-verse for this one; hopefully, you all will find it as good as my preSGW Archive-verse stuff. Minus one or two bits of altered history, there’s very little changed compared to my compulsion to exceedingly alter things in the preSGW timeline. Also, this one will push the PG-13 a bit (mostly due to constant nudity and implications), but I promise to keep it as tasteful as possible but the set up for this is too good to pass up.]

The first rays of sunlight managed to cut through the drawn white almost-see through curtains of the room. Small sunbeams touching a large bed in the middle of a moderately high-end hotel. The rays of light finally touched the face of a blue sleeping hedgehog, whose soft snoring slowly came to a halt as the light was enough to make his eyelid twitch and then finally open. The single eye narrowed before a hand reached from under the covers, and fumbled around at the nightstand, looking for something. Finding the object, a remote; a push of the button caused a thicker curtain to slowly draw close via a mechanical track system. Thus quashing the annoying light rays of the sun. Satisfied, Sonic placed the remote back on the nightstand and curled back into a comfortable position and tried to return to dreamland.

Yet a new sensation prevented sleep from returning to him. His sleepy brain at first had trouble deducing what was going on, he just knew his left ear felt wet- wait a minute. Blinking his eyes open, Sonic craned his head and glanced upward, finding a familiar chipmunk nibbling his ear gently. “Good morning Sal, must you do that every morning?” He softly grumbled in his greeting of the one sharing his bed.

The Princess softly giggled and merely began to ‘groom’ the fur around his ear. “I’m just indulging an innate urge native to my chipmunk and squirrel heritage.” Her playful tone oozed a mix of sass and snark, but also a tenderness only he and one other got to hear. “Is it wrong of me to love on or groom my boyfriend?”

With a sleepy yawn, Sonic managed a smile, “No, nothing wrong there, but can’t you do it when I’m not sleepy?”

The sassy Princess just smirked back, not backing down, and in retaliation, just held his ear between her teeth, causing him to shudder. “I can’t help it, it’s fun to tease you, plus it is almost noon.”

The blue hedgehog reached back his hand bumping her hip as he tried to reach for her fluffy tail but Sally angled her body so it was out of reach. “D-dirty pool Sal!” He squirmed as she started to chew on his ear again. “R-really dirty, didn’t you get enough lovin’ last night?”

Sally was not relenting and slid her arms around his chest, keeping him pinned as she held his very chewable and cute ear hostage. “I diiiiid, but that doesn’t mean I can’t just do this because I love you and I ca-aaaaaaaaaaaaaannn!!” She suddenly yelped and released his ear as she felt a hand grasp her fluffy tail and squeeze softly. Her yelp transforming into a partial moan as the hand continued squeezing and playfully toying with her fluffy appendage. “Aaah! N-Nicole?”

At her name, a third party in the bed slid up from her ‘hiding spot’ in the covers, appearing behind Sally. As if to mimic Sally, Nicole softly nipped at one of her ears, while still keeping a hand on her tail. “You rang Sally-sweetie? Sorry, but I saw you harassing my main Hog’ and I had to save him.” After a slight pause, she playfully added with a crooked smile. “Also this tail was wagging in my face, bad Princess. You know it makes Hedgehog’s and Lynx’s pounce Chipmunk’s.”

Pumping a fist, and now free of Sally’s nibbling, Sonic rolls onto his other side to face the two, smirking as he holds up his hand in the air. “Nicole my sweet cyber-lady gimme some love!”

“Always my main man’.” She happily returned the high five with a free hand, before their fingers latched together in a handhold.

Feigning hurt, Sally pouted with a quibble of her lip. “Et tu Nicole? I thought you were my girlfriend?”

Releasing Sally’s tail and bringing that arm around to tilt her chin, the Lynx leaned in to kiss her lips. “I am, but I’m also his girlfriend, and you were being a Princess bully.” The matter-of-fact way the line was delivered, made Sonic snicker and Sally roll her eyes.

“I am not a Princess bully, and I’ll remember this next time he picks on you.” Arms crossed, Sally huffed, but a quiver of her lip hinted she was being playful and barely held back snickering at her own BS.

After releasing Nicole’s hand, Sonic put that hand to his chest as he sat up in bed. “Moi? Pick on Nicole? For shame Sally, why would I do that? She’s still getting used to her bio-nanite body, I’d be cruel to use my advanced knowledge of pranking on her.”

Both females stared at him with raised eyebrows and expressions unique to each other, that spoke volumes of how much they did not believe him. After a few moments of staring, the trio breaks out into sputters and then full-blown laughter. As their laughter died down, the three gave each other a hug, a kiss and then climbed out of bed.

Stretching, Sonic picked up the remote and had the thick curtain drawn to let sunlight in and so they could see the view outside. As he started to do a few post-wake-up stretches his mind wandered a bit, musing on recent events. After the Dark Gaia/Planet Break incident had been dealt with; the United Federation and other agencies against Eggman, helped the Freedom Fighters tow the Freedom Stormer to a coastal city where a G.U.N. controlled harbor and shipyard were stationed. As a thank you, for their efforts in helping fix the planet and stop Dark Gaia; G.U.N. offered the use of the shipyard to repair the Freedom Stormer. In the meantime, they would be set up at a hotel, on the U.F. 's tab with meals comped on top. Rather generous but none of the Freedom Fighters saw a reason to turn down the offer.

Tails and Rotor often would go to the shipyard to continue repairs, either by themselves or with Nicole or in some cases, help from the shipyard staff depending on what part of the flying vessel was being worked on. For the two tech-savvy inventors repairing the Stormer WAS a vacation, especially as they could get parts to do upgrades they had been pondering installing for a time. Oh, they still took some time to relax at the resort, but they were very content working at their craft.

Bunnie and Antoine decided to use the free time to have as they put it ‘extended honeymoon’ as their original one got cut short thanks to Eggman’s scheme of the week at the time. A sentiment everyone supported and so the two were spending most of this ‘mini-vacation’ by themselves for obvious reasons.

Big simply enjoyed being able to fish from the docks or the local beach. Give the big guy a chance to fulfill his pastime and he was content.

Amy went to visit her cousin who they found out was in the next town over. Some guy named Rob whose wife had just delivered their firstborn and Amy was keen to see the new baby. Cream and Cheese went with her, the young rabbit eager to see the newborn herself and enjoy the free time with one of her favorite people.

As for the three of them; well they would help with the Freedom Stormer repairs sometimes; especially Nicole as she would download herself back into the Stormer’s systems and help figure out what still needed fixing or simply help. Other times she would be helping Sally with her workload.

Speaking of Sally, she did what Sally did best when she wasn’t helping with getting the Stormer up and running, she was multitasking. Updating her Father, the King on what was going on, hosting holo-calls with allied leaders to discuss how to deal with Eggman while he was licking his wounds from this recent defeat. While Sonic usually found the ‘diplomacy’ a snore-feast he had to admit he enjoyed seeing Sally fired up and showing she had the chops as future Queen. Heck, she’d been pushing for the alliances to all really start some ‘info campaign’ to make sure the world knew just how far Dr. Eggman went since he was behind the whole planet breaking apart. Some stuff about ‘weakening his supporters' faith in him’ and stuff about ‘getting those still apathetic to the cause to see what will happen if they don’t all unite to stop the Eggman Empire’, etc, etc.

As for Sonic himself, when he wasn’t running, or doing what little grunt work he was capable of with the ongoing Freedom Stormer repairs; he was enjoying some needed downtime with Sally and Nicole. Especially since the three of them were keeping their ‘more than friends’ relations on the mum. Looking back at the two women who were gathering their discarded clothing items, he felt his cheeks redden at how things changed last night. In a really nice way, but well after focusing on saving the world and not being a werehog at night anymore, Sonic had not given things getting more intimate a thought, and they didn’t even go all the way last night. Just a lot of touching, kissing, and sleeping together without pajamas.

Then again when you nearly die for the umpteenth time and given how ‘close’ this last adventure was; in a way, he understood the need for something more. Whether or not they might cross the ‘next threshold’ anytime soon he didn’t know, but he wasn’t going to rush things. Some things were better taken the ‘slo-mo route’. Yet he doubted he would deny either of them if they sought more and everyone was in agreement. It was just one of those, see what may come situations with this three-way relationship.

Moving towards the window, he stared out at the lovely view facing the beach and a small stretch of beachside near the resort. The sun was up, and the world looked at peace, at least for the time being. One wouldn’t think the planet was in pieces last week. His smile slowly eased into a frown as a forlorn expression washed over his face as he recalled the ‘sacrifice’ made to fix everything. Okay maybe sacrifice was overkill, Chip wasn’t dead, he was just stuck inside the planet. Even with his assurances he could ‘feel and see’ them through the planet itself, it didn’t remove the sense of loss Sonic felt since the spirit returned to his duties. It hadn’t been that long Chip had been with them, but he left an impact and he’d become fond of the little guy.

“You gals think Chip’s okay? That he ain’t alone where he is?” He spoke suddenly, as he stared out the window. His words causing both Sally and Nicole to turn his way, their expressions almost mirroring Sonic’s as the loss of their friend hit them. Yet they each also carried concern for the blue hedgehog, since he was the one taking Chip’s return to the planet hardest. “I know he said he could, ‘feel’ through the world now that the Light and Dark Gaia were in balance and harmony was restored; that he wouldn’t be lonely like he was before; but… I worry he just said that to make it easier for us.”

He felt two pairs of arms wrap around him from behind, not an easy task with his quills, but Sally and Nicole seemed to have picked up the best way to go for a double hug without any quills jabbing into him. After a sigh exhaled from his throat, he rested a hand on each of theirs. “Sorry, don’t mean to be a downer, I just miss the little guy.”

Placing a kiss to his right cheek, Sally warmly nuzzled him as she craned her head so their eyes met. “It’s okay to feel that way Sonic, we all miss him in our own ways, and out of all of us you bonded to him the most.”

“You got him excited to see the world to understand the planet he was meant to protect and serve in his role. Not unlike how two certain someone’s did so for me.” Murmured Nicole as she rested her chin on Sonic’s shoulder, her fingers curling in his chest fur, a habit Sonic noticed that the lynx had picked up. “You inspired him to be the best he could, to find the courage inside he felt he lacked. Take it from me Sonic, even if he’s stuck within the planet, he knows he’s not alone and that he has you, and the rest of us as his friends.”

“I hope so, I really hope so Nicole.” As another sigh left him, the hedgehog slowly began to smile again as he leaned against the two women in his life. “Then all the more reason to kick Eggman’s keister so Chip doesn’t have to fret about some other horror being unleashed, and maybe, when all’s clear we can see him again.”

“That’s the spirit Sonic.” Cheered Sally as she squeezed him before taking his right arm and nudging him to follow. “Come on, the three of us should clean up, and that shower should easily handle three Mobian’s given it’s designed with humans in mind as well.” Her blue eyes twinkle with a bit of mischief as she smiled more. “I wash your back, you wash mine?”

“I call dibs on the tail!”

Laughing at Nicole’s outburst, Sonic shook his head, before giving the lynx a grin. “Fine you get the tail I’ll get the top!”

“Deal!” The lynx clasped hands with Sonic, a deal was struck.

Feeling a bead of sweat start to roll down the side of her face, Sally suddenly started to regret her suggestion. “Uh guys, WHA-?!” She cried out as she was lifted up into the air, Nicole holding her up by her feet, while Sonic held her up with his hands grasping under her arms. “N-now we shouldn’t get crazy the others will start to wonder if we’re late-.”

“Assuming they ain’t sleeping in themselves after all this is a vacation as much as recuperation from all the fighting.” The lynx sing-songed with a cheerful hum as she helped Sonic carry Sally to the bathroom. “We’ll behave and stick to just washing.”

“Maybe.” Sonic mused, earning a giggle from Nicole while Sally rolled her eyes, but smiled warmly.

“I love you goofs, and since you’re adamant, very well your Princess awaits her washing!”

The three share a laugh as Sonic uses his foot to kick the bathroom door shut. The worries of the future put aside as the three opted to share what time they could in this sort of blissful state. At any moment Eggman or his Egg Bosses could start a new incident and put their moment of peace out of commission. Sometimes, you just had to live a little.

[Author notes: Not very originally using the Post-SGW Reboot setting; but every time I tried to create some new alt-verse or one something of the prior ones; it just… Wasn’t working. So I decided to give this a go and rather enjoy it.

Also, I shamelessly do not regret my Sally/Nicole/Sonic shipping of the Reboot verse. So I decided to use it; and while in-story I didn’t explain it as to avoid killing the pacing here’s the 411 on Nicole having a ‘bio-nanite body’.

After restoring her hand-held, learning of her origins and stopping Phage, Dr. Ellidy before the crew left his lab revealed he had one other project that was to coincide with Nicole’s original purpose of being the digital repository of his daughter Nikki’s mind and memories. A pod containing a cluster of bio-nanites coded with Mobian Lynx DNA, that when given a brain to link with, could create a solid, actual living form. Granted it would still be a blend of natural and artificial but you’d have a living being able to experience the majority of the living experience. While still at odds with his feelings for Nicole; he feels Nikki would want Nicole to have all the chances to ‘have a full, and wonderful life and experiences’. So he gave the pod to the FF, and after some tinkering, Nicole downloaded herself into it and later emerged. Nicole was herself still but now with a body beyond hard light holograms. Yet she was still able to digitize herself and return to cyberspace and come back. Cue all the happiness.

As for the menage a trio, I may….revisit this and give them a fuller story and explanation. Hope it was good and sorry for the fatty A/N I just felt having to go over all this in-story would kill the pace.]

#Sonal #Sonally #boundingforfreedom #boundingforfreedomsonal #Fanfiction #Sonic the Hedgehog #Sally Acorn #Nicole the Lynx #PostSGW Reboot #romance #poly #sonsal week #sonsal celebration #boundforfreedom year two

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katedoesfics · 4 years

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Lacuna | Chapter 6

The following morning, Kahli took the completed device back to Dawa and Aadit at the tree farm.

“Will this actually work?” Dawa asked skeptically as he looked over the device.

“I’m afraid of using relics,” Aadit said warily. “The church told us to use as little of them as possible. Bad things happen when they’re used.”

“You’re afraid of everything,” Dawa said with a roll of his eyes. “We have no other choice.” He turned to Kahli with a nod. “Go ahead and try it.”

Kahli shrugged and turned on the device. A loud sound was emitted from the speaker and the panbats reacted just as Merlin said they would. Frightened by the loud noise, they took off screeching, leaving the tree farm and heading back into the safety of the swamp.

“They actually left!” Dawa cheered. “I can’t believe it! We owe ya one!”

“I’m surprised,” Aadit mused. “Maybe I’ll order a couple more of those from you in the future.”

“We can’t celebrate yet,” Dawa said. “Now that the panbat issue has been resolved, we need to move quickly to heal our trees. The panbats took a lot of water and nutrients. We need a fast way of restoring them. Up for the job?”

“Well, that’s what I’m here for, isn’t it?” Kahli said. “Got any idea what you may need?”

“Petra mentioned she knew something about an irrigation system before. Maybe you two can come up with something.”

Petra was either going to be her best friend by the end of this, or annoyed at the mere sight of her. Kahli hoped their relationship would lean more toward friendship, but she was sure time would tell.

She made her way to the research center once more and explained the situation to Petra.

“Something to revive the trees?” she said. “The ancients used many elaborate irrigation systems. I read quite a bit about them. You’ll need a small engine, though. You should be able to find some in the ruins.”

And to the ruins she went. She was used to the back and forth, now, especially as she started to take on more work. Go here, do that, build this, get that part. It kept her busy, at the very least, and though it left her arms sore the next day, she was sure Arlo would be impress with the new muscle soon enough.

Not that she cared to impress him. She didn’t care if she impressed anyone, really. Still, as she worked tirelessly, and alone, in the ruins, she couldn’t help her wandering mind. Whether it was Arlo, or Emily’s incessant teasing on whether she liked him or not, or his relationship with Nora, whatever that was. She thought about the life that the people of Portia already had here, feeling like an intruder. And when her thoughts turned negative like that, they usually turned to her father. Where was he now? What was he doing? How did he feel about everything? About her? And why did he reach out to her, anyway?

She tried to push these thoughts aside especially. They were thoughts that occupied her mind far too often, late at night, or when she was working away in the workshop. It was all the same thoughts, the same unanswered questions, and it only made her grow more and more frustrated.

When she got to that point, she often shifted focus to the animals at the ranch. She had passed them a few times already; the horses, the cows, the sheep and the chickens. She decided she wanted to save up some money, build a barn and a coop and get a couple of each. A horse, at the very least, could help her with some of her larger projects, carrying them from place to place.

She had always had a soft spot for animals, though she was never privileged to have any of her own. Due to her aunt’s allergies, she couldn’t even have a dog to offer her companionship. And she would be damned it she couldn’t at least have a dog to keep her company in the workshop.

Kahli eventually got her hands on a small engine in an abandoned room in the ruins, and she retired wearily to her home for the evening.

In the morning, she went into town as she often did, sitting at the bar at the Round Table as Django opened up for the day. She had come to enjoy her morning routine: a couple cups of coffee with breakfast, listening to Django and Sonia chat and laugh as they readied the restaurant. They seemed the perfect team, always with smiles on their faces, and their presence always put Kahli in a good mood. She had never been much of a morning person, but their cheerful attitudes helped her adapt to her new lifestyle.

“So, how’s life as a builder treating you?” Sonia said, taking the seat next to her with a cup of coffee in her hands. She sipped it and rolled her eyes when Django made a comment about his lazy help.

“I lost count how many times I smashed my thumb, but so far, the bridge hasn’t collapsed, so I guess I’m doing something right.”

Sonia laughed. “Higgins giving you any trouble?”

Kahli shrugged. “Not really. He made a great first impression, but I haven’t really seen him since.”

“Count yourself lucky,” Django said as he walked behid the counter. “He’s brutal when it comes to business. Doesn’t make anything easy for anyone else trying to make a living around here.”

“Well,” Kahli started. “In his defense, I kind of did come onto his turf.”

“Nonsense,” Django said. “You’re not the only one to come to Portia seeking something better. Plenty of people here from other parts of the world. Mayor Gale makes sure to see to it that everyone feels welcome here.”

“You know,” Sonia said. “It gets pretty lively here at nights. You should come hang out and keep me company. Antoine and Emily usually do, but we could use a forth gal.” She grinned. “And to be honest, I’m getting tired of Antoine talking about Dr. Xu all the time.”

Kahli yawned. “I’m just getting used to mornings. Now I need to have a social life after I’ve been working all day?”

Django laughed. “Sonia, let the poor girl sleep. She’s not used to all this hard work.”

Kahli narrowed her eyes at him. “I’m not sure how to take that.”

Django raised his hands up in defense. “I only mean to defend you. You were never a builder before now. It’s hard work that not everyone would understand. I don’t blame ya for hurrying home to bed every night. I’m trying to give you an out, yanno.” He winked at her.

“Nights are more my style,” Kahli said. “I don’t expect to be working too hard today. I’ll come by for a couple of drinks.”

Sonia grinned. “Excellent! It will be fun, promise!”

*****

The irrigation system took Kahli most of the day, but it wasn’t physically demanding work. She welded a few pieces together here, connected a few parts together there, and with the engine in place, the system was ready to be set up at the tree farm. All things considered, that would be the most difficult part, requiring Kahli to set up the water wheel at the lake, then connect the pipes back to the farm where it would hook up with the sprinklers she placed. It would take at least another day’s work, but it could wait until tomorrow.

It was the first time Kahli found herself in town after dark, and Sonia was right. It seemed most of the town was at the restaurant, sharing in meals and laughter after a hard day’s work. As soon as Kahli entered, she found Emily and Antoine at the bar, and Emily eagerly waved her over to them.

“Look who made it,” Emily said. She slid down a seat to make room for Kahli between them. “And here I thought you would ditch us to go to bed like an old lady.”

“Honestly, I was starting to wonder if I dreamt you coming here,” Antoine said. “I haven’t seen you since Preseley brought you around.”

“Yeah,” Kahli started. “I’ve been trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing so no one catches on that I’m a joke.”

“So far, the bridge is still standing,” Emily said.

“That deserves a drink!” Sonia quickly came through the crowd and around the bar. “What’ll it be, girl?”

“Whatever they’re having.”

“Are you planning on getting drunk?” Sonia said with a grin.

“Yes.”

“Aye!” Antoine and Emily both cheered.

Sonia slid a drink over to her and quickly dismissed herself to tend to other patrons.

“To a bridge that’s still standing!” Antoine said, holding his glass up, and the three of them toasted to Kahli’s success.

“I thought I heard your voice!” Sam pushed herself between Emily and Kahli, leaning against the bar. “Guess you have a social life after all!”

“Is that what people talk about around here?” Kahli muttered.

“Not much else to talk about,” Emily said.

“Well,” Antoine started.

“We’re not talking about Dr. Xu!” Emily barked at him.

“But,” Antoine whined.

“Yeah, yeah,” Sam said, rolling her eyes. “We all know he’s your eye candy. We need new gossip.”

“I’ve got one!” Emily motioned for them to move in closer, and Sam and Antoine leaned in, crowding Kahli.

“Kahli’s got someone she’s been eyeing,” Emily teased.

“Emily!” Kahli hissed, but Antoine and Sam both had their attention turned to her, oohing like teenage girls.

“Who?” Sam barked.

Kahli covered her face with her hands. “Why?” she moaned.

“Albert?” Antoine asked.

“Gust?” asked Sam.

“It’s not Dr. Xu, is it? Because I called dibs.”

Sam put her hand on her chin for a moment as she considered the other single men in Portia. “Who else is single?”

Emily giggled. “Someone you know pretty well.” She looked up as the door opened and a wide grin split her face. “Hey, Arlo.”

Sam’s eyes widened. “Arlo?!”

Arlo stopped beside Sam. “What did I do this time?”

Sam spun around to meet Arlo’s gaze. “What? Oh! Uh…”

Arlo looked over her shoulder and offered a smile in greeting to Kahli, but when he saw her hands dragging down her face, he frowned. “What’s going on here?”

“We were discussing the huge crush I have on Dr. Xu,” Antoine said. “Got any advice?”

Arlo blinked at him. “Um. What?”

“Kahli was just telling me to just ask him out already.”

Arlo turned to Kahli who had a look of defeat on her face. “Yeah, that sounds good.”

Antoine batted his eyelashes playfully at Arlo. “Thanks. You’re the best.”

“Okay then,” Arlo said slowly. “I’m going to go drink with Rem now.”

When he was gone, Kahli put her head down on the bar and sighed heavily. “Is this my life now?”

“Unfortunately,” Sonia said as she appeared behind the bar once more, a grin on her face. “You like Arlo?”

“I don’t like anyone,” Kahli muttered. “I said he was kinda cute one time!”

“She wants his babies,” Emily said as she drank.

Kahli brightened when she remembered she had her own drink, and she emptied it quickly. She pushed the empty glass to Sonia. “Keep ‘em coming.”

Sonia laughed. “Poor thing,” she said, and she refilled it quickly. “We get a little exceited around here.” She put her hands on her hips and narrowed her gaze on Antoine, Emily, and Sam. “Kahli is our friend. I expect you three to keep your traps shut.”

Emily sighed and put her chin in her hand, her elbow on the counter. “Yeah, yeah,” she said. She winked at Kahli. “I may tease, but I would never spill the beans. That’s so high school.”

“You mean we’re not in high school?” Antoine said. “Because I know how Sonia gossips.” He narrowed his own gaze on her.

“Do not!” Sonia said, her voice raising defensively.

“Are we gossiping or working?” Django commented as he, too, stepped around the bar.

Sonia flashed him a grin and batted her eyelashes at him. “Just refilling drinks. Kahli’s gonna need ‘em.”

“What kind of drunk are ya, anyway?” Sam asked.

“Guess we’ll find out,” Kahli muttered. She drank quickly and placed her empty glass on the counter.

“Okay, but I’m not cleaning up if she pukes,” Antoine said.

“One of us has to be the responsible one,” Emily said.

“Aw, come on, why’s it gotta be me?” Sam whined.

Kahli burped. “You gotta defend my honor, remember?”

Sam rolled her eyes. “Fine. But just this once! Next time, I’m getting drunk, too!”

“Shouldn’t there at least be one Corps officer sober in town tonight?” Django said.

“Are you letting those assholes drink?” Sam barked. “We agreed Arlo would be the sober one tonight!”

“Oh, relax,” Sonia said, waving a hand at Sam. “When has Arlo ever been drunk?”

“Alright,” Sam cheered. “Arlo can carry all our drunk asses home!”

“I’ll tell him you said that,” Sonia said as she carried a tray of drinks from around the bar.

“Maybe Kahli will jump his bones,” Emily said.

“Django,” Kahli groaned. “My glass is empty.”

“Yes, ma’am!” Django replied, saluting her. He filled her glass once more.

“And keep ‘em coming!”

#lacuna #lacuna6 #mtap #my time at portia #fic #fanfic

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aliciaantoine · 4 years

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HOPE IN GOD - PSALM 42: 11

A testimony of God’s faithfulness by Alicia Antoine concerning Jude Antoine’s heart attack incident on December 23rd, 2019

When my dad Jude Antoine got home from Indonesia on December 15th, 2019, he had a really bad cough. He was weak and was always wanting to sleep. Because of his previous experience with “Broncho-pneumonia”, we assumed that these symptoms of tiredness and cough were related to his weak lungs.

Despite feeling this way, on December 22nd (Sunday), he decided to go on to give a talk at a family Christmas gathering in Kajang. We all travelled to Kajang as a family. As he was preaching, we noticed that he was sweating profusely. When we asked if he was okay, he said that he was tired and that he just needs to rest.

After the session around 4pm, we drove home. During the drive he complained of uneasiness in the chest but attributed it to exertion during the preaching. Upon reaching home, he took a short nap, but woke up still sweaty and still with the discomfort in his chest area. Not knowing what else to do, we sat and prayed trusting that he would feel better. Two hours went by and he still was the same. Hoping that a meal would make him feel better all four of us took the car and drove to a McDonald's drive-thru to get him some porridge. As we were waiting in the drive-thru, my sister (Lavinia) noticed that Papa kept massaging his left arm. She asked him why and he said that it was because his t-shirt was uncomfortable. When we got home after getting the food, Lavinia was convinced that these were all symptoms of a heart attack. Immediately we three insisted that we go to the hospital to check it out. Hearing this, Papa started to freak out (he hates hospitals) and tried to convince us to go the day after. Ignoring him we got into the car and dragged him with us. This was around 10pm on Sunday night.

We managed to get to General Hospital Kuala Lumpur emergency department in 5 minutes (GOD IS SO GOOD!) The male nurse in the Emergency checked him and decided to do an ECG to check the activity of his heart. Looking at the results, the nurse ran out of the room without saying anything. Papa got dressed and was slowly walking out of the room. As he walked out, the same nurse came back running with a hospital stretcher. He told Papa that he is having a heart attack as we speak and that he needed to lay down.

As they pushed him to the emergency, a doctor passed by and asked what was going on, the nurse gave him the ECG results. The doctor looking at the ECG strip responded by saying “oh, wow …. oh wow …. oh wow … oh wow” four times. I was so confused, so I asked the doctor what was happening, he looked at me and said that Papa is having a heart attack and that the doctor in Emergency would tell us more about the situation.

And so, we got to the Emergency, Papa had three doctors around him discussing what was the best way to treat him. Finally, the doctors decided to send him to Institute Jantung Negara (IJN) - National Heart Institute (a Cardiology specialist centre about 10 minutes away) because they did not have a cardiologist at that time of the night. Knowing this my sister and I decided to go to IJN first, while mummy waited with papa for the ambulance to get ready.

As we were reaching our car in the hospital car park, I received a frantic call from mummy. She was crying hysterically and said “Alicia! Come back now, Papa needs both of you now”. Filled with fear, both of us ran back to the Emergency - praying out loud. When we got there, we saw mummy on the floor crying. I asked her what happened and she said that Papa’s heart stopped beating.

I couldn’t believe it, so I rushed into the room where we left Papa. As I opened the door of the room, I saw many doctors and nurses surrounding Papa and on top of him on the bed - trying to resuscitate Papa. One nurse shouted at me, saying “Please go out NOW, your father needs us right now.” and pushed me out of the room.

I was so scared I didn’t know what to do. I started crying. That’s when I saw this Malay lady dressed in a cleaner’s uniform sweeping the floor outside the room Papa was in. She looked at me and said “DOA” which in Malay means pray. At that moment it felt like I saw Jesus. It felt like I heard Him say “Lean on Me, Alicia”.

Knowing how stressed I was, Lavinia pushed the Bible into my hand to distract me from what was happening. Whilst still crying and trembling, I opened the Bible. The first thing I saw was Psalm 42:11:

“Why are you cast down, O my soul. … Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.”

This verse pierced my heart. It was an assurance from God that I will again praise God as long as I put my hope in Him! I prayed out loud, commanding Papa’s heart to beat again, declaring the name of Jesus LOUDLY in that entire emergency ward. It felt like I was praying for hours.

And then, the same cleaner lady (who seemed to be sweeping the same spot on the floor for 30 minutes) - comes back to me and says that Papa is okay. I was wondering how would she know. She never went inside the room. I was so confused because it didn’t make sense.

At this point, the doctors came out of Papa’s room and said that Papa’s heart is beating again. I walked into the room to look at Papa and he was wide awake, looked completely normal but confused. He said hi to me, held my hand and asked me why I was crying. It was as if nothing had happened to him. He had no clue what had just happened – his heart had stopped for 2-3 minutes. The doctors had done CPR but it failed and ultimately used a defibrillator to kick start his heart. (Interesting note: we never again saw the cleaner lady – after Papa became conscious)

After a few minutes (around 1am on December 23rd), the IJN ambulance was ready to take him to the other hospital where they were ready to proceed with immediate angioplasty procedure on him. The nurse at the IJN reception said the procedure should take about 30 minutes – anything longer would mean there were complication.

At the IJN waiting lounge, we were surrounded with so much love and support. We had family with us there physically and family all over the world praying and declaring healing over Papa’s life. We knelt, cried and prayed aloud in the lounge. The presence of God was so strong in that room, even the security guard was watching. It took 1 1/2 hours, the doctors managed to put a stent. There was one major block. Doctors say it was a miracle he survived that massive heart attack in the Emergency considering the block. If Papa had been anywhere else when the massive heart attack hit, Papa would not have made it. The hand of God was all over us that entire day.

Even when death was in front of us and every part of me told me to give up, God told me to put my all hope in Him. I saw His mighty Hand as I trusted Him and put all my hope in Him. He is Yahweh Yireh, our Provider. If God is for us, not even a heart that stopped beating could be against us.

All glory to God!

ALICIA ANNE ANTOINE

Date: 6TH January 2020

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jaggedheartstrings · 5 years

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Spread Your Wings (and leave me behind) || Chapter 8

Read On AO3: HERE (chapter 1)

Word count: 2k

Summary:

Natasha Antonia Stark was a thriving scientist in the 1940's. Alongside her brother, Howard, they build a whole world of technology and science for themselves.

Up until a fatal night in 1947.

She was announced dead in 1949.

* * *

Toni wasn’t going anywhere with him as long as she had anything to do about it.

“I was hoping to do this the easier way, but the best ones do put up the best fight at first, don’t they?”

It was the last thing she remembered before darkness overtook her.

Chapter 8: Part 1.5 - Reprogram My Will

June 18th, 2003, Formosa, Argentina

The therapist at the local trauma center had told it was good to write down stuff. For coping with everything or to help remember. The center was kind of a homeless shelter too. She wasn’t exactly homeless, but she wouldn’t have been able to afford a therapist. The trauma center therapist was a lovely Japanese lady. Her dark hair was always pinned up in extravagant styles, not one the same as the last one. She always had her square glasses on and ready to go.

While she was a therapist who never got payed, her attitude was never indifferent or mean. Ms. Saito was always warm, inviting and that played a huge part in why she visited her over and over again. One of the few friends she had made had suggested to visit the center, once they noticed how difficult it was for her to interact with people or remember anything about herself.

Antonia sold little inventions and fixed people’s electronics. What she asked barely allowed her to survive, let alone build more. But the people on the outskirts of Formosa weren’t that wealthy. She didn’t need extra money. If she couldn’t pay rent or her next meal, the people always graciously offered to help her. It was a close-knit community that helped everyone.

“An!” Turning at the voice of her friend, Alicia, Antonia gave her a big and real smile. She’d learned that smiling at people when you were in a good mood, would put them in a good mood and they might like you more if you don’t glare them to their early grave. Or so Alicia had said.

“Hey,” she greeted the panting blue haired woman. The pastel blue color of Alicia’s hair complimented her darkened skin much better than it should’ve. “How are you?”

“How am I? I am fucking wonderful, thanks for asking. You will not believe what I just saw.” Antoine’s smile was much more real at her friend’s enthusiastic voice.

“Yeah?” she hummed as she returned to the journal she kept close by, in case she’d need to write stuff down. The page was filled with things under her own name, and a few other names on the page next to it.

“Okay, so. The guy at the hot dog stand, remember him?” Antonia glanced up from the page toward her awaiting friend. The girl was literally vibrating with excitement. The headache building in her head was enough to make her irritated by Alicia’s antics. She loved the woman to death, but sometimes she drove her up five stories.

“Yeah, the red head, right? The one you’ve been crushing on for, oh I don’t know, six months, but have never actually talked to?” Antonia snickered when the blue haired girl whacked her on the shoulder. “Oh, come on, Ms. I-pine-on-people-I-don’t-dare-to-talk-to.”

“I will shove you out of the window, don’t test me,” Antonia couldn’t help but laugh at the adorable threat. She was like a kitten trying to fight a lion. They both knew that the brunette would have the shorter girl on her face in seconds. “Anyway! He saw me stalking him and naturally I knew this was my moment. SOOO, I went up to him and was like, ‘hey man, wanna catch a cup of coffee sometimes’. I heard that’s an adult thing to do, so I was like okay let’s try it.”

“You’ve never even drank coffee, you heathen.” Antonia shoved Alicia away as she tried to catch a look of her notebook. The brunette slammed the notebook closed, storing it in her locked cabinet.

“C’mon, you never let me see what you write!” Alicia whined and she threw a look towards the woman who was acting like a three-year-old despite her 28 years of age. It wasn’t new.

“There’s a reason for that. If I told you what was in there, you wouldn’t know what to do with the information. My past is not all rainbows and sunshine.”

“Yeah, I know. You’ve told me like nine million times already.” Alicia scratched behind her ear, “I know you don’t remember anything ‘cuz you had something horrible happen to you- this is why I need you to tell me, so you don’t make that pissed off face when I talk about it insensitively!” She waved at Antonia’s face with her hand. Sure enough, the brunette was scowling at her friend.

“I don’t tell you, because I don’t want to lose you,” she pointed out.

“But some horrid tale of your past won’t make me run away,” Alicia argued against her.

With a deep sigh the brunette informed her, “I’m not worried you’ll run away.” That made the blue haired girl snap her mouth shut and get an understanding look in her eyes. Her father had worked for the CIA and it’d costed her mother’s life. He did get out of the business after that, but it was a bit late to fix anything. “So, what did the cute hot dog guy say?”

Alicia’s eyes brightened as she explained the rest of the first encounter they had had.

Later that evening Antonia returned to her apartment. The whole building was falling apart, and she was quite sure they’d be tearing it apart soon. Which would leave her homeless. Maybe she could room with Alicia. She wouldn’t mind the company and rent would be easier for the both of them.

She stepped inside the lobby and greeted Harold. He was a cleaner/host who held the place up. A long time ago the man had invested money into this building and pursued his dream. But then the people had basically abandoned this part of the town and he was left to the bares. The apartment complex had 16 apartments, but only nine were occupied- Harold included. Antonia was quite sure half of them were druggies. Wouldn’t have been surprising around these corners.

Harold’s frail and weak smile almost broke her heart. He was already in his late sixties, he shouldn’t have been doing so much around the complex. His hands were shaking, mostly due to his never treated addictions. Now he had thankfully enough smarts in his head to not go inject himself. Plus, his grandchildren were quite often around the complex helping their grandfather. Harold’s wife had died a long time ago due to cancer.

Antonia’s apartment was onto second floor, right above the lobby. It was quiet, well until the druggies would start a party. Her keychain held three keys, the keys to her apartment, her workplace and her bike’s lock. Not that a lock would do much around here. A single fluffy ball was hanging from the keys. She’d taken a liking to soft and fluffy things, which was no surprise considering what she had gone through.

The apartment was a lost cause on pretty much everything, though she had tried her best in patching it up. The hallway that opened up right after the door was quite empty, if you excluded the small rug and shoe holder. She couldn’t afford much, most of the stuff in her apartment was used or passed down from friends. She didn’t mind it at all. She enjoyed fixing things and finding out how they worked.

The light that flooded the entry way was dimmed and yellowish. She’d have to fix the circuits again. It was the third time this month alone. The frustrated sigh she let out made her rip her shoes off and hang her purse quite aggressively. As she was about to step into the kitchen, the light almost unnoticeable breathing caused her to halt. Someone was here.

She immediately reached in her pocket for the knife she always had on standby. Her left hand reached for the light switch and as soon as she made out a form, the knife was flying through the air. The figure- a man most likely- leaned out of the way at the very last second. The knife attached itself to the wooden wall behind him.

The man lifted his head at her, eyes glinting curiously. “Hello child,” The Russian accent made her skin crawl and the snarl that left her mouth was downright menacing.

“Who the fuck are you?” She spat out, her hands clenching and unclenching in fists. The man smirked, his expressionless and cold grey eyes watching her every move. “Who are you?” she demanded even louder this time.

“I guess you could call me an old friend,” the words sending a shiver down her spine. “But you’ve been a very naughty girl, haven’t you? Making decisions and relationships all on your own accord.” He moved and she moved towards the kitchen isle where a block of knives was situated at. The tsk noise made her flinch. “I wouldn’t do that. I’d hate to use more painful methods, wouldn’t you?”

The questioning tone was enough to send her through a loop. “I ain’t coming with you anywhere. You might’ve missed it, but I’m done.”

“It’s like you truly believe you have a choice.” At the widened eyes and menacing tone, she was sent back to a time where everything was much worse. To the first time this happened. When the first word hit her, she gasped at the pain, “предложение.” (tender)

“Ah, stop.” She rasped out.

“журнал.” (journal) An image of steel blue eyes flashed, and she fell to her knees.

“шесть.” (six)

Everything left like it was slipping away. Like someone else was taking control and pushing her to the back of her head, unable to affect anything.

Ash. Evening. Nineteen. Reign. Order. Fire.

He continued until only one word was left. After a second of silence he whispered the last breaking word, “криво.” (awry)

The breathing of the figure on its knees evened slowly out, and it lifted its head eyes emotionless and focused on the wall. “Товарищ?” The question solidifying its presence.

“я готов ответить.” (Ready to comply/I am ready to answer.)

* * *

The Winter Flower sat at the Chair. Held together by the straps, the scientists and doctors around it were preparing to do something. It didn’t know, it wouldn’t ask. Weapons didn’t have questions.

Its new handler was rubbing his chin while watching it. He was contemplating on something. His empty eyes were almost unfocused due to the intensity of his stare. He wasn’t actually looking at her, but instead was lost inside his head.

“We are ready,” one of the scientists announced and just like that his attention was back in the present. He walked down from the raised platform towards it. Stopping in front of it, he ran his fingers across its jaw.

“God, after this you’ll be perfect. Absolutely and utterly perfect.” His eyes flashed and the grin he gave it was filled with sharp teeth, “I’m sure you’ll remember that little thing you were working on back in 1995. It’s finally completely finished. That Hansen chick got it finally to stabilize after fifteen tries. You were great help, my dear.” His tone would’ve almost been loving, if it wasn’t filled with disgust.

He walked back up, turning towards the doctor. He’d watched the interaction curiously. “Inject her. Three days is far too long, we need her to be ready and we needed it yesterday,” the man hissed at him. He scrambled away, barking orders in Russian. The Winter Flower wasn’t listening. The hazed daze it was in was going to cause problems if its handler would find out. He’d already made it shoot itself in the leg twice. If it weren’t bandaged soon, it’d bleed out. It wouldn’t dare to inform this to the handler. He knew what’d happen upon shooting yourself in the leg, but he didn’t seem to care.

The sudden burning pain that entered its body caused it to scream out in agony. It felt like it was burned alive. The tears that slipped from its eyes despite its best efforts seemed to please the handler.

Its body was rebuilding itself.

Burning a deep fire through all her limbs, focusing on the bullet wounds as they closed after liquid metal flowed out. “Incredible,” the man whispered out. “Truly remarkable.”

The doctors and scientists seemed to abscond from the room, until only one doctor and the man remained.

And it burned for what seemed like years.

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artsistory · 5 years

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Eat! Party! Eat! Party! EAT EAT!

For some unexplainable reason we woke up at the crack of dawn. My mom and Rusty love to GO GO GO! So we WENT WENT WENT to Cafe Du Monde for some man catchin beignets! This place is open 24 hours and it’s absolutely packed ALL DAY LONG. They were delicious! It was fun to be in the hustle and bustle of the breakfast crowd and a live brass band was playing loudly to the outside seating as we ate! It was a great start to the day.

After we were stuffed full of powdered sugar and fried dough we made our way to St Louis Cathedral and Jackson Square. Brandi will be doing an episode on this so make sure to stay tuned for that!

By the time we finished inside the church we still had some time to kill before our brunch reservation. We wandered around for a bit but soon realized that the 90 degree weather was far too oppressive to continue like this for another hour. And so we found a better way...Horse and Carriage tour!

We clip clopped around the french quarter for a half hour or so enjoying the never ending slew of fun facts and cheesy jokes our tour guide, Sue had to tell us. We finished up just in time to catch our rezzie at Muriel’s. I tried my first turtle soup. They put a splash of sherry on top and I got turtle soup drunk on accident.

Muriel’s was high on Brandi’s to-go-to list because of its ghostly history. The story has it that back in the 1700s this was built as a house! A very fancy house that suffered a lot of damage in the fire of 1788. The guy who built it originally sold it to Pierre Antoine. A wealthy man who restored it to its full glory and moved right in with his wife and kids. Well Antoine had an addiction to gambling and one night he was making out like a bandit! He couldn’t lose! He felt on top of the world and so, for the last hand of the night, he went all in. Well his poker buddy wasn’t about to let Antoine go that easily. He wasn’t going to back down and raised him double. Antoine had bet his whole pile of chips and so with nothing left he bet the deed to his house. Of course he lost. Drunk and dejected he wandered back to his house where he poured himself a glass of his finest wine and ended his life. His ghost has been haunting this place ever since! 2 weeks after his death the first sighting was reported! And they keep coming. This building has been everything from a grocery store to a dress shop. Everyone has always said Antoine could be seen just walking around peacefully. He had never really been a problem until it was turned into a restaurant. The second the restaurant opened strange and disruptive things began to take place. Glasses and plates would fly across the room! All the tables and chairs would be flipped in the night. They couldn’t keep waiters or staff to stay on as they quit by the droves! And so they did the only logical thing they could do and held a seance. The medium asked Antoine whyyy he was so mad now! He had been peaceful for almost 200 years! Well apparently his answer was that every night this restaurant was having a big party in HIS house and he was NEVER invited. So the staff set up a special table just for him with 2 place settings and 2 glasses of wine and the chaos stopped. The hotel still had the seance room set up in his study where he died and you can pay extra to have your dinner at his table. As you can see from my face I was NOT a fan!

We wandered around a bit more before heading out to catch our steamboat!

The steamboat was a history based one that took us to see a historic battlefield. A park ranger with very good mutton chops told us about how Andrew Jackson killed a bunch of Great Britons with the help of a pirate several months after the war was technically over here.

We got back and spent some time shopping around and getting ready for our fancy dinner at Antoine’s (also haunted). There we had a really amazing meal where our dessert included fire!

After dinner we were exhausted but Brandi had a friend in town she wanted to meet up with so we jumped in a short uber ride and headed to Frenchman St. The car got stuck one block up by a huge crowd gathered in the street to watch a brass band playing on the street. We hopped out and joined the fray! It was so good and Michael even joined in when a man cornered him with a washboard. He was tried to teach Michael some basic rhythm not realizing that Michael is a drummer himself. Michael started jamming out and he got overwhelmed telling him to slow down! It was great.

We hopped from bar to bar checking out each band. Every bar had it’s own fun vibe and we were suddenly much less tired. We got woken up by that hot hot JAZZ! It felt like a nonstop party because it was so easy to hop from bar to bar! Being allowed to take your drinks outside made the whole street one big party with live music pouring out of every open door!

It was so fun but we were very tired. We eventually had to drag Rusty home so we could go to bed.

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majormajorcom369 · 3 years

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HOW TO PLAY ONLINE 엠카지노 #2513

On March 21, 2003, a man playing a progressive slot machine at the Excalibur Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas won $38.7 million, the largest slot machine payout in U.S. https://en.search.wordpress.com/?src=organic&q=메이저토토사이트추천 These include an Ace, King, Queen, Jack, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, and 2 of each of the above-listed suits. How Playing Cards are Made-Two layers of paper (with dark glue) or 100% plastic. For maximum opacity playing cards are made from two layers of paper, bonded with black glue. After printing, a plastic finish is applied which determines the feel of the cards (and establishes the reputation of a brand). The latest trend is to eliminate paper entirely and produce "100% plastic" cards made from either PVC or cellulose acetate (the later is heralded as feeling more like paper). The better brands apply the same plastic finish to their plastic cards as they do to their paper ones. Before industrialization, French cards were obtained by using traditional glue (flour and amidon cooked together) to bind three layers of paper: Papier cartier : For the backsides, free from identifying defects. Main-brune : Low-grade paper, providing thickness and opacity. Papier au pot : Supplied by the taxing authorities, for card fronts. Montagu didn't invent the meal - it's meat between bread, after all; people had likely been eating this combo for centuries - but he did give it a name and a cool story to go with it (whether he liked it or not!).

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Typically 43 to 48 numbers are pre-drawn at the beginning of a bingo session. In 2004, California legalized a form of roulette known as California Roulette.[7] By law, the game must use cards and not slots on the roulette wheel to pick the winning number. As Atlantic City, New Jersey, opened casinos during the late 1970s, a shift occurred in the legality of gambling elsewhere in the country, much of it due to the efforts of some Native American tribes. 우리카지노 Ohio, for example, has a so-called "Voluntary Exclusion" program for gamblers looking to kick the habit that allows them to ban themselves for either a year, five years, or life.

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canyouhearthelight · 5 years

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The Miys, Ch. 49

This is another chapter that kinda fought back. I wanted to write one thing.... the story wanted to write another...

Someone pray for me. I don’t care what you pray to, I just need help....

“Is mushroom gravy okay?” Tyche asked, glancing over her shoulder. It was the day after the festival, and we were preparing for the re-institution of family dinners. We had both spent the day in our respective quarters nursing social hangovers of homicidal proportions, but were committed to an evening of comfort food and finding a new comfort zone without…. Without.

“Yeah,” I answered quietly. “Everyone’s good with mushroom gravy.”

A quiet growl preceded the smack of a spoon hitting the counter in my sister’s kitchen. “Sophia,” she said slowly. “You don’t have to force this. Yesterday was enough, you realize that? You don’t have to force yourself to have social interaction two days in a row.”

“You sound like Antoine,” I giggle slightly, mostly out of nerves, before taking a break from the painstaking task of mixing up a meatloaf. Sure, the console could blend it for me, but I liked the irregularity of doing it by hand. “It’s not the socializing, I promise. Tonight is just going to be you, Antoine, Conor, me….” I swallowed thickly, unable to keep going.

“Mon soeur,” Tyche exhaled. “Are you still sad about what happened with her?”

Huh? “What?” I turned around, confused. “You mean Arantxa? You’ve got to be kidding.” I scoffed so hard it made my sinuses hurt before muttering. “Stupid, traitorous bitch.”

“Then what is the deal!?” she cried, frustration clear in her voice. “You love cooking. You love meatloaf. You can make this in your sleep, so I don’t get what the problem is!”

“It’s just… weird, with just the four of us,” I confessed. I always felt better with more mouths to feed, and had gotten used to cooking for five.

“Four?” Tyche looked like I was speaking another language. “What do you mean, four?”

“You, Antoine, me, and Conor. That’s four.”

She gaped at me before stomping over and stabbing me in the chest with one finger. “Sophia. Michelle. Reid. What. The. Fuck. Have. You. Done.” When I tried to take a step back, she stood her ground, hands on her hips. “Why isn’t Maverick on that list?” I mumbled a response, wringing my hands, before she took a deep breath to calm herself. I rarely made my sister this angry, but when I did, I knew I really messed up. “Soph. You’ve got to speak up. Please.”

“I didn’t know if you were okay with me inviting him,” I explained, fighting back tears. “He’s mine, not yours, and I didn’t know if you were okay….” I choked on a sob, shaking my head when she offered her hand.

“Of course, he’s welcome,” she explained, more confused than angry now. “Antoine was always welcome, even before we started dating. You never hesitated. And I don’t believe in that ‘you complete me’ nonsense, but having Maverick and Conor around makes you…. Steadier. You’re more confident, Conor is more serious, and Maverick is calmer. You’re all three… muchier. Much, much muchier. I look at you and see the Sophia that only I ever got to see.”

I nodded, sniffling and wanting to laugh. “I know what you’re talking about. It’s the same thing that happened when you and Antoine started dating. You could be you, all the time, because the only people whose opinion mattered liked you exactly as prickly and squishy as you are. That’s how I feel when I have them around, as annoying as they are sometimes.”

“Antoine leaves his socks everywhere,” she confided. “I don’t even know how he does it… I never see him wear them! But still. Socks. Everywhere.” Her mock-horrified face finally made me smile. “Come on, let’s finish dinner before the other three get here.”

“Aw nuggets,” I swore. “I’ve got to send a message to Maverick.” I flicked my datapad up, silently praying to whatever power was listening that he would get it in time.

Tyche just waved her hand at me. “I assumed he was invited so I sent the reminder to him when I sent it to Conor and Antoine. And I’ve been talking about it during my training, like, nonstop. He knows. You’re fine. Now, season and loaf that meat, woman!”

With a fake groan, I plunged my hands back into meat I had been blending.

Two hour later, everyone was getting seated around the table as Antoine set down drinks for everyone. Before anyone could take a sip, he held up his glass. “To Tyche and Sophia, our most accomplished chefs for the evening.” I blushed and Tyche groaned as we all toasted.

Maverick looked at the food on the table before shaking his head with a grin. “You weren’t kidding when you said ‘family’ dinner. This has to be the most American-sitcom meal I’ve ever seen – meatloaf, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, and dinner rolls.” He looked alarmed when Conor and Antoine started snickering. “What? I’m looking right at it. That’s what it is, right?” He glanced at me and my sister for explanation.

“It is never that simple, my friend,” Antoine explained. Conor just nodded enthusiastically in agreement.

Tyche took pity on him and explained. “Those aren’t regular dinner rolls, they’re pao de queijo. Like… a gluten-free, Brazilian choux.” When Conor gave in and laughed, she smacked his shoulder. “Hey! Those aren’t mashed potatoes, either, buster.”

“Hey!” He looked offended. “I’m not blind! That’s the best-looking mash I’ve ever seen! Fluffy and creamy. Don’t try to pull one over on me.” He shook his finger at her. “I snuck a bit before you put it on the table. That’s garlic mashed potatoes, all day long.”

Comically, she turned her nose up in the snootiest posture she could muster. “Ha! That’s where you’re wrong! There isn’t a potato one on this table. Isn’t that right, Soph?”

Biting my lip, I winked at Maverick to let him know this was all part of the fun. “Hate to break your heart, but she’s right. That’s mashed celeriac and cauliflower. You got the garlic right, though.” I gave my most sickeningly sweet smile, making everyone laugh. To Maverick, I explained “It’s all healthier than what it looks like, but it still tastes like what you think it should. Except maybe the rolls? They have cheese in them.”

Soon, everyone was happily eating, and the conversation turned to what it inevitably did: what everyone was up to. Conor filled us in on how he knew Charly – she apparently worked in hydroponics. Maverick told tales of Tyche learning to fly. Antoine updated us on the feedback he got on the translator updates after the festival. I brought everyone up to speed on how Alistair was working out.

It was nice and familiar, just what I needed. Soon, conversation turned to silly speculation about other crew members we were familiar with. “Has anyone heard from Zach recently?” I asked, curious. “Other than him working at the festival, I haven’t really gotten to talk to him since what happened on Level One.”

“Ooo, he has a girlfriend,” Maverick told us, wide-eyed. “Some girl in research.”

Tyche and I shared a glance, remembering Zach’s comments about Maverick during the lockdown. “Finally,” I exhaled, more relieved than I expected. “I was starting to worry about him.”

Conor furrowed his brows. “I thought… nevermind.” Despite stopping himself, he looked pensive.

“I know he’s attracted to me,” Maverick announced, surprising everyone. “He told me. I explained that I am very asexual, and very not available. We’re still friends.” He shrugged nonchalantly before grabbing a second helping of mashed not-potatoes.

“That’s a relief,” Tyche declared. “Zach’s like… not a brother, but maybe a cousin to us?”

I nodded, still thinking on what Maverick had said. It was still stuck in my mind as we cleared the table, Antoine having explained to Maverick that those who cook do not clean the dishes. I was staring into my wineglass when Tyche flopped onto the couch beside me, nudging me with her elbow. “Hey, what’s going on in that big brain of yours?” she asked carefully.

“I’m really confused,” I admitted. “I don’t know what’s going on between me and those two. Part of me doesn’t want to put a label on it, because I feel like that means I have to pick, you know? What if I lose the other one?”

Covering her face with both hands, Tyche groaned and shook her head. “To be one of the smartest people I know, you can be really dumb sometimes. Have you talked to them about how you feel?”

“No….” I answered hesitantly. “I’m kinda scared.”

“You’re going to make me ask the gross questions, aren’t you?”

“Please don’t.”

“Sophia.”

“No.”

“Sophia.” I must have hesitated a little too long, because my sister turned towards me and covered her face. “Which of them are you sleeping with?”

My face ignited in embarrassment. “Both, in the literal sense. Neither in the euphemistic sense.”

“Both? At the same time?”

“Well, yeah.” I was starting to fidget. Fuck.

“How does that even work?” Trust my sister to get sidetracked by a cuddle puddle.

“It just does,” I shrugged.

“Do you sleep in the middle?”

“Sometimes? Not always. Whoever needs the cuddles the most sleeps in the middle. Usually it’s me or Maverick.”

She smacked my arm impatiently. “Wait wait wait wait wait. You mean Maverick sleeps in between you and Conor?”

“Sometimes? Yeah?”

“Does Conor react differently when that happens?”

“Not that I know of. He sleeps like an octopus: if you’re in range, you get spooned, tough shit.”

“You are so stupid, and I love you. But you are an idiot.”

“Why am I an idiot this time?” I asked warily.

“You’re dating both of them. You realize that, right? All three of you are dating each other.”

All the blood left my face. “Oh, gods. I’ve got to talk to them.”

“Yeah you do.”

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#the miys #humans are weird #aliens #humans are space orcs #humans are strange #fiction #science fiction

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organiclifestylemagazine · 4 years

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Interview With Joel Salatin, Polyface Farms

Joel Salatin is an American farmer and author. He owns Polyface Farms, which is known for its small scale unconventional farming methods. Months ago I heard Joel on a Joe Rogan podcast and was immediately blown away. It’s not very often that we hear people discuss the gut microbiome on one of the most popular podcasts in the country.

Here’s that podcast. I highly recommend listening to it if you have the time.

youtube

Along with discussing the gut microbiome, Joel talked about his farm, Polyface Farms. Polyface Farms is located in Virginia, and they do things a little differently than most. The land that is now Polyface farms was purchased by Joel’s parents in 1961. They’re all about regenerative farming through sustainable practices, like pasture-raised meat, carbon sequestration, and working in a seasonal cycle.

In short, it’s a dream come true for someone like myself who is all about organic eco-friendly agriculture, so naturally, I had to ask Joel a couple of questions.

The older generation is a big fan of talking about life when they were young. My grandfather loves to talk about the fact that he was raised on cow’s milk, and he turned out “just fine.” The difference, of course, is that the milk he was raised on was unpasteurized small scale cows milk. What encouraged you to get into small scale sustainable farming? Does it relate back to how you were raised or did you have some sort of revelation in life? Feel free to comment on how things have changed if you have any thoughts on that.

My paternal grandfather was a charter subscriber to Rodale’s Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine when it came out in the late 1940s. He always wanted to farm but never did. He had a very large garden, though, and sold extra produce to neighbors and corner grocers. My dad received his no-chemical indoctrination, then, from Grandpa, so I’m the third generation in the compost tradition. My Dad was a financial wizard and did accounting work all his life. After flying Navy bombers in WWII, he went to Indiana University on the GI bill and then headed off to Venezuela, South America as a bilingual accountant with Texas Oil Company. His long-range goal was a farm in a developing country and Venezuela seemed as good as any. After about 7 years he’d saved up enough to buy 1,000 acres in the highlands of Venezuela and began farming. The goal was dairy and broilers. My older brother and I were born during that time, and things looked bright. But then came a junta and the ouster of Peres Jimenez and animosity toward anything American; we fled the back door as the machine guns came in the front door; lost everything and after exhausting all attempts at protection, (we) came back to the U.S. Easter Sunday 1961, landing in Philadelphia. Mom grew up in Ohio and Texas and all their family was in Ohio and Indiana, but Dad’s heart was still in Venezuela and he hoped after the political turmoil settled to be able to return to our farm.

With that in mind, he wanted to be within a day’s drive of Washington D.C. so he could get to the Venezuelan Embassy quickly and easily to do paperwork and return. That never happened, but it’s why we ended up in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. When I hit 41, I remember thinking: “If I lost it all, would I start over?” That’s what Dad and Mom did in 1961. I was 4. Dad did his accounting work, and Mom was a high school health and physical ed teacher; that off-farm income paid the mortgage and within 10 years the land was paid off. Dad combined his ecology with his economic understanding to create some broad principles: animals move; mobile infrastructure; direct marketing; carbon-driven fertility. I had my first flock of laying hens when I was 10 years old and then added a garden. By 14 years old, I was our main salesman at the local Curb Market, a Depression-era hold-over that foreshadowed today’s farmers’ markets. With only 3 vendors, it struggled but after a couple of years, we had a growing and steady clientele for our pastured meats, poultry, eggs, produce, and dairy products (yogurt, butter, cottage cheese). We closed it down when I went off to college and the other two elderly matrons at the market quite as well so by the time I came home, that market and all of its wonderful grandfathered food safety exemptions were gone forever.

I’ve always said we were about 20 years ahead of our time. Operating that market during my teen years of early 1970s as the nascent back-to-the-land hippie movement germinated was not easy, but the lessons were invaluable when I returned to the farm and started building a clientele on my own in 1980, long before modern farmers’ markets. Teresa and I married in 1980, remodeled the attic of the farmhouse, and lived there for 7 years until Mom and Dad moved out from downstairs to a mobile home parked outside the yard. My Mom’s mother had lived there for 10 years and passed away, making that spot available. As an investigative reporter at the local daily newspaper, I realized every business was desperate for people who would show up on time, put in a full days’ work without whining, and actually creatively think through better ways of doing things all made me highly employable. Living on $300 a month, driving a $50 car, growing all of our own, cutting our own firewood for winter warmth, not having a TV—all these things enabled us even without a high salary to squirrel away half the paycheck. Within a couple of years we had saved enough to live on for a year. I walked out of that office Sept. 24, 1982, with a one-year cash nest egg and the jeering of every person I knew” “He’s throwing his life away.” “All that talent and he’s going to waste it on a farm.” “Don’t you know you can’t make any money farming?”

We succeeded.

While we were watching the podcast you did with Joe Rogan, my dad and I had several “Wow!” moments listening to you. One of us would be in the kitchen, and we would run into the living room where the podcast was playing, and share a look of absolute awe. “This guy is talking about the stuff that we talk about! And he’s on Joe Rogan!” We don’t know many people who talk about gut health the way we do. How did you learn about the importance of the body’s microbiome? Is there a correlation between your knowledge of the microbiome and how you run your farm?

Perhaps the most profound truth in life is that everything we see floats in an ocean of invisible beings. With electronic microscopes, we can now see many of these things, but because we can’t see them with the naked eye, they are not in our momentary conscience. It’s hard to forget the microbes floating in the air, on our skin, in our eyes, nostrils, and intestines. Our farm’s wellness philosophy stems from Antoine Béchamp, the French contemporary and nemesis of Louis Pasteur. While Pasteur promoted the germ theory and busied himself destroying and sterilizing, Beauchamp advanced the terrain theory and encouraged people to think about basic immunity. Rather than sterilization, he encouraged sanitation. He encouraged folks to get more sleep, drink more and better water (much of the water at that time was putrid) and eat better food. Along came Sir Albert Howard half a century later adding the soil dimension to this basic wellness premise.

In general, we believe nature’s default position is fundamentally wellness and if it’s not well, we humans probably did something to mess it up. That’s a far cry from assuming wellness is like catching lightning in a bottle, and some sort of sickness fairy hovers over the planet dropping viral stardust willy nilly. Sickness and disease, whether in humans, plants, or animals are not the problem in and of themselves; they simply manifest weaknesses developed in the unseen world. Every sickness or disease we’ve ever had on our farm was our fault. We may have selected the wrong seedstock, crowded things, created incubators for pathogens. You can stress things a lot of different ways. But our assumption when confronted with non-wellness is not to assume we missed a vaccine or a pharmaceutical, but rather to ask “what did we do to break down the immunological function of this plant or animal?” That leads to far more profound truth than assuming we didn’t select the right connection from the chemistry lab.

The fact that today people actually talk about the microbiome in polite company is a fantastic societal breakthrough. Hopefully, it will continue.

The current “pandemic” resulted in a total collapse of our food chain at big grocery stores. While things have since calmed down and straightened out, many people are now aware of just how weak our food supply chain is. The obvious solution- buy small- scale, buy local. The obvious problem- buying meat the right way, (small scale and local) is expensive. Here where I am in Detroit we’ve got a great meat guy, but a couple of weeks ago I found myself at the Dekalb farmers market in Atlanta. I spent $9 for one pound of organic, grass-fed ground beef. What are your thoughts for people who are concerned about the costs of shopping ethically? On a broader scale, do you have any solutions to this?

Price; it’s one of the biggest and most common questions. So let’s tackle it on several fronts.

1. Whenever someone says they can’t afford our food, I grab them by the arm and say “take me to your house.” Guess what I find there? Take-out, coffee, alcohol, sometimes tobacco, Netflix, People magazine, iPhones, flat-screen TV, tickets to Disney, lottery tickets—you get the drift. Very seldom does “I can’t afford it” carry any weight. We buy what we want, and that includes many folks below the poverty line.

2. Buy unprocessed. That $9 ground beef is still less than a fast food meal of equal nutritional value. Domestic culinary skills are the foundation of integrity food systems, and never have we had more techno-gadgetry to make our kitchens efficient. The average American spends fewer than 15 minutes a day in their kitchen. Nearly 80 percent of Americans have no clue at 4 p.m. what’s for dinner. In fact, the new catchphrase for millennials is “what’s dinner?” not “what’s for dinner?” So cooking from scratch is the number one way to reduce costs. Right now you can buy a whole Polyface pastured broiler, world-class, for less a pound than boneless skinless breast Tyson chicken at Wal-Mart. The most expensive heirloom Peruvian blue potato at New York City green markets is less per pound than Lay’s potato chips across the street. It’s about the processing.

3. Buy bulk. Get a freeze and buy half a beef or 20 chickens at a time. Buy a bushel of green beans and can them. We buy 10 bushels of apples every fall and spend two days making applesauce; it’s cheaper than watery junk at the supermarket and is real food. That’s not a waste of time; it’s kitchen camaraderie. On our farm, we give big price breaks for volume purchasing because it’s simply more efficient to handle a $500 transaction than 25 $20 transactions. This means, of course, that you must have a savings plan. Half of all Americans can’t put their hands on $400 in cash. That’s not an expensive food problem; that’s an endemic and profound failure to plan

Q: Here at OLM we’re a big fan of systems. We also have 10,000 square foot urban farm right in our back yard and are getting chickens very soon. Developing a farm feels a bit like an optimal opportunity to create the “perfect” system. I’m curious as to how the farm is systemized to be self-sustainable. I’m wondering if the farm is carbon neutral or carbon negative? Do you let your chickens work on your compost pile? Do you monitor cow grazing for optimum carbon sequestration? What advice do you have for the many people including us, who have just started growing our food after the current crisis?

Perhaps the starting point is to think of integration rather than segregation. How many different species of things can you hook together for symbiosis? So we follow the cows with the laying hens in Eggmobiles to scratch through the cow dung, spread out the manure as fertilizer, and eat the fly larvae out of the cowpats (this mimics the way birds always follow herbivores in nature). We build compost with pigs (we call them pig aerators). We have chickens underneath rabbit cages, generating $10,000 a year in a space the size of a 2-car garage and making the most superb compost in the world. We see trees as carbon sinks to integrate with open land; industrial commercial chippers enable us to chip crooked, diseased, and dying trees for compost carbon. The kitchen and gardening scraps go to the chickens. Hoop houses for rabbits, pigs, and chickens in the winter double up as vegetable production in the spring, summer, and fall, creating pathogen dead-ends for the plants and animals growing there at different times of the year. Integration is everything.

In half a century, we’ve moved our soil organic matter from 1 percent to 8.2 percent. I don’t know if we’re overall carbon-neutral, but we’ve done this without buying an ounce of chemical fertilizer and using 800 percent less depreciable infrastructure per gross income dollar than the average U.S. farm. That creates resilience. Over the years we’ve installed 8 miles of waterlines from permaculture style high ponds that catch surface run-off and gravity feed to the farmland below. And the rocks and gullies now grow vegetation where none grew before. This is not pride; it’s a humble acknowledgment of a Creator’s benevolent and abundant design; it’s our responsibility to caress this magnificent womb.

Interview With Joel Salatin, Polyface Farms was originally published on Organic Lifestyle Magazine

#family farms #farming #grass-fed beef #Sustainable Beef

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photograpia · 6 years

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Travel Thursday: (US 2017) The J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

I was in the United States for almost a month this year getting some clinical experience by shadowing physicians in psychiatry and internal medicine. It was a working trip for the most part- but I was blessed to have family and friends who made the most of the downtime when not in the clinics by exploring art and food with me.

A day after I had landed at LAX, my godmother (whom I hadn’t spent time with since a trip to Universal Studios in 1996) called and asked if I was willing to go on a spontaneous two-day adventure. She had planned for us to relive the Universal Studios trip 21 years prior on the second day (and we did, though we were sorely disappointed that the ET ride was no longer around) and told me to choose whatever I wanted to do for the first day. Without a second thought I picked what had always been on my art bucketlist: A trip to The J. Paul Getty Museum.

The J Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center in Los Angeles houses some of the best European art in the US. Jean Paul Getty was an American industrialist, making his fortune in oil. He was an avid collector of art and antiquities, and at his death left the J Paul Getty Trust foundation as the wealthiest art institution in the world. The museum is in the Brentwood neighborhood in LA, an affluent area with homes with beautiful architecture peppered across the hills. A trip to the Getty begins with a tram ride that stretches uphill, showcasing just how lovely the area is.

Then when you emerge at the top, this is what greets you. It was a perfect day- not a cloud in the sky, sun up, a gentle breeze blowing- and for a moment I completely forgot how jetlagged I was.

Note that the Getty Center is HUGE. (Map for reference below). So before doing any exploring, we decided to fuel up at the Cafe.

It needs to be said that the Cafe selection at the Getty is pretty great. It’s cafeteria style with multiple stations- deli, kitchen (full, farm-fresh, from scratch entrees), fiesta (it’s in LA), grill, oven, and a HUGE salad bar (again, in LA).

I had my first bottle of kombucha since landing in LAX. It was a blueberry bottle from local LA-based brewery Kombuchadog- all the dogs featured on the labels are rescue pups, which is a touch I love! Yes, I am a regular kombucha drinker even if I realize it tends to smell like dank feet. I also do so carefully, because as a medical student I am aware that in excess it may lead to lactic acidosis. Kombucha carefully.

For lunch I had a grilled chicken sandwich with air-fried fries. In this moment I was reminded about how enormous US serving sizes are compared to the tiny Asian plates I grew up with as reference. But I digress. That was a pretty good (and freshly-made!) meal, giving us sufficient energy to explore the grounds.

We didn’t have all day at the museum, so we began with the sculptures in the East Pavillion. These three were my favorite:

Bust of Juliette Recamier, Joseph Chinard

The Family of General Philippe Guillame Duhesme, Joseph Chinard

Dancer, Paulo Troubetzky (I repeatedly turn to this image during tough parts of the semester, reminding myself to carry on with grace.)

I have always always loved museums, but have learned through the years that the people visiting them always also play such a big role in the experience.

It is fascinating how one piece can be understood in so many ways and invoke different emotions. Sometimes it’s passion. Sometimes it’s awe.

There were so many beautiful paintings that I stood before for such a long time in the South and West pavilions. These are some of them and the history behind them.

Study of Clouds with a Sunset near Rome, Simon Denis, 1801

I know I sound like a broken record saying this, but my all-time favorite Philippine national artist is Fernando Amorsolo. His mastery of the use of light and the integration into local landscape scenes is unparalleled- and I often find myself looking for work similar to his when I travel.

Denis painted this in Rome, and the weather an impending storm. It isn’t hard to see that in the oil painting, but his technique is seen in precisely how easy it is to see that from the use of light and textures. There is light contrasting with darkness to show the stark contrast in the change in weather. The strokes are done in a manner that you can see how fluffy the clouds are- but also how moist and heavy they must be, full of rain. Denis has a whole series of cloud paintings to hone this skill set (this is the 78th one), and it is a testament to how practice makes perfect.

Spring, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1894

It was the detail in this painting that really caught my attention. It’s a huge painting- almost as tall as the wall from which it hung- but a closer look shows such vibrant colors and such attention to detail. Lawrence Alma-Tadema was a Dutch painter who specialized in Merovingian and Egyptian scenes but after a trip to Rome began painting what he envisioned as lively scenes from Pompeii, as is depicted here. The women and children carrying flowers in this procession are a reference of the Victorian custom of May Day, but juxtaposed against ancient Roman architecture. Almost half a decade after Spring was painted, it inspired certain imagery used in the iconic Cecille Demille film Cleopatra.

Portrait of Maria Frederike van Reede-Athlone at Seven Years of Age, Jean Etienne Liotard, 1756

I’m not even going to pretend to have a deep reason for liking this painting- I saw it and loved it because it was about a girl and her dog. I liked it so much I ended up buying the magnet at the museum gift shop and it is currently on my refrigerator, holding up the Rustans sticker sheet for the Goodness Gang vegetable plushie I have yet to claim.

Historically though, this portrait is a good example of changing attitudes toward children in the late 18th century Europe, and how commissions for children began then. Liotard used pastels for this portrait- as he often did for portraits of children because it was easy to manipulate quickly in case of interruptions- and let’s be real- with kids there’s bound to be a number. Also need to point out that while Maria is seen here as shy, her dog appears unabashedly curious and is looking straight out to the artist AND SMILING.

Pepilla the Gypsy and Her Daughter, Joaquin Sorolla, 1910

It was my boyfriend who introduced me to Joaquin Sorolla’s work on his last trip to Spain. Sorolla’s work is mostly impressionist and he’s best known for his beach scenes (an example below). I loved this because of the warm Mediterranean colors and the tenderness that it shows. This made me miss my mom.

La Promenade, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1870

You remember that scene in Frozen where Anna and Elsa are preparing for the ball, and Anna jumps by the giant portrait of a girl on a swing in her excitement? No disrespect to any one who hates Frozen, but that delight pretty much encapsulates what I feel each time I stand before a Renoir. And I personally really love Frozen as a film, so this is a compliment more than anything.

Promenade (not the name the painter gave this piece) is a homage to the artists he was working with. The light and luminous palette with the feathery brushwork is akin to Claude Monet. You see the greens and browns of Gustave Courbet. The subject- a jaunt through the garden, is inspired by the work of Jean-Antoine Watteau and Jean-Honoré Fragonard that Renoir studied at the Lourve. The couple gazes at each other- to convey a sort of intimacy and depth.

Jeanne (Spring), Edouard Manet, 1881

Jeanne in this portrait is Jeanne Demarsay, a popular Parisian actress from the 1880s. She’s best remembered for having sat for portraits for both Manet and Renoir (Portrait of Mlle de Marsy).

Spring was one of Manet’s last works, and is one where you can clearly see his mastery of the art form. It is a dance of the modern (seen in the fashion, that Manet pieced together himself) and the traditional (the painting style, that early Italian Renaissance profile). It is such a sensual and bright portrait.

Portrait of Leonilla, Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, Franz Xaver Winterhalter, 1843

It needs to be said that if Leonilla were not a princess, this pose would have never been allowed for a portrait of its time. Reclining on a low Turkish sofa at a veranda, this scene was often in reference to harems and odalisques. That this was made at Leonilla’s insistence says so much about her strength and tenacity as well. Known for her great beauty and intellect, she sits confidently in ivory silk, casually reaching for the pearls on her neck while holding a steady, strong gaze.

Irises, Vincent Van Gogh

Two weeks ago I saw the film Loving Vincent, which is art in itself (the first fully painted animated feature film) and looks back on the circumstances surrounding Van Gogh’s death. I also found it to be a subconscious treastise on mental health, which I think is of value to consider when one looks at Van Gogh’s art.

Irises was one of the first paintings Vincent Van Gogh made after he checked himself into the asylum n Saint-Rémy, France. He had been going through bouts of depression and self-mutilation prior to this and his art became part of his healing at the asylum. It was inspired by Japanese woodblock prints and is notable for the curves and waves of the irises- people remark that it is as though he fully understood what it meant for flowers to move. I love this painting more so after realizing the context- that despite the circumstances and the darkness he evidently felt at the time, he managed to create art that showed such air and life.

My jetlagged but thrilled self at the gardens, heart full after being surrounded by such art. If you find yourself in LA and haven’t gone yet, you must must must go visit the Getty!

#travel #art #arthistory #monet #renoir #getty #travelthursdays

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etaussilesautres · 5 years

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Random OC questions

JULIEN CHRISTOPHE TOUBEAU ELLWOOD

Any siblings/Only child? An older sister called Malene. She’s basically the reliable and cool big sister everybody wants and the one who encouraged Julien and company to actually take part in the band competition that made them famous. Malène is an art journalist and lives in Cannes. 

What languages do they speak? French for obvious reasons. English partly because of the British heritage of his maternal family and partly because of his British stepfather Joshua Evans with whom he used to travel back and forth between Cannes and London when he was a young boy. A very bad conversational Spanish Malène makes fun of, but that he learned from one of her boyfriends.  

How big is their family?  Relatively small. Other than his mother, his stepfather and his sister Malene, there’s his father, Jacques (who is currently married to a young socialite the whole family despises) and his grandparents. Both of his parents are the only child of their respective families so Julien doesn’t have any uncle/aunt or cousins.

Are they close to anyone specific in the family? Julien has a very close relationship with his stepfather, producer and probably Nº1 fan, Joshua Evans. Joshua is more than just his stepfather, he’s a friend, a confidant and a loyal supporter of his career, someone Julien trusts 100% and looks up to. Other than that, Julien is also very close to his sister and paternal grandfather, he admires their intelligence, success and the genuine kindness that definitely contrast with his father’s cold personality.

Do they get angry/lose their temper quickly? Not at all. Julien is actually way too collected and detached to take things way too personally or get angry easily. It’d take a lot to get him mad at someone although his father using his image for publicity is one of his triggers.  

Do they have pets? Do they want pets? He has a yellow cat called Manon. He likes to take her while he is on tour, although she has proven to dislike his band’s music in more than one occasion.  

What are they like when they’re drunk/what kind of drunk are they? Since Julien is pretty much a collected and seemingly unemotional person most of the time, he tends to become rather emotional when he’s drunk. Although he doesn’t easily let alcohol get to his head, he loses his decision-making abilities once he’s drunk. He’s the “please don't let me call my ex tonight" and over-sharer type of drunk. Also, he definitely gets “poetic”. 

Have they ever drunk underage? More than he would like to admit, tbh.   Do they consider themselves popular? At the beginning of his career. He totally underestimated his popularity, but he’s gotten a lot more confident over the past years (particularly after letting go of his crush on Minah Delacroix) and he is willing to openly accept he and his band are rather popular.

What is their dream vacation? Julien adores his hometown, so no matter where he might be, the best getaway location for him is Cannes or Monaco.

Have they ever cheated on anyone before? Never.

Have they ever been cheated on? Not really, although his bandmates often joke about Minah “emotionally cheating” on him throughout their short-lived romance.

Are they a liar? Are they good at lying? Definitely not a consummate liar, but he’s a decent liar when he wants to. The only people he can’t lie to are Malene and his closest group of friends (Antoine, Johannes and Jane)

Do they like hot or cold temperatures better? Definitely hot because he grew up in the French Riviera.

Do they prefer swimming in saltwater or freshwater? Julien loves swimming, just in general, but he might be a little more used to swim in the sea, so saltwater.

How would your OC describe their best friend using three words to a stranger? Julien describing his French squad would probably go like “ils sont dingues” (which is the perfect description because “dingoes” can mean either crazy, amazing, insane or absurd depending on the context).

Do they have any overused catchphrases? + "Yes, I'm that guy from that band" + "I'll write a song about that"

Have they ever lost anyone close to them? How did it affect them? Julien considers his parents’ divorce a traumatic event in his life because although he didn’t literally lose his father, he feels as though that destroyed their relationship and the reason why they have basically become strangers by now.

Quick questions

Hot or cold ✅ shower?

Summer ✅ or winter?

Night owl ✅ or Early bird?

Full breakfast or ‘grab a bite and run’✅ ?

Easily panicked or always chill ✅ ?

Coffee ✅ or Tea?

Dogs or Cats ✅?

Writing or reading✅ ?

Movies✅ or TV shows?

Outside✅ or inside?

Sunny weather or rainy weather✅ ?

12-hour clock or 24-hour clock✅ ?

Instagram or Snapchat✅ ?

Study over a period of time or last-minute cram✅ ?

Text or call✅ ?

Cake or biscuit✅ ?

Water✅ or juice?

Climb the stairs ✅ or take the lift?

Order the same meal ✅ or something new every time?

Listens to the album as the tracklisting or shuffles it✅ ?

Believes that ‘Sex should be in a bed’ or that ‘Quickies are cool too’✅ ?

Bus or Train✅ ?

Candles✅ or Febreeze?

Chocolate ✅ or candy?

Smiles in every photo or ignores the camera✅ ?

#julien #julien oc #oc #questions #julien aesthetics #julien style #julien toubeau

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jo-shaneparis18 · 5 years

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Île de la Cité & Paris Saint Germain

29/04/2018: It all started well though not as planned. The intention was that the boys go alone and queue up at the catacombs an hour before they opened, at ten. Shane ended up joining them but a late start meant that we arrived a half an hour after it opened and the queue was rather long. The catacombs are located within Square de l'Abbé Migne, a oval park surrounded by road and a few kilometres away from the apartment. By the time they got on the end of the queue they were almost back at the front door, so a wait was ahead. Little did they know how long.

As daunting as the queue was, the catacombs weren't that big so they were thinking that it may move quickly. That was not the case. The staff controlled the numbers entering and with skip the line tours at the front door as well, after forty-five minutes and some comment that the internet said queuing was between three and five hours with no guarantee of entry, they pulled the pin. The one hour walk to get there was just exercise.

We waited at the Catacombs for nearly an hour and moved ten metres. A croissant and coffee from Paul's for breakfast

To not make the morning wasted, directions were set on Thomas' phone for Notre Dame. They headed then into Café Oz looking for bacon and eggs but only had a coffee due to $30 burgers being on offer. Upon leaving, the rain had started and walking down Avenue Denfert-Rochereau, it became heavier. They then questioned about how determined those still in the line would be now. Drowned rats. With a few short deviations it was forty minutes of walking straight to get there, jackets zippered to keep out the cold.

Cecilia and Jo had a slower start to the day. There was a restaurant down from our apartment called Angelina Tea House. It had a huge reputation for its hot chocolate which is said to be the best in Paris. Queues form outside the Tea House as customers wait their turn to sit. The Tea House was founded in 1903 by the Austrian confectioner, Antoine Rumpelmayer. He named the Tea House in honour of his daughter-in-law. Angelina Tea Rooms have been a favourite meeting place of Parisian gourmet fans for over a century with many famous people eating there. The famous include Coco Chanel, Proust and many of Paris's greatest couturiers. The list of famous names will grow today as Cecilia and Jo will add their name to the list. It's two signature dishes are hot chocolate "L'Africain" and their signature pastry, Mont Blanc, the secret recipe is still closely guarded 100 years on. The ladies headed to the Tea House at ten and got straight in. The decor was amazing. It was like stepping back in time to an elite café of the roaring 20’s. There was a great variety to choose from on the menu and they decided to go all out and enjoy the experience to the fullest, so ordered the "Le Brunch" set meal deal for 39.50 Euros plus an extra 12 Euros for a glass of champagne. The menu was as follows;

Tea, Coffee or Angelina's Hot Chocolate. The girls chose the hot chocolate. The next choice on the set menu was freshly pressed fruit juice or healthy pure juice cocktail. They chose fresh orange juice. Next on the menu was mini viennoiseries, croissant, chocolate filled pastries, raisin pastries, bread roll butter jam honey and chest nut cream. This was followed by Eggs Benedict with hollandaise sauce, avocado, smoked salmon or bacon or Crossaint Angelina cheese or ham or smoked salmon with scrambled eggs, the girls chose the Eggs Benedict. This was followed by a choice of fruit salad, crunchy muesli or caramelised brioche. They chose the brioche. Most of the food and drinks came out all at once including the champagne. The verdict: The hot chocolate was to die for. The food abundant and delicious and way too much. The experience and cost absolutely worth it.

Bacon and Eggs

The women were only half way through their gastronomic marathon when Tom phoned to tell of the change of plans, that catacombs were cancelled and that they were heading to Notre Dame if we wanted to meet them. That was the original agreement but not so soon. Tom was instructed to phone again when they were almost at Notre Dame to give the girls fair warning and enough time to walk to the Cathedral to meet them. After joining the queue at the cathedral, Tom rang again and told them what was going on. This did not please as they would have to be late. Anyway, the rain was heavy and the line long. But it was moving so Beau, Tom and Shane joined the end and put up with the Gypsies trying to sell umbrellas to everyone. As Beau commented, they were trying to sell umbrellas to people with umbrellas.

Large crowd waiting to get in

As we approached the front door the bells rang, obviously signifying mass about to start. When inside it was packed as the centre section was full of worshipers and as such the public were confined to the peripherals. Very dark and very loud. The place was still interesting, maybe more so due to the added atmosphere of the mass but shuffling around for half an hour was enough. Tom and Beau were keen to climb the bell tower but they had to book a time, join the queue inside again, pay at the kiosk inside and then join the queue up the side street that would get them to the top. Nah, give it a miss. It was at this time that we found Jo and Cecilia who didn't want to join the queue. (Cecilia didn’t want to go in on her own). So off to Saint-Chappelle we all went.

Queuing to pray

Not wanting to go inside, Cecilia perched herself at Le Soleil D'Or Brasserie nearby and had a coffee with the plan to look around the nearby shops for souvenirs for her grand kids while the rest of us queued. It wasn't too long before we were through the scanners, inside the courthouse precinct, buying tickets and entering Saint-Chappelle.

Saint Chapelle from inside the court precinct

Built in seven years during the twelfth century, the marvel of Gothic architecture was commissioned by religious unrealist, King Saint Louis IX to house his relics of the passion, supposed objects that he was convinced were authentic. Ripped off by Baldwin II of Constantinople and King of the Byzantines, he purchased a large number of alleged relics that had been kept at Constantinople, including Jesus’ crown of thorns and a piece of the cross that Jesus was crucified on. Wonder what condition it was in even when he bought it. A piece of wood twelve hundred years old at the time. Anyway, he built Saint-Chappelle at a bargain price, less than half that spent on the relics. We are however, all wealthier for it with the magnificent cathedral resulting from his actions.

At first, we entered the lower section which was quite claustrophobic. Although ornate, the vaulted, fabric clad ceiling was quite low giving a closed in feeling. Very impressive though. The next and by far the best was yet to come. We climbed an extremely tight spiral staircase to the next level and were amazed by the tall leadlight windows that took up well over half of the building. Videos showed the glass had only recently been refurbished to remove the grime and pollution which coated it from many years of exposure to the elements. The process looked pain staking and must have cost a fortune. After the windows were reinstalled a glass protective layer was put on the outside to provide better protection.

Bottom bit

Top bit

Exiting through a side courtyard that for some reason was full of armed police officers (probably because of being law courts and police headquarters), we moved along the footpath a short distance, entering the second door facing Boulevarde du Palais, to the Conciergerie, the impressive Gothic palace built around the beginning of the fourteenth century only to be converted to a prison many years later. The Conciergerie had a couple of remnants linked to periods of history. The lower section was built around the same time as Saint-Chapelle and consisted of Salle des Gens d'Armes (hall of the soldiers) and Salle des Gardes, built during the reign of Philip the Fair, a kitchen built by John the Good and one other. The upper section or Revolutionary Rooms, was reconstructed much later and utilised as a torture chamber and place of terror during the revolution. The most notable prisoner was Marie-Antoinette who spent her last days there before heading off to the guillotine.

Being deprived of a few Euro each to get in, we were immediately confronted by an artistic trough full of flowing water. The contraption was designed by artist Stéphane Thidet and entered the Salle des Gens d'Armes via a cascade, wound in and out of the Gothic columns before rejoining the Seine between the two towers, Argent and Caesar, a little further down.

The Seine entering Salle des Gens d’Armes again

Architectural or artistic?

Water level 1910

Climbing a few steps to la Rue de Paris (bearing the executioner's nickname, Monsieur de Paris), we entered the Revolutionary Rooms which once housed the main institution for exceptional justice. The Revolutionary Tribunal. From there the rooms held displays and relics of the period with information boards explaining the First Republic, the period leading up to it and the Conciergerie's role in all of the action. Towards the end of the tour we entered the room that once held Marie-Antoinette, now a chapel.

Off to a bloody end

Where her cell used to be

Upon exiting the building, we sought out Cecilia where we left her, still indulging in a café and some sort of soup or stew (and a bag full of goodies for the kids). By now it was three o'clock and time to head back, for Shane and Thomas had a football game to attend. Taking the opportunity to return via the beautiful Place Dauphine, which unlike last time displayed blossoms on the trees, we strolled back across Pont Neuf, past the Louvre and through Place du Carrousel where we encountered an unusual character who sought attention from both passers-by and the local pigeon population by dropping wheat on the ground from his bulging pockets. One weird one there.

Pigeon Man

After pigeon man, the Africans and the gypsies were avoided, we wound up back at the apartment to get ready to go out again, where ever that may be.

Not so squeezy. A tight trip in the elevator

Shane and Thomas left for the football a couple of hours before kick-off and arrived fifteen minutes later, greeted by barriers and security that wouldn't let them within cooee of the stadium without their ticket. Once they manoeuvered that hurdle, they walked through heavy rain to the entrance to scan their ticket. Immediately upon entering they were requested to put their arms out so they could be frisked. It was an infringement but okay considering the security issues within Europe recently. All said and done Shane waited patiently at the merchandise tent (with Tom watching), eventually picking up a cap and scarf, before both headed up the stairs to the concourse for a beer, watching the rain fall on all who were yet to gain admission.

Getting ready for the match

After another beer and some indecision about where the access stairs were, they headed up for their first glimpse of Parc des Princes, the home ground of the Ligue 1 leaders Paris Saint-Germain. They were playing middle of the table side, Guingamp.

They were both seated well and truly up the top, in the nose bleed section only a row or two from the back. Although the grand stand roof was in the way there was still a good view of the video screen on the other side of the stadium and the pitch. With half an hour to go before kick-off the place was buzzing, particularly the home crowd behind the goals, waving flags and making a hell of a racket.

Home crowd

A couple of milestones could have been achieved tonight, PSG were well ahead of their Ligue 1 opponents and already had the title sown up. A win would have given them a season of home victories, not achieved in Ligue 1 since the seventies. Uruguayan striker Edinson Cavani also had a chance to better Swede, Zlatan Ibrahimovic's 113 Ligue 1 goals for his club. He was equal before the match.

Guingamp came out strong early with PSG not seeming interested, their attack was ineffective and their defence left wanting. As such the visitors dominated the park and were one up at half time. After the break Guingamp went another up before Cavani broke Ibrahimovic's record with a seventy-fifth-minute dodgy penalty followed by a header to equal it up a few minutes later. Paris ended up getting away with an underwhelming draw.

All square

Whilst they were engrossed in all of the action, Beau, Cecilia and Jo decided to go for a walk to Place De la Concorde to view the Eiffel Tower lit up at night and possibly go on the large enclosed Ferris Wheel for a bird’s eye view of the city. When they got to the area the Eiffel Tower was clouded in fog and rain. This also made the ride in the Ferris Wheel for a view of the city a bit useless so they done an about face with the intention of returning home.

Too wet for the Ferris Wheel

That was until they happened across a bar done up in bright orange red and black looking very 70’s. They called in for a night cap. Service was almost non-existent. With one drink down it was a short stroll to the next bar for another drink, and then another (party animals, one at each venue). They then window shopped all the way back to the apartment, the ritzy upmarket part of Paris, the first arrondissement, Rue Rivoli. Clothing is over the top in price.

Contemplating tomorrow

After the football had finished, we walked out of the stadium and back towards where the taxi had dropped us off before the start, turned left and looked for a taxi. It wasn't long before Tom said we were walking the wrong way as we intended to walk towards the apartment so if there wasn't one within an hour we would be almost home. We turned around and headed back in some general direction. We had earlier walked past a small restaurant but had kept going. This time though the rain was coming down fairly hard so we headed in for a feed and a beer with the theory being that the rain may lighten off and the crowds diminish. Due to the circumstances Shane thought it was the best pizza that he had ever tasted, accompanied by being entertained with a dude on the footpath making money from football fans paying him for valet parking. They would turn up at the restaurant, give him their keys and a few minutes later turn up with their vehicle. He was busy for ages and drenched. By the time that we had finished our feed the crowd had gone, the voiturier was almost finished but the rain was still falling. We hit the footpath looking for a cab. At Tom's mention of the word "taxi", the voiturier had in no time given a whistle and a passing taxi had pulled up across the road. Next thing we knew we were heading back to the apartment and out of the wet.

The trip back

A great day today, tomorrow the opera house and visit Jim Morrison.

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