#and the yard had lychee and mango trees

[crowcryptid]

I wish I remembered the address to this house that I toured a few years ago because it was a weird ass house and I think the liminal space enjoyers would get a kick outta it

Basically what we were told was that the house was custom built for this guy (he was either an artist or architect, I don’t remember which) and wanted the pool to be accessible from everywhere in the house??

So there was a pool in the middle.. and everything was built around it. Also the house was very dark. Not painted dark, but the main source of light was windows. I remember there being no lights on at all but i don’t remember if it had no lights or if they just weren’t turned on. Idk if I’m remembering this part correctly but I believe the pool room had a gap between the roof and wall due to damage so it was hot in there too. And everything had that pool water scent. But from the outside it just looked like a regular house.

[qwertyu858]

Forever mad that we used to have a lychee tree in the yard (and a mango and a banana and I think even some lemons/avocados) and it was all torn down so we could just put concrete over everything and now we have a nothing-but-concrete yard.

Specially bc the tree produced so many lychees that half the family was eating them daily and yet, the tree had a lot more that end up dying in the tree or become bird's food and we couldnt eat more. So now, lychees are an expensive and "exotic" fruit that we can just buy a handful at year but hey. At least everything is concrete now.

[parfumieren]

1804: George Sand (Histoires de Parfums)

The subjective nature of scent can override even the most detailed fragrance brief. Gérald Ghislain can explain to me six ways to a Sunday why 1804 is a portrait of George Sand. I will nod and smile and not budge one inch from my belief that it's really about Paul Gauguin. I'm not the only one to reach this conclusion, but as my father used to quip come household chore time, This ain't no democracy, honey.

I'm not sure why Ghislain would associate Sand with tropical fruit, but I concede that if I had to smell like fruit at all, tropical would be the way to go. In fact, all my memories of living on Maui seem to feature fruit-- bountiful and everpresent, in all the colours of a Fauvist rainbow.

In our little upcountry town, my housemates and I had only to step outside each morning to pick fresh bananitos (apple bananas) for breakfast. Going for a walk, I might freely pluck an avocado or a handful of lilikoi (passionfruit) from a curbside tree if I felt peckish. Staggering numbers of ripe clementines glowed like tiny orange lanterns in a neighbor's tree; he welcomed us all to invade his front yard and pick as much as we liked. Nature was generous-- why not he?

Generous, too, was the produce manager at the health food market where I worked. Island farmers arrived daily to bring him locally-grown organic fruits and vegetables, and each new shipment called for an impromptu taste-test. We sampled sweet pink "strawberry" papayas as well as the yellow-fleshed, bilious native variety. We nibbled slices of mellow cherimoya, carambolas (starfruit), and kiwi, and let guava and tamarillo juices run down our chins. I looked wistfully on as Jeff passed around cubes of fragrant fresh mango, to which I've always been severely allergic. As for lychees, I didn't know until I ate my first one that I'd have to chase it with six Benadryl in order to keep breathing. (Those few minutes before my throat closed over? So worth it.)

One of our vendors was an elderly Japanese couple who grew the most astonishing pineapples-- tiny, hand-sized honey grenades bursting with golden nectar. They sold us only one crate at a time, each flawless fruit carefully nestled its own bed of straw. One day I plucked up the courage to tell them - in the only Japanese I knew - that their pineapples were dai ichi (number one, the best). Faces creased with pleasure, they selected a single gemlike pineapple from their crate and presented it to me with a bow. Believe me, my bow was deeper still.

Though pineapples are not native to Hawai'i, they thrive in the rich loam of this volcanic archipelago. Each fruit is a self-contained chemical laboratory where acid (citric/malic), sugar (fructose/glucose), ester (ethyl butyrate) and enzyme (bromelain) create miraculous harmony. When subjected to heat (on a grill, or at the ground floor of an upside-down cake), the sugars in pineapple readily caramelize, breaking down all boundaries between tart and sweet and revealing the fruit's syrupy, liqueur-like attributes.

This melting quality figures large in 1804, a fragrance suffused with equatorial heat. Mitsouko subjected the simple peach to a flamebroil; 1804 ups the ante by adding pineapple and a shot of Charbay vanilla rum for a full-on, righteous flambé. If this sounds a bit de trop, be forewarned that it will segue into a dewy gardenia chord designed to hypnotize you into a state of hammock-swinging lassitude. This is not the perfume to wear when you've got a lengthy to-do list waiting. (If, however, your plans include a two-hour nap on a shady lanai....)

But all this leads me once again to question the logic of this perfume's name. No writer as mercurial and rigorous as George Sand would have endorsed so heavy-limbed a name brand-- and no one as enamored of male privilege would have wished to give the game away with so blatantly femme a scent. I imagine her instead roaming through the park at Nohant whilst wearing a stylish fougère, or a brisk West Indian bay rum appropriated from her estranged spouse...

On the other hand, Paul Gauguin -- grandson of Sand's frenemy, the feminist Flora Tristan -- filled canvas after canvas with worshipful images of the Polynesian feminine ideal. To him should go this soft, rounded, luscious perfume-- and to Sand, maybe a bottle of YSL Nuit de l'Homme?

Scent Elements: Pineapple, peach, gardenia, jasmine, lily-of-the-valley, cloves, sandalwood, patchouli, benzoin, vanilla, musk

[delta-chan]

I know many people who have a mango tree (or two!) in their yard and it is the having them is the worst decision you can ever make. The shade of a mango tree is strong so short of buying expensive and especially stout grass it’s going to be surrounded by dirt. THEN there are the actual mangoes. Mango trees constantly produce mangoes, and they produce A LOT of them. If a family has a mango tree, it will produce more mangos than they can possibly eat and they’re going to have a hell of a time trying to offload them. Most of the mangos end up ripening, falling off the tree hitting cars the ground and nourishing the tree, which makes it produce EVEN MORE mangoes. We even have a car insurance commercial structured like a horror movie based entirely around an overproducing mango tree. These things are terrible. (They also attract violent parrots. We had a huge mango tree at my high school and it was claimed by parrots, anyone who came near that tree got divebombed.)

The superior yard fruit tree when it comes to Hawaii, at least, is the lychee tree. It doesn’t cause nearly as much pain and does not overburden you with fruit. (In fact, people stealing lychee from people’s yards is a problem.) Less common are avocado trees, but they have a little bit of overlap with mango trees.

[arnicaxross]

Her bed in Fairie is everything a magical fantasy bed should be if imagined by a little girl. Hugely round, soft enough to sink into, and the curtains that envelope her bed in a rose red caccoon hang from the ceiling and wrap around the platform to look like a tightly closed flower bud from the outside. It's the most perfect bed she's ever laid in and she's constantly being pulled out of it. "FairieRaide," It's the low booming voice of a dwarf and she can already hear the clanking of his armor as she sits up and peers blearily through the transparent red silks. "Up. 'M up. What is it Jargyl?" Something has happened in the six hours since she came home, got her kid up and dressed for the day and sent him off down the road to the school before passing out face down in the pillows. "The enemy army has killed two more of your kins children, my Huntswoman." Her stomach twists tightly into something cold and painful as she pushes the curtains aside to snatch her phone from the polished stump shaped table next to the bed. No one, human or fae can explain why tech works just as clearly in Fairie as it does on Earth but they're exploring it, slowly. Her twitter feed is on fire. Two hashtags for two middle school boys who according to the police were attempting to rob a store and according to a handful of witnesses were kicking the door of a 7-11 where the white teenaged cashier took their money and then refused them service. "Jesus fucking Christ. We can't even get robbed without them killing us now." She doesn't try to choke back the tears and rage in her voice, the fae of all types find emotions noble. "Your kin already begin to assemble and prepare to ride behind the Hunt and the Sithen has begin birthing more of the old city from her depths." "Thank you Jargyl. Have everyone sent into the feasting hall to wait for me. Ask the Brownies to make food available and the Kobalds to check and see if more of the armory has appeared. There's going to be more potential riders than I have horse and armor." "Aye, Huntswoman. Your kin are proudly ready for war." Dwarves are, were, the predominant war race of the fae. If Jargyl sounds this proud, the small city must be in a state of boiling readiness. "Fuck. I'll be there in a few moments." It doesn't take long to shower and the armor of the FairieRaid wraps itself lovingly around her limbs as soon as she touches it, but it still feel like it's been a dangerously long wait as she stomps across the marble and moonstone flagstones poking ever so slightly out of the lush lichens on the ground and into the feasting hall. The Sithen City holds almost a thousand people in it, rescued from hundreds of protests, jail cells, and raids and it looks like easily a hundred of those adults are waiting on her under the interlaced leaf canopy of the feasting hall. The roof that was a dying tangle of English Ivy and unscented roses when she first fell into the realm is a lush tangle of kudzu and honeysuckle now, morning glories twisting in and out in a dozen shades of blues wherever they want to. It smells like home and bolsters her bravery as she steps out of the back paths and onto the crumbled Queen's dias, hands held up. "I know. I've seen it. Who's been monitoring the protest threads, hands up?" It used to be easier to pick her huntsmen. At first there was always more armor than human riders, then volunteers started filling saddles and over the last year she's had to resort to using lotteries and even letting the armor itself do the picking to streamline the process. A hundred hands in a dozen shades of brown shoot into the air. "You, how many protests are planned so far?" "Thirteen." The girl she pointed to stands up, Iphone in hand and twists tied back out of her face. Tamika lets herself feel the twist of guilt that back in the mortal realm the girl would have been on some high school campus instead of gathering as part of a council of battle, and lets it warm into just another small blaze of anger to add to her determination. The girl may have been in school in the mortal realm, but she still would have been gathered in a group, following the tending tags for protests. The only difference really is that even preparing to ride out, she's safer here than there. "Big ones in New York, Baltimore, Chicago, DC, Austin, and L.A, the main protest in Richmond, and a scattering of smaller ones around the country. The White House has already announced they'll be deploying the National Guard in Richmond, New York, and DC." "Alright, then those are our first targets because those are the people in the most danger. Is there anyone here that's new? Who's never been with us before a protest?" Almost a dozen hands thrust upwards. "Okay. All of you come sit with me while we eat. Everyone else, start eating. It's going to be a long day and a longer night." The Queen's table is long gone, shattered and the pieces dragged away decades before she was ever born, but pieces of the legs still just up from the dias like weather worn broken bones dwarfing the much smaller wooden table that still easily seats more than a dozen. The scarred timbers are loaded with fruit that is common, exotic, and inhuman in glistening crystal bowls, platters spill their airy rolls, dense honied cornbreads, and lightly sugared shortcakes, and in between the bowls and platters are jugs of wine, juice, and the clearest most delicious water any of them have ever tasted. There's no standing on ceremony, not when food is concerned. She's already loading her plate with mangoes and lychees, shortcakes and spoonfuls of berries by the time people start taking seats around her, a group that could be siblings or cousins bow their head, hands clasped and murmur a quick grace as others reach with quiet respectfulness around them to load their own plates. "What is this?" One of the maybe siblings, maybe cousins is holding a Rambutan with a look that waivers between amusement and faint horror. "It's good, is what it is." She snatches one herself and peels it quickly, showing him the glistening white interior before biting it away from the pit. "Did I bring all of you here with the hunt?" "Not us, Ma'am." Oh ghatdamnit, they're calling her ma'am. Either she's too fucking old or they're too fucking young. "We heard about the bottle trees." "It's a good trick, right? We're trying to get word moving to put them up in ways where by the time it starts to leak outside the community that they're gateways, there're too many to get them all down in a coordinated movement." "Are you using Pintrest and shit? Just take some really good pictures and start pinning them to boards. People will do anything they see on Pintrest." "And if you've got a thousand white girls doing it too, it'll take them longer to catch on that you're moving through them." She smiles at them. She knew it was a good idea. "We're running a social media campaign, getting people to do blogs about them as yard decoration, tutorial vids on YouTube, pin boards. See your community leaders when we're done here. We always need more accounts." She piles a heaping spoon of berries into the small well in the shortcake. "After we're done eating, everyone heads out to the stables. All the armor we've got will be there. Everyone lines up and walks the line, touching the armor. You'll know when it picks you. That tends to take a couple hours. After that, a horse, probably a horse, will come out and pick a rider. We'll spend a couple hours riding the area so everyone can get used to being on a saddle and when the dwarves join us, it'll be time to go." "So if you don't get chosen?" The woman at the end of the table leans forward as she speaks and every single one of the knots coiled atop her head is a different vibrant hue. Tamika wishes her hair looked that cute. "Then you can go home or you can stay and volunteer with the ground team. We need people here monitoring the tags, the trends, the livestreams...we can't ride and watch our timelines at the same time. Someone has to send the info through to the carriage teams." The last two times the mounts had paraded out of the stables, teams of enormous black horses had emerged pulling behind them the kind of carriage you only see in period movies involving hoop skirts. And both times they filled both coaches to the limit more than once before the night ended. She just expects them to be a part of the mounting up now. "Our ground teams are vital. We fly blind without them. If you don't end up in armor today, I hope we can count on you to stay and man the lines. And you don't have to try the armor at all if you don't want to. At least twenty people here are just here to volunteer for the ground team." The ambient sound in the feasting hall is rising as people finish eating and begin to talk to each other. Tamika crams what she can into her mouth, gulps down as much water as she can, and rises. "Alright, come on yall! Don't let me see a single fucking adult here cutting lines and shoving, you hear me!" The stables are around the far side of the hill and her breath catches like always at the scale of it as she crests the top of the path that leads down to the beaten dirt of the massive parade ground that makes up the stable yard. The building, a long lodgehouse of white marble bricks and timbers like redwoods, is big enough to hold animals far larger than anything that's ever come out so far. She's been careful not to think the 'D-word' because things that she thinks too hard about in Farie tend to come and find her, but things grow wilder and wake up faster with every new believer she brings back and it's just a matter of time until one day there's a fucking dragon in the stables. 'Shit. I thought the word.' Which is fine. Wild ass Jamie with her purple glasses and her hair in puffs could totally ride a Dragon. It's fine. 'Fuck me I thought it twice. That's a lot of armor.' The thoughts tumble one on top of the other as she lets her eye scan across the long line of tooled leathers and tiny linked chainmails hanging against the stable walls. There's still room to spare, maybe two hundred suits could stretch the building end to end, but there's a lot less space than there used to be. She might have to send down into the city to get more ground crew. Jargyl stands by the gates looking particularly pleased with himself. "And as many for my own people besides. It will be a full hall under the mountain tonight. You are a damn fine FairieRaide." "Yeah, I better be. DC has locked down for 10 blocks around the fucking White House and protesters are fucking pissed that they're not being allowed near the Mall, New York is already threatening to bring out the sound canons if the crowd becomes 'Unruly', and Richmond is the scariest because they're not saying anything at all. They're waiting for us in more places then I think I can get to." "The Hunt has more powers than you've learned, friend. You have not yet begun to harass the enemy armies." She used to feel guilty when Jargyl called the assorted police forces enemy armies. They were just cops, sone good and some not, but just people. But years of faceless riot masks, bone shaking sound attacks, pepper spray and water canons have made all the distinctions dissappear. Her methods have been the same since the first Wilde Hunt of just her and the dogs; run those who will break and run, draw all manpower, recruit, and evacuate as needed, but the response continues to escalate. Their weapons cut everything but flesh, they always have, and the weaponized response just gets bigger every time. People have filed into the paradeyard and no one needs an explanation. People on their phones are peeling off towards benches and hay bales, assembling themselves into teams as everyone else begins walking the long line with one hand out to trail across the armor. "My people should be waiting for me. Ill return with the cauldron before we eat."The first figure has stepped out of line, leather wrapping and shaping around her limbs as everyone applauds and cheers. "We'll be ready for you."