#we do not all 'pay a price' for eating walnuts

[pbandjesse]

I just started coughing so hard I started choking and it was really scary. I for sure not having a good time this morning when I woke up but I was slowly feeling better throughout the day so I thought I was alright. But in the last half hour I feel horrible. Sucks. And like today wasn't all bad but it did have some low points.

I went to sleep last night feeling mixed. But when I woke up I felt bad. My cough is worse in the morning and it feels like I'm drowning. But through the morning I started to breath better. James sent me to work with my little lunch bag and I had a nice drive in to camp.

When I got there I went to the office first to eat my sandwich. It was a little chilly this morning but it would get warmer. Concerning for November but still nice.

I went to the art building to work on sorting out my fibers boxes from the other day. Got eveything sorted again. I need new feathers but I might switch that to a different grass or something. We will see. The feathers I have right now are just so small they fluff around everywhere. Annoying and makes me sneezy.

Sarah texted me asking if I wanted to work on painting doors. So I let her know I would be down there soon.

I wandered down to the office and was very surprised when Nick came out of the bathroom. Apparently he misunderstood the schedule and thought tomorrow's feildtrip was today. Oops. He decided to stay to help out and get a few hours pay.

We went up to the hacienda first to set up the tables for the group tomorrow. And once we were done that I went to walk the trail to look for walnuts while they went to drive the gator around and get the recycling and then go pick up some paint brushes.

I enjoyed my little walk up towards the barn. I would end up finding another black cap mushroom and really enjoyed being outside.

I would only find a few walnuts though. I would walk back to the office by way of the frog pond. But with the drought the pond was basically all dried up. I've never seen it like that before. It's supposed to rain on Friday so I hope it heals the pond.

I jumped in the gator with Nick and Sarah. And after a stop at the art building for paper, we went to the lodge. Recycling sorted and thrown away. And then up to the lodge to start painting.

It was nice to just have a solid task. We worked until 11 in there painting all the doors and window sills. I was listening to my 9 hour YouTube video still. And I would finish it today. But I was working the entire time. It's just really nice to not have to change to or search for a new video. Nick and Sarah got a kick out of me watching it and laughed a bit about it.

We went to paint the pioneer doors last. It didn't take to long. We would wash our brushes and make sure we didn't leave any mess. And then back to the office for lunch.

I ate lunch at my desk. Chatted with Alexi. I got an email saying that the house was pending sale. And it was over the listed price. So you know we didn't get it. And I'm a little sad. But I have to believe that the right one will come soon enough.

And in the mean time we had another one to look at tonight. So even though I was bummed it wasn't the end of the world. Another house will show up.

I talked to Heather on the porch for a little. She told me she found me another mushroom but it was still at the barn. I would take the walk up there and would also work on peeling some bark to try to process that for basket making. I for sure did not get the same type of bark that the woman on Sunday used but it was still fun to peel.

The afternoon was working on my dye paper. Writing instructions and stuff. I was also working on a flyer for a job fair Alexi and Heather are going to tomorrow. I wasn't feeling great but I was glad to have something to work on. I wasn't feeling well enough to go out and do physical things. So I appreciated having a creative computer tasks. And just chatting with Jess was nice. She gave me feedback about the layout and it was nice to collaborate with her.

At the end of the day I felt like my face was all hot and I was uncomfortable. Heather look my temperature but I didn't have a fever. I was just a little flush. But I was ready to go home.

So I went home early.

I didn't love my drive home because I was driving into the sun almost the entire time. But I got home a little after 4 without much fan fair.

I was happy to see James but they seemed very low energy. They told me it was like their knobs were turned way down. House hunting it effecting them a lot. It's got me a little frazzled but they are very unsettled. But we had a plan to see somewhere tonight and that was exciting. We decided to go to dinner at Matthews and then see the house.

So after a while of hanging out on the couch we got in the car. And it was nice going to dinner.

The waitress called out our order right away. Love being regulars somewhere. She told us she didn't realize we were married and her one year anniversary is next month! Amazing! She's great. And dinner was good. I enjoyed my husband's company.

But we were still to early. Oops. To waste some time after we finished eating we walked down the street to walk around the thrift store. It was fun but I'm also in a space where I'm getting rid of and trying not to bring things in. Still fun to look and see things.

We drove to the house next. I liked the street. No broken windows or anything. Not as much trash in the alley. When the realtor came he brought us inside and there was a lot good but we aren't going to put an offer on this one.

Firstly it is huge. 4 bedrooms. Interesting details like a glass pocket door. Arched doorways. A built in dresser in the closet.

But the bad outweighed it. The basement isn't finished and the heating system is incredibly old. There were no appliances at all. No fridge or oven or anything. And it smelled horrible. The realtor thought it was paint but it smelled more chemically and like mothballs on steroids. It was honestly a little hard to be in there for very long. I really loved the first floor and the walk in closet in the one bedroom but for the price, which was more then the last one, it wasn't going to be the one for us.

We chatted with the realtor about what we are trying to get. And how I want a front space that can be a studio to do workshops and my art and not have people have to walk through our home. And so he's going to expand into other zip codes. And I'm excited that he feels like a part of our team. He's a nice man.

We said goodbye. He said he was going to go have tacos. And we headed home.

We got back here and I was really a little out of sorts. A little bummed about losing the house I really liked and that this one didn't work out. But then I went to feed my frog tank and I found my new fish dead! Partially eaten! I don't know what happened but he was munched on. I don't think omelet killed him but he did eat him. Crazy. I feel so bad. Flapjack didn't deserve to die. I hope he has a nice time the day and a half I had him. But man do I feel shitty that he died.

To try to settle my body I worked in the studio. Made a felt sign. Fixed a few things. Me and James got their old walkie talkies to work and we're calling each other from opposite sides of the apartment. Just trying to feel normal.

My cough started getting worse again. I took a hot bath and that helped a little. But I was still struggling.

I would end up choking on a little water and that would send me into such a bad coughing fit I was gagging and now I'm a bit exhausted. I'm trying to breath gently so I don't aggravate it and make my cough start again. But man am I uncomfortable.

I am hoping sleep helps. Tomorrow I have a feild trip and I'm leading ground elements. I hope they are a chill group. I hope you all have a good night. Take care of yourself. Be kind. Until next time.

[maybebabyplease]

james: you know how when you eat walnuts your tongue hurts? but that's just like, the price you pay for eating walnuts?

regulus: ...babe that is a nut allergy

[hotarutranslations]

#IshidasBread Additional Information! How Many Will Be Sold And Such!

Evening Its Ishida Ayumi

 “Ishida’s Bread”

 I have additional information for everyone, About that

 For Ishida’s Bread 

 How much will be prepared?

 Wont it be sold out immediately?

 I mean what’s the price?

 I’m sorry for being late I will answer this

  Ishida’s Bread this time,

  A B C

 We’ll be selling it in 3 variations

 A: 1 walnut bread & 1 sakura anpan 500 yen (tax included) B: 1 walnut bread & 1 chocolate danish 500 yen (tax included) C: 1 walnut bread & 1 cinnamon roll 500 yen (tax included)

 (each set comes with 1 message card)

 There won’t be live photos,

I want to sell bread

 Walnut bread will be included with every set!

 It was the first bread that I wanted to make the most, and since I also love chestnut bread, also, it is in the shape of the 10th generation clover trademark, since it’s a bread I was very particular about, I thought that I want to have a lot available

 With the messages cards,

 Takeuchi Akari-san wrote the title Ishida hand wrote the bread description

 What is written, This will probably be limited to this time too?

 Also, the number that will be prepared, As far as… how many there are…. I’m sorry……

 The specifics are↓

 March 27th (Sat) A, B, C set TOTAL 1200 sets

March 28th (Sun)

A, B, C set TOTAL 1400 sets

 There will be 2600 sets for the 2 days when it comes to the bread individually there will be 5200 loafs… Thank you for your help, Narita Dream Ranch!

 Really thank you very much… 1 performance at HinaFest will have 5000 people, We’ve prepared seats for you visiting, With that the 4 performances in 2 days,

 How many of you there will be,

 Those coming to buy the bread…… Honestly really with this, It’s the first time so we don’t know what to expect

 You may be able to buy it before the 2nd performance, Conversely, if its sold out before the 1st performance…

 I really don’t know, I’m sorry… But at least,

 Since there are many people that want to eat it,

 We’re limiting the number of purchases to 1 set per person

 I myself as well, I would like to hear impressions from a lot of people……!

Thank you for your understanding

 But there are 3 types right…

When it comes to that, I’m super, lost…

Since I want a lot of people to eat it, Really with the feelings of, 1 set per person!

 But,

 If you say, I was asked to get it for a friend who couldn’t come!

Ooh~ please give it to them~ That’s what I’ll think

 Its unfair that I’m getting emotional over it… lol

 Really with those feelings as well,

 I will leave it to your kindness, everyone

 Also the time and place of sales,

 March 27th (Sat)

 Makuhari Messe International Exhibition Center Hall 3 Indoors Narita Dream Ranch Food Truck’s Ishida’s Bread Corner (at the back are goods sales) Sales time is 8:45AM~5:00PM (it will end as soon as it is sold out)

 Ranch Souka momom Aeon Mall Makuhari New City Shop Sales time is 10:00AM~9:00PM (it will end as soon as it is sold out)

March 28th (Sun)

Makuhari Messe International Exhibition Center Hall 3 Indoors Narita Dream Ranch Food Truck’s Ishida’s Bread Corner (at the back are goods sales) Sales time is 8:15AM~4:30PM (it will end as soon as it is sold out)

Ranch Souka momom Aeon Mall Makuhari New City Shop Sales time is 10:00AM~9:00PM (it will end as soon as it is sold out)

 The place will be the same for the 2 days, Please pay attention as the times will be different

 Also, I have a request at the time of purchase

 Aeon Mall Makuhari New City Shop opens for business at 10AM. Please refrain from lining up early in the morning.

 Please be sure to be wearing a mask before purchasing.

 I also have a favor to ask that I’ve thought of

 When lining up make a decision on A, B or C

 This is to ensure a smooth purchasing process…! I want you to decide which one you want to eat!

 The bread will be introduced tomorrow!

 Preparing your 500 yen

 All products will be available for 500 yen (tax included). To avoid crowdedness, and in order to not confuse the lines too much, I hope you’ll be able to exchange the money smoothly, it would be really helpful if you could prepare for it…

 I’m sure you can get change for 1000 yen bill though!

 If possible, please!

 Its more delicious if you reheat it before eating it

 Its really like this, with bread~~~ Of course eating it as is its delicious and fluffy! Its finished! But, heating it up in a toaster at home, if you don’t have a toaster you can use a fish grill (if its not high enough and your worried about it burning you can wrap it in foil)

 I’ll be waiting for your impressions & opinions

 Yes, I’ll be waiting for your impressions and opinions. On my Instagram story, I’m planning to post something about the sale of it, I’m thinking about collecting them there.

 That’s it!!!!!!

 With your understanding and cooperation, I’ll be depending on everyone but,

 Please thank you very much……

  I wrote a lot but, There are also details on the homepage

 Full Text on the homepage

 Man--! I might be writing a ton about bread every day now!

  Thank you very much

  Up To Boy, Yesterday I posted the 4 shot

 Eeh! They’re wearing their member colors! I’m emotional!

 There were various voices like that

 Yeah, everyone,

 Have you seen “Up To Boy”?

Are you not satisfied with the offshots? Lol

 With that! I’m not that fast to put out offshots! I’m going to look at it! To see what its like!

 Writing the Logo

 Was uploaded on YouTube!!

 Great Teacher Takeuchi Akari, wrote it

 Since its super cool, Also something noteworthy,

 Its like the 2 of us in a collaborative work,

 We’ve been doing this for about 9 years, Surprisingly this is the first time

 I’ve really always gotten along with her

 When we’re together we’re just laughing though

 In this way, wondering if we could work together, I also wanted to entrust her with it, And Takeuchi-san wanted to respond like that,

 I feel like I’m really grateful for this relationship!

 Therefore! What Takeuchi-san has written, please definitely look at it!!

 HinaFest is finally this weekend… There is Ishida’s Bread as well but, I’ll of course do my best towards the concerts--!

 See you ayumin ❤

 https://ameblo.jp/morningmusume-10ki/entry-12664380980.html

[pandemicperipatetics]

Texas Cities: Austin

We spent 1 week in Austin, working from home at an Airbnb with 2 desks(!) in North Austin near a yuppie food/shopping area called The Domain. Most of our exploring was limited to a Friday that we took off work, and we were grateful to have our car to explore different parts of the city. Austin seems like a good place to live, and a fun place to visit anytime besides the extremely hot summer, when we were here. Below are our recommendations!

Veggie Food

Tex Mex We really liked all of these places, but there are plenty of other options in Austin as well!

The Vegan Yacht (south of downtown): Has an especially delicious tempeh burrito called the “freeto” ($9) with fritos! They are a bit salty but add a great crunch. It’s combined with a vegan store that had a really fun selection of vegan items that aren’t always found in grocery stores. Parking: free.

Velvet Taco (multiple locations): We love their korean taco (with tofu) and the cauliflower taco (surprisingly tasty). We tried their other 3 vegetarian tacos and didn’t love them. They have meat options as well. This is a chain that we also enjoyed in Houston. Both locations we visited had outdoor seating and had somewhat of a Chipotle vibe (in a good way). Parking: Varies. It was free and easily available at both locations we tried.

Torchy’s (multiple locations): We really enjoyed their migas taco ($3) for breakfast, friendly service, and outdoor seating. If Velvet Taco : Chipotle then Torchy’s : Taco Bell. We would eat here again. Parking: Free and plentiful at the location we visited south of the river.

Other

1886 Cafe & Bakery (Sixth St): This has turned into much more of a tourist attraction than it was when I was in Austin for SXSW 2012; it is listed as a top 10 Austin attraction on several lists online. While it used to have a slightly upscale vibe and involved full table service, now you line up to order at the counter, it’s more crowded, and the cafe feels slightly dirty. However, the Texas-shaped waffle with pecans, fruit, & whipped cream ($14) is still as delicious as I remembered, and eating in the lobby of the Driskill Hotel is pretty nice. Parking: Difficult. We lucked out and found street parking about a 5-minute walk away. You can pay for street parking using the ATX app or a payment kiosk.

The Driskill Lobby - you can eat your food from 1886 Cafe here.

Flower Child (The Domain): This is a great little vegan chain with True Food Kitchen vibes. We tried it in Dallas and really liked the Glow Bowl and a thai wrap. Parking: The Domain has free parking garages with plenty of space.

Pro Tip: Maybe avoid Indian food in Austin. We heard this from a friend, and tried a pretty highly rated South Indian restaurant in North Austin that was very mediocre.

To Do (Stuff We Liked)

Zilker Park Botanical Garden ($8 non-Austin residents, free with American Horticultural Society membership): This is a very pretty place to visit and walk around. In particular, the Japanese Garden has some stunning ponds and the Prehistoric Garden has a very nice waterfall. It opens at 9am - if you’re here in the summer, go as early as possible to beat the heat! The walking path throughout the garden is somewhat shaded but it is still very hot. And wear comfortable shoes - it can be a bit wet and muddy so sandals are not ideal. Parking: Free and plentiful.

Texas State Capitol (free): We really enjoyed our visit. The building is beautiful and allows visitors to roam freely through the lobby and halls. There are free informational tours every ~30 mins, or you can take a self-guided tour using your mobile phone (you call a phone number and enter a code for each item you want to hear about). We enjoyed visiting the Senate and House chambers - there are even staff there to answer questions. It’s also neat to see the portraits of Texas governors lining the rotunda walls on every floor. The air conditioning makes this a great break from the summer heat, and the restrooms were very clean. 

Parking: You can park at the Capitol Parking Garage for free for up to 2 hours, and rates after that are quite cheap. It’s also just a ~10 min walk from there to Sixth Street, so it could make sense to leave your car here rather than trying to find street parking or paying $30+ to use a downtown parking garage.

St. Elmo Brewing Company (or other breweries): There are lots of breweries in and around Austin! We happened to visit this one and thought the outdoor, shaded picnic table seating was very nice. Half pints were reasonably priced at $3.50-$5 and we really liked the “Since, Like, Forever” (a double IPA). There is also a food truck in the beer garden - we didn’t eat, but it was nice to have as an option. Indoor seating is also good if you need to cool off. Parking: Free and plentiful.

Walnut Creek Metro Park (North Austin): We somewhat randomly visited here on a Thursday evening for a scenic walk. The trail we walked was very pretty and right by a stream. This seems like a great place to visit if you live in Austin. Parking: Free and plentiful.

Sixth Street (downtown Austin): If you’re staying downtown + aren’t as much of a grandma as I am, I can attest from my college days that this can be a fun place to bar hop in the evening and listen to live music. There is also a Velvet Taco on Sixth Street, which is an automatic win.

To Stay:

Our Airbnb was in North Austin, right on the North Star Greenbelt (which was very pleasant for evening walks). The neighborhood was a bit run down and the house seemed very old and run down, so while we didn’t feel unsafe, we don’t necessarily recommend this area. 

Downtown Austin is probably a fun place to stay, but parking is very expensive. We looked at a handful of Marriott Hotels, all of which charged $50 per night for parking. Given this, we were happy to stay away from downtown; the 20-minute drive wasn’t a problem.

[lemondropsssss]

Jaskier spends what feels like an eternity wrapped up in Geralt’s arms. He hadn’t expected the embrace to last so long, but each time he goes to pull away Geralt makes a glorious growling sound and tightens his grip and really, how is Jaskier supposed to argue with that? He feels safe for what he realizes is the first time in a long time. Geralt’s scent hasn’t changed, is still the same leather-sword oil-horse-musk that is somehow intoxicating. So he tucks himself under his Witcher’s chin and just breathes, and to his amazement Geralt lets him- no, wants him , is holding him as if he’s important, and it warms him from the inside out.

“We should get back to the house,” Geralt says eventually, voice rumbling in his chest as he pulls back and looks the scant inch down at him. Jaskier steels himself for whatever pity might await him when he meets his gaze but there is none. Just a kind of calm fondness Jaskier hasn’t seen before. “I don’t like leaving Fiona alone for too long.”

“She’s fourteen, I think she can handle a hot mug on her own by now,” Jaskier mutters, not caring that Geralt can absolutely hear him, but he steps away all the same.

Geralt grunts back, but Jaskier can tell he’s smiling. It’s all in the eyes crinkles, after all. “C’mon, say your goodbyes so we can go.”

Jaskier rolls his eyes but does go give Roach one last pat, reminding her that she is practically perfect in every way and such a good horse and better than Geralt and it’s not as if he actually walks anywhere, unlike some very good horses I could name. Geralt’s smile grows to almost-visible-to-the-naked-eye, but he soon pulls Jaskier away with a muttered, How many times do I have to tell you to stop trying to fuck my horse, and the exasperatedly fond look on his face makes Jaskier’s stomach swoop.

He’s still angry. Still sad. Still doesn’t believe him, is still waiting for the moment Geralt will turn around and leave him alone in the dust like so many times before. It will hurt when he goes, surely, but at least this time Jaskier will be prepared for it. He’s built himself a life outside Geralt, his world won’t come to a screeching halt when he leaves. And maybe if Jaskier proves he can handle himself without his scary Witcher around, said scary Witcher would be more inclined to visit. But he does like this feeling. Walking side by side again, shoulders brushing companionably, how achingly familiar it all is.

The front window is vacant when they pass, and Jaskier assumes Ciri’s gone up to bed courtesy of Bea’s sleepy tea. He’s surprised then to find the teen sat up on the countertop, potato in one hand and paring knife in the other. She has a look of fierce concentration on her face as she works carefully, the tip of her tongue clenched between her teeth. Bea is close by, up to her elbows in flour and wrestling with a shaggy bread dough while still keeping a close eye on both Ciri and the pot bubbling over the hearth; the woman is a master, and Jaskier stops to watch her with a smile on his face.

“Geralt!” While he’d been distracted by the domestic scene, Geralt had come in behind him and was now crossing the room with the softest look Jaskier has ever seen on his face.

“G’morning, cub.” Geralt presses a kiss to her temple, and Jaskier has to stop himself from staring; both at the pet name and the very public display of affection. Public being only two other people of course, but that was still rather public to Geralt of Rivia. Ciri must be used to the attention for she pays it no mind, which confounds him even more. “Julian said you didn’t sleep well. More of the dreams?” He tucks an errant lock of hair behind her ear and it’s the thoughtlessness of the motion that stands out to Jaskier.

This is a kind of casual and easy affection he’d only seen- well, that he’d only seen with him. Usually in a liminal time; in a shared bed some fuzzy between awake and sleep, or after the sixth ale of  a long night, pressed together in a dark corner of a tavern. And Geralt would sweep a hand across his, or press their knees together under the table, or curl a protective arm around his waist while they slept. Seeing that affection here, in the bright light of morning is something he wasn’t prepared for, and he takes a seat at the table lest his legs fail him.

Ciri and Geralt are oblivious to his confusion; she’s showing him how her knife skills have improved, and he’s watching her with a kind of fond fascination Jaskier’s never seen before but finds he quite enjoys. He looks up suddenly, their eyes meet, and Geralt’s expression turns to something more Jaskier can’t even begin to place. This man who gives affection freely and without pause is not the Geralt familiar to him.

It isn’t long before Bea finishes setting out a proper morning meal, and Jaskier can’t help but feel a crippling domesticity as they sit down to eat. Their breakfast is porridge with honey and cream, sausages, and the good brown bread that Bea has refused to ever share the recipe for, no matter how much coin Jaskier offers her. She doesn’t sit to eat, which doesn’t surprise him, but she does continue to work on whatever lunch is going into the pot over the hearth.

It’s a good breakfast, and good company. Ciri does wonders towards greasing the conversation, and Geralt says more than a few grunts in passing, which Jaskier considers a monumental feat. But they came to him for a reason and needs must, so Jaskier steers the conversation back towards the business that brought them to his doorstep.

“When you came to me at the University, you said you needed help. What kind? Money, clothes, food?” It’s blunt, but Jaskier would rather know now what the price for this visit will be.

Geralt looks thrown for a moment before he answers. “All of the above. We’re heading North, towards Kaer Morhen. We need,” He clears his throat, clearly uncomfortable with the actual asking part of asking for help, “Money, yes, and winter clothes. Another mount. Fiona needs a better disguise; cutting her hair, dye maybe- maybe even for both of us.” He makes a face at that and Jaskier wants to laugh; Geralt always did love his hair. “We stand out, it makes us too easy to track. Nilfguaard is-” He cuts off, worried gaze wavering over Ciri, which she huffs at and continues in his place.

“Nilgfuaard is hunting us. Me, technically. They’ve been tracking me since Cintra. And they’ve killed everyone who’s tried to help me.” She doesn’t meet either of their eyes. “They’ll hurt anyone to get to me. Geralt is taking us to Yspaden to meet Yennefer, and then to Kaer Morhen together where we’ll be safe.” Ciri is somber and serious for a girl her age, and Jaskier notices she tucks her hands into her lap out of view.

His compassion for her is quickly overtaken by the creeping feeling of something cold sliding down his spine. Poor stupid little Julian who never learns, the voice inside him taunts, He has his child, has the great mage herself, what use is a washed up old bard to a Witcher? All he needs from you is money, he said it himself. That’s what this morning was, the idea twists around inside him and it hurts, physically hurts him to think it but he can’t stop, Nothing genuine, just a way to keep poor stupid little Julian on his leash. He doesn’t- couldn’t actually care for you.

“Right well, ah-” Jaskier’s voice is hard to his own ears, so he clears his throat before trying again. “That shouldn't be any trouble. We should ah-” His mouth runs dry and he’s just trying to get through this as quickly as possible so he can flee and maybe hide from his houseguests for a good few hours in the tub. But no, he is a mature and reasonable adult who is pleasant to his houseguests and who does not cry in front of them. Geralt is watching him closely with an odd look on his face, and Jaskier feels uncomfortably seen. “We should armor you too, you’re no use to anyone at all as a Witcher with no armour and only one sword.”

“Of no use to anyone at all?” Geralt rumbles, one annoyed eyebrow raised in Jaskier’s direction.

“The last time I checked you can still bleed, O Great and Mighty Witcher, and that shirt you’re wearing wouldn’t stop a butter knife.” For a moment they sound like they used to, and it doesn’t shatter his heart at all to hear. He clears his throat, trying to force down the hard lump of familiarity threatening to choke him. “We can get you a mount easy enough. I assume you’ll want one more Fiona-sized?” He winks at Ciri and she grins. “That shouldn’t be an issue, I have friends at the horse market who owe me a favor. Or several, as the case may be. As for clothes, we can go today to the seamstress on-”

“Pardon, Master Julian?” It’s Bea, a few paces away from the table. Jaskier knows she wouldn’t interrupt without cause, and gestures for her to continue. “You may want to dress the child down in things that look more travel-worn as to blend in. Fresh made clothes might fit well, but they’ll draw attention off the beaten path. I still have some of my Piotr’s things, I could fit them to her size easy enough. They’re a bit battered, but well made. She’ll need a new cloak though, I don’t think his will be warm enough for where you’re going.”

“Bea, you are a blessing from the Gods,” Jaskier beams, mentally kicking himself for not thinking of that. Of course they shouldn’t buy new things, fresh clothes are like a beacon to bandits on the road. Stupid, stupid Jaskier. “Auntie, do you have anything we can dye Fiona’s hair with?” He sends Ciri a reassuring smile across the table. “Your hair is beautiful, little one, but your Witcher is right; it draws too many eyes to you.”

Bea considers for a moment before she nods. “I’ve got a walnut dye that should do for her, aye.”

“Grand, you see to that, and I’ll go see a man about a horse. Huh. For the first time, possibly ever, I actually mean that.” He’s out of his chair and halfway across the room before he’s stopped by an oh-so familiar growl.

“I’ll go with Julian.”

“No,” He’s saying before he even turns around,  “You’ll stay here with Fiona and get your hair colored.” Geralt looks like he’s about to argue so Jaskier beats him to it. “Or do you not remember that everyone on the continent is looking for you? If you’re not seen by a Nilfguaardian, you’re seen by a spy, or an informant, or some sad random asshole looking to score the reward purse. So you’ll be staying here, and getting your beauty treatment.”

There’s a stunned little look on his face that makes Jaskier more pleased than it should. He leaves them there, sure Bea will keep them on track and out of trouble, and starts the walk down the street towards the horse markets.

Jaskier wraps the heavy knitted scarf- a present from Bea on his last birthday- around his neck to keep out the first chills of autumn, but that does nothing to keep the ice from his heart. It began as a cool pinprick during breakfast, Geralt is taking us to Yspaden to meet Yennefer, and then to Kaer Morhen together where we’ll be safe and has shifted into a sharp spike of Yennefer, Kaer Morhen, safe that he doesn’t know what to do with.

He remembers the first time he’d asked where Geralt went in winter. He’d been twenty-two, or maybe twenty-four, and as with most stories they’d been drunk. He had wanted to invite Geralt back to Oxenfurt with him, but then Geralt had told him of the crumbling Witcher’s fortress, and the brothers he met there each year. He understood, when Geralt said it was the Witchers sanctuary and not a place for troublesome bards; when they were out in the world, Witchers could never relax, never take a deep breath for fear of killing or being killed. Of course they would need a place without humans, without others, where they could be free for a few months a year. Jaskier was never hurt that Geralt did not share that place with him- if anything, he loved that Geralt had somewhere safe and warm to rest his weary bones each year.

And Jaskier is a grown ass man, he will not begrudge a child being allowed to her father’s home but. But Yennefer. Jaskier knows about the sacking, he knows the last mages to set foot in Kaer Morhen were the ones who brought it crumbling down. If Geralt is bringing Yennefer that must mean they’re together. It will be Yennefer Geralt presents to his brothers, Yennefer who will walk the halls, explore the library, spend months curled up with her lover and their child and-

The honey-colored memory of their early morning embrace is souring in his mind; like black ink spilled over the image and corrupting it until there is nothing left but the acrid feel of Geralt’s arms around him and the burning knowledge that he was going to be left behind again. The promise of the morning means nothing now- Geralt will leave him for Yennefer like he always does, and Jaskier will let him like he always does, and the status quo will remain ever stable.

Jaskier should learn to say no when old not-friends show up at his doorstep, he really should.

He quickens his pace- if he hurries the sale, he might be able to convince Filip to take an early lunch and they can get spectacularly drunk in the hayloft like stupid teenagers instead of doing their actual jobs.

-

here are parts one two three four five. and the full story is on ao3 here 

[shiro-0197]

aw shiro, my love, don't worry about it!! i only hope you're okay and safe :d please only reply when you're free, and don't feel bad about it!! >:(

my day yesterday was okay, i've just been relaxing, and studying occasionally. went out to explore a nearby town too, it's so pretty there. and much colder (since it's a highlands) of course!! Today was great too. I bought doughnuts (they're amazing?? I love doughnuts), and I had instant ramen, but it was SO spicy I nearly died. (Three bottles of water later, because someone finished all the milk in the household *cough* me *cough*) and I'm still just reeling. Sucks having such low spice tolerance HAHA. I'm listening to some old school hip-hop rn, while typing this out :D how were your two days?

here are some i'll be using to teach english :d and that would honestly be much appreciated, he's getting on my last nerve rn. (I included the first few, what do you think?)

thats such a priceless feeling i so totally agree. you're so precious 🥺🥺 i'm sure they're prouder thank you imagine. you're so dedicated!! i'm sure all that extra research you've done will definitely pay off. it's good that you know what the job is roughly like, so you'll be really prepared when you finally do start it. you know that one scene, in the 2nd season of the great pretender? when the chinese mafia boss emphasizes the importance of a translator in literally everything? (like that book award example) i may be getting the thing muddled up, but i found that so cool. like yeah, a book or speech could be absolutely beautiful, but if everyone can't enjoy it due to it being a different language, it would be such a shame. i just find translators really important. sorry, i'm really dorky haha 🥺🥺

awww but i think your personality type is wonderful. a lot of my favourite characters are intj (they're all so precious istg grrrr) yes!! i was in a tooru brainrot yesterday too 😭😭😭 (saw a bunch of couples on my walk, and I was like "if only Tooru was real grrrr") and yes?? there'd be so much to learn from each and every one of them. dedication from hinata, savage lines from tsukki, kindness from yams/yachi, how to be a dork 101 from atsumu. aaaah 😭😭i'm sorry they're all so wonderful.

No pftttt I totally feel you. I saw some people without masks today and I was like "bro wtf" and just really loudly said "I sure hope everyone starts following the rules so the cases don't increase" because I'm a lil bitch like that xD

awww okay!! I'll definitely keep that in mind. Mayo makes everything better, tbh >.< aww that's understandable! I don't have specific preferences but hearing the phrase "soggy cheese" makes me want to cry somewhere :( I don't like nuts in chocolate. I'm very passionate about that? XD ikr??

I'm surprised too, I usually never pass on murder, but I guess you're just special like that 👉👈 sir I'd get married to you as many times as you'd like 😼 oops sorry for being cheesy, but—you like cheese ;)

U

I won't ask why, don't worry. Since I kinda feel the same about Malaysia tbh. It's a love hate relationship, I think HAHA but yeah 😣😣 i don't look up to US at all, and it sucks because people generally do. And I'm just like ;-; why (no offense to Americans tho lol)

is that even legal omg they're so chaotic?? XD how cute tho. Angel does stuff like that all the time too, but I'd never know that when I first met her (she has the most perfect exterior, and then when you get to know her; she's the biggest dork) Schools opening on the 20th, I can't wait to see her then :] (I can, however, wait for the exams which are scheduled for the 25th ugh)

peanut butter is indeed yellow, not up for discussion hehe :) here's my favourite hues!! I love gentle, soft hues like these (pastels) , for yellow; I don't have a favourite. they're all wonderful

ahhh no that's so precious of you!! :)) I'm smiling rn.

yeah skdhskdjsk I'M JUST SO GRRR. Whenever someone goes "hey Ari can you ______" and we both respond?? The tension?? In the air?? Bro skdjskks. 😔🤚 You share a name with one of the most precious characters too tho!!;

This is Shiro from Voltron hehe. I love him so much, just like I love you (tho I'm sure we both know I love you more <3)

I share a name with a book character. His name is Aristotle Mendoza, but his crush-turned-boyfriend calls him "Ari" (which has been my nickname since I was 12). Reading it for the first time was the BEST feeling ever. It's also my favourite book, "Aristotle and Dante discover the secrets of the universe".

—Ari :D (no pfttt I love the tag so much. I have my own tag, that's like the best thing ever 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺)

Heyyy I'm so sorry for answering so late!! I know you said not to apologize but..... well hmm no excuse I just feel like apologizing, but either way thank you for your patience!!♡ This is the third time I'm rewriting this, and this time I'm doing this in my notes because fuck it😔

Im glad to hear that!! Highlands are always so pretty. Wish we had those here, but it's only steppe here:( Boring~ ooh, donuts!!! They're really good. I havent much, but I tried them like 3 times and they're so good. I really hope I will get to eat more<3 also WHAT'S THOSE NOODLES' NAME I WANNA KNOW- Are you feeling okay now, though? XD

My days were nice!!! Felt as if I had been hiding three bodies, but I've been feeling better lately. We had online school yesterday so I'm excused from the errands for the half of the day, thankfully. But your messages make me very happy. Though I dont always feel like writing a response (or I get stressed because it doenst save) so very sorry for that😔

Ohh those look so pretty!! I'd totally join to just look at them. The colors are so nice🥺 it looks like one of our olympiad prep slides, though better. I dont have the screenshots sadly😩 Either way I really love the little details like the squiggly thingies or the Ж .... they seem unnecessary but the energy changes a lot without them hehe

I really hope they will be🥺 that'd mean a lot to me. And I'm also really hopeful itll work out. I really don't wanna disappoint my family, which is literally just one person. The less people there are, the more it hurts, you know?

Yeah, that scene meant so much to me!! I dknt remember much, but I was very happy they said something like that, because I've been told being a translator wont work out for me. Now look at me, I'm about to tell them to fuck themselves<3 I was also so surprised to see Laurent know that many languages ..... I aspire to be like him😩 And honestly, I havent though so deep of that but you opened my eyes and now I'm about to float off into the next universe😭 dont apologize though, its very cute!!!♥︎♥︎

Heheh, I guess you're right.. every single anime INTJ is a silent sexy mastermind and I love them . ... YEAH every single time I see a passing couple i cry because I dont have anyone 😡💔 and sometimes when I see people doing something amusing (which includes people failing cuz I'm evil) I just imagine one of the characters doing that and I smile all the way xD Honestly, I'd sell my father on black market for a single day with one of them:( though that may sound like a really low price because his cigarette filled lungs wouldnt cost a lot... I sound like my 7th grade self again I'm so sorry

BAHQHHANEJWJD I HOPE THEY WERE EMBARRASED. I HOPE THEY FELT AWKWARD AND OTHER PEOPLE DID TOO, they deserve it. Like, learn your lesson bitch, it's been a year!

Yeah!!! I love mayo, not to the point where I would gulp it down from the package, but it does make dishes taste good. Same, soggy cheese on itself sounds like a dish served in the ninth circle of hell. You should try nuts in honey!! Like, just straight up dip them in honey. Sounds weird, and it doesnt always taste NEJFJKSKF (depends on the honey)but I think it's worth trying xD Walnuts are the best with honey I think

That was so funny ... TOO FUNNY, I LAUGHED FOR LIKE . 3MINUTES STRAIGHT and I do not laugh when I'm tired. You really are special 😭😭😭😭 cheesy ... HAHRNFJJSF

I'm so sorry for being a bully like that but it's so funny how you left a single U there . Its so mysterious, was it in purpose? Or were you lost in the excitement if messaging me?

I was one of those people, honestly 😭 but mostly because I wasnt aware of its political condition, I guess. Maybe theres more than just politics that's bad about US, but honestly, it has more opportunities than this hellfire. Though now I'm more into Norway and Japan. Really wanna travel there :(

Heheh, yeah, we never really show off to strangers at first. I dont know what exactly I mean by we, but you get my point ♡ Good luck though!! I hope it goes well for you<3

Oh they looks so pretty!! They're really wonderful. Like bubblegum and cotton candy and literally anything sweet... it's so cute !!! And I totally agree, there isnt a bad yellow.

HAHAH, honestly, that reminds me of how there were 4 people with the same name in my class, and whenever the teacher did the attendance thing, they would all stand up. Teachers usually dont say the last names, so we always gotta ask which person they mean if theres more than one person with that name, so yeah.. That happened on accident at first, but then they just did it for trolling xD

OH MY GOD HES SO PRETTY? HES SO PRECIOUS?? HUHHH??? I gotta thank Kuro for this wonderful opportunity of sharing a name with someone like .... him🥺

Oh that's so cool!! Also, he has a boyfriend ... I really need to start reading xD it's so cute though! It sounds like such a good book, I'm glad you share a name with him, hehe!!

I also share my real name with one of the characters in a kids' show, and its SO ugly, I'm in pain. Every time my friends see one of those on TV they go

Which is a pain in the ass, it's so embarrassing...........

Awh, okay!! I'm glad you love it, cuz I do too. Because it's your name.... cuz I love u. That was so lame PLEASEJWJDJSJF I HOPE YOUR DAY WAS GREAT !!! LOVE YOU

[argyrocratie]

The Tyranny of Words by Stuart Chase (1932)

  CHAPTER XIV: TO THE RIGHT WITH THE ECONOMISTS

(...)

I employ a skilled mechanic to mow my meadow and cultivate my garden. He used to be employed in a Connecticut mill, but a new machine was installed and he and some others lost their work. So he is keeping himself and his family alive as best he can at a fraction of his former income. He was a victim of what is termed 'technological unemployment.’ A machine took his work from him, and for a considerable period he could find no other work to do. He might have left town, but he had bought a house, his children were in school, his wife liked the neighbourhood and to take to the road was a risky venture with machinists out of work on every hand. Now what do the classical economists do with my friend Roy Thompson?

They prove by irrefutable logic that technological unemployment is impossible. I know what I am saying, for I have debated the matter in public with classical economists and can tick off the arguments with my eyes shut. The logic proceeds like this: A new machine is put into a pin factory to take the place of men. The cost of making pins is lowered. Presently competition lowers the price of pins as the machine is generally adopted. Therefore housewives spend less money for pins and have more money to spend for silk stockings. Therefore the factories making stockings employ more help and no unemployment results. On the other hand, if the first factory has a monopoly of the new machine and does not choose to lower the price of pins, the owner of the factory takes in more money. This money he either spends, let us say for a private aeroplane, or invests in a new pin factory. Workers have to build the aeroplane or the factory, giving more employment. On purely logical grounds, you cannot get round it. Employment shifts, but does not decline and the same amount of money continues in circulation. Q.E.D.

How do you get round it? You look steadily at Roy Thompson, at scores of still less fortunate Roy Thompsons. You adopt the operational approach, disregard the logic in your head and observe what is happening outside. You are careful not to generalize from one or two cases. In the world of fact, you find that men and women frequently lose their jobs to machines, to stop-watch efficiency methods, photo-electric cells, to improvements in agricultural methods. You can count them if you have the heart, leaving their benches and their tools and going out upon the street.

You can examine the curves of output per man-hour for this commodity and that and note how they have been rising for fifty years. You can halt any working man and ask him to tell you how he or his friends have lost their work from time to time because of new inventions. It is not hard to check and recheck the facts of technological unemployment. Referents for the term are very plentiful. Very good – or rather, very bad. Millions of Roys have suffered for a greater or lesser period. Do they find other work? Many of them do. Often like Roy, they learn new trades at inferior pay. But the increasing obstinacy of unemployment in the modern world indicates that many do not. Whether they do or do not, certain relevant human factors must be brought into the concept. Can Roy1, after twenty years of working at a lathe shift his skill to qualify as a linesman if men are wanted in that field? Can Roy2, after living forty years in Middletown with his roots driven deep pick up his family and move to Seattle if men are wanted on the docks? Can Roy3 now unemployed hibernate like a woodchuck and live without eating because a year hence there is to be a demand for machinists in the television industry? Can Roy4 change from man’s work in a machine shop to women’s work in a rayon factory? What kind of employment awaits him? Where does it await him? When does it await him?

It is two very different things to talk about 'technological unemployment’ as a net statistical effect and to observe Roy in his perplexity and discouragement. If new inventions speeds up, it is obvious that more men and women per thousand are in transit from a job lost to a job hopefully to be found. And what happens if the owner of the factory does not care to buy a private aeroplane or to invest in a new pin plant? Suppose he just puts his money in the bank, and the bank just lets it stay there? For the last eight years new investments in private industry have been pitifully small compared with earlier periods. What if we have as many pin factories as prospects for profitable investment warrant?

These considerations by no means exhaust the question. But perhaps I have given enough to show that knowledge about technological unemployment, or indeed any kind of employment, is not advanced by the syllogisms of classical economists. The classicists treat the term as thing-in-itself without finding the referents which give it meaning. Most characteristics are left out. Observe the brutality of the result. If one can prove by logic that there can be no such thing as technological unemployment, then any apparent idleness must he due to human cussedness – Roy must have been a slack worker, improvident and wrong-headed – and one can lean comfortably back in one’s chair with no need to do anything about it. More, one can violently object to anybody’s doing anything about it, for this would interfere with the functioning of 'economic law.’

'Unemployment’ is not a thing. You cannot prove its existence or nonexistence except as a word. The validity of the concept rests on the shoulders of millions of your fellow citizens. Are they suffering because they have no work? Are their families suffering? Are the children without shoes with which to go to school? In March, 1937, I visited WPA kitchens in Savannah, Georgia, where 4,500 schoolchildren certified as underweight from malnutrition, were being fed. Savannah is neither a large city nor a city of slums. If you cannot see through the word 'unemployrnent’ to ragged children standing patiently in line with bowl and spoon, you have no business hanging out your shingle as an economist.

Let us inspect another favorite abstraction of the economic faculty: 'The function of business is to supply the consumer with what he wants.’ Translating this to lower levels: The function of the radio business is to supply Adam1 with a serviceable radio at a price consistent with the cost of producing it. In the fall of 1936, a leading radio trade journal made the following editorial comment:

The ear of the average consumer is notoriously cauliflower when it comes to distinguishing between good radio reception and bad. Since original boorn-boom dynamic speakers superseded early high-pitched magnetics, few improvements impinging upon the auditory organs have been sufficiently obvious to nudge obsolete receivers into oblivion without the aid of vocal mesmerisms by some retail salesman. The public eye, on the other hand, appears to be readily impressed, and we predict the best year since 1929. Design for selling.

In short, do not build radios for the ear, because there have been no recent improvements to warrant new models; build them to sell an elegant Circassian walnut cabinet. Here are some assorted vocal mesmerisms:

Band-Stand Baffles Tone-Tested Resonators Violin-Shaped Cabinets Vibracoustic Floating Sound Boards Automatic Flash Tuner Overtone Amplifiers Acoustical Labyrinths Magic Voice Mystic Hand Dial-a-matic

What the radio industry does in the economic textbooks is one thing; what it actually does is another. The observation holds for most industries which can make more goods in a year than people buy in a year, or in more learned language, where capacity exceeds demand.

What a remarkable term is 'business’, especially in America! How is business? – not your business, but business-in-general. Statisticians toil over composite graphs and charts to answer this mythological question. If there is no such entity as 'business’ – and by now we know there is not – it seems a little superfluous to be constantly taking its temperature. Business says. Business speaks. Business recovers its voice. Business views with alarm. Business is jubilant when the Supreme Court votes down the NRA. Business is sick. Business is terrible. Business runs through a cycle – charming image. Business has recovered: Look at the chart – there it is, as plain as the nose on your face. Back to 1929. The curve says we are all right, therefore we must be all right. What, eight million unemployed; farmers in the Dust Bowl down and out; share-croppers reach new depths of misery? Forget it. Keep your eye on the chart.

This is pure hocus-pocus. Not only are there no dependable referents to which we can hitch the chart, but those to which it has been hitched – 'carloadings’, 'bank loans’, 'lumber production’, 'cotton-mill consumption’ – cannot he combined into any composite curve which does not violate mathematical sanity. A great mathematician, Ivar Fredholm, calls such omnibus index numbers 'hermaphrodite arithmetic monsters devoid of all sense’. At this point we note a curious perversion of the scientific attitude. Opinions as to the health of 'business’ are based on figures, rather than on hearsay and hunches. We are looking, we believe, at cold facts. We are scientific as hell. But the 'facts and figures’ we look at have been mutilated beyond meaning. Some day we must give up prostrations before a phantom 'business’, though the charts reach from Wall Street to the moon. The term 'business’ and its faithful follower 'service’, often prevent us from observing what useful or useless things businessmen are actually doing.

Many economists and statisticians believe it legitimate to argue that industrial prosperity after a slump will inevitably return, because their charts show ups and downs in the past. They point to the scientific nature of the 'proof’. But the graphs a real scientist draws describe the conditions of an experiment arranged by him. They can be used safely for drawing conclusions only if similar conditions can he arranged. The humps and hollows on the economists’ charts refer to changing conditions. There is no similar arrangement and few valid conclusions are possible. The context has changed and the result must be guesswork. 'Introducing graphs of supply and demand,’ says Hogben, 'in a fictitious free-exchange economy does not make economics an exact science.’

A business executive with whom I am associated asked me the other day, 'What will be the reaction of the public to the new laws for retail price maintenance?’ This was an important question, for as manufacturer, wholesaler and retailer of a commodity he had to decide a policy covering costs, prices, possible injunctions, court orders, notification to retailers and so on. Yet my colleague was trying to settle this critical matter with the aid of a ghost.

There is no 'public’ which is a useful concept in the premises. Calling it 'John Q. Public’ does not help. Between us, we had to break down 'public’ into a series of interested groups – New York retailers, retailers in the West, jobbing houses, customers of various kinds – before we could know what we were talking about and arrive at a valid decision. Observe that in this case no theory was involved. As businessmen, we had to determine, by the following Saturday morning, a specific course of action involving the stability and the jobs of a considerable business enterprise.

Formal economics wanders in a veritable jungle of abstract terms. Here is a sample of the flora:

land labour capital; capitalism rent wages; the iron law of wages purchasing power production; distribution interest; the long-term interest rate profit the profit system money: the gold standard credit; debt; savings; securities inflation; deflation; reflation value; wealth the law of diminishing returns the entrepreneur the economic man free competition; the free market the law of supply and demand cost; income price levels marginal utility monopoly; the trusts property individualism; business socialism; public ownership the consumer; the producer the standard of living planning

Some of these terms are useful short cuts provided one does not objectify them. But if one employs them without being conscious of abstracting, they acquire a fictitious existence. Some have no discoverable referents. 'Value’, for instance, is as elusive as 'the Omnipotent’. Some have referents very difficult to1ocate: 'capitalism’, 'individualism’, 'inflation’, 'credit’, 'money’, 'business’. Some have referents easier to locate, provided one makes the rare effort to find them.

Following Bridgman, we might prepare a list of meaningless questions in economics:

1. Does capital produce wealth? 2. Is the consumer more important than the producer? 3. What is a reasonable profit? 4. Is man by nature co-operative or competitive? 5. Is fascism a kind of capitalism? 6. What is a classless society? 7. What is the American standard of living? 8. Are capital and labour partners? 9. Are we headed for inflation? 10. Is decentralization better than centralization?

These questions are either completely meaningless, or meaningless as they stand. Given a position in time and space with further description of the terms employed, qualified answers might be found for some. For instance, Margaret Mead studied a tribe in New Guinea where habits of co-operation were very strong. A hundred miles over the mountains she studied another tribe where competition was so ferocious that it threatened survival. On the basis of these observations we might venture a qualified answer to question 4. For question 8, one can say that capital and labour are partners in the same sense that Castor and Pollux are brothers – mythological matters both.

Korzybski observes that any study to become a science must begin with the lowest abstractions available, which means descriptions of happenings on the level of sense impressions. Economic literature usually reverses this procedure, starting with high-order terms and working down. Thus you will find in Chapter I of Dr. Blank’s Principles of Economics elaborate definitions of 'land’, 'labour’, 'capital’, 'wealth’, 'profit’, 'money’, 'credit’, 'property’, 'marginal utility’. As any two economists have great difficulty in agreeing upon the precise meaning of these terms, the treatise begins with shaky assumptions. Worse follows when the shaky assumptions are woven into elaborate systems by deductive logic. The best fun which a professor of economics apparently gets out of his academic life is to demolish the theories of his confrères. The single time to my knowledge that American economists were in general agreement was when they objected to the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill in 1930, by a joint memorandum of more than a thousand signers. That was a red-letter day in the history of economic thought.

To extend agreement and make the study of economics conform to the scientific method, it is necessary to lay aside abstract definitions and apply the operational approach, What is Rufus1 doing on his farm? What is Roy1 doing at his factory bench? What is Junius1 doing in his bank? (A bank studied on the basis of what is going on inside without recourse to abstractions like 'credit’, 'liquidity’, 'soundness’, is a pretty whimsical thing.) What is Sylvia1 doing at her desk? Observe and record what a great number of men and women are actually doing in furnishing themselves and the community with food, clothing, and shelter. Then proceed to inferences. Then proceed to general rules governing economic behaviour – if any can be found. Then check the rules with more first-hand observation. Never forget Adam1 acting, the date at which he acts, the place where he acts. Fortunately some economists and sociologists are beginning to follow this programme. We find it in the studies of Middletown by the Lynds, in Ogburn’s Social Change, in Economic Behaviour and Recent Social Trends, in the studies of the National Resources Committee.

Inferences drawn by Adam Smith about the England of 1770, or by Karl Marx about the England, France and Germany of the 1850’s, are obviously worthless for the America of today. Some deductions may still he sound, but all are suspect pending operational check in modern America. To criticize American economic behaviour today, or to prescribe for its improvement because Adam Smith said thus and Marx said so, is as foolish as believing that a fly has eight legs because Aristotle said so. Both Smith and Marx used their eyes and ears more than their fellow theorists. Ricardo, for instance, might have been born blind, so pure a theorist was he.

Economic laws became in the hands of the classical school just laws in themselves. Often they were merely logical exercises. So it was that classical theory stood triumphantly symmetrical, an absolute! And so it is still too much taught. By a series of assumptions and with the use of certain chosen illustrations it can be worked up to climactically. And when the thing is complete – there you are! But the student goes away from the demonstration unsatisfied, frustrated, angry, feeling as though a logical trick had been played upon him. And why? Well, because for one thing, in the twentieth century the truth must be useful and this is not.

So says R. G. Tugwell. Meanwhile Dr. Wesley C. Mitchell observes that it is impossible to prove or disprove the classical laws.

The laws and principles were developed with the industrial revolution. The Wealth of Nations was published in the same year that Watt made a steam engine which would really work – the same year, incidentally, that the American Declaration of Independence was drafted and signed. The classicists were much influenced by notions about science, but they did not adopt the scientific method. They tried to erect economic laws like Newton’s laws of gravitation, but they did not copy Newton��s operational technique. It was like a little boy making himself a choo-choo after seeing a locomotive.

Editorial writers today are still infatuated with these 'laws’ of a make-believe science. They pull them out of their heads with pontifical finality whenever reformers or Congressmen propose a measure which editors do not like. 'Economic law cannot so cavalierly be set aside,’ they say. 'We cannot circumvent the law of supply and demand any more than we can circumvent the law of gravitation.’ 'Only crackpots would seek to outwit the immutable principles of economics.’

Classical economics not only was largely innocent of the scientific method; it also became a kind of theology selling indulgences to businessmen. As factories expanded after Watt’s steam engine, a philosophy was needed to give respectability and prestige to the rising class of manufacturers. The philosophy was first identified with the 'natural laws’ of Newton. Then it twined itself like a boa constrictor (yes, I am conscious of abstracting) around Darwin’s hypothesis of the 'survival of the fittest’. What a handout! The greatest good for the greatest number, so ran the dogma, arises from the unimpeded competitive activities of enlightened self-interest. The faster the stragglers are bankrupted and undone, the stronger the economic frame. What appears as competitive anarchy is not really anarchy at all, but a beneficent system of control by natural forces. The big fish eats the little fish, the strong businessman eats the weak. It is all very gratifying and lovely, and as remote from reality as the labours of Hercules.

In 1798, Malthus published his famous essay on population, one of the grandest examples of extrapolation on record. The essay was in part designed to answer William Godwin’s argument to the effect that mankind could achieve happiness through the use of reason. Malthus wanted to scotch the dangerous idea that happiness was in prospect for the mass of the people. (The principle of 'original sin’ again). So by study of the exceedingly unreliable statistics of the time, he laid down two postulates: first, that population tends to grow at a geometrical rate; second that the food supply tends to grow at an arithmetical rate. The population of England was then 7,000,000; in a hundred years if the curve was followed it would be, he said, 112,000,000. If food was sufficient for the 7,000,000 in 1800, by 1900 the supply would expand to feed only 35,000,000 – 'which would leave a population of 77,000,000 totally unprovided for.’

This fantastic hypothesis was then solemnly applied to the problem of poverty. As population was destined to leap ahead of food supply, restrained only by pestilence, war, and famine, it followed that measures to improve the living-standards of the mass of the people were futile. 'It is, undoubtedly, a most disheartening reflection, that the great obstacle in the way of any extraordinary improvement in society, is of a nature that we can never hope to overcome.’ That stopped the fellow Godwin in his tracks. The essay was also used for decades as conclusive proof that reform laws were pernicious. In the second edition of his essay, in 1803, Malthus relented to the point where a new element was introduced into his equations. It the poor would employ 'moral restraint’ in their procreational activities, they might possibly gain a notch or two on the food supply. It was very cheering news to the well-to-do. The poor had themselves to blame for their poverty and even if moral restraint was widely practised, poverty was largely inevitable anyhow.

Malthus’s iron law of population was paralleled by Ricardo’s iron law of wages. This great principle put poor people in another vice. Since labour is a commodity, said Ricardo, its price goes up and down with demand. When demand for labour is slack, wages will remain at the bare-subsistence level. If demand becomes brisk, wages will rise, workers will have more money. They will then produce more children and presently the addition to the population will bring the price of labour back to bare-subsistence level again. So what is the use of trying to improve the condition of the workers?

Nassau Senior 'proved’ that hours of labour could not be reduced, because the employer’s profit came out of the last hour of operation. A 68-hour week was common at the time. Eliminate that last hour, he said, and industrial profits would be eliminated and the business of the nation ruined. Thus if children in factories worked 67 hours rather than 68, panic would replace prosperity. Senior’s analysis was derived from theoretical examples where the arithmetic was correct but the assumptions untenable.

Senior’s contribution to economic theory proved that hours could not be reduced. John Stuart Mill and other classicists proved that wages could not be raised, by the famous 'wage-fund doctrine’. Workers joined unions and struck for a raise. Pure madness, said the economists. Why? Because there was a certain fund set aside out of capital for the payment of wages. There was a certain number of wage-earners. Divide the first by the second. It was all arranged by Heaven and arithmetic and trade unions could do nothing about it. The wage-fund theory was the stock answer of the manufacturer and editor to the claims of organized workmen. It had been blessed by economists and must be true.

Observe how these 'laws’ were put to tangible use, holding back improvements in working-conditions for scores of years. The philosophers produced nonsense which was at least disinterested. Many of these classical economists had an axe to grind and cruelly sharp they ground it. Not until 1876 was the wage-fund theory exploded by an American economist, Francis Walker. He argued that wages were paid not out of a fund of stored capital, but out of current earnings – a theory which came closer to the facts. It is a pleasure to note that John Stuart Mill who first popularized the wage-fund hypothesis in his Principles of Political Economy in 1848, published the following statement years later: 'The doctrine hitherto taught by most economists (including myself) which denied it to be possible that trade combinations can raise wages… is deprived of its scientific foundation, and must be thrown aside.’ A brave, fine statement. But working people in England and elsewhere for fifty years had paid a bitter price for a 'law’ that had no scientific foundation.

Orthodox economists have had a particularly bad time of it since 1929. Governments all over the world have been indulging in financial operations of a shockingly unorthodox character. As Chester T. Crowell points out in the New Republic, the learned faculty stands on the sidelines shouting: 'No! You can’t do that!’ And while they shout, it is done. The economically impossible is performed again and again. For instance:

1. Mussolini simply could not carry on his vast operations in Ethiopia with a gold reserve of only $3,000,000,000. It was unthinkable. The reserve was a mere drop in the bucket; it would be gone in a month. But Mussolini did it. Ethiopia was brought to heel, and Italy is still afloat financially.

2. If a nation has a gold coverage of less than 2 per cent, obviously it has no currency worthy of the name. Panic and chaos are inevitable. It cannot hope to carry on foreign trade; its citizens will fly from their native money standard. In terms of respectable economic theory, the German financial system today is a corpse. But the corpse does not fall down. It goes right on acting as if it were alive.

3. We were all brought up on the fundamental idea that if the British Treasury ever repudiated a government debt, it would be the end of the pound sterling and of world trade. The financial backbone of the planet would be broken. Well, the British Treasury owes the American Treasury some billions of dollars, and the latter can whistle for its money. The pound remains firm, and ships still sail the seas. Because of the repudiation, Congress passed the Johnson Act, forbidding loans to warring nations, and so giving the American people one of the sturdiest defences against being dragged into war that it was ever our good fortune to secure. England’s perfidy has been our blessing.

4. A nation, we were taught, could not go off the gold standard in fact, no matter how many proclamations its statesmen made. If it devalued, prices would shoot up, and gold would still be master. The United States went off the gold standard by proclamation and most domestic prices hardly fluttered. France, which clung nobly to gold, suffered a much more severe depression than the reprobates who abandoned it.

Yes, the orthodox economists are having difficulties on the sidelines. Is the trouble with the wicked world which pays little attention to their 'laws’, or is the trouble with the laws themselves? How valid are 'natural laws’ which can be violated right and left?

[greyskywrites]

Wolf’s Price

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Part V. Ima Vulgas || Mother Wolf

“News has come to me of what befell Morhall, and our king. They say my daughter fled into the snow, rather than be killed by the Kressosi. They say it is impossible that she survived, but I do not believe it. My Liana is a wild creature, fierce and stubborn. I do not know all of what the man we called our king did to her, but I know that if he did not break her spirit enough to make her afraid of the wild, then there is nothing in those wilds that can kill her, either. “My Liana will come home someday, and mark my words that when she does, she will be a greater woman to Saren than any queen who ever wore a crown.” Ervind Anarin, from a private letter 

XIX. Journey

5.1k

Veland helped me to gather wood for a fire, though he was quieter than I liked. I had told him we were going to see my family, and that was all, but I knew he must be able to sense that something was wrong. He asked me why we had to leave in secret, why Muras and Todd weren’t coming with us.

“There are dangerous people looking for us,” I told him. “Men who would hurt us. That is why we have to go to my family. Muras and Todd… they cannot help us.”

Veland held his armful of wood, and bit his lip. “Why not?”

That was a good question, one that I didn’t have a satisfactory answer for. I smoothed Veland’s hair. “Because this is a journey we have to make on our own, puppy.”

Always, it should have been alone. I was foolish for thinking I could keep Todd and Muras with me and still pay my debts. I should have left them the moment my feet were once more on Sarenn soil. If I had not been so afraid…

We were camped in a hollow where the wind did not touch us. We had been traveling several days, and we had to stop to find food, or else we would starve before we got any further. Tyna had come up with some mushrooms under the snow that were a little past their prime, but still edible. Veland had shown me how to build a rabbit snare, and set them himself. Atsa children learn early how to make such snares, but I took him away before he could learn to hunt for foxes and weasels. He would have made squirrel snares, too, but the squirrels were still hibernating. We would have to hope there were enough rabbits around to feed us.

I eased myself down on the blanket by the fire, the baby kicking up a storm. They had hardly ceased moving since I left Morhall, as if they, too, were running. We set the wood we had gathered near the coals to dry before we added it to the fire.

Bili snorted under the trees, shaking his head. Tyna emerged from the trees, having been checking Veland’s snares. She had two rabbits on her belt, and something in her herb basket. “I have good news,” she said, “I found a squirrel cache.”

“What did it have?” I asked.

“Walnuts. There must be a tree nearby.” She sat by the fire, and pulled out her knife to skin the rabbits. I sent Veland to the stream to fill our soup pot with water, and stoked up the coals of our fire.

Tyna waited until Veland was gone to say what was really on her mind. “I still think we could have afforded the time to better plan, store up some food.”

“I was not staying another moment in that place.” I had been so angry I was afraid I would kill them. I hadn’t felt rage like that since I decided to call the Wolf down on Corasin. It had scared me bone-deep, to feel that kind of hate again.

Tyna let out a quiet sigh, and separated out the organs we could eat and those we could not. “Be that as it may, this was rash. How do you mean for us to make it all the way to the river?”

I wasn’t certain, yet, but I knew I had no fear of starving. I had not come all this way just for the Wolf to let me die alone in the wilderness.

I took the walnuts from Tyna, and set out in search of a flat stone on which to break their shells. Veland came back from the stream with half a pot of water, which Tyna helped him hang over the fire. In went the rabbits, and their hearts and lungs and livers. The rest, Tyna wrapped in the skins and carried off into the trees, to pack them in the snow far away from our camp.

Veland came to smash walnut shells with me, crouching in the snow, a serious little frown deep in his face. “Ima,” he said, “how long are we going to stay with your family?”

“I don’t know.” Truthfully, I did not know how we would be received. Julas had a family, a Kressosi wife… I was arriving some eight years too late, asking an enormous task of my brother. An enormous amount of forgiveness. The only thing I knew for sure was that Julas would not immediately turn me away. We had been as close as twins, once.

“Can I see my brother again?” That was how he asked to see Kip’s portrait. He had a hard time with Kip’s name, if he even remembered it, but the word for ‘brother’ he had learned quickly enough. I reached under my blouse to retrieve the locket, taking the chain from my neck.

Veland opened it carefully, squinting at the small painting. “Is he with your brothers?”

I shook my head. “No, puppy. He’s with his father, in Kressos.” Foolish of me, to tell Veland he might someday meet his brother. They would never meet, now. I had made sure of that. Perhaps it would have been easier to never tell Veland about Kip at all. To not instill in him the same sense of scattered loneliness I carried in myself.

What was I going to do when Julas started doing math, and realized how old Veland was?

My son was not going to be anyone’s king.

When we had cracked open all of the walnuts, we added them to the soup pot, and I wrapped a blanket around my shoulders while Tyna cooked. The baby kicked again, and I let out a breath.

Tyna glanced at me.

“He’s coming soon,” I said. “Before the next dark moon.”

“That would be early, still.”

“I know, but,” I held my own belly. “Veland and Kip both jumped like this, in the month before they were born.” It would be early, but not so early. Tyna nodded. “Then we had best find a safe place for the little one to be born.”

Veland snuggled up against my side, and I wrapped an arm around him.  “Puppy,” I said, stroking his hair, “there is much I have to tell you, about where I came from. Who I was, before I was your mother.”

#

I was dreaming of being a wolf again, of running through the trees on four legs with a pack at my heels. I would wake up with snow and twigs in the wolf pelt I slept on. Tyna said no one could wake me before dawn. More than once, she had tended to Veland’s bad dreams while I slept.

We had found for ourselves a cave that was too shallow to host a slumbering bear, but deep enough to keep us out of the wind while we slept, and nurse a little fire.

Veland set his snares, and we didn’t starve, but it wasn’t enough to really ease the hunger. I knew we had to do something. I would not bring a baby into this cold when we were already withering. So in the night, when I woke inside of a wolf skin, I set out hunting.

Tyna about jumped out of her skin, the first morning she woke to find a deer carcass in our cave. Three wolves sat on the edge of our camp that day, watching as we butchered it. What we could not eat, or fit into our soup pot to keep hot for the next day, we fed to them. Everything that could be eaten was. We cracked the bones for marrow, sucking it out as we huddled by our fire, cut fat into our soup pot.

We stopped going hungry.

Veland would curl up with his head against my belly while I told him about my family—our family. I told him about my brothers, and my parents. “Your grandfather is passed now, but as far as I know, my mother still lives. She will be so happy to meet you.” I told him all the stories I had grown up with, of Anar and his sons, of great people in our family line. Veland would only move his head when the baby managed to land a kick against his skull.

“Ima,” he said, curled up next to me.

“Yes, puppy?”

“Are dangerous people looking for us because you used to be a princess?”

Tyna looked up from the tear she was mending in her coat, her eyes meeting mine.

I stroked Veland’s hair. “That’s part of it,” I said, “but not all.” I hesitated, and drew in a breath. “There is more I need to tell you,” I said, “about your father.”

Everything I had been through, I think it was telling Veland that he was the son of a king that was the most difficult. To try and explain to him, in a way he could understand, the importance of that, without terrifying him. He needed to be afraid, but he did not need anything added to his nightmares. “There are going to be people,” I told him, “who want to make you a king, too. A king is a very dangerous thing to be.”

I kept thinking of my meeting with Weta. Three kings will die on your account. “I won’t let anyone put a crown on your head,” I said, “because if they did, Veland, there is no count to the number of men who would want to take it from you.”

Veland stared at me so, it took everything I had not to look away. “My eba… was the king?”

I nodded. What else was there to say to a boy who could still count his age on his fingers? He did not need to know yet just what kind of man Corasin had been.

“But… Uncle Muras is the Wolf’s Son… he killed the king.” Veland’s face scrunched up in a frown. “Uncle Muras killed my eba?”

I took Veland’s hands in my own. “He did,” I said. “Because he is a soldier of Kressos, and that is what they do. That is why you can never be a king, Veland. Kressos will do everything they can to prevent it.”

“Would Uncle Muras ever hurt me?”

I gazed at my son, confused and afraid. “No,” I said, softly. “No, he wouldn’t.” If he had wanted to do anything of the sort, he had had ample opportunity.

Instead he had let everyone at Morhall believe that Veland was his.

I pulled Veland into a hug, kissing the top of his head. “I love you so much,” I whispered. “I will do everything—everything I can to keep you safe.”

Veland sniffled into my dress, and I held onto him while he hid his face from the world. These times when he was able to hide, they would be few and far between. I wouldn’t take any of that from him.

Tyna came over to sit beside us, and draped a blanket over Veland, rubbing a palm across his shoulders. “Little one,” she said, “there will be many people, too, who want to protect you, and keep you safe. Things will be hard, for a while, and they will be scary—but there will be good times, too, and friends you can trust. Your ima isn’t trying to frighten you, just prepare you.” She gazed at me a moment, and squeezed Veland’s shoulder.

Tyna had given up wearing her hair in a Kressosi style. It was braided now, beginning at the crown of her head. It had been a long time since I wore my own hair that way. Eleven years.

After we ate, as night closed in on us, I asked her if she would help me braid my hair.

Tyna looked at me a moment, as if I had asked something impossible of her, and then she nodded. By firelight, while Veland slept, she combed through my hair, gently working through the tangles. “I didn’t think you were going to tell him the truth about his father.”

“He deserves to know,” I murmured. “There will be no avoiding it.”

Tyna parted my hair, her fingers against my scalp. “And what are you going to offer the lords of Saren, if not a prince?”

“What they really want, and what they would get if I gave them a prince,” I said, “a bloody and brutal war.”

Tyna worked slowly and methodically with my hair. “And after?”

“I can’t give them rule,” I said. “I can’t tell them how to do it. It’s something that they will have to work out on their own. The only thing I care about is keeping anyone from ever again calling himself King of Saren.”

“Yes, I remember your hatred of kings.” Tyna’s voice was gentler than I expected. “What will you do with yourself, if such a war is won?”

I had thought so much on the inevitability of war with Kressos, of the pain and suffering it would bring, that I had not thought of an after. Of what my life would look like when my debt had been repaid.

I tilted my head forward, to keep the tension in my hair as Tyna finished the braid. “When war is done,” I said, “and my debt to the Wolf is paid… I will retire to Arborhall… and grow old and fat on cider and lamb.”

Tyna laughed softly, finishing off the braid. “An admirable plan. Will old Aziran-trained physicians be welcome?”

“I don’t see why not.” I was pleased that she intended to stay with us, at least for the time being. I had grown fond of Tyna’s stern and practical nature, even as she scolded me for doing dangerous and foolish things. She had even made sure Veland still practiced his letters, tracing them in the snow with a stick while we cooked and worked.

She had also saved him from poisoning us all with mushrooms that he found under the base of a particular tree.

When she tied off the braid, Tyna held my hair a moment more before she let it fall against my back. I touched the crown of my head, feeling how differently the weight rested on my skull. “It’s strange,” she murmured, “I didn’t think I’d missed this.”

“The hair, or being Liana Anarin?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer. Tyna got up to put more wood on the fire, to keep it burning through the night. It was the firewood, more than anything else that occupied our time now. We collected a great many pine cones to keep it lit. She seemed different, since we had left Morhall. I thought, perhaps, she felt a little guilty about all the people we had left behind.

“Where did you even get the name Sargis?” Tyna asked suddenly, looking up from the fire.

I laughed a little. “From a drunk man who asked me to marry him on the riverboat to Kressos.” I had almost forgotten him. He had been maybe seventeen, sloshed out of his mind, and I had grabbed his shirt to keep him from falling overboard. He had looked at me, smiled, asked me to marry him because I was “so kind and beautiful,” and immediately vomited over the side. “He said if I married him, I would be the most beautiful woman in the Sargis family.”

Tyna almost smiled. “Seems you’ve not had any shortage of suitors in your life.”

I shrugged, rubbing my belly. “For all the good it’s done me.” I got up to stretch, and we heard a wolf howl in the distance.

“One of yours?” Tyna asked.

“I don’t know. What makes them ‘one of mine?’” I settled onto the blankets and fur. Bili, who had already bedded down, reached over to sniff and snort in the middle of my back. The gelding that Tyna rode was already asleep, head tucked against his side.

“You’ll have to be better about pretending you understand how this all works when you’re talking to lords,” Tyna said.

“I’m not a fool,” I said, annoyed.

“No, you aren’t.” Tyna settled in, taking off her shoes. “I know you aren’t.” She rubbed her ankles, wincing. “You were right that I’ve been in Kressos too long. There’s so much theater to politics.” She pulled a blanket over herself, curling up on our makeshift bed of thin cedar and pine bows. “But there’s no sense worrying about all that playacting when we’re still in the woods, is there?”

“Can I ask you something?” I murmured.

“You can ask whatever you like, I can’t promise I’ll answer.” Tyna put an arm under her head, looking at me.

“Are you really here because you want a free Saren?” She had spent so many years in Kressos, killing for the crown prince—I had to wonder.

Tyna gazed at me a moment longer, and she drew in a breath. “That was why I decided to make a friend of you, when I realized who you were. I thought, finally, this can make a real difference. Something more than the nothing action of killing a single king and a single prince. Without something—someone—to remind the people what it means to be free, I couldn’t kill enough Kressosi nobles to make a single bit of difference.”

“And now?” I asked.

“And now,” Tyna murmured, “I am here because I don’t want to be parted from you.”

I gazed back at Tyna, not sure I wanted to ask her what she meant. I was still raw, still aching from what I had left behind. She had to know that.  She probably knew, too, how badly I needed her help. How friendless I was in the world without her.

“Don’t look so morose, Princess,” Tyna said, calling me that because she knew it would needle me, “I know how hard things must be for you right now. You asked a question, and I answered. That’s all.”

The baby kicked me in the ribs, and I let out a breath, shifting. “You should have seen the way they looked at me when they told me. They knew what they had done to me, and they thought I would just… stay.” That was what burned me the most. That they thought they could just tell me, and everything would be the same, afterward.

“I can’t puzzle out for you what they were thinking,” Tyna murmured, “or what they hoped to achieve. I can’t say anything that will make you feel less betrayed—but I can tell you this: your story isn’t hinged on those men. It never was. You are the one who was chosen by the Wolf, and you are the one who speaks for a god. Yours is the story that will be remembered, and not theirs.”

I laughed softly, shook my head. “I don’t care about my story,” I said. “I care about my life.”

#

I ranged far in my wolf dreams, farther than I should have been able to. I was coming to know this forest better than I had known any place I ever called home, its hills and hollows and the clear cold streams, many of which were at least half frozen.

As we were not presently in want of food in camp, I was only wandering that night, sniffing my way through the dark trees. The moon above was a thin sliver, not enough to light up the snow on the ground. I had slipped past a slumbering woolly rhino bull unnoticed, and was sliding through the ferns when I caught the scent of a human camp other than my own.

I stopped, chest deep in the brush, listening. It was late, and the camp was quiet, but I did not think it was large. I could only hear a pair of elk breathing, grunting in their sleep. Hunters, I thought. That was the only reason to be this deep in the forest, so late in winter.

I crept forward just to be sure, careful to stay downwind so the elk would not scent me and panic. I could see the smoldering embers of a fire, a red glow against the forest. Two figures were bedded down together, against the side of one of their elk. I watched them from the brush, trying to get a scent on them.

And when I did, I recoiled.

As familiar to me as my own scent, I knew them.

Todd and Muras had come looking for me.

I backed slowly into the trees, and spent the rest of the scouring the area around them, looking for others. They couldn’t have come alone, that would be mad. Alone, in an unfamiliar forest—they couldn’t be.

I found no one else.

As dawn drew near, I was called back to my human body in the camp. I plunged into as many streams as I could, following them until I could no longer, in hopes that if my tracks were discovered, they would soon again be lost.

I woke with the sunrise and a gasp, bracing as if I expected to be found already. I sat up slowly, scanning our camp—but Veland slept on, and Tyna too. I was the only one awake in the thin grey light.

I carefully pried myself up, bladder bursting, and watched the trees warily as I walked into the brush. How could they be here? To guess where I was going was one thing, but to find the route I had taken—I didn’t know how they could have done it.

I pulled our soup pot from the snow we had packed it under and hung it over the fire to heat while I waited for Tyna and Veland to wake. I could hear the wolves howling again, calling to each other. “Don’t harm them,” I whispered to the winter air. “Please, don’t hurt them.” If more blood had to be spilled on her account, she didn’t want it to begin with them.

A raven croaked somewhere nearby, and I let out a breath, deciding I should make myself useful and take the elk to the stream for water. I scratched Bili’s neck while he drank, his ears flicking every which way, listening to the sounds of the forest.

Muras and Todd were to the north of here by a few days ride, and it would not take them long to spy the smoke from our fire, if they hadn’t already. Could we risk leaving the cave, and looking for a new place to shelter? There might not be another place that safe for a hundred miles, and I knew the baby was close. If we didn’t have shelter when it came…

Tyna knew something was wrong the moment she looked at my face. She sent Veland to gather wood, and looked closely at my eyes. “What is it?”

“They’re looking for me,” I said. “And they’re not far from us.”

Tyna looked north, as if she could see them from our camp. “Well,” she said, “that’s terrible bad luck for us.”

“As best I can tell,” I said, “they’re alone. No soldiers anywhere that I could find.”

Tyna made a puzzled frown, bending to tend to the fire. “I can’t imagine Morhall would let go of its only commander like that.”

I held my belly in both hands as I walked around the camp, stretching my legs. “I don’t know how they’re here, but if we stay here, they’re bound to find us.”

“Much as I agree, I can’t advise we move without knowing where we’re going,” Tyna said. We didn’t even have a tent to shelter us from the wind if we couldn’t find a place to shelter. “Perhaps your wolves can give them the runaround for a bit. Lead them astray.”

Perhaps. I wasn’t certain, though, and that uncertainty meant I didn’t want the pack anywhere near the two of them. I remembered too keenly the men that had died on our journey north.

We ate, and set out to gather firewood and things that might supplement our soup pot. Tyna was happy to come across some large mushrooms growing out of the side of a tree, holding a tiny bit of snow on their tops, which she told us were quite delicious and filling.

Veland was quiet and sulky, which I had anticipated, but that didn’t make me worry any less. He checked his snares, and we were richer three rabbits. Toward midmorning, my feet hurt too much to do anything but return to camp and begin drying the wood, and skin the rabbits.

The baby was still kicking fiercely, which did little to improve my mood. I was sore and tired and cold and somewhere out in the trees Muras and Todd were looking for me.

It seemed I had always ended up in the beds of men who refused to let me go. Perhaps it was time to give them up altogether. I seemed to have nothing but bad luck with them.

I knew, even as I thought it, that it was both unkind and untrue.

Kaspar, for all his faults, had always been good to me. He had wanted me to be happy, he had wanted to take care of me. He just couldn’t be what I needed him to be.

I had known Todd would always put Muras first. There was no betrayal in that. They were connected in ways that I couldn’t be, simply because of how long they had known each other. Even so, once Todd was satisfied that I was not dishonest, and that I did not mean to displace him, he had always tried to make me laugh. He had played with Veland, kept a careful eye on him when he absolutely didn’t have to. I knew there had been times when Veland had gone to Todd for help before he had come to me.

And Muras… I knew why Muras had lied to me. It wasn’t because he wanted to protect me from the truth of myself, or protect us both from it. He had lied to me because as long as he pretended he didn’t know who I was, he could keep me by his side. As long as I was only Lya Sargis, and not Liana Anarin, he could allow himself to love me. Lya Sargis was only his Sarenn mistress. Lya Sargis was someone safe to love and protect.

Liana Anarin was a great deal more dangerous.

I knew and understood. It didn’t mean I forgave him for it. For marring the memory of his affection and tenderness with a lie. That he had known what he was bringing me back to, known exactly what it meant to me—and let me believe that I still had to hide it from him. How much easier would I have slept on that journey, in those walls, if I could have known there was one place I didn’t have to keep my suffering to myself? If I had known that my secret was safe.

That was what I was most angry about—that Muras had denied me that safety. And now he had the gall to come looking for me.

When Veland and Tyna returned, I had cooked the rabbits and mushrooms into our soup pot, and we ate together as the snow fell around us, hopefully dense enough that it concealed the smoke from our fire. I wrapped my arms around Veland while we sat, and thought on Arborhall, with its warm hearths and my foremothers’ tapestries.

I wished my father had lived long enough that I could see him again, or that I had been brave enough to return sooner. I had nothing to put in his barrow mound when I went, but I hoped that knowing that I had lived, that my son had lived, would be enough.

I could not let my father’s spirit believe that he had consigned me to death.

#

It was my father that first taught me to ride. It infuriated my mother endlessly, how my father conspired to get me away from my lessons and had me always at his side, whether he was with the elk or holding audience. Some of my earliest memories were of being perched in my father’s lap, playing with a toy while he discussed wool taxes with with the shepherds’ guild. I was his firstborn, his only daughter, and he spoiled me terribly.

But I learned, from all those hours spent watching my father. I learned how it was that Arborhall was run, not just the household that my mother managed, but the estate over which my father was lord. When times were lean for the farmers and shepherds, they were lean for us, too. “Starving men are dangerous men,” my father told me. “Hunger makes wolves out of all of us. When that is true, it’s best not to be the fattest lamb on the field.”

When our younger brothers were born, Father took Julas and myself to see them, and each time reminded us that we must look out for our brothers, that our family must be a haven for all of us. The world, he said, was a dangerous place, and if we could not trust that we would be safe with each other, then we could not trust anything at all.

I hadn’t known what he meant, then.

My father’s brother, the uncle Barwald that Tyna once met in Azira, I think was the reason for that warning. From what I remember of him, he was not a bad man, but he was terrible at correctly judging what he could say in front of strangers. Father had to work hard to appease more than one person my uncle had offended.

But when they traveled together, it was my uncle who could spy and shoot down a hunting snow lion no one had yet seen or heard. Once, when they were charged by a woolly rhino bull—a beast which is near impossible to kill when enraged—my uncle managed to put a musket ball through the bull’s eye, bringing it to a stop just at the edge of their camp, where everyone else had already fled trying to climb into the trees. However much trouble my uncle caused with other people, my father knew he would not have survived without Barwald.

While Julas and I were young, I think my father realized with some dismay that I was a great deal more like my uncle than I was like him—that wherever I went, there would be some trouble trailing behind me.

[spicyhoneyheart]

Cycle

Hi! I hope you're all doing well! I've been quite busy this week with my own projects but I also helped with a fundraiser event with my printmaking collective. It went very well and some of my donated prints went home with such lovely people! It was a very nice evening. Another wholesome thing: while the Commissions for Cause was a bust, I had one person follow up after the event in hopes of a commission. I told him that he could wait until the next charity event (so the proceeds could go for a cause), or pay directly to me as the artist, which he ended up deciding without hesitating. I kept the rate as it appeared on the charity event though; I had hoped the lower-priced items would invite more to donate but it did not! So I will adjust the list to directly reflect the materials and labour. This one was fine though, aside from translating the difficult pose it wasn't any trouble. As thanks for being the first to commission at all, I gifted him a complimentary print to choose from. I really enjoyed the experience! News aside, it's time to dive into another section of my concepts: Narrative. More specifically, the narrative of Hope and Despair. I was first invigorated to pursue this topic from one of my favourite video games, Shadow of the Colossus. It's been through a few remasters but it's been an influence of mine since its first release in 2005. Fumito Ueda, the creator of the game, tells a story of cruelty through abstraction and minimalism, dubbing his approach as design by subtraction. This approach is a method he developed to ensure that the idea or “feeling” of his concepts are unclouded by overt substance and clear narrative, oddly reminiscent of Romantic sublime qualities. To be more specific, the size of the monsters the player is faced to kill, the picturesque landscape spanning countless leagues, and the instances of overwhelming saturations of light fulfill some of Edmund Burke's guidelines. The narrative one can derive from this game is one of cruelty and senseless sacrifice, as illustrated by this quote: “when you have killed all sixteen colossi, you feel loss rather than triumph”. I feel that the basis of Shadow of the Colossus' narrative lends to the relationship between hope and despair, in which the confrontation of certain consequences results in further sacrifice, but this time in the form of reconciliation. In literature, Paradise Lost is a great example that explores this narrative. John Milton's epic poem recounts the fall of humanity through a more elaborate retelling of what occurred in the Garden of Eden, starting with Satan's own fall from heaven and ending with Jesus' resurrection. It is through the consumption of fruit from the Tree of Knowledge that original sin is birthed and final death is introduced to the world, the consequence for disobeying God: “Greedily [Eve] engorged without restraint, and knew not eating death” (Milton, Book 9: 791 – 792). When further investigating the significance of the gardens that exist in Christianity, consequences of Adam and Eve's actions are thus noted: “No longer would Adam and Eve enjoy a flawless environment. Instead, among other things, childbirth pains would intensify and man's labour became toilsome and less efficient as thorns and thistles would infest the ground – the ground to which they would ultimately return in death.” ​It is this mistake taking place in Eden that creates a deep despair in which neither Adam nor his ancestors can ever personally repent. However, the poem expresses that this ordeal may have been somewhat fortunate. According to Christian belief, it is in the coming of “the second Adam”, Jesus Christ, that humanity can also experience salvation. Jesus suffers in Gethsemane and dies in Calvary, absolving the sin Adam and Eve committed under Satan's advice. The story of Paradise Lost provides a much more personal conceptualization of Christianity's pursuit of redemption and everlasting life by explaining the birth and conquest of the final death, which relates to my interest in post-mortem beauty and a beautiful death. Which we'll get to later!! In my process document, I go into a very quick explanation of what hope and despair contribute to our lives. Experiencing a balance of both in your life contributes to the growth and maintenance of the human soul. A surplus of either entity will result in overconfidence and complacency (hope) or debilitating anxiety (despair). Nobody chooses to experience tragedy, nor do they enjoy it, but it's important not to live life fearing it or treading delicately through life to avoid it, because it's inevitable. It's going to find you at any point and in any form, and what you can choose to do is be open to it and its presence. Address it as what it is and come to an understanding. I feel the most prevalent despair that we share as a sentient species is the fear or dread of death. Romanticist artist Francisco Goya, in the later years of his life, composed the Black Paintings. These murals displayed horrific scenes on the walls of his living room, dining room, hallways... I believe these to be results of Goya coming to terms with his fear of death and mental state. Frescos such as The Drowning Dog and Saturn allowed Goya to release all tension accumulated during his lifetime. He was able to explore themes of sorrow, pathos and panic with complete freedom. I argue that this form of expression is a way of confronting despair and crafting hope for self-care. Experiencing close encounters with death, he bought a property away from the city and chose to express himself in ways that no patron would have the mind to request. These paintings were meant for his own private viewing, in which he expelled these morbid scenes from his mind and onto his walls. Upon given a form, despair and death seemed much more manageable.

Other instances can be a bit more subtle in terms of addressing death. Vanitas still-life acted simultaneously as a comment on Dutch citizens' vanity for their material possessions and as a prompt that mortality is temporary. Memento mori, the reminder of death. The presence of certain iconography, like skulls, timepieces, or cracked walnuts imply something or someone that no longer exists elsewhere exists in the painting. The commissioning of such pieces connotes a belief that paintings immortalize the presence of whomever the vanitas is referring to. Artists often inserted small self-portraits of themselves for this reason, given that any of the objects have a reflective surface. I believe that this idea helped artists and patrons alike with handling the idea of death, reminding them that their worldly possessions will not serve them in the afterlife. The idea that there is an afterlife at all strips death of its finality, making it more easy to accept.

But we don't know what lies in the realm of death. A garden, a kingdom, or pure darkness. We can believe what we've been taught or believe the accounts of those revived when they flatline. Or call it all lies. We believe what makes us feel better about it because we know it's inevitable. The key, I feel, is to not be consumed with a fear for it, neither be so careless or apathetic to its existence. You know, a balance of hope of despair. Coming full circle, baby! Personally I try to take a more positive outlook on death. I focus in on the idea life goes on even when our life doesn't. I am in love with the idea that once I'm gone, some new form of life or spirit flourishes in my remains. There is something so dang gorgeous about post-apocalyptic scenery, where nature reclaims the industrial landscape. Life and death, hope and despair, are not simply cycles to me, but coils. It's gonna be different, but the same, every time. Things got a bit grim, but we'll get over it. This one has a few paragraphs from my research essay two years ago, which provided a basis for my process document and my 2019 thesis works, Anthrocopia and Self-Vanitas. Next week I'll dive into how all of this relates to the contemporary sphere and to my practice. Take care, Gosia

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#3yrsago Keep your scythe, the real green future is high-tech, democratic, and radical

"Radical ecology" has come to mean a kind of left-wing back-to-the-landism that throws off consumer culture and mass production for a pastoral low-tech lifestyle. But as the brilliant science journalist and Marxist Leigh Phillips writes in Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff, if the left has a future, it has to reclaim its Promethean commitment to elevating every human being to a condition of luxurious, material abundance and leisure through technological progress.

Phillips is a brilliant writer and an incisive scientific thinker with impeccable credentials in the science press. He's also an unapologetic Marxist. In this book -- which is one of the most entertaining and furious reads about politics and climate you're likely to read -- he rails against the "austerity ecology" movement that calls for more labor-intensive processes, an end to the drive to increase material production, and a "simpler" life that often contains demands for authoritarian, technocratic rule, massive depopulation, and a return to medieval drudgery.

It wasn't always thus. The left -- especially Marxist left -- has a long history of glorifying technological progress and proposing it as the solution to humanity's woes. Rather than blaming the machine for pollution, Marxists blame capitalism for being a system that demands that firms pollute to whatever extent they can, right up the point where the fines outweigh the savings.

As far back as Engels, Marxists refused to countenance the idea of limits to human growth. While Malthus was (incorrectly) predicting that humanity would exhaust its food stores any day now and plunge into barbarism, Engels wrote, in Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy:

Even if we assume that the increase in yield due to increase in labour does not always rise in proportion to the labour, there still remains a third element which, admittedly, never means anything to the economist – science – whose progress is as unlimited and at least as rapid as that of population.

But how can a finite planet sustain infinite growth? Through improvements in material processes. We use a lot less to make things today than we ever have, thanks to science -- and capitalism. The less labor and material used in a process, the less it costs to make and the more profit there is. But growth under market conditions also requires pollution/extraction/waste/overproduction:

The firm not be able to pay for new materials or labour or the upkeep of its machines and will go out of business. This is why capitalists, left to their own devices, have no choice but to pollute or extract or pump out CO2 or catch fish at a rate that is heedless of what remains of our store of resources. It is not that they are evil or greedy. If one capitalist says to herself “To hell with the profits! The planet is more important!” then she will quickly be beaten by a rival who is not so scrupulous. To keep going, they will have to give up on such high-minded thoughts. And this is true regardless of size, whether a globe-rogering, $11-bajillion-market-cap, Taibbian vampire-squid investment bank or a mom-and-pop corner shop that sells nothing but thimbles of rosewater-scented whimsy and hand-sewn felt puppets of characters from Wes Anderson films. If right next door, a big-box chain-store Whimsy-Mart opens up with vats of all-you-can-eat cut-price Owen Wilson dolls and that small business doesn’t toughen up, then they’re fucked.

Companies can only abstain from harmful conduct when the market is regulated -- no longer "free" -- and they are required to do or not do certain things that the state has banned. If all companies are required to follow the rules, then following them won't mean being undercut by a competitor. But regulation can't solve the problem, because it's always fighting a rear-guard action:

...[H]owever much we want to regulate capitalism, there will always be some new commodity or market inadvertently ‘polluting’ that has yet to be regulated. So the regulator is always playing catch-up. Further, capital’s need for self-valorisation tends to strain at the leash of regulatory restraint, as there is always some jurisdiction where this regulation does not exist. Which means that there is a force in the economy constantly pushing toward pollution that we are forever trying to push back against, a beast we cannot tame or cage. This is why social democracy goes further toward preventing pollution than less regulated forms of capitalism, but cannot absolutely prevent the problem.

The answer, Phillips argues, is a democratically planned economy -- a socialist solution. Not the "green lefty" answer, which requires "de-growth," but growth that is guided by democratic, not market, forces:

•  The capitalist says: There may or may not be resource limits, but don’t worry about them! Innovation will come along in time! Full steam ahead!

•  The green lefty says: Innovation can’t save us! There’s an upper limit to what humans can have / an upper limit on the number of humans. Slam on the brakes!

•  The socialist says: Through rational, democratic planning, let’s make sure that the innovation arrives so that we can move forward without inadvertently overproducing. And move forward we must, in order to continue to expand human flourishing. So long as we do that, there are in principle no limits. Let’s take over the machine, not turn it off!

"Let’s take over the machine, not turn it off!" There's something gloriously anarcho-steampunk about that, right in line with Magpie Killjoy's Steampunk Magazine motto: "Love the machine, hate the factory."

Phillips believes that the green left's anti-consumerist/pastoral view is more aesthetic than political: they don't want to stop consuming, they just want to stop consuming things that poor people like, and limit their consumption to labor-intensive items that are priced out of reach of most of the world. Material abundance is the end of want and immiseration, and it's what progressive activists have demanded for their brothers and sisters since ancient times.

In the wake of the Black Friday sales after US Thanksgiving that in recent years have begun to take place in other countries as well, or Boxing Day sales the day after Christmas in Commonwealth countries, where people line up (or queue) before dawn in the freezing November weather outside the local MegaMart for ridiculously cut-price deals on everything, I’ve begun to notice a welter of Facebook status updates, tweets and ‘news’ articles sneering at videos of the trampling, stampeding chaos and images of people coming to blows over 40-inch plasma TVs, lap-tops or tumble dryers.

A survey of the incomes of those racing through the aisles to get to that hundred-dollar stereo that normally sells for $400 should give the smug tut-tutters pause though. This is one of the few times of the year that people can even hope to afford such ‘luxuries’, the Christmas presents their kids are asking for, or just an appliance that works. In a democratically controlled economy, we may collectively decide on different production priorities, but surely we would still organise the production of items that bring people joy. Why shouldn’t people have these things that bring them pleasure? Is the pleasure derived from a box-fresh pair of Nike running shoes or a Sony PlayStation 4 inferior to the pleasure the subscribers of Real Simple magazine derive from their $2000 coffee table made from recycled traffic signs? Likewise, why is the £59 hand-carved walnut locomotive from a Stoke Newington toy shop any less consumerist than the free plastic Elsa doll from Disney’s Frozen accompanying a Subway Fresh Fit Kids Meal?

The difference is a poor-hating snobbery and nothing more...

Anti-consumption politics almost always seem to be about somebody else’s wrong, less spiritually rewarding purchases. It is perhaps the pinnacle of conspicuous consumption. At the very least, no one should mistake this lip-pursed bien-pensant middle-class scolding for speaking truth to power.

The left once campaigned for better conditions for the workers who make things, now it is preoccupied with buying less of what's made, but "An anti-consumerist model of campaigning simply and ineffectively replaces that of a trade unionist model." Sure, the stuff is made by terribly exploited workers. That needs to stop. But rather than campaigning for a retreat from the comforts of technology, let's campaign for their provision to all who want them: "Inequality should not be replaced by an equality of poverty, but an equality of abundance."

Rather than campaign against Walmart, lets use its supply-chain management to liberate its goods from exploitation!

Yes, Virginia, while Walmart, the third largest employer in the world, operates within the free market competing against other shops, internally, the multinational firm is the very model of planning, as are all firms. Highly hierarchical and, yes, dictatorial, but planned with brilliant efficiency by humans nonetheless. As American Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson has scandalously suggested, strip out the exploitation of its workers and the lack of democracy, and the stunning logistical wonder that is Walmart actually becomes an example of planning that socialists should study with keen scrutiny. Walmart is, Jameson asserts cheekily but with sincere admiration, “the shape of a utopian future looming through the mist, which we must seize as an opportunity to exercise the utopian imagination more fully, rather than an occasion for moralizing judgments or regressive nostalgia.

The only way to create a sustainable future is to soak the left in technological expertise, not to turn our back on it. We need to figure out how to make a lot more with a lot less, more efficiently and effectively than ever before. We have to stop pretending that organic food -- which uses more pesticides and requires more land than high-tech farming -- is better. We have to stop pretending that "GMO" is a meaningful category. We need to figure out how to give people the wealth and comfort and the access to contraception and knowledge that lets them have fewer kids -- not insist that the technologies that feed the kids they have today be banned because they originate with terrible companies. The problem is the companies, not the technology (Edison was a colossal asshole, but I still use battery power and lightbulbs all the time).

The left has done this before, with enormous success, in the area of AIDS activism:

But I also know the tremendous advances that evidence-based medicine has achieved over the last 200 years as a result of the germ theory of disease, sanitation, antibiotics, vaccines, pharmacology, lab technology and genetics. As Ben Goldacre, the doctor and health campaigner who manages to be simultaneously Britain’s most trenchant critic of Big Pharma and of medical frauds such as homeopathy, herbal medicine, acupuncture and ‘nutritionists’, puts it: “Repeat after me: pharma being shit does not mean magic beans cure cancer.” The socialist left, with its historic commitment to reason and science, has to separate itself from the distractions of the crunchy left.

We could do far worse in this regard than learning from the AIDS campaigners of the late 80s and early 90s in organisations like ACT-UP and the Treatment Action Group. They described and continue to describe themselves as “science-based treatment activists.” While engaging in multiple high-profile acts of militant civil disobedience against the pharma giants and both Republican and Democrat politicians, they also soberly, rigorously plunged deeply into the science of their condition, and were willing to change tack upon the advent of new evidence, as happened when early demands of expanded access or “drugs into bodies,” as was the slogan of the time, proved to be insufficiently nuanced. Despite most of the activists lacking any formal medical training, the extent of their evidence-focussed self-education and the quality of their reports and recommendations were such that clinicians began to recognise them as their equals in an understanding of the disease. And through this combination of a grounding in science and militant activism, ACT-UP and TAG changed the course of an epidemic, forcing governments to care about a plague killing queers, drug users and minorities.

Agrarianism isn't intrinsically leftwing. There's something inescapably Tory about the idea of a world as a Richard Scarry village where everyone is a small shopkeeper in a shire. It's the same force than animates xenophobic anti-immigrant sentiment (and there's plenty of people in the green left who also militate against immigration, for the same reason). Small is beautiful only after you get rid of 80% of the world -- otherwise, we need dense, intense, technological living. The more of that we get, the more of the countryside we can be left for wildlife.

We are not in a lifeboat. Lifeboat politics are awfully convenient for thugs who would rather force you to do what they say than convince you. The Earth is imperiled, and it can't be saved by telling the world's majority that they will never enjoy the comfort that the minority of us enjoyed for the past century: "It is important for those who quite rightly care deeply about the threat to humanity represented by myriad ecological problems to inoculate themselves against such thinking, to foreswear anti-modernism and the lifeboat politics of limits to growth."

In the past century, certain leftists pretended that Stalinism's horrors were the price we had to pay for socialist rule. Today, the austere greens tell us that hairshirts, de-growth, and radical population reduction are the unfortunate and inevitable consequence of undoing capitalism's excesses. Neither is right. Dinosaurs walked the earth for ten million years; we've only been here for a couple hundred thousand years. The idea that we'll just stop now, stop progressing and improving on the things we developed, become "steady state" creatures, for the next 9 million years and change is a terrible one. Let's not swear off our futures.

Some people love living in the countryside, genuinely prefer it. But a mass-scale back-to-the-land experiment would be a disaster: "a wistful, sentimental appreciation of nature and lamentation of a lost Eden arises from a certain level of city-dwelling privilege forgetful of the tribulations of rural life and ever-present menace that is the wilderness. It takes a certain kind of forgetfulness to be able to romanticise the hard-knock life of the peasant. The peasant would trade places with the gentleman horticulturalist—or, more latterly, the Stoke Newington subscriber to Modern Farmer magazine—any day."

A sustainable world is one in which we do things better. The better we do them -- the more material abundance we harness -- the more free we will be, both from want and coercion:

As a result of our audacity, our ultimate resource, each of the limits imposed upon us by nature that we have breached—from fire that allowed us to expend less food energy intake on digestion and permitted more energy to be given over to our expanding brain, through electric lighting that allows us to stay up after dark, to the technologies of the bicycle, the washing machine, the pill, abortion, and fertility treatments that have chipped away at patriarchy—has required a growing consumption of energy. All of these natural limits were imposed as arbitrarily as the rules and dictates of any illegitimate government. For this reason, one would think that the most defiant possible demand of anarchism—the political philosophy that challenges not just the power of the state, but all illegitimate authority—would be for the ever greater degrees of freedom delivered by the liberatory power of more energy. Indeed the entirety of the left, not just anarchists, in recognition of this potential for liberation, used to argue not against energy expenditure or technology, but that these advances be shared by everyone, rather than just the elite few.

Energy is freedom. Growth is freedom.

Austerity Ecology marries incisive science writing, radical politics, and blazing prose. It's an important book about climate, and an even more important book about the politics of doing something about the climate.

Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff [Leigh Phillips/Zero Books]

https://boingboing.net/2016/01/12/keep-your-scythe-the-real-gre.html

[layesica]

2019: It was a year that ends tonight.

2018 was rough, right? Well, so was 2019!

I did not feel like writing this, but it’s a tradition now, so for the fifth year in a row, here’s what I did all year with some of the crappy crap that made it not the greatest. I can’t promise an unwavering sense of optimism, but it’s okay. I’m okay. Here we go!

JANUARY Went to The Not Inappropriate Show at UCB curated by the Odenkirks, then Spent New Years Eve at Dynasty Typewriter with Ian & Emily. It was fun, but... eh. Home is better, y’all. Home is always better. Did a couple performances of a show at Second City – A Fonzie Scheme. It was fun. I was in an improv class at The Pack. I think it was Improv 4. The last weekend of January, Very Famous went to Sketchfest, which was super amazing. That’s, like, a goal. And even though it had pretty much nothing to do with anything I did, it was cool. And it was fun. And I was at a party with Neil Patrick Harris and I was SUPER cool about it.

Went to stuff: LA Times screening of Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse. It was free, and I would have never seen it otherwise. I enjoyed it. It was good.

Salt & Straw Flavor: Toasted Coconut Milk & Cookies (V)

FEBRUARY Made a return trip with Ian & Emily to San Francisco. Well, Oakland with an SF jaunt. I don’t have any cool stories, but Emily fought a seagull for her cookie and won, and that was pretty badass. On the drive back, there was a ton of snow just on the other side of the Angeles National Forest. I wasn’t excited enough to get out of the car, but snow is nice to look at. Oh, I had lunch with one of the head writers on my dream show that my old roommate met at the gym. I am terrible at networking.

Went to stuff: LA Times screening of VICE. It was free, and I would have seen it... eventually. It was... a bit... self-indulgent.

Salt & Straw Flavor: “The Chocolatier Series” = Jeni’s Coffee & Sweet Cream

MARCH Auditioned for a house improv team at The Pack. I didn’t mention working with a practice group all of February & March to prep for that. The biggest bummer about not getting on a team may have been the loss of that practice group. It was fun while it lasted.

Went to stuff: Saw comedy dads, Bob & David, at Largo. They asked for volunteers, and I almost passed just thinking about it. Ian & Emily jumped up there. Good for them!

Salt & Straw Flavor: Smoked Sea Salt & Chocolate Crack

APRIL Interviewed for a new job at one of the guilds. HEY! I owe the government $3700. That’s fun! I went ahead and added a good purse to my new 0 APR card.

Went to stuff: Dana Gould Podcast at Dynasty Typewriter. Panel with Conan Writers at Lyric Hyperion. For some reason, I saw Avengers: Endgame. I dunno. I feel like I should see it through for some reason. Deadline did their day-long FYC event, The Contenders, at Paramount, so I spent all day seeing so many people from TV and eating so much yummy food in between. Amazon FYC at Hollywood Athletic Club – went mostly for the building. Prime seat at Conan taping.

Salt & Straw Flavor: Wildflower Honey with Ricotta Walnut Lace Cookies – I wait all year for this to roll around again!

MAY We were supposed to have a call for a travel show on Buzzfeed, but they ghosted us. I went camping with a huge group at Idyllwild, which would have been fun, but it was FREEZING and I got SUPER sick on the second day. After a few days, I got better and got the guild job. Free insurance, baby! (More on that later.) Bought a Universal pass.

Went to stuff: A UCB show with people from Chicago. Free Booksmart screening with Q&A. Such a good movie! LA Times panel for Broad City. I never really watched it, but I would love to have a partnership like that! Netflix FYSee for Nanette. Guys, people are like vultures for the passed trays. Adam Sandler at Dynasty Typewriter. Attended the actual red carpet, fancy-pants premiere of Amazon’s Late Night. It was enjoyable and not at all realistic, and I could not stop staring at John Early in the theater. He glows!

Salt & Straw Flavor: Pear & Blue Cheese

JUNE Went to stuff: FYSee for Dead To Me. I had not seen it yet, but then I watched it and it’s good. JV show at UCB with Paul F Tompkins. Did a lap at the AT&T Shape event that is always free. I only go to be on the WB lot where I would like to be more often. Like, 40+ hours a week more often. That’s it. I just went to stuff.

Salt & Straw Flavor: Campfire S’mores (with Brian)

JULY SO. MANY. EARTHQUAKES. After the third one, it stopped being cute. Went for a drive to the Angeles Forest and hiked to a waterfall. Did a sketch with Very Famous at Packcon. It was a small group, so I got a part! Huzzah!

Went to stuff: Saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood at the Cinerama dome. (First visit!) Not a great idea because I kept trying to pick out the scenery and got a bit of motion sickness. Shirtless Brad Pitt on a roof in the ‘70s is nice.

Salt & Straw Flavor: Goat Cheese Marionberry Habanero (2x)

AUGUST Went on a random overnight to San Jose. Time to get panicky about Pack Sketch Teams! I did what I should have done last year and requested to be moved. I loved the people on my team, but I wasn’t getting a return on investment for myself. And that’s no fun. Did a show called Gibberish with Duckboi as Sharon Osborne and wore a great wig. Sketch is fun. Fell off my bike & got bruised legs.

Went to stuff: Mike O’Brien & Friends at Lyric Hyperion. Saw some Pack shows to be a supportive. Put up a sketch at GSY.

Salt & Straw Flavor: Green Fennel & Maple

SEPTEMBER Started working tech at UCB. It’s pretty easy. I get to see new faces... and old faces, too. I have no more comedy theaters to work at. Well, unless someone is going to pay me real money. My vision has been getting blurrier, so I went to the eye doctor to get new glasses. Ended up getting referred to a specialist for a “freckle” in my eyeball, but had to wait a month to go. Submitted a character video for Pack Sketch performer auditions. Got a callback! That’s one step further than last years attempt, and I actually came up with characters and I was pretty proud of it. Came up with more characters, then faced the fear of being on a stage all by myself while trying to be funny. I felt good about it. It used to take a day to find out, but not this time...

Link to Character Audition Video

Went to stuff: Got an AMAZING ticket (location & price) to see Skintight at the Geffen with friggin’ Idina Menzel. She is a queen! It’s a cute theater I should go to more stuff at. Saw Scott Thompson as Buddy Cole at the Lyric Hyperion. So good! I think I’ve seen the evolving show every year I’ve lived here. My face hurts for several days after. Lyndsey got a fancy job and invited me to the Dreamworks Friends & Family screening of Abominable. Would not have seen it. It was cute. Thanks, Lyndsey!

Salt & Straw Flavor: Forgettable

OCTOBER Flew to Denver for my cousin’s wedding. I almost typed, “weeding.” That’s Colorado for you. It was my first time to see my family all year. The time just got away from me. I got a late flight out and spent the day walking around Denver on my own. Went to a good bookstore. Ate some Giordano’s. Left my luggage in a van. Found out I got cut from Very Famous – also, Very Famous got cut from sketch night – and I didn’t make a new team. Started watching new season of Mr. Robot and felt so lost, so started it from the beginning. The new Almodóvar came out, so I bought one of those expensive Arclight tickets. It was very, very good. Maybe my favorite Almodóvar film. Worth it! Saw the specialist about my eye. They dilated it, took a bunch of pictures, did a closed-eye ultrasound (Yeah, they use jelly for that!), and refereed me to another specialist. Hunter picked me up, and I ate at Canter’s for the first time. The specialist’s office made the appointment for me at an oncologist. Guys, I just wanted new glasses and now can’t stop Googling some pretty scary stuff! Lyndsey took me to USC & hung out with me for a while. They dilated my eye, took a bunch of pictures of it with a bunch of different machines, performed an OPEN EYE ultrasound, saw two trainees and then the doctor. She said she is not diagnosing me with melanoma. BUT it has the orange color and a sliver of the fluid that are “concerning.” The pictures of the tumor weren’t as large at the ophthalmologist’s pictures made it look. So... bright side, I guess. I go back in January to check for changes. Margot scooped me up and brought me home. Baby’s first root canal! 

For our very last Very Famous show, everyone got to put up a sketch they wrote. My favorite had too much production, so I did a black out. It turned out great, and I felt loved. It was a very nice way to go out.

Went to stuff: Two weeks after the Arclight screening, the LA Times invited me to see Pain & Glory with a Q&A, so I finally got to be in a room with my favorite director. I may have cried... slightly more than I did just seeing the film.

Salt & Straw Flavor: Black Cat Licorice & Lavender (2 cones, 1 pint)

NOVEMBER It was time for Penelope’s annual visit to the vet, so I rented a car for the weekend and took her. She had lost quite a bit of weight. I sprung for all the tests, and she has kidney disease. Her numbers aren’t terrible, but there’s not really treatment for it. We switched to a new kind of prescription food. All I can do is be good to her and try to keep her hydrated & happy. So... yeah... September – November have been... uh... not so great. On the bright side, I got invited to be in the Night Cap with Stacy Rumaker show as a character! I love this show so much - and when you read a thing in December, this show is the exception to that. I was so nervous, but I pulled it together and think it went very well. It felt good! Also, I am so emotionally invested in Mr. Robot! Mom & Dad came to visit for Thanksgiving and that was a nice relief. It rained most of the time, but we got out at about a bit.

Went to stuff: Vulture Fest screening of MacGruber with Will Forte & John Solomon.

Salt & Straw Flavor: Spiced Goat Cheese & Pumpkin Pie (with Mom & Dad)

DECEMBER Fell off my bike, bruised my legs, and scraped a chunk of skin off my hand. Finally: I left my mark on this town! I was not in the mood to plan a birthday thing, but rented a car to take Penelope for her health certificate she might need to fly home with me, then went on a showtune-belting drive on my birthday. Not the best drive ever, but it was nice to just drive aimlessly. Margot went with me to dinner at an Italian place in Los Feliz. In other news, Penelope gained some weight. Then I flew home for Christmas. I’ve just been sitting around with Mom & Dad, and it has been great. I had lunch with Justin & traditional margaritas & Tex-Mex with Lindsey. I finally did an entire month of morning pages after 4 years, so I may be done with that. Oh, and I (temporarily) quit comedy.

Went to stuff: Saw CATS (can’t hate on a bad movie with bad source material) & Little Women (I cried so much!)

Salt & Straw Flavor: Apple Brandy & Pecan Pie (with Brian), but I’m in Texas now, so I’m ending the year with some Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla. Do better, Tyler!

So, that’s it. I was not looking forward to this, but it did make me feel a little better since the crap at the end has just felt like it has beaten me down. I’m not a quitter, but a breaker is maybe a good idea for a bit. I don’t have any resolutions for 2020.

If you’re still here, THANK YOU for reading my yearly download. I hope that you are doing well.

You’re great!

I love you!

Have a great 2020!

[topbiohacking]

How to age Well. 5 Secrets to Age Well!

Aging Gracefully Is A Choice! Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

There are few people you might know of in your life and when you see them you immediately think ‘wow, they are really aging gracefully! Is there a secret? Or did they inherited some special genes?’ It’s a simple question, but the answer might surprise you.

So, what does it really take to age well?

Diet: Not a specific diet, but a balanced diet of what you already like to eat!

Exercise: No Crazy exercises that you will do once and regret for the rest of your life. Something you already like but a new way of doing it.

Memory Health / Brain Health: To do everything right, you need your memory to remember, and remember correctly.

Skin & Hair: What we put on our skin eventually makes its way inside (partially or in an indirect way) the same goes for our hair.

Cell Health: Everything boils down to our cells! This is where everything started from, so it makes sense that we should fix everything at the roots.

First – Diet

When we usually talk about dieting we always like to label our diet with some sort of a name. However, if you are looking for a specific diet and diet plan, maybe this is not the article you are looking for. Even though we will be talking about food and nutrition from the inside out. 

But for us, we look at diet and food from a holistic approach. You need to eat almost everything, and everything in a moderate amount will benefit you. There are many diet plans out that tell you to stop completely consuming one thing or another. But most people who start on those diets, don’t make through the first month. The main problem with such diets that they are not sustainable. Cutting something out ‘cold turkey’ might work for some, it does not work for the majority. 

Food Variety Is Key To Provide Us With All Nutrition Image by silviarita from Pixabay

For diet, we are going to provide the tips that will give you the best results with the least amount of effort! Tips that will require you doing less not more. It sounds like a good deal. Right?! Let’s dive in. You need to look at those three areas ONLY:

Look at your food consumption for a longer period of time. Not daily. Balance it on a weekly basis, monthly and overall basis.

Stick with organic whenever you can.

The dirty dozen and The Clean 15 lists. A simple list of food that you want to get organic, and another list that you might be able to go with the non-organic. The top 15 foods with the least pesticides are called the Clean 15, while the 12 foods with the most pesticides are called the Dirty Dozen. The list is courtesy of the Elizabeth Rider Blog 

THE DIRTY DOZEN (2019)

Buy these organic whenever possible – Updated 2019

Strawberries

Spinach

Kale

Nectarines

Apples

Grapes

Peaches

Cherries

Pears

Tomatoes

Celery

Potatoes

+EWG’s Dirty Dozen Plus:

Hot Peppers +

THE CLEAN 15 (2019)

These are ok to buy conventional (not organic) – Updated 2019

Avocados

Sweet Corn

Pineapples

Sweet Peas Frozen

Onions

Papayas

Eggplants

Asparagus

Kiwi

Cabbage

Cauliflower

Cantaloupe

Broccoli

Mushrooms

Honeydew Melons

Second – Exercise

Exercise is closely connected with diet. We can’t talk about one without the other. Also, the same goes for exercise that goes for dieting. Most people who start a brand new exercise that is totally different from their daily activities, typically they will give up on the new routine quickly. 

For sure, there are some crazy cases where people stick with it from day one and keep going forever, but most of us, we need to adapt those exercises in our daily life one exercise a week, or one exercise a month. 

This Is The Reality Of How Most People Feel About Exercising. Especially, Trying Something New For The First Time

This Is What We Think Of Ourselves When We Exercise For The First Time! It’s True After A While But Right Away.

Here are a few steps to get your exercise ‘requirements’ done easily:

Things you like to do or you are already doing. If you like walking, then start with it. If you like working out, then do this. If you like hiking or even as simple as shopping. Yep, you read it correctly. You can just add a few steps to your shopping trips. Park the car further, do a few more laps around the mall. Chase your kids, or grand-kids around the yard, the park, or even the living room. Take the stairs down and the elevator up. Or half-half.

Break a sweat. If you can break a sweat in whatever you do then you nailed it! Sweating is a sign that you are putting your body in activity mode. Nothing too crazy, but just a little to move you forward ahead of where you are today. Usually, 3-5 min of high-intensity exercise should be enough to break a sweat.

Add one more. By the end of the day, you just want to add one more pump to your heart to keep it pumping longer. One step, one repetition, one pound of lifting weight, one positive change no matter how small it is.

A Walk With Your Grand-kid In A Fresh Air, Is More Thank Just An Excellent Exercise! Image by emailme3 from Pixabay

NOTE: Never, Ever use your progress in dieting and exercising as a rewarding/excuse to bring bad habits that you are trying to move away from. The reward of walking the extra mile is not another donut. You are better off without them both in this case.

Third – Memory Health / Brain Health

There’s no point of dieting and exercising if we don’t remember doing them. It might sound silly to bring up such a thing, but it’s so real. We don’t remember to exercise until it is too late in the day or the week. Or we forget what kind of activity we planned on doing today. So, in this case, we are missing on our physical health because of our mental health. 

“Sometimes you will never know the true value of a moment until it becomes a memory” Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

Our brain is the most important organ in our body. It is the central computer of the whole body. When we start forgetting, slipping off mentally, we lack mental clarity, memory issues, lack of focus, and other issues. Those are problems on their own, but also they are signaling issues that are occurring from our bad food, lack of activity, sleeping behavior, and so on. However, the good news is that we can reverse most of them. We can change our food, and see it in our brain, and we can feed our brains and see the results on our bodies. 

That’s how science started discovering the types of food that will help our brain become healthier and stay healthy. Few of those foods are:

Wild Salmon – Omega 3

Walnut 

Avocado 

Almond

Blueberries 

Broccoli

Coconut oil 

Turmeric – curcumin 

Dark chocolate

Drinking water – Brain content is 80% water.

Two more tricks/ hacks that will help improve brain health, but has nothing to do with food and as easy as eating food, are:

Brush your teeth with the opposite hand. That will help your brain develop new neural connections.

Learn something new! Anything. Learning new skills, activities, games, crafts, new learning helps the brain to engage, wake up, and spark the young activities that once used to have.

Skin Care Is Not Luxurious, It Is Essential Image by chezbeate from Pixabay

Fourth – Skin & Hair: 

We often don’t think much of what we are putting on our skin & hair from deodorant, shampoos, lotions, sprays, etc. We pay attention to the way it smells, the way it makes us feel, but not the ingredients, or how we are getting those results. 

A simple example of this case is that we use lots of deodorants, but we are not sure (aware) of how they are working. Most of them use harsh chemicals to kill the bacteria that are causing the odor, but at the same time is hurting our skin. There is a nice article by publicgoods that explains the way ‘deodorant’ works on our body.

The same goes for shampoos that we use, we like the smell, the price, and maybe the results, but over time we start losing hair. That’s when we start looking for solutions and start educating ourselves on what we the heck we are putting on our hair.

If you think you are starting to go bald, you might want to check this blogpost First Signs Of Balding

And if you are a woman losing a lot of hair then you need to start with considering treatment from the source, the scalp first. Here’s a good blog post I found for this (it has good humor in it as well haha) Inside My Quest to Find the Holy Grail of Hair Care

Fifth – Cell Health

Last but not least, is the health of our cells. Out of everything, this is what all boils down to. It takes no genius to figure it out, but it’s important to say it over and over that the health of our cells is the health of our body.

The problem that we see out there with all of these big corporates and big money, is that they look at each problem in a very disconnected way from other problems so they can sell you an UNLIMITED number of product “solutions”. While the core thing is to look at the main source of all the problems which are our cells. 

Our Health Start From The Health Of Our Cells Image by Colin Behrens from Pixabay

The health of our cells starts by fighting Cellular Stress.

What Is Cellular Stress?

Nrf2Science describes that “Too many damaging free radicals — or too few protective antioxidants — can wreak havoc on cell membranes, mitochondria, and DNA, leading to tissue damage and a wide range of chronic diseases, including cancer, chronic fatigue, diabetes, arthritis, and heart disease. For more than 50 years, scientists have known the aging process to be linked to highly reactive oxygen molecules produced during normal metabolism. These oxygen molecules, often called “free radicals” or “reactive oxygen species” (ROS), can react with and cause damage to cellular structures throughout the body. Particularly vulnerable to oxidative damage are cell membranes, DNA (genetic material), and mitochondria (where cells generate energy)—and damage to these vital areas often means that cells cannot function properly.” Cellular Stress/Oxidative Stress is something that we need to combat in our cells as it has been linked to many chronic diseases like cancer, chronic fatigue, diabetes, arthritis, and heart disease, etc.

Oxidative Stress Diseases

Some of the chronic diseases that are linked in a way or another to oxidative stress

The Cause of Oxidative Stress

Even though Oxidative Stress is harmful to the cell, it is part of its natural behavior. According to Nrf2Science “Sometimes, the body deliberately makes free radicals in order to neutralize viruses and bacteria.” Also, scientists have found that the cell produces free radicals during its normal metabolism. However, the problem arises when there are too many free radicals that they begin to interfere with the cell’s normal functions. The increase of free radicals might also be from external sources as well. External factors like food, pollution, smoking, pesticides, fungicides, chemicals, etc.

A quick search on the topic of Oxidative Stress and the diseases related to it will yield quite some results, probably more than what we would like to see. However, relatively speaking, all research seems to be limited, or new in age. But for the most part, this is where taking antioxidants started taking off. Things like vitamin C supplements, vitamin E supplements, eating more blueberries, etc. The kind of routine that we have been familiar with. The only issue with this approach is that we are supplementing our body with external antioxidants, which is better than nothing but is very limited in the amount of effectiveness in combating oxidative stress and eliminating the increasing number of free radicals.

The Best Solution I Have Found & I Personally Use & Put My Reputation Behind…

The other emerging approach, which is the one I subscribe to, is ‘hacking’ the Nrf2 pathway to signal the production of antioxidants within our body itself instead of supplementing our body with external synthetic antioxidants. In my mind, I imagine our body as this perfect computer and at some point it starts to slow down (due to aging and other factors), instead of me upgrading the machine by adding better processors, which is not possible to our “human-machine”, I will try to optimize my existing system/ body to perform better to go back to its original capabilities.

Releasing the system from the unnecessary burden that we are putting it in, is much easier, and more efficient than upgrading or supplementing with external resources. That’s where Nrf2 Activation comes into the picture.

We can think of Nrf2 as the new sheriff in town! Oxidative stress & Cellular Stress are the bad guys. The antioxidant is the policemen. Everyone is telling you to add more policemen to your body to fight the bad guys, which is a good idea, but what’s even better is that you have your body making its own policemen if you enable the sheriff to do their job! NRF2 is the sheriff you need on your side!

Get The Best NRF2 Activator…..Period!

By The Way, If You Don’t Take Anything Away From The List Above Then Take One Thing & One Thing Only, To Get The Fastest Results! Activating Your NRF2 Naturally Please Don’t Go Another Day Without At Least Giving Your Body The Benefit Of The Doubt, To Heal Itself From The Inside Out!

“No Matter how much it gets abused, the body can restore balance.” 

-Deepak Chopra

Get The Best NRF2 Activator…..Period!

Resources: https://jimkwik.com/ https://blog.publicgoods.com/breaking-a-sweat-antiperspirant-vs-deodorant/ http://www.nrf2science.com/ https://www.elizabethrider.com/dirty-dozen-clean-15/ http://blog.topbiohacking.com/wp/blog/we-keep-hearing-that-western-diet-is-different-than-eastern-diet-eastern-western-mediterranean-etc-why-it-even-matters-how-diet-affects-nrf-activation/ http://topbiohacking.lifevantage.com/blog/inside-my-quest-to-find-the-holy-grail-of-hair-care/

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[friendshipcampaign]

Session Recap: 5/11/19: Welcome Rest

As Kriv passed the area of the market set aside for carnival games, a small pixie flew into his shoulder, releasing a puff of red dust that felt like the crisp air of fall. She asked to be taken back to the Pixie Toss booth and Kriv warily inquired if this was some kind of trick, but she assured him that wasn’t the case, and he carried her over to the booth, where there were many more pixies in assorted colors -- as well as leaves in similar hues and catapult for launching the little faeries onto them.

Amaranth, who was walking by the area, spotted Kriv at the Pixie Toss and wandered over to it herself. She asked if she could throw one of the pixies -- who seemed very excited about the concept -- and was told the price to play the game was a copper piece and something colorful. She paid the latter cost with a small flower she’d been given with her purchase from Buns & Roses. Selecting a golden pixie from the group, she succeeded in tossing her onto a leaf of the same color using one of the catapults. Her prize was a small bag of glowing, golden pixie dust, with a sun charm tied around the neck. She was told it would glow like sunlight, and if applied to someone who didn’t wish it, would be difficult for them to remove.

“This is the first thing that’s gone right for me today,” she remarked.

Kriv decided to try his own hand at the Pixie Toss, and after paying the odder price with a scrap of green fabric from his old blanket, catapulted the pixie who had bumped into him earlier. He told her he hoped she had fun, whether or not he won, but overshot the toss a little.

After playing the Pixie Toss, Kriv wanted to head over to the test of strength game, which was run by a tall, muscular firbolg woman. The price of a scrap of gossip along with his copper piece gave him pause for a moment, but eventually he told her that he had learned one person he worked with was part of a criminal organization, and that another might be as well but he wasn’t sure.

Amaranth gave him a look.

Kriv hefted the large hammer to play the game with ease, and smacked it heavily into the platform that raised the weight. A little mechanical bird at the top sounded when he succeeded. He was given a prize of a magic wishbone that, when broken by two people, would give one of them a boost and the other a handicap.

Hoping to impress the woman running the game, Amaranth stepped up to grab the hammer as well, boasting that she could do it. For her piece of gossip, she said that she knew the lady that had defeated the Fossegrim at the market last month, and watched her bash him over the head with his own fiddle. She swaggered up and took hold of the hammer, but couldn’t even manage to lift it. Laughing, Kriv patted her on the shoulder.

The pair next went to a game called Storm the Castle. The price here was a copper piece and a joke. There was a goblin running the game, with a tiny baby clinging to his back. Kriv pushed Amaranth to go first, unable to come up with a joke at first, but as she also tried to think of one he stepped forward.

“What do you call a frog that makes a deal with the fae?” he said. “A padlock.”

The goblin laughed and handed him three balls, which he could throw at a little illusory castle target set up ahead. He only was able make the shot with one of the balls and the illusion flickered a little, briefly showing a crumbling facade before reverting to its previous image. 

Stepping forward herself, Amaranth spoke.

“How much does it cost a pirate to pierce their ears?” she said. “A buck-an-ear!”

Her juggling knowledge coming in handy, Amaranth managed to tip the castle over with only two shots, the illusion shattering as she made the second hit. As a prize, she received a stick of burnished wood with some wire at the end and an orange stone on top carved to look like a pumpkin. She was told it was a wand that could transform one non-magical object into pumpkin per day. She seemed unenthused.

“Amaranth, do you know what a pumpkin is?” Kriv asked.

“Sure I know what a pumpkin is,” she lied.

She immediately bapped the stick against a rock, causing it to transform. Once it had changed, she pointed to the pumpkin and said she knew they looked like that.

There was another game in the carnival area, this one with darts. It looked to be intended for kids, as whether you won or not you got a little illusory animal to follow you for the day after playing. Kriv looked over at it wistfully and Amaranth encouraged him to go over and play. The gentle satyr running the booth did the same, assuring him that he’d get a prize even if he didn’t win. The cost for this one was a copper piece and one of your favorite words.

Kriv paid with a coin and the Draconic word “mopom” -- which he didn’t translate when Amaranth asked about it. He was able to hit two of the target orbs with darts, and picked an illusion of a red-winged blackbird to follow him. He also received a prize of a small walnut shell made into a tiny bed, which could grow to full size when set down on the ground. After he had won, he admitted to Amaranth that “mopom” meant goat.

On the side, Amaranth bit into her newly-transformed pumpkin and immediately spit it out, disgusted, and asked if they were supposed to be eaten. Kriv told her you could make pies out of them. She started trying to eat the insides, now that there was a hole in it, and announced that she thought she’d figured it out.

The two of them spotted Erwyn, who had been talking to some of the frogs in the pond after finishing his errand, and called him over. After some coaxing they convinced him to try a game, and the trio headed over to a game called Tip the Troll, which was run by a goblin in a cloak who charged a copper piece and a sneaking suspicion.

“I have a sneaking suspicion the world is getting more and more dangerous every day,” Erwyn said for his.

“I think that’s just what it feels like to grow up,” said Kriv.

“Oh, do you want to play too?” the goblin asked him.

Erwyn hit one of the little illusory trolls and won a small clamshell makeup palette as a prize, which could serve as a mild glamour before turning to mud and berry juice at midnight. Kriv overshot one of his tosses into the pixie toss pool and they cheered, but he still managed to hit one of the trolls and won a teapot capable of making tiny steam illusions.

Kriv told Erwyn he should try the darts and the elf agreed to give it a go. For his word “payment,” he told the satyr that one of his favorite words was “quácë,” but he only hit one of the orbs. Still, he was told he could have one of the illusions. He asked for a small white dragon. 

As she walked away from Zoke’s, Ditto was tackled by the fox girl the party had met their last time at the market. Delightedly, the girl told her that, since Ditto had given her money before and the girl had been told by her aunt that she could only be Lady of Stargazey Keep if she figured out how to make mortal coin, she was now officially in charge of it. She gave Ditto a messy but still gilded scroll with a fox pawprint on it, and told her if she was ever in her stretch of the Faewilds they would give her safe passage.

Continuing her conversation with Mynskay after this encounter, Ditto agreed that she would hide them in the demiplane until the thing with Zoke blew over so they didn’t have to lie. She messaged Kriv and asked where he was and found the trio that had been playing games. She got excited about the little illusions Kriv and Erwyn had from playing darts, and gave it a try herself -- paying with a copper piece and the word “clikrankle,” a Gnomish word meaning “useless, but still bringing delight” -- and won a little magical snowglobe. It could be shaken once a day to lower the temperature in a mile radius by about 10 degrees, and would cause snow if it was cold enough and there were clouds around. For her illusion, she selected a little hopping rabbit.

Ditto gave Erwyn the small candles she’d purchased earlier with the Calm Emotions effect (her intention was to sneak the other, cloyingly scented ones into Voski’s bag later). At the food stalls, Kriv grabbed some final busubusu. Amaranth noted a stall built out of a giant pumpkin, amazed that they could get so big, and suddenly reveled somewhat in her new power.

The four then headed to the meeting place the party had agreed upon earlier to find Voski, who had been playing her lute over at the Grimpond for much of the day. (The market had not yet found a replacement for the Fossegrim). As dusk settled in, the party members all placed their hands in or on each others’ as Kriv held the medallion given to them by the lady and market began to fade into mist. There was a flash of mint green, and they found themselves in Elessea’s throne room once more.

The archfey Lady was leaning on her throne, chin resting on one hand, listening to the animated, Infernal conversation of a barbed devil who stood in front of her. At the party’s arrival, the devil gestured to the group and began going on about how they’d been causing a great deal of trouble -- which had apparently been the topic of the conversation prior to this point. Voski cast Comprehend Languages to try to listen in.

“There is a claim on her that hasn’t been processed, but it’s entirely valid, I assure you!” the devil said, pointing at Amaranth.

“Tell me, do the Hells have claim upon your soul?” Elessea asked Amaranth, in Common.

“Nothing has claim upon my soul,” Amaranth said.

“That’s what I thought.”

The devil went on angrily, saying something along the lines of, “you know we have what you want,” before Elessea lifted a hand and a wave of water washed over it, causing its form to twist and shift. It fell to the floor, transformed into a sea urchin. She turned to the party and asked how their assignment had gone.

Voski presented the scroll that Auntie Eyren had signed verifying that they’d completed their task. Lark examined it for the Lady. Elessea then looked at the party, examining them, before slowly asking if they’d enjoyed the market -- and when they’d encountered the goat.

“Well, I’m a paladin, so I can just have one,” Kriv said.

“His name is Volfred,” Voski added.

When Lady Elessea inquired further about how their mission had gone, Voski explained that there had been a small altercation involving a fiend in the broad scope of what they’d been asked to do, but that Auntie Eyren could attest for their actions. She also said that, as a witness, Auntie Eyren could explain why Elessea was now down one employee, at least in this reality, as a result of Orsik’s departure.

Elessea asked if they could take the urchin down to Kevin -- who the remaining party members had not met yet -- to send it back where it belonged. As they filed out, Erwyn noted that the Lady, who usually seemed bored and removed from things, seemed slightly more perturbed than usual at the interaction that had occurred earlier.

Once they were some distance from the throne room, Astoria told the party she was awfully glad to see them back safe. As they headed further down, the party began to smell freshly-baked bread, and eventually were greeted by Kevin -- a hulking red devil in a small-ish (for him) apron reading Curse The Cook. When they presented the urchin to him, he didn’t seem very surprised that the Lady had lost her temper with the emissary. After unceremoniously chucking it back through a portal in his oven-- which Erwyn was noticeably curious about -- he asked them if they wanted some bread. 

As the party asked some questions about the portal to the Hells, Kevin explained that there was also one somewhere else in the palace to someplace “goody-goody,” and mentioned that while there had previously been more traffic from those on the Outer Planes visiting the Ladies, it was much rarer nowadays. They talked with him a little about how he’d been recruited for this job and he mentioned he’d been working there since before the time of the current Elessea. To their surprise at this, he explained that Elessea was the name of the land, and thus also the name of the Lady presiding over it. He also recalled that the old one had been much chattier. Eventually he pulled out a horrifying giant blood red sword, with serrated edges and a bone handle in the shape of several screaming faces, to cut them all some bread. Erwyn closed his eyes as it was sliced. Amaranth abstained from eating any.

As they left, Voski discreetly inquired with Astoria about what had become of Lord Edward, and learned that Elessea had made him one of her castle guards, giving him some sort of a bird’s head. She told the party that there had been more emissaries stopping by -- fae, this time -- to speak with the Lady, but she didn’t speak their language and thus didn’t know what they were talking about. Erwyn mentioned that he spoke Sylvan, which was likely what they were having their discussions in, and said if one stopped by while the party was there she could fetch him and he might try to see if he could understand anything they were saying. Ditto suggested that if they were to try anything, she might also be able to make him invisible.

Astoria also told them that at one point while she was in the throne room, there had been a sudden sound like a string breaking on an instrument, but louder, that rang out through the entire castle, and that it had been the only time she ever saw Elessea look truly shocked. She also looked somewhat shyly at Amaranth and mentioned that they had discussed some singing at some point while the party was staying back in the Faewilds. At the reminder, Amaranth pulled out the mushroom buns she had purchased at the market, and the drow looked back at her like she’d been handed the world, immensely grateful.

Kriv tracked down Russet and Gusset in order to have a stable installed in his room, asking for a remodel with some of the colorful brickwork characteristic of dragonborn architecture. Amaranth went and knocked on Voski’s door. The windchimes set up near the front made a small, unexpected ship’s horn noise as she approached, and after Voski called her in she headed down a small winding hallway that lead to to the inner area of the room, where she asked if she could sleep there for the night. Intuiting her concerns, Voski commented that Amaranth wanted the added security of the Tiny Hut. In turn, she asked Amaranth in a very roundabout manner if there was some kind of a connection between the Devil’s Dirge and the Unseen. Amaranth replied that in her experience, there hadn’t been, and that the imp that had broken into their room in Wayspell was unfamiliar to her. She had her suspicions, however, that there might now be a connection, due to how closely its appearance coincided with their run-in with Hayel.

As Amaranth departed, sneaking out to grab some blankets, she just missed Erwyn, who had also intended to speak with Voski before the night was over. When he knocked, the windchimes made a slight birdsong sound. Shyly, he asked her if she wanted the clamshell glamour palette he had won at the Market earlier that evening, though he carefully admitted he didn’t know much about makeup or if it was really Voski’s color. She examined it and accepted the gift, thanking him. The makeup shifted tone a bit as she did so.

As the pair talked, Amaranth stepped back inside the room. Erwyn was taken aback when she explained she was going to spend the night in Voski’s room. With the reason unexplained, he took his leave quickly, seeming confused and perhaps a little sad about the apparent exclusion.

Kriv and Ditto met in her room to mess around with the Rhymer’s Ring that Ditto had received from Auntie Eyren. Kriv attuned to it first, with his first attempt being a casting of “Find Speed” that caused him to be able to run around the room incredibly fast -- though he ran into a wall on his first try. Ditto attuned to it next, and tried casting “Creep” -- which made her and Kriv somewhat quieter than normal, though it curiously compelled them to adopt a cartoonishly sneaky posture as they moved. Ditto immediately used this power to head out of the room and try to startle a guard. When she returned, Kriv asked how the spell might effect Tiktik -- who it turned out, when Ditto inquired, was also stuck walking oddly. His eyes slid to Volfred, suddenly even more curious.

“No,” the goat told him. He started laughing.

That evening, as Kriv settled in to sleep, the modifications to his room complete now, he turned to face Volfred once again.

“This was a good birthday,” he said to him, telepathically -- referencing the fact that he had just turned 18.

The next morning, Russet and Gusset brought breakfast to everyone’s rooms. They weren’t summoned by Elessea for anything, so the party members all remained in their quarters -- until about midday when Astoria knocked on the doors to Erwyn and Ditto’s rooms, informing them another emissary had arrived. Ditto asked Erwyn if he wanted her to cast Invisibility on him. He expressed some nervousness about the idea, saying that he’d rather not chance getting caught so visibly looking like he was trying to sneak around, in case someone were to see through it. He mentioned having a backup plan, and that if he was caught there was something else he might consider asking about -- which was that he’d like the chance to visit Bramble and Rose in Soreth, as this was legitimately true.

Ditto hung back, but sent Tiktik trailing Erwyn and Astoria as they got closer so that she could watch through her familiar’s eyes if anything went wrong. As they approached, Erwyn tried peeking his head around the corner to see what was going on -- and spotted an amorphous entity made of wisps of twisting shadow and dozens of bright blue eyes, one of which looked straight at him.

The emissary alerted Elessea to someone nearby and she snapped her fingers, sending Lichen and Elm to go investigate. As they drew closer, Erwyn stepped out, hands up, apologizing profusely and saying he had a question but this seemed to be a bad time. They ignored him, grabbing his shoulders and marching him into the throne room.

“What is your business here?” the entity hissed at him in Common. 

Erwyn nervously stumbled over saying that he sort of worked at the palace and had a small question for Elessea, but would be happy to leave them to their business. The emissary floated up close to him and stared for a moment with its many eyes.

In Sylvan, the emissary expressed that it was unimpressed with Erwyn as one of her choices to have “investigating this.”

“I have told you before, I’m taking care if it,” she replied.

“Be glad that Elessea has authority over you and I do not,” it said to him ominously, again in Common, before speeding off to the side.

Apologizing quite a lot again, Erwyn babbled out his request to go visit Soreth once more before the party was sent off somewhere else, since he knew she could open a portal to there. He promised that he would have one of the others come along, as it probably wasn’t wise for him to go off on his own.

“Yes,” the Lady said, coolly. “We don’t want you dying again.”

That being said, he was genuinely surprised but happy when she approved his request, though she told him he needed to move quickly. The emissary, which had glared through the conversation, narrowed its eyes at him as he went off to find the others.

“You need to take this seriously,” it said to the Lady, in Sylvan again. “We don’t have much time.”

Erwyn and Ditto gathered everyone up in Kriv’s room to discuss who wanted to go along to Soreth. Ultimately, everyone decided to go except for Voski, who said she was interested in remaining and observing court proceedings. They headed to the throne room, where Elessea bid them return before the sun set, and activated the portal.

The party members found themselves in the same stone circle they’d originally been sent to -- where Tavra stood stoically, with Bramble held under one of her arms, protesting loudly and saying she’d only be a little while. She saw the group and shrieked with glee. Rose, who had been standing off to the side, was not similarly restrained. As it turned out, since Erwyn had indicated in his last Sending to them that the group was returning to the Faewilds, the girls had been hoping to make their own visit.

The girls rushed in for enthusiastic hugs, Bramble her usual boisterous self and Rose now sporting a shorter haircut, shoulder-length and clad in a jerkin and pants as opposed to one of the dresses they had last seen her in. As everyone excitedly updated each other on recent events, Ditto showed off her new flying shoes and cast Fly on Bramble so she could participate in the fun, and Rose reverted to her dragon form for a bit to fly around with them. Amaranth did her own showing off by turning a nearby rock into a pumpkin. 

As the group walked back to the castle, Rose more quietly grasped Erwyn’s hand and told him she was glad to see him as well. When they arrived, they saw the palace had been somewhat repaired from the damage that had happened when the party was last there. A climbing rope had been tied to the tree that had sprouted in the courtyard after one of Erwyn’s early wild magic surges. Ditto asked if they’d taken care of the spores from the beholder’s eye stalk, warning they could be dangerous, and Tavra placed a hand on her shoulder and asked to hear more. Ditto launched into the story of the beholder situation, which the girls were entranced by.

Amaranth snuck up on Stelly in the kitchens, startling her. The forlarren was terrified at first, then confused, but once Amaranth explained that she was just back to visit for a bit she was very happy to see her. They hugged each other tightly, and Stelly offered to make pies while they were visiting. As she worked, Amaranth hung out with her and asked if she knew any recipes involving pumpkins. Stelly offered to make her some recipes for pies, bread, and pancakes.

Bramble and Rose asked to pet Volfred and Kriv told them the goat could understand them, which they were excited by. After a bit, he wandered into town with the goat to pick up the sword that he had commissioned from Undwyn when they’d been there before. He talked with Volfred as they walked about some of his complicated feelings as of late. 

Back in the Faewilds, Voski slipped into the courtyard and tried observing the castle staff, but found it to be eerily deserted. Eventually, she found one of the guards -- either Elm or Lichen -- and asked if would be alright for her to see Elessea. She elaborated further to the Lady about the situation that had lead to Orsik’s being whisked away to another timeline, impressing on her that it wasn’t anyone’s fault and that Auntie could confirm this.

In Soreth, Erwyn briefly took his leave from Bramble and Rose, asking about Calma and if she was still around. When told that, though she still seemed very subdued after losing her divine powers, she was still around helping with some of the reconstruction efforts, he asked if he could be taken to see her. Once they were alone, he told the half-elf some of what he had heard from Alembic and Palava, about Lyrium in the wake of the disaster -- specifically that more people had been saved than she might think. Though he danced around explaining his source, he also told her that he’d managed to learn a lot recently about potentially preventing planar disasters and closing breaches, and that he believed that if her goal was truly to pursue that sort of thing, she could still find her own way.

[foodpilgrim]

Appalachian Anomaly

At the annual Table Rock Writers Workshop last week, our special guest was Emily Nunn, a native of southwest Virginia and author of The Comfort Food Diaries, published in 2017 by Simon & Schuster. Emily read from the memoir in which she discovers that comfort food is less about the dish and more about its preparation. Food can be a way to express the deepest care without saying a word. Cooking for others can be more comforting than eating itself.

After her presentation, Emily, who also created the “Table for Two” column in the New Yorker magazine when she worked there, revealed a recent discovery—a wood-fired pizza joint in an unlikely place—Roan Mountain, Tennessee, the little village at the base of the high peak that divides North Carolina and Tennessee. Back in the 19th century, the winding road to the top, then very narrow and precarious, allowed traffic in one direction (toward Tennessee) in the mornings and then became one way toward North Carolina in the afternoons. Hardscrabble mountain people made the passage on foot, by hack, and on horseback as they could.

Eventually, in 1894, a resort hotel called The Cloudland was built right on the state line near the peak at 6,286 feet. Travelers could rent rooms with spring mattresses, copper tubs, and steam heat for two dollars a night, a fee which also included three meals. The state line was painted on the dining room floor at the Cloudland, because those seated in Tennessee could order an alcoholic beverage to go with their meals, but those who were on the North Carolina side could not. The Mitchell County (NC) sheriff reportedly came often at dinnertime to patrol the border, hoping some of those imbibing in Tennessee might accidentally stumble across the state line into North Carolina, presumably then being forced to pay a fine as steep as the slopes of the Roan.

Anyway, I digress.

Emily’s report of the Roan Mountain pizza was so evocative that Donna Campbell and I set out at week’s end to sample it. I have reported here on Pie on the Mountain in Lansing, NC, and Big Ed’s Pizza in Oak Ridge, TN. Both restaurants feature righteously fresh ingredients, including the now-ubiquitous Benton’s Tennessee Bacon. However, the pinnacle of pizzas for me is in Carrboro, NC, where Gabe Barker--the son of James Beard Award-winning chefs Karen and Ben Barker--makes ten-inch Neapolitan miracles at his Pizzeria Mercato. 

Gabe has developed a handcrafted thin yeast dough that blisters to perfection in his gas-fired oven. The Mercato toppings vary with the season--organic vegetables and meats from the Carrboro Farmer’s Market across the street and the finest imports of Castelvetrano olives, Italian cheeses, and dried Calabrian chiles. Gabe’s most sublime creation to date is a grilled sweet corn and Gorgonzola pizza topped with razor thin slices of Serrano pepper scattered sparsely enough to open the sinuses without numbing the tongue. But I digress again.

On the way to Tennessee Donna and I studied the Smoky Mountain Bakery’s online menu and agreed on the Gourmet Veggie and the Hiker’s Surprise.  All of their pizzas are more-or-less 12 inches and range in price from ten to twelve dollars with a maximum of twelve toppings.  When we arrived on Cloudland Drive, we couldn’t see the restaurant from the road, only a bank of sunflowers just beginning to bend toward autumn.

The sign out front

Ten years ago, Tim and Crystal Decker, both northern Californians and seasoned chefs, set up shop in a renovated barn to create this Appalachian anomaly.  He is a European-style artisanal bread maker and she is a pastry expert. Their son Anton, a musician, also takes a turn in the kitchen.

If Gabe Barker’s place in Carrboro is urban chic—concrete floors and recycled timber tables and benches—this place is shabby seventies. No frills, no fuss. A throwback to hippiedom.

Breakfast is still under way when we walk in, served until 10:45—omelets, biscuits and gravy, pancakes, Belgian waffles, and pastries. The pizza oven is blazing by 11:00. The line soon runs out the door, and inside you find yourself waiting amid stock storage—cardboard boxes piled high and to-go pizzas already stacked in boxes on a low bench for pick-up beside the cashier’s station. A glass cabinet holds cherry pinwheels, lemon crinkles, coconut macaroons, snicker doodles, blueberry scones, red velvet sandwich cookies filled with cream cheese, banana bran muffins, and little loaves of pumpkin bread laced with walnuts and cranberries. A sign above these treats reads: “Stressed is desserts spelled backwards.”  On the opposite wall, a metal baker’s rack on wheels is heaped with chocolate chip cookies and sweet rolls in plastic bags to go.

Eight young people are navigating around the flour-covered worktable in the kitchen. Two are rolling out dough, another is chopping toppings. Another slathers on tomato sauce while the young man closest to the hot maw of the oven wields the pizza shovel with grace. The rest take turns taking orders and swiping credit cards through nothing more than an iPhone.

Down the line, salads of frisee, mesclun mix, luscious cherry tomatoes, and random red beans sit in closed clam shells on refrigerator shelves for the taking. Three bucks per salad or two for five, DIY. Commercial dressings, however, come sealed in packets at the ordering window—the only disappointment, as it turns out. On down the line, self-serve fountain drinks with free refills are two dollars. There are a few tables inside; many more outside on the wrap around deck.

We place our order, take a number, and find communal benches at a long picnic table out back in sunlight dappled by a half-dozen black walnut trees towering over two sides of the deck. There is a vegetable garden, now waning, in the sideyard. Trees up the hill beyond are rounded sculptures of kudzu. Tendrils trail down and wave in the breeze. A sudden waft of woodsmoke heightens my appetite. We prepare with paper plates, napkins, plastic cutlery, and condiments, including red chile flakes and a shaker of parmesan that doesn’t taste like sawdust. All of these acoutrements are anchored against the wind in plastic bins on each table.  The service is surprisingly quick.

Gourmet Veggie and Hiker’s Surprise. All photos by Donna Campbell

The Gourmet Veggie pie comes first--backroad-Italian rustic—chunky onions, generous bites of artichoke, a heavy hand of cheese.  Yet, the dominant taste is salty black Kalamata olives and sweet sundried tomatoes—both flavors intensified by the oven’s heat.  I suspect the tomatoes are local and dried on the premises. Fantastic.

Next out, the Hiker’s Surprise lives up to its name immediately. What is that crunch?  Besides the saltine-like crust, there are deliciously browned chunks of walnut. Wow. The walnut pieces have been laid down on a light brush of pesto and then slyly covered by slabs of mushroom, more sun-dried tomatoes and caramelized onions, and the silky melt of Gorgonzola. The only thing I can imagine that might add to this magic is a handful of sliced red grapes spread and roasted over the top. (I mention this addition only to work in another  pizza joint recommendation in Fayetteville, West Virginia, near the New River Gorge. Pies and Pints is the name—Gorgonzola and Grape is the pizza’s appelation.)

So, Miss Emily Nunn, you do not disappoint. These pizzas are a rare find, an unusual amalgam of flavors in an even more unlikely place. But as you told us last week at the writing workshop, the comfort often comes in the odd mix at the table. Or as she put it near the end of her book: 

“Luckily, I had figured out that life was not a banquet at all but a potluck. A party celebrating nothing but the desire to be together, where everyone brings what they have, what they are able to at any given time, and it is accepted with equal love and equanimity.”  

That’s how it was for us at the writing workshop--sharing what we had brought unvarnished, both our manuscripts and our personal stories, mostly told at table when we stopped long enough to eat. And so it was at this Appalachian anomaly—Californians making pizzas and pastries on the side of an ancient mountain. We declared our gratitude in the moment, delighting in the many tastes unfolding, bite after bite, on a not-exactly-round but satisfying crust.

[arnulfodial31-blog]

Marijuana Trip  Tips For The “Chronic” Vacationer

What type of fuel grows like a weed, does not ruin the earth, cleans the air, and can solve America's energy, security, and job crises? Solution is Hemp (pot, - think of the M word, as some places won't allow that word be used). The folks at A new.G.T. says any talent and many types of ages are welcomed. Auditioning talent has 90 seconds to impress the judges who claim they wish to see "anything and all the details." With instructions like that, I would not be surprised if we get folks in line who can roll mirror "cannabidiol" cigarette or mountain folk who is able to shovel snow above tree line without oxygen. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers GREW HEMP; Washington and Jefferson Diaries. Jefferson smuggled hemp seeds from China to France then to U . s. Slow and steady wins the business growth battle. Nancy becomes heady with her sales success in her suburb and begins to eye other markets so she will likely make even cash. While on his or her local college campus seeking a tutor for her son, she realizes the campus is a ready-made niche for pot it is initially very successful in capturing that provide. However, what she doesn't realize is that she is treading on another dealer's territory (one for this campus security officers), also a mock arrest on campus this particular officer, she loses about $15,000 in inventory. When she tells Heylia what happened, Heylia just laughs and tells Nancy she has been "jacked" by another dealer, and Total Reaction CBD employing price she pays for trying to grow too awesome. I just pumped him for all of the justifications he previously had. He went on and on while he begin to slow down I prodded him again until he ran associated with your the wondrous benefits to smoking weed, it didn't take long; and I saw that a lot of of causes did not really concern smoking marijuana, they had to do with the textile uses with the Hemp Plant. Mike: Yeah. I like the fact that is becoming low through the glycemic index, although that varies noticeably based for a manufacturer. We have anywhere from 13 to 35. A lot of variation there and it all depends on where comes from. EFA represent Essential Extra fat and that one nutrient that demands needs in order to have healthy skin treatment. This nutrient comes through eating meals that aren't normally a part of the average teenager's diet regime. Some common food causes of EFA are sunflower seeds, walnuts, leafy green vegetables, flaxseed, Hemp Legal, shellfish, canola oil, soya oil, pumpkin seeds, and chia seed. Hemp is a very efficient and cost-effective associated with fiber, and Total Reaction CBD Reviews biomass-produced (pyrolysis) fuel and. History shows us that even the Total Reaction CBD Oil from hemp seeds can make fuel. Support other crops thrive, and makes probably the most effective rope, clothes, insulation, fiber, and good deal more.

[mealsforsquares]

Lamb Chops and Carrots

R was at work late, so I figured it was time to make lamb chops. I don’t make them very often, although there’s no reason not to I suppose, I just don’t. We have several excellent outlets for lamb chops around us, and I’m always happy to pick some up. I prefer to do it when the weather is conducive to grilling, but that’s not going to happen in winter in the North, so I was going to have to make due with a pan*. Lamb goes well with carrots, and also takes to sweetness pretty well, so I decided to try out sous videing a vegetables by doing some carrots.

So that was where it started. The carrots, I mean. I sous vided them for awhile until they were soft. You sous vide vegetables at a much higher temperature than meat - you would never want to eat meat that had gotten up to 185 degrees, but you have to get the carrots that hot to break them down, so it took forever for the water to heat. This is the price we pay for doing things, I suppose, that they take time. This is my new philosophy: things take time. Who knew?!

Anyway. The carrtos were sous-vided. So I got some butter in a pan and added to it a slug of maple syrup, an equal-sized slug of vinegar, and some chili and got the carrtos in there. I let it all happily bubble away until the liquid had mostly come off and the carrots were effectively glazed.

The lamb was a much simpler matter. The chops themselves were somewhat thin, so I just got a pan very hot and seared them off until the outside was the color I wanted. Boom, done. I set them aside to rest.

I chopped a cucumber, a bell pepper, and a stalk of celery into big chunks and tossed them in a bowl. I added a generous crumble of feta cheese, and ran a knife over soem olives very quickly. I tossed some walnuts in there for texture. I put together a vinaigrette of olive oil, rice vinegar, balsamic vinegar, mustard and pomegranate molasses, dressed the vegetable chunks with them, finished it with some torn basil, and called it a salad.

That was pretty much it. The lamb chops were great, the glazed carrots were great. Glazed carrots, man, what an underrated food. All-time great stuff, glazed carrots. The salad was hearty and vegetal, and all went home happy. I mean, we were all already at home. We stayed home happy. You know what I mean.

* actually, I wanted to sous vide them, but I had some technical difficulties even with the new sous vide machine, which is cool and nice and good and cool.