Archive | February 2014

Food Log 2/27/14

Feb28

Seem done eating…

Coffee, 2T half-and-Half, 1 teas sugar
Clementine x um lots
Cheerios, 1/2 cup
egg salad w/ tomato and lettuce
Coco multigrain pop cake, x3
Puffed grain cake x2
Peanut Butter, 1T
Tiny-apple
(can you tell I like repetitive days)?

Thorne Onion Souup
(this involves a pot full of onions cooked down over hours, with beef and, this time, carrots)

Ice Cream
(nom)

The weekdays are relatively easy. The problem will be this weekend.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/684466.html. You can comment here or there.

Friday: A Writing Summary of the last 8ish days

Feb28

February 20th Summary

Other Trees, Same Forest

Friday Show and Tell – What have you been up to?
Friday Show and Tell

On Honesty in Cooking, or Writing…

Signal Boost: Prompt Calls

A Phenomenal Description of Addergoole and a lovely post by @KOrionFray

Written to my Prompt
Priority Override by Mephit

You’re So Meta

(Seeing the forest for the trees)
Thing I want to play with in the Addergoole Universe.

February is World-Building Month
A Summary
Day Twenty: Dragons Next Door
Day Twenty-Three: Vas’ World
Day Twenty-Three: Tír na Cali
Day Twenty-Four: Unicorn/Factory
Day Twenty-Five: Addergoole
Day Twenty-Six: Tír na Cali

Stories on Electronic Trees

No Setting At All
People Talk, to a writing prompt by @KOrionFray
Locked in

Addergoole
How do We Manage? (Ayla and Shahin)
Promises, Regine/Ambrus
Apoc
Unwelcome Guests, Part II – Baram and his house-elves, Ardell & Delaney
Unwelcome Guests, Part III
Post-Apoc
They Have to Notice Eventually (post-apoc, a continuation)
A Sea Change (Regine, Comes after Planning and
Microbit One)
Tower

Aunt Family
Beginnings of a Cast List
A Locked Chest is Locked for a Reason, Beryl

Fae Apoc
Sporting

Fairy Town
Born of a Fish

Inner Circle
Background Character Word-Doodles

Reiassan
Fifty Years, Rin before Into Lannamer

Tír na Cali
The Collar Job, Part V (Leverage xover)
The Collar Job, Part VI (Leverage xover)
The Collar Job, Part VII (Leverage xover)

Unicorn/Factory
Unicorn Hair

Homesteading

(Living in the trees)
Canning Butter

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/684043.html. You can comment here or there.

Born of a Fish, a drabble of Fairy Town for the Random-Bingo

Feb28

To [personal profile] kelkyag‘s prompt to my other bingo call.

This fills the square “Born of a Fish”[Aarne–Thompson classification system #705] square and is from my Fairy Town ‘verse.

There is a fountain in the park that never goes dry and never freezes.

In this town, that’s more than a bit notable. The fountain is never touched with graffiti, never littered in or near; the grass is always trimmed and the stonework perfect.

It looks as if it goes down forever. It looks as if it is a portal into some distant sea. And the fish there are big, and fat, and beautiful.

Babies come from there, sometimes, when the need is strong, popping out of the water as if born from the fish.

And sometimes babies vanish there.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/683698.html. You can comment here or there.

Friday Show-And-Tell: What have you been up to?

Feb28

Shamelessly copied from [personal profile] jjhunter:

Friday, every Friday, I invite you (yes, you!) to share with me key Dreamwidth (or LJ, or Tumblr, or anything else) posts from the last week. They can be one or more of your own posts, posts of others you’d recommend, interesting discussions, linkspams, tiny delights, whatever stands out to you from the last seven days that you’d like to highlight. Assume that I’ve been away and pining too true and catch me up on what matters to you.

In return, I will make a point of commenting on at least one post of those you share, and I encourage others to do the same.

Newcomers, lurkers and long-time commentators equally welcome

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/683118.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day Twenty-Six: Tír na Cali

Feb28

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The twenty-third question comes from [personal profile] wispfox and is for Tir na Cali.

Why did it originally start out as a hostage situation?

(Referencing the end of this.)

This is a bit of worldbuilding that could definitely use more scrutiny.

When Tír na Cali began as its own country, it was in a precarious place. The Civil War was in full swing, and the northern U.S. was very clear on what it wanted to do to rebellious states.

The Californians needed a decisive victory. At the same time, they needed workers; there was plenty of labor to be had and less people to do it. Thirdly, with the aristocracy just beginning to flex its muscle, the powers-that-were understood that their normal human population was going to need some sort of sop to accept a ruling class.

The royalty – or the extended family line that would become California’s monarchy – had always believed in a stratified society of responsibility and control. It was, while not easy, reasonable and practical to expand that to all segments of their new country; bringing in a slave population gave normal-human citizens, even the poor, someone else who was below them.

Back to the hostages. The first slaves taken were actually hostages, the children and sometimes (unlike in modern day) wives of decision-makers. Along with them were a large swath of ordinary teens and twenty-somethings and relatives of newspapermen and financiers. The first round of slave-taking was done with the intention that no corner of the Union would have a family who didn’t have a child somewhere in California.

This could have backfired horribly, yes. It could have led to a massive retaliatory war.

But it didn’t.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/682929.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day Twenty-Five: Addergoole

Feb28

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The twenty-fifth question comes from [personal profile] anke and is for Addergoole.

What’s the reasoning behind keeping future Addergoole students in the dark about pretty much everything?

This one is actually fairly straight-forward.

One of the primary purposes of the Addergoole School is to encourage more half-breed children to Change, thus coming into the full extent of their powers, and to Change in a safely controlled environment, where they are unlikely to, say, set the school gym on fire or get killed by a mob.

Stress and surprise can trigger the change, and a series of stressors and surprises can trigger it more quickly than all the surprises at once; thus Hell Night, which originally was meant to spook and scare students more than it was meant to ambush them into Keepings.

However, for various and sundry reasons, the Administration is happier if every student of Addergoole experiences a year Kept. A secondary reason for the secrecy is that it makes new students easier to catch.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/682733.html. You can comment here or there.

Promises

Feb28

This is to [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s prompt to this January card for [community profile] origfic_bingo.

It fills the “promises made” slot, and is in Addergoole, which has a landing page here

“I promise you,” Regine had said, when she had first locked a collar around Ambrus’ neck, “that as long as you are mine I will take care of you.”

It hadn’t been the promise that he’d wanted, but at the time, he hadn’t knows that he could want things, and so he had taken it as a kindness and a courtesy.

“The children you sire here will all go to Addergoole, that I promise you.”

That had been over a year later, long enough that Ambrus could think about wanting things, long enough that he’d begun to count on his fingers the number of times he had taken a woman to her bed.(128)

But Addergoole was an abstraction to him, a project, and the children he might be siring, even the one he had already held and named, they were all even more abstract. His mistress was smiling at him.

And it wasn’t the promise he wanted, still, and he did not think he could ask for things, so he took the promise as a kindness and a courtesy, and thanked his mistress sweetly.

“I promise you that my use for you is far from over.”

The promise came nearly fifteen years later, as Regine was wrapping up what she called “the initial phase of the Addergoole project,” already gearing up for “the educational phase.” Ambrus hadn’t, exactly, asked for that promise, but she had offered him freedom, and he had panicked, thinking, now that the initial phase was done, she was sending him out into the world.

It wasn’t the promise he wanted, but by now, he was used to the way his mistress spoke, and the bond of Keeping was pushing heavily on him. So he nodded, and accepted it for what she’d actually meant, and moved on.

“I promise you.” This time she was swallowing, hard, having trouble with her words. He had noticed, by now, so many years later, that she rarely made promises like this: only for him, and even more rarely her crew, did she speak so casually. “I promise you, Ambrus, that should you ever wish to come back, you will always have a place in my home.”

That wasn’t the promise he wanted. But Ambrus had learned to wait.

“…and in my heart.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/682348.html. You can comment here or there.

Trading Words for DW Paid Account once again – 150 words/$1US

Feb28

I am once again out of DW Paid Account.

And DW doesn’t take paypal, so I can’t pay out of my slightly-depleted-due-to-sick-cat-and-exploding-pipes-anyway paypal account.

So! 🙂 150 words (give or take 25) for each $1US, minimum $3 (One month paid time).

Thanks!

Thank you, [personal profile] jjhunter!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/682224.html. You can comment here or there.