Archive | November 9, 2014

Waking Up In Cali, a ficlet xover (@inventrix)

This is a break from Nano, essentially: Kyle, Lady Maureen, and his succubus half-sister (Ivette) are Addergoole characters; the setting is Tír na Cali..

Kyle woke up in a small concrete room, on a small, hard bed, wearing nothing but his skin – his Masked skin, he checked – and with the familiar feeling of a collar heavy on his neck.

And it was heavy, the sort of thing only sadistic or control-freak Keepers put on their Kept. He touched it; it felt plasticy and thick, hard and not giving at all. And locked on.

Okay. Memories. He needed some of those. He’d been out at a bar – well, that sort of thing happened when you were in college, and he didn’t want to be that strange. And then there’d been the weird rainfall, and he and Dave and Jerry had hopped through it to a bar none of them could remember seeing before. And then… then there’d been a redhead.

He tried not to think too much about how much redheads did him in. He knew more about his mother than he ought to, and he knew more about himself than he ought to, and that being said, she hadn’t looked anything like either his mother or his succubus half-sister, except that she’d had flaming red hair.

So bar, alcohol, redhead… “Fuck.” He ran his hand over the collar again. “Fuck, fuck, shit.” Well, once he could get to a phone – assuming he didn’t have orders not to – he could probably get in touch with his mother, and Lady Maureen could probably make this go away.

He didn’t feel guilty about that. He ought to feel guilty… shouldn’t he?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/845825.html. You can comment here or there.

Look, not a #Nano post! Things Learned about Gardening This Week/end

Gardening – well, anything really, but today I’m talking about gardening – is a learning experience. Even harvesting.

This weekend, we learned:

Hot Peppers: The very tip of a hot pepper isn’t indicative of the rest of the pepper.

T. cut off the tip for me to taste, to gauge hotness so we knew how much to put in our enchiladas. Nothing. So he sliced off another tiny slice.

Burning, so much burning. Drinking milk, drinking cider, crying. Well, not quite crying. So much burning.

Turns out those were the ghost peppers. Whoops!

Hot Peppers, part II: When drying hot peppers in the oven, check the oven before turning it on to make cookies.

Then again, it’s not the first time we’ve learned that. You could smell the capsaicin all the way in the other end of the house.

Carrots: Can overwinter just fine in the garden, just mulched over a bit. Also, given a raised bed with fresh compost + peat, they go wild. These things are huge!

(Also purple. But that was on purpose).

Kale: a fitted queen bedsheet works great as a row cover on frosty mornings, esp. for a 4×6 foot raised bed. On the other hand, kale doesn’t give a shit about frost and the bed we didn’t cover was just fine.

Tomatillos: aren’t supposed to get ripe. Also, if you plant a tiny free tomatillo plant and let it go, it will take over a whole bed.

Broccoli: get huge! if you let it flower.

And, considering the tomato blight and the ridiculously sad squash harvest, we’re really glad we don’t depend on our garden for our food.

All in all, an educational week!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/845650.html. You can comment here or there.

An outtake from my story: 95 words about hair & shoes

I challenged Capriox to write 25 words about hair as a warm-up and, um:

Avery didn’t think about her hair, more than you had to to keep it from falling off of your head. It was there. Brown, a little bit greasy when she ignored it too long. Hair. Kendra’s hair, on the other hand, was a thing of beauty, twists and turns, braids and beads and the whole thing looking like a modern art project. On the other hand, Kendra didn’t like her shoes, not at all, and Avery had bought every single pair of shoes in her size at the goodwill, the Salvo, and the Thrifty Shopper.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/845339.html. You can comment here or there.