Tag Archive | weeklies

…but we’re a cat family! Thorne Thursday

Mar28

This weekend, I encountered Newfoundland dogs for the first time in the flesh, and, oh, boy, is there a lot flesh!

A friend is considering adopting one of these giant dogs (as a merely-huge puppy), so I went with him to visit a breeder south of Ithaca.

I have never seen a dog this big! I have also never seen a friendly large-breed dog as mellow as these dogs. While kisses abounded, and petting was definitely a must, my friend, the breeder, and I were in a small room with four grown dogs and a puppy and it never got to the uncomfortable jumping-all-over-everyone stage.

This breeder’s male dogs range easily up to a hundred and fifty pounds; the females are a little bit smaller, staying around one-twenty. They can get even bigger than that, I’m told, up to around 170 pounds for the males and 150 for the females.

Newfies are originally bred as working dogs; the breeder casually told us that we could hook them up to a cart when they had reached eighteen months. Just what I need for my back yard: a bear-like pony to haul around yard waste!

Tempting. So very, very tempting. But my kitties look at me and remind me that we’re a kitty family.

And, besides, we’ve got to rip out 3/4 of the house this summer. We can wait for a puppy until after that.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/499923.html. You can comment here or there.

Syllabic Sunday: Don’t know much about History…

Mar24

I have these four words in my list, although I cannot find the post in which I posted them:

telyen: story
telnyent: truth-known
telyentozh: myth
telnyenttozh (hunh. I think that should be telenyentozh): history (Wow, that’s clumsy, don’t take that one as canon yet, or the myth one)

Where I wanted to get with this post was BOOKS.

Because the Cālenyena love books. Well, they love the written word. They were fascinated with it when they discovered it. They wrote histories into their tents. Usually biographies. They decorated their clothes with tales of their prowess, and lessons learned. They painted stories on their saddles.

Actual books, paper in a library? That took a little longer.

The word for writing come from the [east-coast-people] word Saayish, and is zhēzhet

The word for book comes from the proto-bitrani word urnia, and is turnē

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/497340.html. You can comment here or there.

That Girl Thursday: Cody

Mar21

Guest Entry by [personal profile] lilfluff
Cody sh’Leyla cy’Caitin oro’Yolanda

Cody knew exactly who she was at her old school. She was the school freak and a geek. A role she had come to accept and even take some defiant pride in. And when she was informed she would be sent to Addergoole she didn’t expect any of that to change. Then the changes started coming.

Early the first week Doctor Caitrin gave her a name for her body’s physically genderless condition, the first time any of her doctors actually spoke with her regarding it. In the second week the masks came off revealing students and staff with far more blatant differences than hers. Then Hell Night came and terrified her until her Change came upon her. Fortunately as she recovered in Doctor Caitrin’s office she found she now had a protector in the form of her keeper and a whole suite full of new friends.

Cody was only a bare fraction over five feet tall short before her Change. Her lack of height and androgynous features often meant she was mistakenly thought younger than she actually was. Which while annoying she found preferable to when people thought she was a boy. That wasn’t helped by her preference for dressing in overalls and wearing unflashy jewelry. She has tried growing her chestnut colored hair longer but has found that no matter what she does it soon looks messy and at least when it’s short it just looks tousled.

After her Change she lost two inches of height and while furless she has taken on an almost elfin-feline appearance. The pupils of her gray eyes are no longer circular, long whiskers have sprouted from her face, and her ears grew longer and mobile. The only thing missing to complete the appearance would be a tail. But given her lack of fur she soon decided that was a good thing. While her Change didn’t bring claws or other fearsome features she did find herself with better hearing and balance, puzzling new sensations from her whiskers, and a powerful leaping ability. She just needs to make sure not to jump headfirst into walls like she did when she first changed.

She has yet to identify an innate ability. She is capable of bringing extreme focus to tasks. To the point of shutting out the outside world. But, she was prone to doing this long Changing or even arriving at Addergoole. With little social life she would often turn this focus onto her studies working at times several months ahead, leading to the grades that she thought were the reason she’d been granted a full ride scholarship for Addergoole.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/495445.html. You can comment here or there.

Irish Soda Bread

Mar19

T. and I like cooking for the holidays.

We really do. It’s a fun excuse to try something we don’t normally do. Or something we like doing that’s a lot of work.

We have never made soda bread before, so we decided we would try that this time. We went with this site. I think it’s a bit preachy, and did not attempt to verify the veracity (heehe) of its claims, but I wanted to try a simple bread first.

(Plus another recipe we found called for a stick of butter. I am trying to lose weight here, people!)

To quote the site: The basic soda bread is made with flour, baking soda, salt, and soured milk (or buttermilk). That’s it!

So that’s what we did. Our Dutch Oven is a bit big, so I nested a round Pyrex inside it, put the bread in that, and otherwise followed the recipe completely (we did the brown bread one, the 1st recipe).

Tasty! T. thinks it needs another flavor if we do it again, and it is an immensely dense and filling dough, but it worked really well with our corned beef brisket in french onions soup.

Experiment: Success.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/494326.html. You can comment here or there.

Magic Mondays: frodleikr

Mar18

In the setting of Faerie Apocalypse and Addergoole, Frodleikr is a Word, one of the cornerstones of magic. It is a Domain, a category of thing-to-affect, rather than a Manifestation, which is a manner-of-affecting.

[personal profile] clare_dragonfly asks: When was frodleikr lost, and how the heck do you even lose a Word?!

Nobody knows. Nobody is talking. And who can fault them?

The legend is that the thirteen departed gods (and the one that stayed) each had their Words. Eleven were given to share among all of the fae, but three gods favored specific breeds: Frodleikr went to the Daeva, of course. The other two went to the other two breeds.

Not every Daeva had access to the Word, of course, but many of the oldest did. The theory goes that it was lodged in the strongest fae blood. And, as time went on, fewer and fewer fae, it is theorized, had access to the words and fewer and fewer could teach its use.

Nobody’s quite certain when it vanished from memory. Certainly, the Council still remembers it, and the oldest of fae still alive. But who wants to admit that they’ve misplaced a building block of the universe?

If the Grigori and Mara know what happened to their Words, by the by, they’re not talking

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/493973.html. You can comment here or there.

16-Minute Saturday: 100 Per Cent

Mar17

This is written to the image prompt here for “Sixteen Minute Saturday,” something I adapted for alliteration from Ty Barbary’s 15-minute Fiction.

I’d love if more people played along!

“It’s data tagging.”

“Like facial recognition?”

“Exactly like facial recognition. They pass by this camera… see? And then we know which one they are.”

“Doesn’t work for the females, though.”

“No, we’re still working on that. But the antlers are very close to unique.”

“Very close to…”

“Well, all right. It’s not an exact science by any means.”

“Aren’t you in the exact science department?”

“No, I’m in the tracking animals department. Exact sciences is down one floor and over three rooms.”

“Right, right. So. It doesn’t track the females and it’s not one hundred percent accurate at tracking the males. So what does it do?”

“Well, it projects the patterns on to them, too, in a hard-light display that is really pretty nifty.”

“It’s nifty.”

“Yep. Really nifty. And, what’s more, mating interest is up one hundred percent for females looking at the males with the nifty displays.”

“…One hundred percent.”

“That’s what I said.”

“So, are you the growing-antlers department, by any chance?”

“No. That’s up one floor and over two rooms. And it hurts like hell. But let me tell you… totally worth it.”

“One hundred percent?”

“In clinical trials – me – more like one thousand percent.”

“Going.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/493107.html. You can comment here or there.

Syllabic Sunday: Kids and kids

Mar17

Children! They are required for continuation of the species!

Like all people, the Cālenyena have children, and they have words for them, of course

Pabap is a baby, a “carry-on,” or tes-tyētyē (self-carried), testyē.

Lerū is a child, generally one tall enough to walk but not tall enough to carry a spear or throw weapons.

This is the equivalent to their goat terms:

Pebyab is a tiny goat, not large enough to do much but bleat.

Lelū is a young goat kid, old enough to walk but not to be ridden.

The similarities in terms is not accidental. Especially when a herding culture, the Cālenyena tended to gather all their young together and raise them, so that babies and goat kids would grow up under the watchful eye of the pregnant mothers and the too-old to ride. Similar still happens today in remote villages and small towns.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/492794.html. You can comment here or there.

Way Back Wednesday: Leaving Town (D.J.)

Mar13

Some decades ago.

“What the hell kind of freak are you?”

“You’re no kind of woman at all!”

“Get out of this town!”

Dane Jordan straightened its skirt, thumbed its nose at the crowd, and left in no particular hurry. As long as it was leaving, they probably wouldn’t throw things. The trick was to leave so that they all saw it leaving – and didn’t think about the fact that its house was in this direction.

Dane had left more towns than it could count anymore. This was one of the cleanest departures so far, knock on wood. Then again, Dane had a lot of practice.

There was a car waiting in the driveway. A lean woman sat on the hood of the car. “I heard the trouble.”

Dane shrugged. Play it cool. Always play it cool. “Shit happens.”

“Not around the Ellehemaei.”

Now that was a word Dane hadn’t heard in a while. “I’m listening.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/492394.html. You can comment here or there.

Magic Mondays: Magic in Tír na Cali

Mar12

Magic in the Tír na Cali world is held almost entirely in the bloodlines of the royal family of California, and is more rightly called psychic powers than magic.

Every grey-eyed royal member of the family has one psychic power. Examples include telepathy, mind control, Love, teleportation, telekinis, and rapid healing, but many variations exist; while “families” of powers run in bloodlines, the specific manifestation of any given child, even within identical twins, is still very hard to predict.

Power level is thought to be determined by the strength of the royal blood in one, and this is often but not always accurate. Thus, royal women are often unwilling to carry the child of any but another royal.

Powers manifest in early teens, and with manifestation, begin a slowing of the aging process that continues through puberty; post-pubescence, empowered royals age immensely slowly, and the pubescent period itself is prolonged in royals.

A millenia ago, the powers of the Californian royalty’s ancestors – who were neither Californian nor royal at that time – could barely lift pennies or sway thoughts. Today, they can move tanks. Their powers are continually evolving and growing.

What tomorrow may bring is terrifying and wonderful.



This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/491654.html. You can comment here or there.