Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Turtie tank!

Tortie the turtle has a new home:
Just above the middle purple plant is a little red eared slider turtle. This is a 20 gallon tank, with about 5 gallons of water, 7 plastic plants, & a filter/basking area.
The tank is covered with an appropriate metal screen top. Heat lamp is on top.  For the first few hours   Tortie was not noticeably impressed. He spent a great deal of time hiding. Now that it is quiet, he has been out & about, small enough to climb the plants, he pops his head up & glares at whomever may be within vision.

A closer look of Turtie nesting in his plants.
Grandchild #1 watching Turtie looking for the best hiding places.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

It's a chill wind blowing

But it's still April.  Which is very close to a warm spring. Which means that I am looking for rhubarb in the grocery stores (marmalade or BBQ! ), wondering about good buys on grapefruit (jam!   ), & still looking for a decent sized 5l crock .   The thing with moving frequently is that I don't get the chance to see where the cool spots are in the summer (in other words, where best to put The Crock). Then again, it does give me the opportunity to take my time in finding a nice sized crock ;)

On a side note, I did get my plant tower put together. Also, discovered that I need some lower sided plant flats for it. & I need my daughter to show me how to upload photos on this new laptop.  By the time I figure out the photo issue, I should have Tortie the Turtles' tank washed out. Yea!

Saturday, April 20, 2013

My guilty secret!

Whenever I'm feeling stressed & have the need to hide out inside of a book, I turn to the mystery cozies of Marian Babson .  No scary monsters, no gothic horror romance, no masterful wordsmith-ery that remains with a person through the dark night. Just a bit of mystery, the occasional murder, & usually a cat in tow, somewhere.  Nice, soft, & relaxing-- Babsons' books are the literary equivalent of Midsomer Murders .  Easy on the eyes, shorter in length, predictable to follow, & a comfortable fit. For example, from "The Cat Who Wasn't A Dog":

Quote 1: "Come to think of it, she was right.  Your average ghost isn't really the matey sort.  At least, not with his peers, although he might occasionally try to cosy up to the living- when not content merely to scare the living daylights out of them."  (page 116, paragraph 14)
     Why is that, anyway?

Quote 2: " 'I like to know where I am, in relation to everything around me.'  I couldn't understand people who didn't.
                 'It's all those gangster films you were in', Evangeline said severely."  (page 118, paragraph 10)
      Evangeline could have a point.

1 Visual: "We were surrounded by dead creatures.  They stared at us with glassy eyes from dark corners.  Birds perched on rocks beneath glass domes, a fox lurked in the shadows behind a trestle table, on top of which white mice paraded in increasing sizes from a baby mouse up to a large white rat."   (page 11, paragraph 1)
     I like a sturdy trestle table almost as much as I do a sturdy, but graceful, pedestal table.



Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Feels like Spring outside,

so garden daydreaming is at its' height! Just because I'm restricted to a plant tower inside doesn't mean that I can't sigh over various container gardens. For instance, a used wading/puppy pool & a few re-usable tote bags equals a neat little garden.  Bet I could manage a few radishes ...just because I'm not overly fond of them is no reason not to grow them ;) Probably won't try the carrots as they're not a big fan fave of the grandchildren.  For next season, I'll be stocking up on a few nice sized, tough bags.   Thinking about sprouts & sprouting , but not sure how well they will go over.  For lovely, lovely inspiration, 66 square feet is a wonderful place to start. 

For days when I need a bit more daydreaming time, I think how lovely it would be to grow my own cocktail ingredients, thanks to Amy Stewart & Territorial Seed .  And, if I had a bit more room in my city yard, little dinosaur fluffies would be skittering around :)

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Poem Bone

My homage to Magaly, in honor of To The Bone :

Saw this:
      Photo courtesy of Conjurers Kitchen .
Thought this:
                                                       Lifes' support leeched by
                                                       Death marked runes tell the future
                                                       Frost the wedding cake.

Friday, April 12, 2013

Lovely vision in bone ;)

(I had planned to post this book opinion on Saturday, but the laptop decided to kaput, so...)

Todays' book is number 12 in Yasmine Galenorns' Otherworld Series.  By title, it is 'Shadow Rising' & is told in Menollys' POV.  This series involves three half-human, half-fae sisters (Camille/witch, Menolly/vampire, Delilah/werecat), living in Seattle, working for the Otherworld Intelligence Agency, & looking for 7 Spirit Seals while fighting off demons looking for the same. 

Vision 1: "He began to transform, right there, in the tree-crowded wood.  Smokey let out a low growl, but backed away as Shade's form rippled.  He began to grow, but unlike Smokey, instead of a majestic white dragon, what appeared was a terrifying, haunting form of a skeletal dragon surrounded by shadow and a violet smoke.  He looked almost fossilized."  (pages 57-8, paragraph 10/1)
      His appearance may not be as intimidating as a white dragon, but a shadow dragon is just as cool!  It also makes sense, within the story & within Otherworld cosmology.  The logic within those inhabiting Otherworld is one of the things that keeps me reading the series.  Peoples found are functioning & correct, not placed merely because the species happens to be trending in the readership of the moment.

Quote 1: "Spirits dance and spirits writhe,/ spirits toil, spirits tithe,/ Fire and ice, and spinning wheel,/ let your life to this sign be sealed!  A fiery glowing sigil appeared in the air, crackling as it burned with a bright purple flame.  A thousand howls of anger came rushing through the rune...  (page  130-1, paragraphs 8/1)
     A witch is known by the power of her chants, & this is a lovely one ;) .  Once again, purples are associated with shadow/banishing/dark.  A stronger touch than basic black, most thankfully marking an absence of 'Bewitched' or 'Charmed' sorts of magic.

Quote 2: "There was an eerie silence that went along with being a vampire.  No breath filling the lungs, no heart or pulse beating.  Once I'd died and been turned, I began to realize how many sounds the living body makes, sounds that I never noticed, but took for granted.  As a vampire, all the sounds of life  within are silenced."  (pages 185-6, paragraphs 9/1)     
     Here is something that I had never considered, about vampires.  How silence accompanies the vampire everywhere.  How unnerving the quiet must be, as noise is one way we humans make our presence known.  Menolly wears beads in her hair to alleviate this unease.

The Otherworld series is one of the very few that I collect.  A cohesive adult world, full of good/bad/both species (human, vamp, demon, damn near everything in between), living ordinary lives in between hauntings, drug dealing, &, perhaps, demon invasion leading to the end-of-life-as-we-know-it. A thoroughly enjoyable place to visit on a regular basis :)

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Mundane bones

Not all bones are metaphysical, mystical, or used in foretelling. Some bones are pretties which lead to shinies! For example, this lovely from Hula Tallulah .  Or my shinies, which were packaged in such bright beauty:

 The brightness revealed:
It's a peacock pendant, by the way...please pardon the crappy pic!
When not drooling through the pretty shiny bones, older bones, if not ancient bones, call my attention. A favorite blog for reading about same is Powered by Osteons. A lively writer, who is also a mother of a young one & a college professor, she writes reviews about (the tv show) Bones , from an bioarchaeological  POV, ancient romans, & what her students are up to

Her take on Bones is lighthearted & I wish I was close enough to take one of her classes (& qualified to!) :)  Either way, reading her words about the Romans & looking at her photos, my mind happily leaps to old days, imagined lives, & just where these bones wandered & what they said.  I wonder, as well, what these ancients would have thought of the Sugar Skulls & their newer neon colors.  Would they have gladly worn these colors or been appalled?  Ah, if only I had the wordsmiths' skills.......