ayyy snow

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We just got plowed out for the first time this year, which sounds dirty, but really, it’s one of the town garbage trucks with a vast blade attached to the front rumbling and scraping along the road, indicating that there’s enough accumulation on the roads for the town to figure it’s about time for that to happen.

it was snowing lightly this morning, and just above freezing, and then it grew slowly colder and just shat down snow all day, and now we’re getting about an inch an hour. Which is normal for this time of year, it’s just that we had none of the usual ramping-up of autumnal things, so it went from flowers still blooming to HARD FROST and then IMMEDIATE SNOW so it’s kind of. Well, I didn’t clean up the yard, to put it mildly. By tomorrow morning we’re expected to have eight to ten inches.

Dude had the day off so he at least put the storm windows in. And coiled up the hose, since I asked him to. 

I did not have the day off, so I spent it in a windowless room. We met for lunch, though, which was pleasant– tacos, at the human trafficking place. (Buffalo has such riches of taco joints, we have the gentrified leftist one, the MAGA douchebag one, and the human traffickers, which is really just a full spectrum of options, and there are more taco joints besides.) (Oh yes, Buffalo’s food scene is a vastly rich one, with a full spectrum of a great many things.) (when this crossposts the links will be stripped out but rest assured, I cited sources on those.)

I forgot I only have one laptop charger now, and brought it to work today which I hadn’t been doing, and then left it there, so now I’m sort of eyeing the charge on my battery skeptically. I did read a book on my phone, and I guess I could read one on my Kindle too, but I’ve still got 44% so. 

I downloaded a bunch of old public-domain books on my laptop today, all old works on hoodoo, witchcraft, and the like. It’s not that I want to take up witchcraft, per se, but I do want to study it. I’m not sure, to myself, whether it’s that I want to include it in something I’m writing, or whether it’s for me. We’ll have to see. 

Anyway The Black Pullet is much less interesting than I’d thought. A lot of the oldest sources on the occult seem to be really preoccupied with exoticness and ancientness, which I do get the attraction of, but it’s also… listen, as someone who does a lot of works of the imagination, I know what a work of the imagination looks like when I see it, and am not fooled. The things one imagines often reveal a great deal more about who they are than they think.

The other thing I’ve suddenly begun researching is how to make candles and oil lamps of one’s own. I have so many books now in my saved list on the library website that I’m going to have to plan several visits, because of course I still have tiny house books (and that grey water system’s guy’s book is at the library too!) and now candlemaking books and grimoires and gosh, I don’t know when I’m going to read all this. 

It’s because I’m not writing anything for NaNoWriMo, of course. I was, I got about 400 words of outlining done, but I’ve had to pause for various things, and I think it’s too late to try to dive back in. Which is fine, NaNo doesn’t do anything for me– I have proven over and over again most of the years since 2002 that I can easily crank out 50,000 words in a month and it doesn’t really get me anything, I’m far better served by being more deliberate and less wordcount-driven. I have to do some more brainstorming and think of what to do, I suppose. 

Which apparently, at the moment, is reading copious amounts of how-to books and daydreaming about a room of one’s own, with maybe a desk in it. 

candle wicking

I am posting this for the amusement of unicornduke, with whom I'm in the slow-mo midst of a giant flax seed-to-thread project (we're at the stage of having two years' harvests sitting in various barns, all at different stages of processing, though we've got tentative concrete plans to go further, in that my dad's got the schematics for a full set of processing equipment and we're going to meet up and build shit ~*soon*~) (he is on for Thanksgiving week sometime-- I'm probably getting into town around the 20th though I gotta finalize all those plans today-- so sometime in the ten days after that)--- ---- -- -
ANYWAY

last night during my sort of weird manic "I'm gonna learn all the things" state about candlemaking I Googled how to make a candle wick (expecting, like, what kind of cotton twine or thread to look for, how to prepare it, etc) and the very first result was this:
Joybilee Farm: How To Make Your Own Candle Wicking:

To make candle wicking or coarse towelling you can plant oil seed flax and harvest the seeds for oil and the stems for fiber. Oil seed flax is shorter than fiber flax and since the seeds are harvested when ripe, the fiber tends to be coarser as well. Coarseness can be somewhat controlled by planting the plants closer together and by harvesting when the plants are 1/3rd yellow and 2/3rds green. At this stage the seeds are immature, but they will mature while the stocks are drying. If you plant fiber flax, use the tow fibers, that are removed from the longer, silkier line fibers, during fiber processing.

Yes this person seriously expects you to be so committed to using local resources that you're going to go out and plant flax just so you can harvest tow so you can process it and spin it to make wicks.
(Actually, you have to spin it and then use a lucet to make it into cord! which I do know how to do, actually, so I'll really do this, for sure, but holy shit, lady. And then you mordant it! These candles are going to be fucking gourmet. I was going to use paraffin but fuck that, I have to use beeswax I chewed myself, now.)

I mean, like, fair, now I'm probably going to do this! But how funny is that, to be the number one search result? I'm just imagining being, like. A normal person. And trying to learn how to make candle wicks, and being told to sow a pound of flaxseed over a 20x20 plot and wait 100 days, as step 1.
I love this and yet. And yet! Who in their right mind! This is great.

book rec: The Cobbler’s Boy

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I read this book because I loved the Goblin Emperor and it’s the only other thing that came up when I searched my library’s Libby app for Katherine Addison’s name.  Behind the cut: a brief summary and review.

She cowrote this with Elizabeth Bear. The Cobbler’s Boy is a fictional story about Christopher Marlowe as a 15-year-old boy, trying to figure out what to do with his life– he has a gift for scholarship, but is the only son of a drunk, abusive cobbler with four daughters and a new baby on the way, and he knows he’s not likely to get a chance at further schooling. His friend John Lattimore is a scholar who he hopes will teach him Greek and help him attain a prestigious scholarship, and he has a young friend, a classmate, a boy, for whom he is beginning to realize he has… certain feelings. 

Into the midst of all this, comes a murder plot, interlaced with court politics (Elizabeth vs. Mary Queen of Scots! v exciting) far beyond Kit’s understanding, and his only chance is to solve the mystery or his father will be hanged for it. 

It’s a fun, sort of YA-feeling story, with high stakes, affecting detail, good characterizations (even the drunken father is not a monster, you do understand him, even if you don’t like him)– and it has some of the same things I loved about the Goblin Emperor, where Kit is the POV character and so the world is expertly filtered through the things he’d notice, colored by his experiences.

And it manages, despite the setting, to not be a Sad Gay Story– the boys realize they could be burned at the stake for their feelings, but they also seem to realize that they can still carve out some joy for themselves, perhaps. 

So, I recommend it if you’re looking for some fun Feelings; I breezed through it rather quickly. Good distinct characters, I had no trouble keeping track of his variety of sisters and the other characters, which is a nice change from another book I’m reading where I honestly don’t know which of the two main characters is narrating at any given time and I don’t know either of their names and I’m over a quarter of the way through the book. Maybe I won’t review that one.

I wished there was a little more of the setting– I don’t know much about Canterbury circa 1600, but as Kit isn’t prone to gazing about the place (as he’s never lived anywhere else), you don’t see much, and probably it would have been clunky to include. I guess I can look that up on my own, if I want to know more. 

paganism

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I was just at a fast food joint and as I waited for my food I became aware that the song on the tinny PA system was… a Christmas song… about Jesus. Like… I don’t know the song but it was all about how this time of the year is when we celebrate Christmas, because of Jesus. it was very much a direct Non-Holiday song with all the emphasis on Jesus. His name occurred repeatedly. And it was… listen, that’s weird. It’s real weird.

I decided just now, as I have the song tinkling half-forgotten in my head, that I’m going to become a pagan, but not like, a Wiccan type of pagan. No. 

No, I’m going to worship Mithras. I don’t really know anything about Mithras except that he was worshipped largely in mystery cults so there’s a lot we don’t know, right? (I apologize in advance if there’s a large active Mithraic population I just don’t know about; I don’t mean to erase you, but my education thusfar has presented it as very much a mysterious relic of a bygone era.) (I promise, I’ll Google it after this, I just thought it’s funnier if I do this knowing as little as possible.)

What little I know seems appealing, right? He was a young hot dude who wrestled a bull, right? And like, nobody could talk about it? That last bit is very appealing.

But the thing that made me think of it is that “Mithras” scans identically to “Jesus” in songs and such, and I could just do Mithras carols, except then I’d have to kill every listener to keep the secrets, right? but let’s just. We’ll get to that later. 

In the meantime, time for Mithrasmas.