Here's to the Death of 2016

Happy New Year everyone. And I'm so glad it is a new one. 2016 was made of suck. In true Hannah and Amanda form we have yet to send out cards and letters. These are coming, I promise. They may arrive in July but, much like the ukes in Sensitive Pornograph, they are definitely coming. 

2016 took so many people and pets from us all. And it didn't leave without a fight. In the last week I managed to cut myself nice and deep on my thumb (new knife for Christmas doesn't leave one wanting!) and break all my nails. They are my natural nails and I'm used to the longer ones occasionally meeting with a jagged death but not all fucking ten nails at once. I look like... like... someone who cuts their nails. It's horrendous I tell you! 

But not all of the end was bad. There was a spontaneous Hobbit extended editions marathon one day. And Yule was made of ash, mead, reindeer fur, and three lone souls bearing witness to the birth of the new sun after the longest night. And what a sun it is! We've had some beautifully sun shiny days. Cold as fuck but sunny at least. 

Looking forward to the future: Hannah and I are going to start writing 6 hours a week. That's the minimum that Brander Sanderson, the author of the Mistborn series) prescribes his students in his college writing class. I think 6 is fair and more than doable. I think I shall start with a short story and then return to Death Man. I need to finish that so that I can do two things: send it out and get on my life! Haha. I feel trapped by my desire to make it perfect, but I keep forgetting what my first MFA mentor told me and that is - it will never be perfect. There will always be a sentence you wish you could tweak or a phrase that you want to go back and hash over again and again. In short, you will never be finished writing. You're never finished composing. But there comes a point when the book itself is finished with you. And that's where I need to be. And soon. 

There's a wolf moon coming up and I would like to greet the full moon in her splendor with wolf howls in the night. I remember last year's Wolf Moon and want to relive the energy though in a much more contained way. The aspect of wolf I want to explore this year is the cunning and sly aspect, the clever watcher from the shadows. I want to embrace those shadows for all the secrets and knowledge that may lie within. 

In other news: the two kitties are getting along remarkably well. They tolerated/cuddled on the same cat bed last night for four hours. However, Narcisa it seems is feeling very under the weather. She's thrown up (very tiny amounts) twice this week and this cat never throws up. I mean she's a rock solid warrior princess, she ain't got time for that shit! Yet she's thrown up twice that we know about and her voice is ragged and scratchy. That may be a result of all the hissing she threw at Thorin when he first came to live here but I think she's caught a cold or something. We're taking her to the vet on Thursday because we're paranoid mommies and don't want to just say "Oh, she'll get over it on her own" because what if she doesn't? What if she suffers for our negligence? So to the vet she goes.

Kitty's gonna Kit; Pyrex gonna Py

Tomorrow marks week three after catching the sick and I'm finally feeling better. Still coughing (because goodness knows I wouldn't want to spend a day not doing that!) and still a bit weak and sore in my core but overall I'm feeling much more like my old self. And I can talk again! World beware. So here's a quick update of all things fanged and fragile.

Our friend Chris got us a cat for Christmas/Yule. She knew we were looking and so she paid half of the adoption fee which was the only reason we were able to get a cat and it was damn nice of her. We visited her rescue ccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc                                                                                                                                                    yttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttth6777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777x

Okay... so I left the computer for a minute and came back to the above nonsense. Since it was the new cat who inserted said nonsense, I've decided to leave it for your viewing pleasure. Also it ties in nicely with my explanation of this cat's proclivities. 

So back to where I was: we visited the rescue and found a four month old little orange tabby. He came from a feral mama but had been fostered pretty much since birth with his brothers and sister. Of the litter he was the smallest as well as the last to be adopted. So we brought him home. Narcisa had things to say. Mostly hissing things to say. But it hasn't even been a week and the cats are already playing and chasing each other. They sniff each other a lot and are not aggressive toward each other at all, however it may still take some time before they cuddle. If they ever do cuddle. But I think eventually Thorin (that is the little one's name) will wear her down.

In the mean time however the Son of Thrain has found his calling in dismantling our computers. He took mine off internet access for two days. It wasn't that he put it into airplane mode... no he somehow erased my computer's connection to our wifi. Hannah had to work her magic and run a whole bunch of cleaners before I was able to get back on the net. No sooner was my compy back up and running did he waltz over to Hannah's and erase all her icons. He's been known to turn off the computers as well as save print-screen images to Hannah's one drive. Yeah, he's pretty good with the technology but that isn't surprising as most kids these days are born with a tablet in their hand. 

The cat and his shenanigans aren't the only reason for this post tonight. Earlier today, friend Rachel of kettle korn fame, came over to the house to hang out with us while Hannah made a butt-load of bierocks (German buns) and I made an equally loaded butt of baklava (honey-nut pastry). Apparently it was b-named food night in the Hannamanda kitchen. Anyhow, I made some fun alterations to the baklava. I am trying to think of a dairy and gluten free sort of substitute for a friend but that might not happen. I'm a wee bit discouraged, you see. I made the Krampus-klava (pumpkin spices and whiskey) without too much stress and followed that up with Snow-klava (the addition of sweetened coconut) but then I made my masterpiece: Freya's Delight Baklava. We named it that as I was constructing it. This baklava had everything in it apart from the kitchen sink. And the honey syrup mixture that I put on top was perfection! I set it on the stove to cool and went to work on a special fruit filled batch for my dad that I call Loaded Odin Baklava. 

I got one layer of Loaded Odin down when there was a sudden loud pop-crack sound. I looked up to see Freya's delight (and Rachel's very special baking dish that she had let me borrow) scattered all over the kitchen with a decent sized fire roaring over the burner. A burner that I had left on. I feel like a moron for that rookie mistake but I know that I'm not the only one who has done it and I take solace in knowing that while it's embarrassing at least it is common enough to illicit a teensy bit of sympathy from my culinary friends. The best part about this sudden emergency was that none of us panicked. Hannah quickly and efficiently herded the cats to the bedroom and closed them in while Rachel and her boyfriend helped me to extinguish the fire (baking soda is my new best friend) and clean up massive chunks of broken glass and honey. What a fucking mess! But how cool of them to help me. 

The kitchen counters are very clean now and I'm nearly 100% certain that there is no glass in the bierocks that Hannah made earlier. I suppose if we find blood in our stool we shall know otherwise. The last thing I have do to now is to mop the kitchen and that will have to wait until morning. I'm exhausted and it wasn't until Rachel and her boyfriend left that I realized how late it was. Today has been an interesting one to be sure. (Or yesterday into today rather, since it is still in the very wee hours of the morning right now.) 

At first we thought the breaking dish might have been a sign that we'd angered the gods or that we were somehow undergoing a sort of curse. Earlier in the evening my Yule tree fell over on the table for no seemingly no reason. So the tree falling and dish breaking all seemed a bit spooky at first but we realized in the end that the tree fell because I had neglected to ever balance it properly (something I have since rectified) and the dish broke because I'm a moron. In all actuality we can count this as a blessing because no one was hurt. We could have easily been in the kitchen and been cut, burned, or otherwise harmed when the dish exploded but everyone was off doing their own things. A cat could have been in there, or been in the tree. But no kitties were harmed either. Aside from adding a lot of cleaning to the evening and wasting a batch of baklava (and the loss of Rachel's dish which I'm still very sad about as the dish had belonged to her mother who is no longer with us) the evening was a fairly decent one. 

The 'Now' and a New Challenge for October

Right now Hannah and Tsuki are watching a J-drama in the living room. It's called Good Morning Call and while I'm not really following the show much it's really interesting listening to Hannah and Tsuki bitching out the main characters, chiding them, and squealing over them. Fan-girls are so cute. 

Right now Narcisa is asleep in the Bowie room. She and I have been working on laundry for the past couple of hours but right now she's curled up on a chair snoozing to the sounds of Swedish Folk Fiddling via my phonograph. 

Right now I'm waiting for one load to finish drying and another to finish washing. Right now I'm so freaking tired.

Yesterday Hannah and I celebrated my dad's birthday. I made him a passport with five different locations on it and I tasked my father with putting 'something' from each place into his passport as a keepsake. First was Scandinavia. We went to Little Euro and had crepes and Aebelskivers and egg Florentine. It was all very delicious. Next we went to Japan (a.k.a the Nishinomiya Japanese Garden in Manito Park). It was a slight disappointment because the lawn maintenance guys were mowing and weed eating so it wasn't exactly as tranquil and meditative at the Japanese gardens are supposed to be, but overall it was a great experience. And the koi fish were adorable. After that we went to India. This one was a bit of a stretch; I had them ride the tiger (or sit next to the tiger) on the Looff Carousel downtown. Mom and dad had a good time I think. Hannah rode the tiger side-saddle and I rode the horse in front of her. Next we fed the trash goat. We have a statue outside the Carousel house, it's a metal statue of a goat with a button next to it. When pushed, the button triggers a very strong suction at the goat's mouth and the idea is that you hold up trash and the goat sucks it up and eats it. Dad and I fed the goat pieces of Inlander and other trash and then we helped a young boy and his dad feed the goat. 

These activities didn't take as long as I'd planned. The next stop was supposed to be Germany but we weren't hungry enough for dinner yet so we stopped at a Starbucks for some coffee and chill time and then went to JoAnn's to see all the things. I love their skeleton collection (cats, dogs, rats, vultures, etc.). I can't wait until Hannah and I have a real house and can deck it from top to bottom with everything Halloween. After JoAnn's we went to Das Stein Haus. It was a little different than the first time I was there but it was still good. Everyone enjoyed their food but I did learn to go during the week Mon-Thurs for the best deals. I'm keeping that in mind for the future. After Germany we were supposed to go and see a movie but mom and dad were pretty tuckered out so they headed home and Hannah and I went grocery shopping. We went a little crazy but dang we are set. Our fridge is totally stocked and we have all the fixings for some fun meals this month. 

Back to now: Hannah made fresh bread from scratch. As soon as the butter softens, we will be consuming a slice of the freshness. 

And now, looking ahead I'm thinking about working on a spell challenge for October. A friend linked me a 'spell a day' writing challenge a long time ago and I was looking through it and decided that it sounded promising for October, however I'm not going to try to write 31 spells in one month. What I'm going to do instead is make a list of fifteen spell prompts for the month of October and pull every other day. It will go like this: Day 1 - pull a prompt and write a spell. Day 2 - find/create a sacred space and perform the spell (with others or solitary, your choice). Day 3 - pull a promt and write a spell. Day 4 - perform that spell. And so on and so forth. However that leaves one odd day at the end of the month: October 31. For that day I'm going to reflect on how the spells that I've woven and worked during the month have seemed to influence my state of being or the course of events. So, for now this is the project plan. I think it would be a great way to tap into creativity and spirituality just in time for Witche's New Year. 

Today is... Sundancing Day

For August Break the prompt was 'Today is....' and so to sum up today I have a picture of Narcisa with her mouse laser light toy nestled in her fur. She's played with it a lot today and is at the "I just don't have any more fucks to give" state. I reckon that's where I'm at too. 

Work is interesting at the moment. I hope tomorrow goes a bit more smoothly. It's barely Monday and I'm ready for Thursday again (which is my Friday). Right now Hannah and I are working on getting the house all organized for some serious writing but that is taking time and a lot more energy than I seem to have lately, 

For the tarot draw today I used an oracle called: Wisdom of the Hidden Realms.This is a deck our friend Fiona gave us recently. I drew the Sun Dancers card some of the tenets of this card are as follows: Expect the best and praise it in advance. Stay positive and leave the timing up to the Divine. All things are possible now. 

I agree with the card's advice and it's good to remind myself right now of staying positive. I'm having a weird emotional roller coaster at the moment and doubting almost everything. So many of the things I'd planned for this weekend, for today... just nothing. But tomorrow's a new day and I get to work on my goals again with improved attitude and determination. I shall find some fucks to give!

Two days for the price of one! August Break and Tarot Draws coming at you!

August Break 16: Breathe. Steam rising from a pot of boiling potatoes.

August Break 17: This is the bedroom window in the Bowie Room.

Bowie gets batty drapes. Because Bowie. That's why.

Narcisa loves playing in any and all curtains. I boosted the color of her eyes a little. Because Bowie.

Today: Forest Folklore Tarot. I drew the eight of wands. "Two paths lead through a wood carpeted with bluebells. The way before you is highlighted, but you have more than one opportunity ahead. It is up to you which direction you choose to take." Wands are all about fire and passion and this eight means I'm quite far along in the journey of which I'm making my decision. This card for me relates to job choices, writing endeavors, and staying true to what choices I do make. Tonight I had a long conversation with a fellow MFA Grad student. Last night I had a conversation with another MFA Grad fellow. I'm really feeling those connections right now and I need to follow the highlighted path because it is the one I've been ignoring for a while now.

Also for today: The Magical Menagerie Creature Guide Deck. I drew the Crane. "Longevity, ancient lore, vigilance." Also past lives. I've been thinking a lot about where I come from recently, not just in genealogy but also spiritually. Who or what I was before I was this crazy Amanda. Each day I gain new perspective; each day I feel myself opening up more and more to the divinity in and around me. The lessons I'm learning now are going to stick with me forever. Apart from lessons I have choices to make. The crane is elegant and long and beautiful and sacred. Air (intelligence and idea) meets water (deep emotional being) in the image of the crane. It is beautiful to see rational thought and emotions in such a serene marriage. We sometimes ignore rationality to follow dreams just as we squash our true feelings to do what seems reasonable. There is a balancing act in this and I while emotions and intellect will never exist in equal parts, they are always both present and relevant. Sometimes your brain and heart can even work together. I think in a way that is what this card is telling me. Listen to both to find the proper path.

August Break: A Secret (Or many secrets as the case may be!)

We have so many secrets, 

The cat, she knows them all.

We keep our secrets on a shelf,

We never let them fall.

Narcisa hides all her secrets behind gold pumpkin eyes.

Our mermaid is tied and blindfolded to keep our world a secret from her.

Lost in Browne's Addition I see a tree on the corner. And a little red door. Secrets.

I approach the door wondering if it is locked tight.

There is a chain lock and that's it. I can open it if I want. I wonder if I really want to look inside.

Cobwebs! And a deep dark hole into the center of the tree. I can only imagine what secrets lie inside. The cobwebs tell me that these secrets are old and shouldn't be too disturbed. I close and lock the door and leave.

We've kept our world a secret from the mermaid for now but someday she'll be free.

Narcisa likes to hide so she can learn secrets. She is the Seeker of Secrets and to this day she has kept each and every one.

Letting it Go; Helping it Grow

This was the pumpkin plant as of the 23rd of June. And I thought he was so big!

I sat down yesterday at work and wrote about the things I need to let go of. Firstly, I need to accept the loss of two of my favorite rings. They were both opal - lab created for one and most likely fake for the other - but they were important to me. One signified my engagement and the other was a beautiful gift to Hannah from her grandmother. I'm very sad that they are gone but at the moment there is nothing I can really do about it other than try to call all the pawn shops in the area to try to track them down. But today is not for wallowing in loss. Today is for a rebirth into the hot months of summer and then into fall. So we're going to rearrange things and clean things. 

This is the pumpkin plant now. I had to replant him into the ground instead of the blue tub.

I also had to move the tomato plants! Little pumpkin plant took over.

Secondly, I need to let go of all my email trash. I need to clean up my inbox (sort and delete as necessary) and make it place where I can keep track of things better and be more efficient at responding.

Forget-Me-Nots - when they were first starting to bloom.

Thirdly, I need to go through everything in the spare bedroom and continue getting rid of things that no longer serve the Hannah or myself. We are doing a pretty good job of that but alas my Bowie room remains a complete catastrophe of excess and has yet to become a true office. 

The first of the Marigolds to show their beautiful faces this summer.

And this leads me back around to my plans for rearranging. I'm going to create an office in the bedroom. I would love to go in there and work on writing. It's quiet and cool and there's gorgeous tree and plant life right outside the window. Also I could go in there and work even when we have guests over if I wanted to. The trick for me would be to get a comfy seat and a little pull out table. I might pick another one up today at the store. 

So many beautiful Marigolds now. Took this photo today. They just keep blooming!

Life is really busy. I've learned recently that, religiously speaking, I prefer interacting with the divine through nature and deity acknowledgement. I guess you could say I like being a totally typical pagan. My lifestyle is a combination of Witchery and Heathenry but religiously I'm a total 'go with the goddess flow' kind of gal. I had thought perhaps I might be more Jodo Shinshu Buddhist but... while I love and wish to live by much of Buddhist philosophy, the religious aspects imparted by the Jodo Shinshu Buddhist Priest I spoke with a few weeks back do not really jive with me. At least not at this moment. But in the future who knows!? That's what Buddhism is all about: impermanence and a life full of 'nows.' I love the idea that we only have the now and should spend our time making the now as happy as possible. Tomorrow I may feel differently and that's alright. Each now builds on the last and continues to shape the person that I am in the moment. And I want to work toward being the best person that I am able to be in each now.

A Bachelor Button. It was one of the first. We've had
blue and purple and pink ones off and on for the past month.

That being said I want to speak about my garden some more. I'm really finding an inner peace in working with the plants. The other day I thought about Masuru Emoto's experiments with water crystals. How water (an allegedly non-sentient element) reacts directly to positive and negative energies. I thought about how soil and air also must react these energies. I want to give 'happy' water to my garden and plants. I want to share my love of growing things with the soil and air so that the green things growing there are imbued fully with the happy water, happy earth, happy carbon dioxide, etc. I think about the sun and wonder if our energies are strong enough to make it to the center of our solar system and the answer is - why not?

And here is one of our vertical garden survivors: the proud and flowering Catnip!

And here's who loves the Catnip. She loves it fresh but I want to dry some
so she can have it for smelling and playing in later in the year.

This whole planet used to worship the sun and the moon and the earth and all the things that made up life. And in return for that worship, weren't people rewarded? Why can't a rain dance actually bring about rain? How can we live in a world now that is so disconnected from the reality of energies and intention? You get out of life what you put into it. You have to put love in the family recipe or it doesn't taste the same. You have to thank the sun for giving us warmth and life and you have thank the moon for giving us cycles and tides and the push and pull of emotions and deep dark beauty. And you have to love and honor the earth for every single day you're alive. I think the most aware I am of life and energy is when I spend time with the green babies in my back yard. It's nice to feel that connectivity and it's that understanding that will help me let go and live in the moment and rearrange my house. And make the most of my day. And my life.

And a final look at the large pumpkin plant. It's probably taking up twenty feet now.
I love this plant and I like to think that my love is part of why it's so huge and healthy!

My Chakra Shark and Failed Attempts

Follow this link to see the artist's Tumblr.

I've been getting rather frustrated with the creative challenge. Yesterday I played around with newspaper trying to make newspaper flowers, or paper roses. It didn't work very well and I ended up giving the disappointing bud to Naricisa who played with it and lost it somewhere in the dining room. Then earlier tonight, after I finished with Shrinky Dinks, I went to paint some keys with nail polish and ended up hating how they looked. I'm still not sure exactly what kind of mischief I'm going to get into with those keys but they just keep vexing me! Anyway I gave up on that venture as well. So it's not for lack of time or trying that I haven't been keeping up and I guess that's what's super frustrating. If I was just sitting on my ass and watching TV making the conscious choice not to put energy into a project then I could own that. But I am working on these projects and while I know that failure is a better teacher than success it just sort of feels like wasted time. Time I should have spent sleeping, cleaning, doing laundry, resting from my illness, or talking to Hannah or friends. 

So I just have to keep telling myself that I'm not wasting my time, because if I let myself believe that then I'll start to go crazy! Instead, I'm going to keep on pushing through this month. I did manage to finish one more project tonight. I've been wanting to do this for a while. I call it the Sharkra (chakra-shark combo). I got the little stones from our High Priestess (IEPG) and intended to use them for just such a purpose as this. So question time: I made a Sharkra sign to hang up in my cubicle at work. What did learn? I learned that stamps never come out in a straight line for me even when a use a guide paper. I also learned that tacky glue is pretty awesome. And I learned that Sharkras is not already a thing. So there, world, I invented it! It's MINE! Hahahaha! And lastly, did I complete it? Yes. And as soon as the glue dries completely I think it will look pretty neat. And I'm excited to bring it to work as my first piece of myself to go up at my desk. I plan on bringing a ton of pictures of Hannah and the kitty and my friends, but that will have to wait until I have the money to get the all printed out. 

To create the shark, I used this free silhouette template.

Project 15: Shrinky Dinks!

Inspired by my friend Danielle's recent project of Shrinky-Dinks, I decided to have a little shrinking fun myself. I bought a cheap kit at the dollar store earlier today. When I opened it up I was surprised to find that you had to draw the designs onto the plastic. I seem to remember that back in the day, the plastic already had the outlines on it and all you had to do was color them. But, with the freedom to draw whatever I wanted I decided to include My Little Pony and a few Halloween images. 

I traced each design onto the clear shrinky-dink plastic and then colored them all using a wide variety of markers (the dollar store package only had two small markers with it). After I had traced and colored all of the images that I wanted to include on the plastic sheet, I cut them out carefully and placed them on aluminum foil on a cookie sheet.

Only takes about two minutes for these babies to cook. And when they come out they are reduced in size by about fifty percent. It's a fun and silly project. I had to add My Little Pony to mix because Danielle mentioned in her video blog that she remembers when she used to do My Little Pony Shrink-Its when she was a kid. So in the spirit of revisiting both our childhoods I traced a few choice MLP characters. I only had Rainbow Dash, Twilight Sparkle, and Pinkie Pie on hand otherwise I probably would have only done ponies.

If you look at the first picture of the designs laying on the college ruled notebook, you can see how the ponies take up about six rows before cooking and only take up about three rows after cooking. They are so tiny now! The ponies, skulls, and Halloween thingies all fit in my hand with room to spare. Not quite sure what I'm going to do with them all yet, but it might be fun to drill tiny holes and make an itty-bitty mobile out of them. So to sum up: I did Shrinky Dinks. What did I learn? Choosing my own designs was more fun than having the designs preset. I'm sure I learned something else, too, but I'm still too groggy in the head right now to come up with it. Did I complete the project? Yes. With the help of Narcisa. She loves to get up on the table whenever we do crafts. Today she helped me color by rubbing her face all over the end of the marker as I was trying to stay in the lines. She's a good kitty.

They say the third day of a routine is the hardest...

I had an awful time coming up with things to do today. There are many rather large projects that I want to do but they are too massive for Creative October, and the smaller projects I wanted to do today just didn't take any kind of form for me. In the end I sat down and played with beads and ended up creating a shiny garland necklace for Princess Luna. I've been wanting to decorate her (make her something special) for a while now and the garland looks so pretty on her dark blue coat. The pattern I followed was: one flower bead, two shiny non flowers, then one flower again. The beads came from my next door neighbor. She brought them over a while ago when she decided she'd had enough of her boys demolishing the house with them. 

The picture quality sucks but trust me, the beads are really cute.

Princess Luna in all her splendor.

Nacisa had to investigate. She wasn't too impressed, I suppose.

She does like Luna's horn though!

In answer to the survey questions: 1) my project was a fishing line and bead garland necklace for my Build-a-Bear Princess Luna Pony. 2) I learned that you should always use the stretchy stuff to string the beads instead of fishing line because it was harder than heck to squeeze and squish her head through the second wrap. Also I learned to not overthink the projects for this month too much. Simpler is fine. 3) I completed the project.