Spirit of the Wind

By way of redsixwing
Comment below and I'll ask you five questions. Answer them in your own journal, offer to give the first five commenters their own sets of questions, and let the cycle continue!

1. What's your favorite thing to see while out hiking?
Amphibians. As much as I have a soft spot for mammals, it's hard to see much more than squirrels or deer when out hiking. Very rarely I've seen skunks or raccoons, but it's not common. Amphibians, though? When I'm out hiking it's pretty easy to see a red eft or toad, and they're fun to watch. They're pretty active, but not fast enough to quickly head for cover. So I can watch them for a while.

2. Do you have a favorite insect?
Restricting myself to just the USA? You know, I'd have to say the monarch butterfly. They're bright colored, it's amazing to think how far they migrate and how that migration takes multiple generations, and even now they're a fairly common insect. I've seen half a dozen flying around at once in a little patch of forest near my home.

I like to grow milkweeds that they can eat and feed upon. You don't want the butterfly bush, you want butterfly weed or common milkweed. That's the good stuff.

3. Is there a winter tradition you particularly enjoy?
Latkes during Hanukkah! They're absolutely delicious warm or cold, and there's a lot of different recipes that use different root vegetables, or apples, or squash. Some of my family make salmon ones, but of course I don't eat those.

My favorites are sweet potato latkes, and carrot and parsnip latkes. Though you need to be careful to make sure your parsnip isn't too woody or fibrous, or it won't come out so well. Difficulty in finding good parsnips is why I haven't made the parsnip and carrot ones for a few years.

4. What's your go-to snack to share?
Trail mix.

5. Do you have a standard set of tropes you use to set up an NPC when running a game?
Not really. I'm actually not that good at playing NPCs; my personality tends to shine through and so while they might have varying goals and ideology, I think they seem pretty similar to my players. This is one reason that I tend to try and not emphasize NPC-PC relations very much when running a game, especially on the personal level. Instead I try to emphasize interactions with the physical and social landscapes of the setting, and focus on exploration, solving mysteries, and combat.

It has been an eventful month.

The snowstorms have affected us--well, not as badly as a lot of areas. Compared to Texas, we're blessed. But yes, it's snowed just as much as you'd have thought, and today is the first day it's gotten above freezing in weeks. Most days it's been in the single digits (Fahrenheit!). We're right in the middle of the winter weather. Meanwhile, the Arctic and the Roof of the World are super warm, because of course they would be.

Things look like they're going to moderate a little... but while we'll enjoy a thaw, the Arctic won't be cooling down at all.

My various houseplants are growing pretty well. Aside from the basil, which is well and truly dead at this point. I think I might start growing orchids in its former pot; it got a nice big terracotta pot and that would be good for some terrestrial orchids.

On the note of houseplants, here are the pictures of the lizard I promised so long ago:




Their name is Elizabeth. Yes, as in "Lizzie."

I've been doing some interesting baking--learning to make focaccia. It is way easier when you have a bread maker. Come summer, I'd like to try making a variation on this, but for now it's mostly variations on "sundried tomatoes and olives with Italian herbs." Which is still quite good. I'd like to try it with some vegetarian bacon.



And that's the foaccia.

In other stuff--boning up on my Mesoamerican history and mythology, because I'm running the next Apotheosis. I've found all sorts of interesting things skimming the Oxford Handbook on the subject--like how Tlaxcalla's comparative egalitarianism is attributed in part to the worship of Tezcatlipoca (and partly due to the needs of the military).

Whole gang was together for last Sunday's RPG session. I was pulled up two hundred feet into the sky by the tail of a silvanshee agathion and tried to dispel a giant storm by setting off six fireballs in the center to disrupt the winds (it didn't work, but in my defense, the storm was magical in nature, a fact I didn't realize at first). Ended up having to fall two hundred feet into water, but rolled a natural twenty and used my cloak of the manta ray, so I was pretty much fine. Then the druid transformed into a giant whale after some prodding of the GM (just so that's clear, we did the prodding), held the crew, the cargo, and my plants inside her mouth, and deposited them inside an underwater dungeon. Also, she got a splinter.

Then we ran into an aboleth. I got transformed and got de-transformed later, but we lost all our crew and will probably have to track the bloody morons down, if they are even still alive, which I doubt. Next time we're getting some people with high will saves.


Haven't posted anything lately, which I'm sorry for, but things got in the way and my giant big post kind of gummed up the works. Still been reading everybody's journals, though.

I was going to send cookies to the Wall Street protesters, but apparently they want non-perishables. Cookies are perishable. And the ones I made were fragile. So sending them would be a bad idea. Instead, I shall send them canned food. But good, wholesome canned food. Possibly locally grown and inside glass cans.

I've joined the Wanderer's Library, and posted Skinwalkers on it.