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.

Gardening goes well. We're having a truly terrible weed problem this year, but it is slowly being resolved. Some beds are being deconstructed... which is sad, but ultimately necessary. The plants are being consolidated in other gardens, though. So things will be more filled in, which reduces the amount of gardening we have to do. This can only be a good thing.

A lot of plants being planted this year are native shrubs, which will also be good for filling in. Most have good wildlife value. And speaking of wildlife, we finally managed to get frogs spawning in the pond. There were at least two spawning events, and probably three--I saw bullfrog tadpoles (some of which have metamorphized by now), a newly metamorphized gray treefrog, and fresh frog spawn.

I've been trying to head out to the woods more. I normally don't go, because I hate driving (and cycling there seems risky, given I'd be traveling along city highways), but... it's not that much farther than the grocery store. This most recent time I went, I got to see a bunch of six spotted tiger beetles--little emerald jewels, running along the forest floor hunting for prey. They're right up there with butterflies and fireflies for "Citrakayah's favorite Midwestern insect."

Recently I have been considering how likely I am to rub my face all over various sleeping areas and seeing if I can figure out a pattern. I really can't. I do it a lot for hotel beds, which would suggest large size or it not smelling like me being a determining factor. But I haven't done it when I was renting rooms in someone's house, despite there being a large bed there and it not smelling like me. I do it on my own bed, which is small and smells like me, though less so.

I can't really find any pattern. I'm kind of curious to know if other cat therians (or, hell, other therians period) do the same thing, and if they've noticed any patterns.

I've been getting back into writing for the Wanderer's Library/SCP Foundation, which I have been doing at various points and not actually ended up completing anything of note. This time, though, I have a better feeling about things... mostly because several things (a story about a woman who is actually part of a predatory shadow entity, an SCP involving sapient orcas and the geopolitical fallout of them, and a rewrite of an older entry for the Library) are basically done and ready to post. So we'll see how that goes.

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).

The plants are doing well. The butterfly garden established in the fall is... well, it's not quite as successful as I'd hoped; we didn't get any butterfly weed showing up, not yet. But the blazing star is coming up and growing rapidly, the boneset is coming back up, and the asters are coming back. And they will spread; boneset in particular seems to spread well. It's only been in the garden for a couple years, but we went from one plant to eight.

I've an apple tree outside my window, and the bees have been loving it. We (me and my mother) think we'll probably plant another one where the dying apple tree currently is, and maybe this time we'll actually get one with large, edible apples.

Also mounted a bird feeder outside my window! Where I am the squirrels can't get to it, so the birds have eagerly been devouring it all. Yesterday I saw a red-headed woodpecker, which was quite a treat. The cat loves it, of course, and when the window's closed the birds seem surprisingly tolerant of her. Perhaps they don't see her as well.


I've finally run a plot for Kaerwyn (a creative writing roleplay site). It did not work out well, though... it kind of worked out better than I thought at first? People thought the plot was too short, which is good to know, but also I've learned that I tend to railroad. But people really liked my ability to describe completely alien environments. I have ideas about how to use that advice, so at least it was a learning experience.


I was furloughed about a week ago. I get 75% pay, blessedly, but it's still somewhat concerning--and while I expect to be back to my job by the end of the summer interim, I've been wrong before.

Mostly right now I'm trying to use the time I've got to help out around the house and get some of my personal projects done so it's not a total wash. Applied to a job, but don't expect to actually get it.

Life continues to go pretty much the same as it usually does. Job hunting is still going nowhere fast, though I am beginning to suspect that, in order to get a job in my field, I will first have to work for six months to a year, for free (or, worse, pay someone to be an intern or a volunteer). Alternatively, a Master's of Science might get me a job doing field research.

Such is the economy these days. I talked to some other zoology grads (well, one other, and she's the only one I really ever talk to), and it's apparently just a fact of life--though I suspect I'd be better off if I'd done an undergraduate research assistantship.

I have been seeing a therapist lately, and I may go back on antidepressants. I'm rather reluctant to do so, but I am having long-term emotional issues, and thinking that they're entirely due to environmental factors (my social isolation and lack of meaningful, self-directed activity), rather than a chemical imbalance in my brain, may be self-delusion. Not that I don't think the environmental factors feed into it. I try to find jobs, and I help my parents with the gardening, but the former is unfulfilling, and the latter is simply me helping another with their project, rather than doing something I have great interest in myself.

Not that I find gardening particularly dull. While helping clear out overgrown beds is a pain, renovating the has been interesting. There's an area in the pond garden that we're going to clear out, and plant ice plant in, and we may also get creeping phlox.

Unfortunately, our food plants are doing poorly this year. The strawberries especially aren't producing much of anything. I think the plants may simply be old, or there might not be enough water.