Open Post and Garden/Cat Update!

[kimberlysteele]

The overgrown brussels sprouts... planted about 2 months too late. Live and learn! The tomato (bought from a big local nursery called Keller's Farm Stand) was one of two. Both were great producers and they are still going.

 

I'm slowly working on this garden. I put more mulch in it and I'm trying to grow the elm volunteers as a hedge in several places. My husband (he built this garden from scratch about five years ago based on a design I requested) has made noises about re-doing the crushed stone part in brick someday.

 

Nasturtium took over this garden. There are also a couple of very successful "Better Boy" bush tomatoes and some rose and sedum propagations. The pink flower in the back of the nasurtium bed is full of Takane Ruby buckwheat from RareSeeds.com. I don't know what to do with buckwheat, so I plan on collecting seeds and hoping I can direct sow it next year. I like it as an ornamental. It has been blooming consistently since early June this year.

This is Cedric, the tree I rescued from the back of the office building my lesson studio occupied. He is getting very large! The pear tree in back of him gave us our first big harvest of pears about a month ago.




Oakinawa the Oak tree surrounded by coneflowers (Echinacea purpurea), also had a growth spurt this year. Kiki's grave is marked by the iron kitty. I have plans on making that area into a garden but I did not do much with it this year.

Suggestions wanted for decorating the front room. I am aware the rugs are too small. I plan on putting up more hanging plants as time goes by. Should I do floor pillows? Ambient lighting such as LED string lights? Faux stained glass?

Shadow. He is going on three years old.

Ash. He is also around three, born around the same time as Shadow. He has fully come into his own and has quite the cattitude as you can see in this photo!

I am delighted to report Bee (short for Jujube) is in good health these days. She is not throwing up or having problems with peeing excessively anymore. A short regimen of herbs, mainly maca, devil's claw, amla, and kitty multivitamins seems to have brought her back from the brink. She seems to have de-aged a few years.  Nevertheless, please keep her in your prayers.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Art nouveau style lamp / window transparencies, salt lamps, incense holders, second hand franklin mint plates, wood carvings, mosaic art?

[kimberlysteele]

Thank you! Yes, I think all of those would suit the vibe. I like making mosaics and I have an awful lot of broken dishes (thanks, kitties, specifically SHADOW). All of those things are also very easily obtainable thrift and used.

[methylethyl]

I love your yarrow patch so much!

Over the summer I dug one up wild, and brought it home-- I've been nursing it along in a flowerpot and contemplating where in the yard it would be happiest, because I feel like a garden isn't complete without it. They're one of my favorite semiferal herbs-- and not because they're good to cook with or anything. I've been using the stuff medicinally and it tastes nasty! But I love the plant itself. It has a lot of personality.

[kimberlysteele]

Thank you! The blooms were pretty this year and ranged from white to fuchsia pink. I was saying how mint and bindweed seem to hate each other. Bindweed enthusiastically strangles any other plant, but when it comes to a thriving mint plant, there are actually sections of my yard where bindweed seems to shrink away from it. I have never seen bindweed growing anywhere near the yarrow either. Maybe yarrow is another aromatic bindweed repellent?

[randomactsofkarmasc]

I second the suggestion of mosaics! Also, I noticed you had some tables/plant stands with flat surfaces. Those are just begging to be art-ified. Have you ever played with Mod Podge? Llewellyn (sp?) has a sale (usually in September or October) and they sell all their current year calendars super cheap. I bought one of gorgeous dragon paintings. Bought some cheap canvases from local hobby store, and podged the dragon pictures onto canvas. (And actually got to the point that I tried to mimic brush strokes in the podge, so the paintings on canvas had a little texture.) Super cheap and I have some fabulous stuff for my walls. (But you could do the same thing on the sides of the flat surface plant stands.) And I have plans to podge one of the geometric symbols (that is currently taped onto the wall by my bed) that keeps unpleasant things from disturbing my sleep. (The image that I got from one of your posts.) Also, Walgreens, if you give them your email address when you order photos, will put you on their mailing list. They have coupons for either super cheap or free prints almost every week. Some of the prints are 8x10. Sometimes they offer the 11x14 for $1.99. I thrift frames (or sometimes ugly pictures that come with good frames) and paint the frames (and sometimes the matting). And my next crochet project is going to be to make a poof--one of those big pillows that can be a seat or a foot rest. Something like that to go with your chair would be fun.

[kimberlysteele]

Thank you for these great suggestions. Yes, I have done decoupage/Mod Podge before -- it is very relaxing. I have a couple of prints that are from calendars. I am a big fan of Kinuko Craft and I have a couple of prints on my walls that are actually from an old calendar of hers.

Those dragon prints sound cool! Life is too short for blank walls and/or boring art. I too have no problem painting frames and sometimes mats and completely re-working thrift store art and frames.

I have a Canva Pro membership, so if you ever want one of their graphics that is only available to subscribers, take a screenshot of it and the size you want and I will send the printable file to you.

I was so inspired by these suggestions today that I finally got off my behind and painted a thrifted curtain rod that I have had for a few weeks for the sunroom. It was 11 bucks at one of the local thrift stores. It was an ugly brown color, so I painted it rose gold. It will go on the back wall by the easy chair. I already have pink curtains for it as well. I may end up buying some decorative trim for them or fancy tie-backs depending on what I can find.

[jpc_w]

I will have to post a picture of my balcony pot garden somewhere.

The marker for Kiki got me right in the feels.

[kimberlysteele]

I hope you do! I would love to see it.

Thank you. I miss Kiki every day.

[unicourtney]

You have such a lovely garden! I think that string lights and stained glass would look especially beautiful. I had a cat who looked just like your Ash except her name was Shadow. :)

[kimberlysteele]

Thanks! I am deciding what kind of string lights to hang. There are lots of LED ones, including solar powered. How weird that you had a cat named Shadow who looked like Ash! Was she a Korat cat or a Russian Blue by any chance? We think our Ash is a Korat -- he has the svelte look of that breed and some of the attendant problems of overbreeding despite being from the local shelter.

[unicourtney]

She was definitely a Korat because of those beautiful yellow eyes. :') I know whichever lights you choose to hang will be just lovely!

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for sharing pictures and your beautiful garden and lovely kitties. I'm so glad Bee is improving.

I appreciate the picture ideas in the comments. We need to put something up on our blank walls.

Things feel a bit dreary and sad for me at the moment - no special reason. Things just seem dark. I'm generally optimistic by nature, but I'm having a pessimistic week. The pictures, post, and comments are cheering. So thank you all.

Heloise

[kimberlysteele]

Thank you! If it is any consolation, the collective state of the astral is trashier than ever. I have given up any hope of it getting better within my lifetime. The darkness may not entirely be you.

White Man's Magic

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Kimberly,

I said a while ago that I'd discuss my concept of "white man's magic" in more detail, so here it is:

Basically, I feel that the Anglo-Saxon race is one of the least magically-inclined races in the world due, at least in part, to selective breeding.

To begin with, in Norse society, there was the concept of a "Nifling", which was about the worst thing you could be. It was basically a weak, ineffectual or effeminate man. To accuse someone of being a nifling was to incite a battle to the death, as the accused would either have to fight you to take the insult back or die, or otherwise the insult would stick and they would be outcast from the men of the tribe. Magic was seen as underhanded to the Norse and problems and disputes should be dealt with directly as men, so magic was a feminine thing and practiced only by niflings. (Women were semi-tolerated to practice magic, but within narrow bounds of things like charms to ensure a husband's safe return from battle)

(Interestingly, in the sagas, Odin himself - a magic user, was accused of being a nifling by Loki and did not battle to renounce it, but I guess you can do what you like when you're the king of the gods)

So in short, there was a Norse selective pressure against magic users.

The Norse ended up invading the British isles.

Next came the Catholich church to the Germanic world, of which Britain was a part, who outright banned all wizardry. Whilst the level of stake-burning was less than in Southern European countries, I'd argue that was only because there were fewer magic users to begin with.

Then came Protestantism, which stripped the last vestiges of magic from the church. By then, there were already so few magic users that there was no one to pass on the true magical traditions in any wide-spread sense, and only folk magic and 'superstitions' remained. There were outliers, but these tended to be men like John Dee, who provided useful services to the rich and powerful, and scattered wise women and healers.

Next came the industrial revolution, which oddly enough, got started in England and spread to the other Northern European countries and then the United States. With machinery, many magical applications and traditions became irrelevant (eg. why offer poppets of John Barleycorn to a field to increase crop growth when you can just plow deeper with an engine-driven tractor) and urbanised populations, fed by the agricultural surplus, quickly forgot the old ways when working 14-hour shifts in textile mills. The increasingly wealthy merchants and mill-owners who became the ruling class did not even have the magical knowledge that the landowning aristocracy they replaced used to get from their eduction in classical literature, so yet more was lost.

As a result, Anglo-Saxons subconsciously internalised the concept that magic doesn't work because it doesn't exist, so this is the message they outwardly project, which in turn affects their reality. Around the true anti-believer, magic quite literally doesn't work (and as I think I said before, a hardened skeptic will cause all magical experiments they observe to fail). Anglo-Saxons instead specialise in machines to do many of the things which magic can potentially do (eg. a telephone instead of telepathy).

This does, arguably give some real advantages - I mentioned previously how the Spirit dancers in North America and the Boxers in China, who had previously been shown to actually resist or evade bullets, died ingloriously by Anglo-Saxon weaponry, with the weapons themselves (in my opinion) subconsciously infused with a magic-dispelling power and wielded by soldiers who scoffed at the 'primitive' beliefs. Machines are in theory more reliable, have more predictable results and can be used without requiring years of study and practice. But machines are also wasteful, soulless, are usually designed for a couple of specific functions (so you need lots of different machines) and cause separation from nature.

In addition, death curses, hexes and other such "offensive" magic is far less likely to affect an anti-magician, which in my opinion partly explains why the British had such success in defeating native tribes - the natives' technology of magic simply didn't work against the British. The only way they could fight back was to use their own weapons against them (such as the plains tribes, using rifles and horses).

On a wider scale, I feel that this process is part of humanity's cycle of going down to the lowest physical level, before we can start to bring ourselves back up to the spiritual.

Somewhat thankfully I guess, the stubborn Celtic Welsh, Scots, Irish and to a certain extent Cornish peoples held onto their old traditions, and are still competent magic users (in my opinion, the Celts have Atlantean roots, but that's another story...), so have provided a reservoir population to rejuvenate the magical traditions.

I myself am actually an odd mix - my dad's side of the family are completely Anglo-Saxon, and my surname literally reaches back to the Norman conquest of 1066, whilst my mum's side of the family are Scottish and Irish Celts. As such, I have an aptitude for machines, but my real interest is the esoteric and the unknown, and I have a strong intuitive sense (as well as a somewhat fiery Celtic temper). My dad is about as psychic as a house brick, and my mum is psychically perceptive, even if she doesn't accept it as such. I've been trying to get into radionics to bridge the gap - un-powered magical engineering feels like a field of the future (think one-off, custom-made items infused with power, like a hand-made mechanical clock which alarms if there is danger, or if someone is lying, that kind of thing).

Mr. Crow

P.S. Nice garden and cats! :)

Re: White Man's Magic

[kimberlysteele]

Fascinating! I had never heard of this "nifling" business before you mentioned it and I had no idea the Norse had any aversion towards magic. It certainly sheds a great deal of light on the way they dealt with the trials and tribulations of interconnection though. I wonder what they would make of modern day Heathens and the Norse revival.

Since magic is only something everyone does all the time -- to my mind, magic is the process, culmination, and reverberation of intention and since all beings, including inanimate objects, have and use intention, the decay of magic in the West is more of a degradation. I am currently reading Eros and Magic in the Renaissance... damn, that book is obtuse and it is going to be a LONG time before I feel equipped to comment upon it. Nevertheless, it seems clear that cacomagic is alive, well, and whirling through a neighborhood too close to home. I forget which TikTok video or essay or whatever where I compared the average modernite to a leper. We live in an age where the astral state of affairs can and will hurt us, but like lepers, we have so much damage we cannot feel anything. We cannot feel the astral equivalent of our nose falling off or our feet rotting away. We may feel the spiritual equivalent of constant pain as I imagine lepers do, but it isn't the kind that can save us from more damage. The unseen world is coming at us all the time, we just don't know it. I scolded baby witches in my TikTok not to do counterhexes and to do a daily banishing ritual instead because they may think they are playing baseball but I say differently. The hard truth is we are all playing dodgeball against legions and armies of vicious, well-equipped mercenaries all the time. This includes the least psychic and most materialistic people.
Counterhexing merely paints a target on the counterhexer's back: HERE I AM TRYING TO DEFLECT GARBAGE INTENTIONS BY THROWING GARBAGE!

I am not a traveler, but if I ever travel, I would like to see Brittany and Normandy and other places where the Normans first stormed the continent. You are lucky to have such a cool ancestry and to live where you do. Thanks to a certain sketchy genetic testing service, a spit test tells me that I am indeed half Asian, a quarter Mediterranean (Greek, Italian?) and a quarter British Isles/Celtic. I have distant white relatives who settled in Ohio and Pennsylvania. I am fortunate to have sleuthed my own birthmother's surname, and that particular information is how I found out that four of my Japanese great-grandparents went through the American internment camps in WWII and one of them died there.

Your radionic machines sound fascinating! I hope you build a bunch of them. I have an extra copy of a very rare book called Steampunk Solar donated to me by the author if you want to borrow it. I don't mind sending it overseas indefinitely.