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Bereavement Leave – a bonus story for Patreon

Sep25

A bonus story of the occurred-to-me-in-a-flash sort.  Warning: a bit of morbid humor here.
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“Miss Hemlock, you have been on Bereavement Leave seven times this year.  Nobody has that many—”  The HR manager clearly changed what she was going to say “–grandfathers.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Harris, but I do.”  Juniper chose to answer what the woman had meant instead of what she’d said.  “Dead relatives, that is, not grandfathers.  I had six of those in living memory… No,  I’m afraid it was something of a chain reaction.”

“…Chain… reaction?”  Mrs. Harris had heard a lot of things in thirty years in HR.  From the look on her face, this was not one of the things she’d heard.

“So, it all started with my grandmother’s second husband, my Grandpa Rich.  You know about that one.  He lived a long life and passed away easily, may the spirits take his soul.”

We commend his soul to any god who can find it.  The funeral had been quiet, a little snarky, and full of tension. Continue reading →

Bread Crumbs – a recipe blog for Patreon

Sep24

We have been experimenting with bread, now that the warm weather has subsided a bit (well,it had.  It appears to have come back with a vengeance but… hey).

The current experimentation is breadcrumbs.

The thing about homemade bread is that it goes stale far more quickly than store bought bread, so if you have a couple days of not eating bread, you have a rock in your fridge.  Good for breadcrumbs or bread pudding or stuffing… but there’s only so much of that you can eat, and Igo through maybe one tube of breadcrumbs every five years.

So… mixing bread crumbs back into bread.  The first experiment was ¼ cup to a 2-cups-of-fluid recipe, and you could barely notice any difference.  The bread was a little crumbly in texture — but that could have been the lackadaisical kneading.  (I am not all that good at making all variables the same, but OTOH all variables are never the same over a stretch of days.)

The second bread was one cup of breadcrumbs into the same 2-cups-of-fluid standard House Thorne bread recipe.  This one, I kneaded with the machine, and I also had a longer (overnight) sponge period — both of which build gluten.

Super chewy bread! The breadcrumbs made a nice texture in the bread without interfering with the crumb or the structure.  Hooray!

Next: cup and a half.  That’ll be this weekend, if we finish the second loaf before then…

…or maybe we’ll end up turning yesterday’s loaf into breadcrumbs for tomorrow’s loaf.

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Small Victories – a story of Aunt Family for Patreon

Sep21
A story of the Aunt Family, in the same time period as Excuse Me? ; i.e, very early in Eva’s tenure as Aunt.🌱

 

“Evangaline, what are you doing?”

Evangaline’s Aunt Ramona had a habit of inviting herself in that Eva had not yet broken her of.  She blamed her late Aunt Asta, who had found it easier to allow the family to appear to walk all over her than to contradict the pile of aunts and great-aunts, grandmothers, mothers, and sisters (In their family, the men knew better, at least, than to contradict the capital-A Aunt).  Aunt Asta had not been gone long enough, and Eva had not established herself well enough, that the family had managed to differentiate between Asta’s bad habits and Eva’s.

On the other hand, she had no interest in listening to that tone for the rest of her life – or at the very least, for the rest of Aunt Ramona’s life.

“I am making a greenhouse on the sunny side of the stable barn,” she answered calmly.  Calmly was best.  It irritated the older relatives.

“You are – yes, I can see that.  The question, Evangaline Jane, is why you are making a greenhouse.  Workers!  On our property!” Continue reading →

Whole World Whispering

Aug21

For TNG, Cap, and Tal, with all my love. 

 🌑

The whole world whispering
Born at the right time

It was said that if the the royal seers and astrologers could not find an appropriate sign for a royal event, they would make one.

Few could argue, however, that when Ahana, the moon, covered over Orena, the sun, in a total eclipse over a large stretch of the kingdom, the moment was ideal for all sorts of signs.

It was then that the royal child was born, into the darkness of the night-at-noon, and the world, or at least the kingdom and those near it, leaned forward to see what the astrologers and seers would say.

The astrologers and seers, who would normally be standing on those balconies allowed to them declaiming their message to the public, were nowhere to be found.

They were closeted deep inside their tallest, largest tower, whispering to one another.

“Should we tell them?” hissed a younger astrologer.

“Should we lie?  They’re the King and Queen!” hissed a middle-age seer who had never been much for those times when a sign needed to be found in a less-than-obvious manner.

“We should tell them the truth,” declared the head of divination.  At the looks she was given, she smiled dryly.  “We tell the truth as we always have.  As we always have.”

They stood on their balconies as the King and the Queen presented their tiny newborn child.  “The child has been born who will have the mighty quest,” declaimed the loudest of them.

“The child has been born who will have the kindest heart,” declared the oldest of them.

“The child has been born who will see what has not been seen,” cried the head of divination in her strongest voice, to the silence of the gathered crowds.

In the Queen’s arms lay a child every bit as ordinary as every other royal child for the last three generations.

On the far side of the nation, in a midwife’s arms in a small farming town, lay the child who had been foreseen, born as the eclipse passed over the family farm.

👶🏻

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Dating Things – a story of Tootplanets for Patreon

Aug15

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The spellbook had been one of the best finds on the planet they had poetically called 17-5-12.

The original population had been something very close to humanoid, as far as the drawings, the records, and the shapes of the buildings showed.  They had left behind stacks and stacks of ephemera, all of it on linen-esque paper-fabric, much of it rolled into scrolls, slide into cases, and sealed into vaults.

At least: much of what survived had been treated such.  They’d found a lot of scraps here and there, pieces stuffed into nests of the local rodents and the local avians, pieces stapled to walls by what they assumed were the last survivors. Continue reading →