life

I could never have planned a better prank than this.

September 13, 2024September 12, 2024 J.Leave a comment

I’m not really a fan of pranks, chiefly because most of what the internet has come to consider “pranks” aren’t actually funny.

But oh man, did fate line up some extremely perfect timing yesterday.

My Handsome Assistant was in office. I message him frequently — usually not anything of consequence, just what the cats did, pictures of cool bugs I found, etc. Earlier in the day, I saw a notice about a puppy mill bust in Cecil County. 23 dogs, mostly Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, bichons, and shih tzu, are currently looking for foster homes while rescues sort through their assorted health problems, issues due to neglect, and so forth. Animal neglect and abuse upset me, so I vented to him about it for a bit.

(Also, I was maybe kind of hoping I could tug on a few heartstrings and get him to agree to try to foster.)

Anyhow, a half hour later, my phone buzzed.
The camera system detected “a pet” in the front yard.
I do not have pets in the front yard.

Nonetheless, there, on the camera, was an adorable little fluffy white dog snuffling around the front porch. I dropped my phone and hurried outside to get a better look — was he alone? Lost? Were his people close by? Was he at risk of getting stuck in the fence? Running into the street? Being captured by owls?
There’s a nest of ground wasps — what if he got stung?

Sure enough, there was a little white dog hustling around the yard. I called to him and he happily trotted over, wagging his tail. He seemed outgoing and relaxed, so I let him sniff my hand and gave him an ear scratch. He also had a collar and tag, so finding his family should’ve been no problem.

And it wouldn’t have been, had I not left my phone inside.

Dilemma.

Not wanting to lose track of him or have him run into the street/be captured by owls/eat a bunch of wasps, I was torn for a moment.
There was only one thing to do.
I didn’t have a leash or a way to secure him in the meantime, so I gingerly scooped that little dog up and carried him inside to hang out while I figured out where the #$%& I left my phone.

He seemed perfectly okay with this. I set him down, he sniffed around a bit and wagged his tail, all, “Hello! Yes! Okay!”

That was when I had a brilliant idea.

Phone in hand, I snapped a few pics, sent them to my Handsome Assistant along with an “I can explain,” and brought the little guy back outside to call his family. They came over to pick him up not long after and were very nice. He hung out on the porch with me until then, getting pets and being extremely chill and good-natured about everything.

Honestly, as far as ways to meet your neighbors go, this is definitely one of the better ones.

It’s also a great way to confuse and startle your spouse when they know you have a soft spot for animals and are given to hypomanic states.

Seriously. I couldn’t’ve planned it better.

If you live in the Maryland or Delaware area, there are still several dogs looking for foster homes. They’re coming from a puppy mill, where they’ve been confined, underfed, overbred, and never offered the opportunity to be part of a family and just be dogs. If you have the ability to open your home to one of them (or one of any number of other dogs currently awaiting adoption), please consider filling out Renee’s Rescues’ foster application.

Even if you’re not in MD or DE, there are always animal rescues looking for help with fostering. If you have the time and love to give, reach out to your local organizations to find out how you can help!

Puppies, Pies, and Paranormal Problems.

November 30, 2023November 28, 2023 J.Leave a comment

You know, a lot of people go outside and play a game on Thanksgiving. Parents of younger kids might take them out for a rousing game of catch. Teens and adults might play a little touch football in the back yard. It’s pretty common.

It is less common to spend what feels like several hours pursuing a small, self-propelled football, while everyone involved is about a picosecond away from a collective panic attack.

I don’t have any family in the area. For a long time, neither of us did. Holiday meals were either made up of whatever we felt like cobbling together, whatever delivery place was open, or a smorgasbord of unrelated snacks, straight-up goblin-style.

My Handsome Assistant’s awesome aunt and uncle moved just a few hours away not long ago, so we’ve been spending more holidays there. They have a lovely house with a big yard and plenty of spare bedrooms, on a small, peaceful road surrounded by farms. Inside this house is a pair of adorable and very sweet Yorkie/toy fox terrier mixes, as well as a rather petulant ghost. Almost two petulant ghosts, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

This Thanksgiving, we made the drive up with a gallon of homemade meadowfoam mead and a vegan pumpkin pie (made using this recipe from Chocolate Covered Katie and some of our mysterious yard pumpkins).

Now, the older of the two dogs has a habit of running off. They’re both small enough that using an Invisible Fence would be problematic, so they’re carefully supervised and let outside in a movable pen.

All of this is a long way to explain that, through a convoluted set of circumstances involving a basement, a grill, and the Maryland Renaissance Festival, the older dog snuck out. He saw this as the opposite of a problem, since he had a house full of people (and eventually several neighbors and neighbors’ dogs) to play tag with. However, everyone else involved had… mixed feelings about the situation.

I don’t know how long I spent chasing that dog down, calling his name, running through strangers’ yards in hot pursuit of a football-sized creature in a little blue sweatshirt. The cold squeezed my wheezing lungs until the edges of my vision got gray and fuzzy. Eventually, everything looked like tiny dogs: gas meters, squirrels, shrubs. A few people offered me rides as they drove around looking for him, but I turned them down — it seemed like it’d be helpful to have someone on foot who could duck into even more strangers’ yards if need be.

He made it all the way down to the nearest main road and disappeared from view, so I ended up walking down the middle of the street just in case he darted out again. This seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do at the time, because my oxygen-deprived brain figured that speeding drivers would a) notice me sooner than they’d notice a tiny dog, and b) would probably slow down to avoid committing vehicular manslaughter. At that point, I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that Doc Martens are less than ideal as a running shoe, so I also figured that being hit by a car would likely hurt less and I’d get to lie down for a little bit. Having been hit by a car before, this seemed sound to me.

Through some miracle, we all managed to tire him out. (Hey, humans are pursuit predators, right?) Four people formed a kind of pincer attack, and my Handsome Assistant performed some kind of acrobatic tackle and swoop maneuver that resulted in my Assistant on his back, one arm upraised, and a very upset tiny dog in his hand. Like a meatball sub with opinions.

Dog snared, we went back to the house. My lungs eventually calmed down enough for me to get a full breath again. There was ham, turkey, sausage, smoked vegetables, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, green bean casserole, cranberry sauce, candied yams, and biscuits. There were also four kinds of pie and a cake.

We played a guessing game that was half charades, half “Name that Thing.” It involves writing down random words, putting them in a bowl, and drawing them out one by one. In the first round, the person reading can describe a word, but not say it, while their teammates guess. In the second round, the reader can only use gestures. In the third, the reader can only use one word.

In our defense, my Handsome Assistant and I didn’t originally know how this game worked when we were coming up with words. The game itself was hilarious, but you don’t know pressure until you have to figure out how to convey “imbroglio,” “Steven Seagal,” or “Azerbaijan” purely through interpretive dance.

A long, unanticipated aerobic session and eating my weight in potatoes and pumpkin pie made me sleepy, so after the Macy’s parade and Dolly Parton’s halftime show, I was ready for bed.

The bedroom, however, was not.

I’ll be honest with you; I’m used to being woken up multiple times a night. Kiko needs to eat special food and refuses to do so until and unless she has received tiny kisses on the forehead. Having my sleep interrupted is pretty much whatever at this point.

Nonetheless, there’s an enormous difference between being woken up by a tiny paw gently tapping my forehead, and the repeated crashes of something absolutely flinging the shit out of everything on the nightstand. It’s not like I placed a valuable and unsecured antique marble collection up there, either. There was no reason for anything to just… roll off. There was especially no reason for it to hit the floor like Tom Brady crawled out from under the bed just to spike it. Half of the time, I hadn’t even fallen back to sleep yet.

I wasn’t in the mood. I’d already missed seeing the Snoopy float, the absolutely bonkers amount of pie I’d eaten was giving me indigestion, and I had a blister on the back of my heel that was big enough to need its own social security number.

“Knock it the fuck off,” I grumbled, unaware of the irony of this statement. A mostly empty tube of lotion slammed down like… I don’t know. A thing that’s extremely extra affected by gravity. I pulled the pillow over my head.

Next year, I’m bringing my ghost box and a pair of jogging shoes.
I’m not getting caught out again.

Link round up

Good News Round Up: 6.17.2022

June 17, 2022June 16, 2022 J.Leave a comment

Hello! Have you ever wondered what your dog’s thinking? As it turns out, scientists might have an answer for you — sort of. This is a collection of posts and articles that I thought were interesting, funny, or just made me feel a little better about the state of things. I hope they can do the same for you.

A Glimpse Into the Dog’s Mind: A New Study Reveals How Dogs Think of Their Toys. Apparently, dogs have a “multi-modal mental image” when it comes to their favorite playthings. That means that they most likely focus on what is, to them, an object’s most significant sensory features — like its smell. Scientists discovered this by having dogs search for their toys under varying conditions, and observing which senses they seemed to rely on the most for specific objects.

Plants Appear to Be Breaking Biochemistry Rules by Making ‘Secret Decisions.’ As it turns out, plants make decisions about their respiration in ways that we didn’t anticipate. They can actually choose how much carbon they release, by deciding how much they retain for building more biomass. This all happens via a molecule called pyruvate. Most interestingly, plants can actually track what sources their pyruvate comes from, and factor that into their decision making process.

This DIYer Made the Coolest Boho Bookends for Only $1.75 , and They Look Straight Out of a CB2 Catalog. Are you into biophilic design? This is a design philosophy that uses natural materials, like wood and stone, which have beneficial impacts on our mental well-being. This super cheap, easy DIY uses a scrap of travertine limestone, and there’s no perfectionism allowed — the perfectly imperfect, organic shape of the material is part of the appeal.

Binding and Burying the Forces of Evil: The Defensive Use of “Voodoo Dolls” in Ancient Greece. The popular image of the “Voodoo doll” has little to do with the practice of Voodoo. The classic image of a human-shaped object that you stick pins in to cause harm is much closer to the concept of the poppet, a vehicle for sympathetic magic. This paper discusses the use of effigies as a means of binding and suppressing evil in ancient Greece, as well as similar binding rituals in Egypt and Assyria. It’s a long read, but an interesting one.

Researchers identify the origins of the Black Death. We all know that the bubonic plague came from fleas that carried Yersinia pestis, but how did the fleas get it to begin with? One popular theory held that it came from wild rodents in East Asia, but archaeological evidence and ancient plague genomes tell a different story.

Project: SigilPen. I often have to explain that Neodruidry is my religion, but witchcraft is a method. I use modern Druid magic, and I use witchcraft, though the two are very different. Either way, I love magical alphabets, sigils, and the concept of language and symbols as a form of magic on their own. SigilPen is a way of creating neat, accurate sigils using a magic square (kamea).

A lot of online sources for sigil magic fall into the trap of using a single magical square — usually the Square of Saturn — rather than choosing the kamea that’s aligned with what you’re actually trying to do. SigilPen allows you to choose whatever square you want to work with, and helps you translate your word, phrase, or name into a sigil. The site has several other very interesting tools for modern magic, aside from the SigilPen.

Pretend I folded this up and passed it to you under a desk.
– j.

crystals · Neodruidry · Plants and Herbs · Witchcraft

7 Ways to Set Up a Pet-Proof Altar

October 22, 2020October 13, 2020 J.2 Comments

Let me preface this by saying that I love my cats. I do. But one of them has an odd obsession with getting into any plant that’s within reach (and several that aren’t), and the other will hurl things and scream if one of us fails to sit on the kitchen floor with him in the morning. I don’t know why this is, but it’s the reality of the situation.

Anyway, as you can probably tell, this makes setting up and maintaining a home altar somewhat… challenging, shall we say. Not only do I not want my altar disturbed, I also don’t want to have to worry about someone eating something they shouldn’t. So, here’s how I keep everyone (and everything) safe:

Train Your Cats to- hahahahahaha

Sorry, couldn’t resist. Couldn’t finish that thought with a straight face, either.

She might be your familiar, but that doesn’t mean she cares about your stuff.

Choose Portable Altar Decor (But a Permanent Space)

In my opinion, part of an altar’s power is in its presence even when it isn’t being used. Some of that is lost when you have to set up and take down your altar every time you need it, but that doesn’t make a portable altar any less beautiful or meaningful.

If you do have to go the portable route, however, I’d recommend keeping a dedicated altar space. Even if you can’t have food offerings out without your dog getting into them, or your cat tries to knock over all of your statuary, you can still have a specific space that’s only used for your temporary altar. Get a nice accent table and cover it with a cloth. Set it with a good-sized crystal or a vase of flowers (if your animal companions will allow for it). Save the other altar tools and decorations for when you’re actually performing a working, but keep that space as a designated altar even when it isn’t in use.

Use a Drawer

One of the best ways I’ve found to avoid my felines’ penchant for destruction is to choose a table with a nice, deep drawer, and set up an altar in that. You can still have a permanent space, and all you have to do is pull the drawer open to get to work.

Remember to close it gently, though — you’ll keep your altar tools and decorations from rattling and knocking around that way.

Use the Floor

If having things knocked over is your primary concern, why not just put them on the floor to begin with? The fact is, having chairs and tables so far from the floor isn’t a universal thing — plenty of cultures around the world use low tables, floor cushions, or nothing at all.

Designate a space for a floor altar. Set it with a small accent rug and your altar supplies. Place a comfy floor pillow in front of it, and you’re golden.

Use the Outdoors

If your interior space is too thoroughly dominated by your four-legged roommates, consider working outside. It’s a bit less convenient if the weather’s bad, but outdoor altars are beautiful, functional, and, if you work closely with your local nature spirits, immensely powerful.

The only tip I’d offer here is to choose altar decorations that are resistant to walking away. Expensive statues might disappear on you, and shiny crystals may prove irresistible to the local bird population. Materials that aren’t durable enough might end up a bit worse for wear after a few rainstorms and a couple of rounds of sun bleaching, too. Largish stones, garden statuary, candles, and — of course — plants are inconspicuous, not likely to disappear, and can handle being outside.

Watch the Center of Gravity

Few things are as nerve-wracking as a tall, lit candle. This is especially true when that candle is in the same room as a cat. If candles are part of your practice, make sure to invest in some good, heavy candle holders. If you can make sure your candles are sufficiently bottom-heavy, they’ll be less likely to tip over easily. For this reason, I also recommend tealights and jar candles over, say, long, fancy tapers.

The same is true of any statuary or other decorations. Avoid choosing items that have a high center of gravity, because they’re much more likely to tip over if, for example, a very zealous boxer puppy wags his tail too close to your altar.

Invest in Some Museum Wax

Museum wax is what helps keep museum displays in place. It comes in several types, from an opaque, gummy material to one more like clear dental wax, and can help things stay stationary if they get bumped. The only caveat here is that it doesn’t work on an altar cloth — museum wax provides a tacky surface between two smooth finishes, so it won’t really help to keep your statues in place on top of fabric.

Know Your Poisons (They May Not Be What You Think)

So, we probably all know not to let our pets get into toxic herbs or houseplants. The ASPCA has a good list of plants that can trigger adverse reactions.

I remember watching a video by a crystal worker a few years ago. In it, they mentioned being guided by their intuition to charge a piece of cinnabar(!) using fire(!!). The reason I mention this is that, sometimes, the list of things we know we should keep away from our pets isn’t as long as it ought to be.

For example, cinnabar is an ore of mercury. Some specimens even have droplets of mercury on or in them. Metallic mercury is, itself, not that toxic — organic mercury compounds are far more dangerous — but inhaling heated mercury vapor is a super bad idea. Honestly, you shouldn’t even really handle cinnabar or wear it next to your skin. If you want to work with it, use gloves, keep it in a glass container, and definitely don’t let your pets touch, lick, or play with it. Definitely definitely don’t heat it up.

Some other gemstones contain toxic materials, like lead, arsenic, or antimony.

Plants and mineral specimens aren’t the only sources of a potential poisoning, either. Some pottery — particularly very old or inexpensive stuff — may not be food safe. This means that its paint or glaze can contain toxic minerals that might leach out if you use it to cook with or eat from. While this isn’t usually a super serious concern for altar tools, it can be if you have a pet who tries to sneak a drink out of your altar’s water vessel or steal your food offerings!

The bottom line is, it’s important to know what goes on your altar. If you have pets, it’s equally important to assume that everything is going to end up on the floor or in someone’s mouth eventually.