So, I own a few games.

Um. As long as you’re under 1000, it still counts as a few, right?

What may come as a shock is that I did not buy these games simply to enjoy that extremely large number. No, I intended (and still do intend) to play them.

But how to go about such a Herculean task?

Why, blog about it, of course! Because… blog…

Um.

So, starting in alphabetical order, I’m going to play those 638 games… plus the ones I own on Origins and outside of game management systems and from other places… so, you know, maybe closer to 700? 700 games maybe? Oh god…

SO! Starting in alphabetical order, I’m going to play those bazillions of games, and blog about them.

I have no idea if I’ll try to finish them, or just play them until I get bored, or become so transfixed by the title screen that I am never able to begin the game, much less finish it, but at least I’ll have tried them all, right?

So, here it goes. Starting with A…

Popular with unicorns who enjoy: Games by Sara
No Unicorn Magic »

It’s been a month since we arrived in California and, as a result, I’ve written this first blog post at least a dozen times in my head. And that means that now that I’m sitting down to write it, I have no idea where to start.

One of my pseudo-entries opened with a joke about time warps in California, which is why it seemed like it had taken so long to write this blog post. Really, it had only been a few moments for those of us trapped outside of time (so no getting mad at me).

In one of my pseudo-entries, I decided to calculate how many elephants it would take to get from Cupertino to Calgary. If you know me, you know about my fixation with elephants as a unit of measurement that started in a college astronomy class (it’s only fair to call it a fixation when you’re reasonably sure all of your friends have heard “who measures things in elephants?” more than once). I’m still going to do that, because, well, it’s a fixation! And now I’m curious! And it feels like my blog will be more professional with some math in here.

So! It’s 1,336.7 miles from Cupertino, California to Calgary, Alberta (according to google, anyway, and who questions google? Certainly not me — they can actually find me and beat me up pretty quickly now, since they’re only about an hour or about 7,656 African elephants away — just a second, I’m explaining my calculations here, I promise.)

So, the average African elephant is apparently 30 ft.

I say apparently because it’s really hard to find out how long an elephant is. They’ll tell you how tall they are, sure, but what good does that do you, unless you’re counting how many perfectly–vertically-laid-out elephant carcasses it takes to get from Cupertino to Calgary, and that’s really morbid.

I did find one site that told me they’re about as long as five to six dogs.

Oh good; dogs are a much better unit of measurement.

But what kind of dogs? That could potentially be a pretty small elephant.

So I had to go with a random answer I found on WikiAnswer, so it’s probably completely inaccurate. But it’s all I had to go on. I mean, if I wanted to, I could tell you very precisely how many elephant penises it takes to get from Cupertino to Calgary, because searching up “How long is an elephant” is a really bad idea, because no one on the internet means the elephant itself, they obviously mean its penis. But I’m pretty sure my mom is going to read this, so I’d better stop talking about elephant penises.

So, assuming that this random person on WikiAnswers is right, we’re looking at 30 feet for an African elephant. I found another source that said 21 feet for an Asian elephant, but when you say elephant, you think Africa. Also, it’s already clear to me that this math is going to be ludicrous and going for the smaller elephant is just asking for trouble.

SO! 30 foot elephants. Google tells me that there are 5,280 feet in a mile. Hoo boy.

I better break out Excel for this.

So, we’re looking at 1,336.7 miles x 5,280 to get the number of feet, which is… 7,057,776 feet. Then, we divide that by 30, right? Oh, why am I showing my work? If I had just said that if you lined up elephants between Cupertino and Calgary there would be a gajillion elephants, who would have questioned me? But now, now you can see all the flaws in my logic.

Well, no turning back now. So, 7,057,776 feet divided by 30 feet per elephant gives us… 235,259.2 elephants. I feel bad about the point two, because I don’t want to have to be the one to hack that bit off an elephant just to get that last step to Calgary, so we’ll call it 235,289 elephants.

See, and it’s a damn good thing I picked African elephants, because my good friend WikiAnswers is telling me that there are between 450,000 and 700,000 African elephants in the world, but only 35,000 to 40,000 Asian elephants, so if I’d picked Asian elephants, I’d be stuck in like Oregon or something.

…

So I’m pretty sure people aren’t reading this to hear about elephants. I should probably talk about California.

I’ll start with a map, because those are educational:

On this handy dandy map, you can see San Jose sort of in the middle-ish, and then off to the left is us — Cupertino. If you swing all the way north and west, you hit San Francisco. It takes about an hour to get there on the freeway, while San Jose is about 20 minutes away. Fingers crossed that gives you at least a vague idea of where we are.

If you want to get more specific, we’re here:

Yep, that’s our front door.

No, there will be no pictures of the inside, because it looks like a cardboard bomb went off in here.

Okay, it’s not that bad anymore. But still, I want our friends reading this to think of us as actual adult human beings, and that won’t be possible if you see our box fortress. (Although, I guess that ship sailed when I started talking about elephant penises, didn’t it?)

Cupertino is a small city with a population of about 60,000 people (there’s a Wikipedia link there too, for you nerds), and it’s probably best known because Apple’s headquarters are here. In fact, it seems like Apple owns just about half the buildings here — walking down the street, you’ll see Apple logos everywhere.

Obviously, Lab126 (the company that makes the Kindle, and is part of the Amazon group of companies — yes, you have to say it like that, you can’t just say “it’s owned by Amazon” because if you do, your head will explode. Ryan actually explained all the legal reasons, but it made me feel like my head was going to explode, so I’m going to go with exploding.) is also here (although the Amazon headquarters are in Seattle).

If you head over to San Jose, you’ll see the head offices for just about every tech company you can imagine — we’ve seen Adobe, eBay, PayPal, Cisco, TiVo, and a whole bunch of others — it’s a little surreal. It’s like you’re travelling in the internet. Except with less elephant penises. (Sorry, last one.)

But the only way my brain can really think of it is that San Jose is like downtown Calgary, and then all the little cities that surround it — Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Campbell, Los Gatos, Santa Clara, Mountain View — they’re all communities. Except they’re not, they’re their own cities, and they have their own little downtowns. It’s weird.

Cupertino itself is basically the most expensive area around because of Apple and because of the school systems. The city has one of the top-ten high schools in America here, so people come from all over the world to send their kids here, and apartment prices are at a premium. Since I can’t work (I’m here on a dependent visa, so telecommuting for a Canadian company is about all I can do unless a company down here will sponsor me for a visa), I figure my best bet is to try and infiltrate this high school. I’ve decided that this time, I’m going to be one of the popular kids — I’ll be the slightly chubby cheerleader that is therefore totally non-threatening to the other cheerleaders, but makes them feel better about themselves. I also have an older boyfriend (younger boyfriend, maybe? I dunno if Ryan can pass for older than a high school student, let’s be honest) so I’m no threat to their boys, while being someone that they can look up to, because I’m totally experienced.

Yes, yes, it’s all coming together.

I keep getting distracted, don’t I?

Here, let me distract you with some pictures of our apartment complex!

Our complex:

A little park across the street:

Corporate housing across the street from that:

Inside the complex…

Into our little area…

And up the stairs to our door!

There, now we’re back on track!

As you can see, it’s pretty beautiful — I actually took those pictures yesterday, so you can see that it still looks like we’ve only just hit fall here. Ryan and I went out for lunch yesterday and I was walking along in a short-sleeved sweater and shoes with no socks, and there were people walking past us in toques and jackets, so I asked Ryan if he could tell I was from Canada. (Speaking of, yes, I have called someone a hoser, but only because he asked me to “talk Canadian”. ;D)

The weather, which everyone asks about, has been in the mid to low 20s every day, so I guess I won’t be able to break out my snow pants for Hallowe’en this year. (But all of my costumes are fat somethings. Fat ghost. Fat bride. Fat Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. I guess this year I could go as a ghost who has just come off a really successful diet.)

And now we come to it, I’ve talked about being far from home, I’ve talked about the area and where we live now, and I’ve talked about the weather, so now I have to talk about the food.

I’m not even talking about amazing restaurant food, although there is that here. Okay, I’d better talk about normal person food first, and break out the pictures.

Everywhere has glorious unsweetened tea to drink, which makes me both stupidly and obscenely happy.

The food is also truly awesome. That’s Figgy Piggy pizza from Pizza My Heart — it has bacon, black figs, fresh sage, and feta cheese. It is totally amazing. They also have an equally amazing Watsonville Apple with green apple slices, pepperoni, sausage, bacon, green onions, gorgonzola cheese, and garlic. So yes, I will be about 300lbs when I come back for Christmas.

There’s also a Japanese Curry House (above is a picture of Ryan with a delicious lime float, and the cutest smile!), an Indian restaurant, a really wonderful Italian place with a wine bar (it’s okay, they let us in even though we’re not cool enough to drink wine), a little bagel place, and a bunch of other places, all within walking distance.

If you go a little farther, there’s also an amazing candy shop in downtown Campbell that has a bajillion flavours of salt water taffy including maple bacon, root beer, and coffee.

Please just attach the bag to my face.

But now that the normal person food is out of the way, let me tell you about the junk food.

Look. Just look. Bask in its glory:

What is that gentle friends? That is the gajillion kinds of pop tarts they have down here. You may notice Cupcake Pop Tarts, Apple Pie Pop Tarts, Hot Chocolate Pop Tarts, and Cookie Dough Pop Tarts, which leads me to ask… what did Canada do to anger the Pop Tarts people, and how can we rectify it?! Because when I come back, there’d better be Cupcake Pop Tarts waiting for me, or there’s gonna be some kind of Pop Tart incident at the first grocery store I hit. (Sprinkles and frosting everywhere!)

I have to say, the choice here is flabbergasting. There is a cherry variety of every pop ever. And there are fancy cookies as far as the eye can see. CHEETOS COME IN FLAVOURS HERE. FLAVOURS, MY PEOPLE!

It is indeed a glorious place.

And really, isn’t that all you actually needed to know about Cupertino?

Popular with unicorns who enjoy: California by Sara
No Unicorn Magic »

Hazel, One.

In retrospect, Hazel had to admit: she was lucky. She had so much.

She had grown up surrounded by love, with a mother and two wonderful aunts in a house that smelled always of cookies and sweets. She had been given an extraordinary education in the forest that surrounded her home on all sides, learning from her family and from the woodland creatures in equal measure, and eating up every morsel of knowledge they had to offer.

She had never wanted for food, or friends, or fun.

* * *

The two children had been trudging through the forest all night and were exhausted. They had begun their journey in high spirits, but in the waning light of the setting sun, with empty stomachs aching, and weary feet smarting painfully, both had to admit that running away from home did not, any longer, seem like such a clever idea.

“Jane, I’m tired.” The little boy tugged at his sister’s skirt and cast glassy eyes too big for his head at her, hoping for some sympathy.

“I know, Albert.” She tried not to look at his puppy-dog eyes, knowing they would be her downfall.

“Jane, I’m hungry.” Somehow, Jane was sure, his eyes had gotten even bigger.

“Albie, I know.” If he started crying, she was done.

“Jane, I’m scared.” And now that his lip was quivering, it was all she could do to keep her heart from breaking.

“Oh Albie, we’ll find somewhere soon, I promise!” She knew she shouldn’t promise, because she had no way of knowing if she could keep it, but if he kept looking at her like that…

Blessedly, Albert didn’t say anything, and Jane had a moment to gather her thoughts. When her little brother spoke again, though, she finally did break down into tears herself.

“I’m still glad we left, Jane.”

“Oh Albie, you’re so terribly brave,” Jane wept, great wet tears rolling down her pink cheeks in waves as she threw her arms around her brother and squeezed him tight. “I wish we were at home, even with horrible old Gertrude. At least she was better than our last stepmother. She’s only a little ugly, and she only beats us every other Thursday.” In hindsight, it didn’t seem so bad at all.

“And she made lovely lemon tarts for her desserts, and even blueberry treacle sometimes, and every so often she would make the most wonderful gingerbread, why I can smell it even now…” And she could.

“So can I!” Albert cried excitedly, charging off towards the scent before Jane could say another word.

“Albie, no!” Jane cried as she dashed after her brother, crashing headlong through a bush before stopping dead in her tracks, right next to little Albie. For before them was the most wondrous sight either of them had ever laid their little eyes on.

It was certainly the most splendid house that had ever been built, all made from gingerbread, with marzipan shingles and pulled sugar windows, and a little door made of pink shortbread. Gumdrops lined the sugar windows, and jellybeans dotted the gingerbread walls with bursts of colour. Best of all, tiny candied birds alighted on the powder pink branches of cotton candy trees, too tiny and darling to be real. And yet, there they were.

“Is it real, Jane?” Albie asked, his eyes as wide as the peppermint doorknob.

“Oh, it couldn’t possibly be,” Jane breathed, her voice thick with delight.

“Do you think it belongs to anyone?” Albert asked, glancing this way and that before taking a hesitant step towards the delicious little cottage.

“Like who, a witch?” Jane asked incredulously. Everyone knew there was no such thing…

“Probably,” a voice posited behind them, and it was a testament to the house that it was a full ten seconds before either child was able to tear their eyes from it and turn around.

Behind them was a girl only a little older than Jane, but certainly much taller, and much willowier. Jane had to admit that with her long raven black hair and her large violet eyes, she was beautiful. Or, well, she would have been if not for the gargantuan hairy mole on the end of her nose. But she was still beautiful enough that it nettled Jane, who was only a little pretty.

So she snorted. “Witches aren’t real,” she told the older girl, crossing her arms over her chest in what she hoped was a superior gesture.

“Oh no?” the girl asked, smiling softly at the pair of them in a way that almost made her lovely enough to forget the mole, and which consequently nettled Jane further. “This is the Black Forest, you know.”

“Do witches like the Black Forest?” Albert asked, hiding behind his sister and clutching at her skirt.

“Haven’t you heard of Hansel and Gretel?” the girl asked him curiously.

“Of course we have,” Jane nudged her brother. “And everyone knows that after Hansel and Gretel came home, the word was spread to all the kingdoms, and all the witches in the forest were killed during the Great Gingerbread Purge, and now they’re all dead.” Jane smiled smugly at the girl, feeling much better knowing that she was at least much better educated than her.

The girl smiled prettily and shrugged, “well, then I suppose you’d best come inside and have something to eat. You both look positively famished.” With that, she beckoned them towards the house as she started towards it herself.

“It’s your house?” Jane asked uncertainly, glancing back at the wonderful little house and hoping her stomach wasn’t growling too audibly.

“Mmhmm,” the girl agreed, “I live here with my mother and my aunts. They found this lovely little house in the woods before I was born. I suppose it’s a relic from the Gingerbread Purge, but it’s stood up quite nicely.” The girl smiled so warmly that Jane almost forgot how much she disliked her, and when she held open the door for them, she almost went straight in.

“Oh, please Jane! I’m so hungry!” Albert said when she hesitated.

His eyes had once again doubled in size and his lip was already quivering, so all Jane could do was swallow a little sob and guide him through the door.

“Are you sure your family won’t mind if we stay for a little food?” Jane asked, belatedly remembering her manners as the girl closed the door behind them.

“Oh no,” Hazel smiled, “they won’t mind at all.”

* * *

Hazel was certainly lucky to have all she did. But just as lucky, her mother and her aunts would have said, were the things that Hazel didn’t have.

Growing up, she didn’t have any mirrors, so she had never really noticed the huge, hairy mole that dominated the end of her nose. She had never quite gotten the hang of telling time, so she didn’t wonder why her mother and her aunts never seemed to get any older. And she had been kept far away from the nearby village, so she didn’t know that plump village children weren’t part of every growing girl’s diet.

Popular with unicorns who enjoy: Fantasy, Writing by Sara
No Unicorn Magic »

My dark and shameful secret is that I heart pokemon forever.

So here is me as a super awesome pokemon trainer (from Pokemon Black and White) with my faithful Emboar, Wiggly, getting ready to unleash our favourite move on some unsuspecting grass-type pokemon.

Because that’s how we roll.

Popular with unicorns who enjoy: Doodles, Pokemon by Sara
No Unicorn Magic »

So instead of writing like I’m supposed to be, I decided to play with inking in ArtRage Studio a bit more and practice with something a bit less doodley… but it’s still Naruto, because I love his colour scheme and the fact that I can very plausibly draw him doing very dorky things…

Oh Naruto, you so pretty. :3

Popular with unicorns who enjoy: Doodles by Sara
No Unicorn Magic »

Ryan and I have been watching a lot of Naruto lately so I’m basically bound by nerd law to do some dorky doodles.

DOOOOODLE!

Naruto. Watch it.

Popular with unicorns who enjoy: Doodles by Sara
No Unicorn Magic »

May 4, 2011: bushwhack \ BOOSH-hwak \ verb;

1. To defeat, especially by surprise or in an underhanded way.

2. To make one’s way through woods by cutting at undergrowth, branches, etc.

It happened, she supposed, when she was bushwhacking through the woods. Her father, incidentally, would have called it a stroll, but Gemma would use no other word than bushwhack; her father’s “lovely woods” were a mess of underbrush and brambles and who-knew-what-else, and the result was nothing short of expedition every time she decided to go for a “stroll.”

But if she were thinking back, she would also have to suppose that Rowan had seen her long before she ever saw Rowan. She might have been able to convince herself that she had seen a pair of eyes in the undergrowth, or a hint of just the wrong colour green if she hadn’t spent any time in Rowan’s company. But now that she knew her, Gemma knew that Rowan wouldn’t let anyone see her unless she expressly wanted to be seen.

So it was both a very good and a very bad thing that Rowan had mistaken her for someone else.

It began with the flowers and moss left on her windowsill soon after they arrived at the house. They would appear every morning, the most delicate little flowers she had ever seen. Tiny white flowers like stars that never seemed to wither or die, even though they had clearly been cut from their root.

But some days the flowers and moss would serve as funeral dress for little birds. She would find them placed lovingly on her windowsill as well, and when she received those gifts, her blood would run cold, but she knew better than to tell her mother and father. Something, she knew, was leaving them, and they were for her.

A month later as spring grew warmer, she began to hear singing coming from the woods, almost a bird’s song but not quite. She couldn’t explain why, but she knew it was for her. And always after she heard the singing, she would find the little birds on her windowsill the next morning.

As the days continued to grow longer and hotter, and there was less and less for her to do in the stuffy manor house, she went into the woods. And when she did, she couldn’t help but notice that some paths opened easily before her and others seemed piled with undergrowth and thick tree-branches, almost as if the trees were herding her. And when she continued on her merry way, bushwhacking through those closed paths precisely because they were closed, she was sure she could hear laughter.

Soon she learned that if she stopped being stubborn and followed the paths that lay open to her, she would find herself in sunlight meadows filled with the tiny white flowers and beds of the springy green moss she found on her windowsill.

But eventually it was less out of stubbornness and more out of fear that she stopped taking those open paths,  because when she found herself in those clearings, the unnatural urge to lay on that moss and sleep the day away almost overtook her every time.

One day, when she did sit down, the singing that always followed her through the woods became louder, clearer, and she picked herself up and dashed out of the woods, sure that something wonderful and terrible in equal measures would find her in the clearing if she stayed.

* * *

It was one day in late spring, when summer was almost ready to take its turn, that Gemma found herself once again making her own path through the woods and small bird alight in a tree made her stop. It was like one of the birds she always found on her windowsill, and it gave her pause because she realized at that moment that despite all the still little birds she found in the morning, she had never seen a live one. For some reason, she felt suddenly cold and her palms began to itch and sweat, and all she wanted was to leave the woods, but when she turned towards her home, a girl stood in her path.

Only, maybe it wasn’t a girl.

Her skin was woody brown and rough, and her hair was almost the rowan leaves of the trees around her, only it was just the wrong shade of green. Her eyes were as red as the rowan berries that grew on the trees, and she was tall and still and beautiful. As Gemma watched her, she thought at first that the girl wasn’t moving at all, but she realized that instead, the girl was moving perfectly in time with the wind through the trees – she moved with the woods as naturally as she breathed, and Gemma almost called out to her.

The girl’s berry red eyes, though, were as cold as winter, and froze Gemma’s words in her throat.

“I do not like your games anymore,” the girl finally said after a moment, and Gemma knew in an instant that it had been her singing, and leaving presents, and guiding her through the forest. It did not make her feel any better to have the mystery solved.

“You have kept me waiting, and I am getting very angry, Garrett.”

Gemma knew very clearly at that moment that angering this creature was the last thing that she wanted to do. The berry red eyes bored into her as she stumbled for something to say, her throat suddenly dry and her mind blank. Hastily, she rubbed her slick palms on her dress and tried to think of a suitable apology, something to appease this rowan girl and quell her quickly growing anger.

“I’m so-” Gemma finally began in a whisper, but stopped just as the words began to form on her lips.

The girl had called her by someone else’s name.

The girl had called her by a boy’s name.

“Hang on now!” Gemma said, her fear suddenly thawed in the heat of her anger at being apparently mistaken for a boy. “Garrett sounds very distinctly like a boy’s name.”

The rowan girl blinked her berry red eyes and opened her mouth to respond, but Gemma was not nearly finished yet.

“You don’t think I’m a boy, do you? Perhaps I’m not as beautiful as you are, but, but… a boy? I’m most certainly not a boy. Do I look like a boy? I don’t look like a boy!”

There was a very brief pause during which the rowan girl stared very fixedly at Gemma before asking, “you’re not Garrett?”

“No I’m not Garrett!” Gemma shrieked, but wished she hadn’t when the confusion left the rowan girl’s eyes and instead they went dark and cold again.

“Why were you trying to make me think that you are Garrett?" she hissed, curling long brown fingers tightly around the tree branch she stood against.

There was a brief second when Gemma thought about running, but instead she balled her sweaty hands into fists and stood her ground.

“Oh no,” Gemma said, although not quite as bravely as she might have liked, “you’re not going to blame this on me. I didn’t ask for your flowers and moss and little dead birds on my windowsill. I only came here with my family and they started appearing, and you started following me through the woods, I expect, and I don’t look like a boy, and—”

The rowan girl was next to her a second later, so close their noses were almost touching, and she looked at Gemma very closely. She made little “hmmm” noises, but her eyes remained cold, so Gemma couldn’t decide exactly how terrified to be.

“Hmmm. But you have pretty black hair, like my Garrett. Although yours is longer, maybe?” She held out Gemma’s hair and seemed to be measuring.

“And you have eyes like my Garrett, green and bright.” The girl came too close to look at Gemma’s eyes and Gemma was momentarily dizzied by the overwhelming smell of the forest.

“You smile like my Garrett,” the rowan girl said finally, touching Gemma’s lips, eliciting a shiver.

The rowan girl backed up very quickly at this, although her eyes had changed again. They were sad now, all the cold and anger having drained out of them.

“You’re not my Garrett,” she agreed finally, leaning heavily against the rowan tree at her back.

Gemma was still shaken from the girl’s fingers on her lips, so she didn’t say anything, she just brought a hand up to touch where the rowan girl hand, wondering at the warmth she still felt there, not realising that the warmth had spread to her cheeks and that she was blushing.

“But,” the girl said, and she straightened to her full height, staring at Gemma with her berry red eyes bright now, “you did take my gifts. And my gifts are not, I am afraid, freely given.”

With that, she started towards Gemma again, berry red eyes seeming to glow hot now, as a wolfish grin spread across her face…

Note: Well, at least Gemma’s story might be a little more interesting now. I’m only about five days behind, so I’ll be trying to do two a day for a little while until I catch up. Gemma and Rowan might show up again for the ninth, when the word is splenetic.

Words like that are why I’m doing this.

Popular with unicorns who enjoy: Word of the Day, Writing by Sara
No Unicorn Magic »

May 3, 2011: purlieu \ PUR-loo \  noun;

4. A piece of land on the edge of a forest, originally land that, after having been included in a royal forest, was restored to private ownership, though still subject, in some respects, to the operation of the forest laws.

When the king gifted Gemma’s parents the purlieu at Riverton, she did not share their joy. Her father had been waiting for the lands taken from his family almost 200 years before he was born. Since the first day Gemma’s grandfather had walked him through what was then the king’s forest and explained that it was his birthright, Gemma’s father has known those trees were his.

Gemma, however, had lived her entire life at court, and could not care less about an estate so far away from the castle and everything she had ever known. That her father wouldn’t stop talking about the estate house, and the rowan trees that made up the forest, and the small stream running next to the property only made her resent it that much more.

What estate house could compare to the castle?

What tree could compare to the thick stone walls of the castle?

In the days before their departure, she had almost convinced herself that she would hide in the castle larder until her parents had left, and when they were well and far away at their estate house, she would venture out and throw herself upon the mercy of the king. Surely he would be able to see that for a girl like Gemma, a life at Riverton would be nothing short of exile.

She had, in fact, worked out a very dramatic speech, and had practiced crying prettily in front of the mirror, but in the end she knew that she would have to go. So she packed up her favourite things, and walked the castle halls one last time, and joined her parents in the coach.

The journey to Riverton took three days by coach, and her father spent the whole ride telling her about running in among the rowan trees and racing sticks down the stream when he was a boy. Her mother laughed to see such boyish enthusiasm in her husband, but Gemma only sat in the corner of the carriage and sulked.

Why would anyone want to live somewhere it took so long to get to? she wondered sullenly as she stared at the floor of the coach and obstinately ignored her parents’ good mood.

They spent the night at road houses along the way that got smaller and rougher the closer they got to home, which only served to reinforce Gemma’s diminished opinion of their destination, and when they arrived, nothing could lift her spirits. Not the rustic charm of the estate house, or the flowering of the rowan trees, or the gentle babble of the stream that seemed to follow a person wherever they went on the estate.

She was, in fact, entirely disenchanted with her new home.

That was, of course, until she met Rowan.

Note: Just a quick piece tonight because I’m tired, and because my word today was purlieu. I firmly believe this was my punishment for complaining about dandle.

I’ll continue this piece as I get appropriate words, or, I suppose, as the fancy strikes me. It is going, at this moment, to be a bit of an unconventional love story, which I hope will be a little more uplifting (and less silly) than the stick baby story.

A slow start, definitely, but I hope it will be worth the read later. (:

Popular with unicorns who enjoy: Word of the Day, Writing by Sara
No Unicorn Magic »

May 2, 2011: dandle \ DAN-dl \ verb;

1. To move (a baby, child, etc.) lightly up and down, as on one’s knee or in one’s arms.

All she had wanted was a babe to dandle on her knee, someone to bundle up in blankets and coo at, and love. That was all she had asked for, but as someone always does in these tales, her husband had warned her to be careful what she wished for. And he had been right.

But what more could she rightly expect, when the one she had asked had been a witch?

“Go out into the woods each day, and bring me a twig from a different tree,” the young girl had said, gazing at her with sightless eyes. “Bring me alder to make him strong. Bring me ash to make him wise, and willow to help his little mind thrive. Bring me oak for nobility, and hazel for honesty. And bring me rowan, to protect him from harm. Bring me one each day, and in six you shall have your babe.”

And so she had gone out into the wood and collected one twig each day, to make her baby and make him strong and wise and noble and honest. She had brought them all to the witch and the girl had cut strands from her hair to bind them together and when she was done, she had formed a crude doll out of sticks.

“Do you truly want a babe to dandle on your knee, someone to bundle up in blankets and coo at, and love?” the witch had asked her, and so she nodded as fiercely as she could and proclaimed “YES!” just as fiercely.

“Then take this babe, and love him, and he shall be yours,” the witch had said, and she pressed the bundle of sticks and hair into her arms with a smile.

The witch would say no more, so all she could do was to press her money into the girl’s hand and take the bundle of sticks home to her husband.

But when she arrived home, her husband was not pleased.

“And what is that?” her husband had asked, all hard-eyed and frowning.

“This is to be our babe,” she had said fiercely, not daring to let herself feel foolish for saying it.

“What? That bundle of sticks? That’s not a babe!” Her husband snorted at her, and it cut right to her poor, desperate heart.

“If I dandle him, and bundle him in blankets, and love him, he will be mine.”

So she bundled him in blankets, and she cooed at him as if he were a real babe, and not a bundle of sticks, and she tried very hard to love him.

But as time passed, and the villagers whispered about the poor woman and the bundle of sticks she carried everywhere, and bundled in blankets, and dandled on her knee, it became harder and harder to try.

She would visit the witch again, from time to time, but the witch would only ask her “do you love him?” And the woman would leave, because she couldn’t quite bear to love a bundle of sticks, but she knew that to say no would not give her the answer she wanted.

Soon even her husband began to tease her, because he couldn’t stand the whispers and sidelong glances any longer, and the woman became less and less sure that if she could just find a way to love the bundle of sticks, it would be her babe.

“It’s just a bundle of sticks!” he would yell when she sat by the fire with it.

“No, it is my babe,” she would reply, but each time she sounded a little less certain.

Finally, one day, when months had passed and she felt sure that this bundle of sticks was just that, and that the witch had played a horrible, cruel joke on her, and she could take the whispers and stares no more, she stood and cried out, and cast the bundle of sticks into the fire.

And when she did, the sticks burned.

Because they were sticks.

The next day, she went to see the witch, but the girl had moved onto the next town where women had a poor understanding of human reproduction and were silly enough to believe that babies were made out of sticks and consequently paid quite a lot of money for kindling.

The end.

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In an effort to stretch my writerly muscle and increase my writerly output (not that two small sections of a short story in six months isn’t outstanding) – I am taking on a project.

Dictionary.com has a Word of the Day feature, which I have decided to leverage to my own nefarious ends.

I’m going to be truly optimistic, and say that I’m going to write a short story/scene/poem/random collection of words every day for the next week, whether I like it or not. (Take that, me.)

And then I’ll optimistically try for another week.

And before I know it, I will have written something.

Something, dear reader.

My only regret is that I started the day of the word dandle.

Dandle. Honestly.

Well. Here we go.

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