![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Operation: Make A Home is underway
Jan. 3rd, 2019 11:39 pmBuilding a chicken coop and goat area literally occured to me years before 'hey what if we got art from our friends and put it on the wall, and then we would have our friends' art on the walls, and that would be nice'.
In this vein, I'm working on building an outdoor seating area in a weird sticky-outy bit of driveway that my FIL used to use for his tomato plants, which is now mostly full of empty, sun-brittle planters and a stack of bricks left over from when they built the house.
I'd already used some to build a little succulent bed along one side, and there's enough that I'm going to do a way bigger one along the other side, but in the meanwhile I built a little fire pit to sate my little pyromaniacal soul, and today we hauled home a bunch of cinderblocks as the start of a bench.
Eventually, there will be a big clay oven I'm gonna build, a grill that I won't, a firepit, the bench, and two good-sized flower beds. When it's cold, we will have fire and friendship, and when it's hot, we will have outside cooking that doesn't make the house a million degrees.
Daughter of Ivory
Dec. 30th, 2018 10:32 pmKatya was an old woman now, and she took pleasure in that fact. That she was old, and that she was a woman, after so long not feeling like she had any claim to the word. As she drew up her nets, fat squid squirming and shining in the early morning light, she was filled with the contentment of her life and her work.
Long ago, when she was young, her name had been longer. She had been Katyarinova Moonborn, Katyarina Bonechild, Daughter of Ivory, Blessed by [god], and so many other, tiresome names besides. They hadn’t meant much. They hadn’t *done* much. This, hauling fish and squid into her little row boat, her ankles sepia-brown from their ink, this had earned her freedom, this fed children and the old, this was so much more worthwhile an endeavor than dancing for the moon had ever been.
She was old, over a century now and not the oldest of her kind, carved thick and fat as the style had been then, carve them fat and teach them to polish away their scratches and nicks and they will wane line the moon with time. Pah! She was the moon in truth, showing every flaw and every scar in shades of grey on her yellow-cream surface. Her hands were a scrimshaw of work, shells and beaks and knife slips showing their path over her body, cloudy where the rocks from her dancing days had abraded gently at her thick feet, though she wore shoes now to protect them, soft thick-soled things the leather girl on Crumpet street made for her, sweet child.
Ah, her baskets would be full today! Her barrels too, lines strung out to dry the bulk of her catch, salt waiting for others, precious ice for the last. Those she would walk up the long roads to the palaces with, her with her trays of ice and the finest, fattest fish, the thickest squids, the longest eels.
There was a new girl, like she once had been, but delicate as she never was nor wished to be, a child who did not know how to dance for the moon, who was no priestess, who had perhaps one name and it still soft and short. Katya had seen her at the windows, and the man who sold blubber at the wharf said they had placed an order for the finest mineral oils, scented with frankinsence and faraway rose. Katya wanted to see this new girl, with her holes pre-drilled for earrings, her gold eye-casings and the soft green jade of her fingertips. She raised her hand (gloved, yes, padded on the side, yes, she’d seen what so much knocking could do) and gave the door a hearty wallop. One of the kitchen girls answered, a sullen thing with drab straw hair she’d met a few times before. Katya preferred the other one, the redhead with the gap in her teeth, who smiled so broad like all the joy in the world was slipping in between them.
“Eels, fish, and squid, my dear? Fresh caught this morning, still full of life!” Katya held her box out enticingly.
The kitchen girl glanced behind her, unsure, but Nati, the cook, had recognized her voice
Daughter of Ivory
Dec. 30th, 2018 08:13 pmThere has to be a reason all this ivory is being stockpiled, and let's go with this. Big-ass chunks of ivory are cut and polished and fitted together into graceful ivory girls, brought to life by some form of magic (maybe why you need specifically dragon ivory?) (maybe the "better" forms of ivory are the ones that are most magic-dense?), both to show off one's wealth and to have a Fancy Immortal Servant to take care of the delicate wimminfolk or something.
In the past, I feel like these guys would have had some Solid Practical Reason to exist, maybe religious or as a master-work for some magical guild, maybe just for extra labor that doesn't need food to live, and there are still living examples of these folks out there. Most would be owned by whatever person made them, but some would be free, and I'm imagining a friend for our new-made golem who's yellow with age, and whose fingers are grey from all the tiny scratches she's gotten over the years, that get exposed to squid ink for improptu scrimshaw. Maybe some of the older models lightly polish the scratches away (as new girl is being taught to do), but this lady's proud of her lifetime of work, so she accentuates them.
Daughter of Ivory
Dec. 30th, 2018 08:12 pmFor some reason, the ivory merchant is amassing huge stockpiles of ivory, probably from several sources. I'm picturing someone who has a network of contacts, hunters and fishers in the north for mammoth and walrus ivory, poachers in the south for elephant ivory, and for dragon ivory he sets out on Expeditions his own self whenever he hears of a dragon he can reasonably expect to get to.
The ivory merchant isn't noble, but is solidly Upper Middle Class, and one of those folks that hobnobs with nobles at the low-to-middle-fanciest parties, and he wants to move up in the world. After all, the first king of this line is said to have become so by hunting the Big Dangerous Dragons (that sadly were all wiped out) back in the day, so a minor earldom for just a shit-ton of Draconis Minoris skulls isn't necessarily out of the question.
Daughter of Ivory
Dec. 30th, 2018 07:51 pmSo one of those random ‘your fantasy book title’ generators popped up on facebook a few weeks ago, and like many humans, I took a glance but didn’t really intend to think hard about it, because it is what it is, right?
And most of those things have a list for your first name and a separate list for your last name, but this one… did not. And since ya girl’s got double initials, I ended up with ‘The Daughter of Ivory and Ivory’. And of course my brain ran away with it.
(and yes, that is one of our cows, that’s Derpy Horns)
Anyway, I haven’t written in a while, so I might start actually playing with this idea. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it yet, so far I’m thinking two main characters who would each qualify for being a Daughter of Ivory (one the child of an ivory merchant, the other some kinda ivory golem), and … some sort of plot. I mean, something’s probably gotta happen at some point in the story, probably. General disillusionment with the status quo of some folks stockpiling large amounts of ivory from various creatures, and other folks being made from said stockpiles.
Just gotta figure out what.
(no subject)
Dec. 21st, 2018 01:33 amThen... today I accidentally some yarn.
The spouse and I were in town running errands, and found a new yarn shop. Just in the wild! Right up by where we were going for dinner! So we headed over, and they happened to have some lace weight yarn that I really like but don't usually buy, because it's more per yard than I generally prefer, but it was 40% off and they had almost 1600 yards of it, which is enough to actually Do Something With.
So here's me, sneaking in under the wire to thaw that sheep just a bit, before the year ends.
