Wake Up Sheeple and the Magic Rocks

[corvi]

WAKE UP SHEEPLE.

We are taking a delivery of SHEEP Thursday night, which is terrifying because we need to fence a pasture for them, from scratch, before then. AAAA.

(We can just put the sheep in the goat pasture, but having been transported several thousand miles from juli 's grandmother's farm, I doubt they need another shock along the lines of "what are these non-sheep and why do they keep trying to climb on me and eat my ears?")

Of course, I have such a sore throat I can't speak or sleep, which all that outdoor exertion in the cold is doing wonders for! Heh.

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A couple years ago, juli got us a matched pair of magic rocks. They are lab-grown alexandrite, a nifty crystal doped with chromium ions. Chromium doping is responsible for both the red of rubies and the green of emeralds. In alexandrite, chromium does both: they're simultaneously both red and green. Whether they look red or green at any given time depends on ambient "white" light: if there's slightly more red light (like from a light bulb), they look red, if there's more green (like from the sun) they turn green.

Ours go from red with a hint of purple to green with some grey. I looked at mine a lot when I was in NYC for my brother's wedding: it was mostly blueish greenish sea grey, and it was kind of surreal to think that thousands of miles away, under the usual heavy cloudcover, juli 's was probably still red.

Several of the touristy photos I took in NYC are just intriguing new colors of magic rock.

Rocks is weird. Here is a different magic rock: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunstone_(medieval)

I keep having these ideas for fantasy stories I want to write where the fantasy elements are just cheap plot devices to point up how weird the real world is.

I want to write a "fantasy" story about solving problems with magic rocks.

I want to write an urban fantasy story about home landscaping and how you can tell whether or not your neighbor is a vampire by whether they have planted a suspiciously large number of night-blooming flowers in their garden, or bat-pollinated flowers, or plants that bloom only once in 60 years. What to suspect if you come upon a garden of plants that are drab in visible light but amazing in uv, or plants that change colors in the presence of iron / spilled blood in the soil

I want to write a fantasy story featuring a disgruntled and sardonic chef cooking for increasingly strange mythical creatures, guided by Earth's lovely and strange culinary traditions.

I really doubt this sort of thing amuses anyone but me - I'm sure it would just come off as trying way too hard to be clever - but it would amuse me a lot. :)

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And now back to the cider press, because there isn't enough craziness happening this week. WAKE UP SHEEPLE.

Comments

[wordweaverlynn]

Sheep are fun. And alexandrite is exceedingly cool.

[spiralsheep]

I think you should hope the sheeple are sleepy and not awake enough to try following their homing instincts, heh.

the fantasy elements are just cheap plot devices to point up how weird the real world is

I love stories like that. People do write them and I read them when I find them.

What to suspect if you come upon a garden of plants that are drab in visible light but amazing in uv

The gardener is an insectoid alien in disguise!!1!! Or a creature of the night!

[corvi]

I love stories like that. People do write them and I read them when I find them.

Oo, do you recall any titles off the top of your head?

[spiralsheep]

Nah, sorry. I read hundreds of short stories every year. The nearest I can recall, which isn't quite what you're looking for, would be something like Ken Liu's short The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species:

http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-bookmaking-habits-of-select-species/

[pie]

I would read fic about vampire gardens, so hard. It'd be like how Ready Player One has all that fanwank validation for people who remember 1980s cultural trivia, only with botany!

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

There is an app, I think it's the Hippogrif's Cookbook.

Ah, gardening as a hook. Though, vampire vs luring 'toy' wielding geek...