So many links, so little time to comment. Pick one, two, or three of these to read. Mix and match. Fill your plate. Come back for more.
• Sexy vampires threaten Catholic youth, thus encouraging — you guessed it — “dabbling.”
• Witchy craft: I am building these.
• Another interesting article on the revival of Siberian shamanism.
• “An Ordinary Girl Born into a Family of Witches” — in the famtrad sense. So of course she wants to be “normal,” because this is not Young Adult fantasy fiction. Or maybe it is.
• An interview with Victoria Nelson, author of The Secret Life of Puppets, on Gothicka, vampire heroes, human gods, and the “new supernatural.” That happens to be the title of her new book.
It’s funny you posted this now, as I just finished watching the rest of True Blood this past weekend when we had a free weekend of HBO. Not entirely happy with it, but I think the final season was better than some of what I heard last year about it reviews-wise…
Please be careful of what type of wood you use for building raised beds. If your intent is to plant veggies in it DO NOT use any type of treated wood as the poison (even the copper presently being used) in the treatment leaches into the soil and then into your veggies. Treated lumber is okay to use on flower beds, however. The best wood for veggies is cedar which is naturally rot resistant, although my cedar beds really only lasted about 5 years. I then switched to concrete blocks and those, while terribly expensive, have served me well for the last 10 years. I’ve been gardening for over 20 years.
As I have noted elsewhere, the wood in freight pallets is TOO CHEAP to be treated. Since the pallets are treated as disposable items, who would pay to treat them?
I also have a bunch of scrap redwood from someone’s deck that was demolished, and redwood comes with its own natural oils.
That article on the normal women in a family of witches was fascinating. Some people’s grandmas really were witches.
On my mother’s side of the family, her father was what I believe is called a “koldun” (which is a kind of healer, but would nowadays be considered a “witch”). I was told that the “information” to do that would be passed down from the eldest in one generation, to the eldest in the next generation. Unfortunately, my grandmother, being a rabid die-hard Polish/Lithuanian Catholic, stopped my grandfather from practicing his knowledge and passing it down to my mother. Sigh…