ritaxis: (blue land)
ritaxis ([personal profile] ritaxis) wrote2004-10-09 08:11 pm
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Not too bad (1200 words)

Finished Chapter 19, in which our guy finds himself with a dead man in his arms at the beginning and meets Candelario at the end, and in the middle he gets rained on a lot. Started Chapter 20, which starts with Candelario's crib and goes on to the truck wish and how our guy survives that. Maybe Candelario and our guy meet Araceli at the end of this chapter, or maybe not until the beginning or even the middle of Chapter 21. I am so much less sure of things than I was, though things are falling into place nicely with great five-day hiatuses of complete blankness.

I also bought more plants than I could carry at the Native Plants Society Sale: Monkey Flower; monardella; yerba buena; sweet root; wild ginger; a lobelia that looks like all blue lobelias but it's native; and a wild strawberry.

And I couldn't get pine nuts or spinach (well, I could get spinach, but I didn't like the looks of it) so I made chard with walnuts and raisins and it disappeared in five minutes at the barbecue potluck. My friend has all these barbecue potlucks all year (in the winter they're daytime affairs) and people tended for the longest time to bring meat and booze. And then for a while they brought dessert and meat. And now they bring dessert and noodle dishes and meat. I feel it is my civic duty to bring vegetables. And they gobble up the vegetables because a person can't live on meat and dessert alone, or even noodles and booze.

And I spent an hour and a half conspiring with a man's aunt about how to salvage his life after a psych discharge from the military.



The Mustard Fairy leaped out of the coconut carriage and marched toward the house with great strides. For the first time Katie noticed that the Mustard Fairy was wearing bright gold colored, very heavy boots, laced up with red laces. The other odd little people jumped and tumbled out too, and followed the Mustard Fairy. Katie looked over the edge of the coconut, calculating how to jump down without turning her ankle. The cocount seemed very tall, and the ground looked hard.

The Mustard Fairy abruptly turned on her heel and looked at Katie. "come on," she said. Katie climbed up to the edge of the coconut, balanced with waving arms, and after a short hesitation, dropped down on to the ground. Then she ran to catch up with the Mustard Fairy and her entourage.

The house seemed larger inside than out, and very airy and bright. The floors gleamed, the walls were festooned with colorful banners (mainly, but not all, yellow), and wreaths and garlands of spicy-smelling plants hung everywhere.

The Mustard Fairy collared a very dark, wrinkly, lean and almost woody-looking man, and asked, "Well? Are we ready? I brought her with me."

"Oh yes, your Sharpness," said the wrinkly man, tweaking the Mustard Fairy on the nose and making her sneeze. "We are completely ready!"