Asakiyume mita

The cashier was friendly, chatting with people as they came through. The woman ahead of me was buying just icing in a squeezy tube--two tubes of it.

"You decorating cookies? I love decorating cookies!" the cashier said. The customer allowed as to how she had a special recipe for cookies that used cake batter, and yes, she'd be decorating them, and the cashier seemed genuinely thrilled to hear it.

This cashier, she was quite pretty. She wasn't super young--not a high school student or a college-aged kid--but she wasn't old either. Maybe early thirties. Maybe mid thirties. She had expressively draw-on eyebrows, sort of 1920s style, long and arching. She had pale-ish skin and eyes, a wide mouth, and oiled curled hair that was dyed a deep auburn.

So I was quite tickled when it was my turn and I saw her name tag read JOLENE.

Jolene, I don't know if you'd be my man's cup of tea, but I think you're the best!

(I drew this picture of her.)

If I wait to have a chance to write about any of these properly, I'm likely to write about none of them, but if I list them here, then maybe I'll come back and do it?

• Nando has responded to the questions I sent him, questions that were gleaned from people's responses to his latest story. I will definitely be sharing his answers at some point, but I can't do it right now.


• I might write a cordyceps story. There is an awful lot of cordyceps fiction out there recently. But I might add to it. In honor of that possibility, I doodled some cordyceps critters. (Try to ignore the improbably long body of the dog in that doodle. Also: my story would not feature cordyceps critters. It would be All Humans.)


• Partly I want to write a cordyceps story because I feel like I have something in me--much less sinister, I'd like to reassure you (but of course that's what the fungus would get me to say, right???)--that is compelling me to go back to the Amazon. Or that's just me pulling a Digory-at-the-bell-of-Charn** move to forgive my own supremely selfish desires. Whatever, I AM going back. Solo, because Wakanomori does not have the flexible work schedule that I do. In 14 days. A 10-day trip, seven full days down there. I will shove my face in all the flowers, taste all the fruits, listen to all the birds, process some cassava and hopefully make some chambira twine, and ... uhhh, come back to infect everyone with a desire to go down there?

So yes. My news.

**( Explanation of Digory at the bell of Charn )

"The Curious Case of the Cave Salamander," by Gwen C. Katz, in the February 2021 issue of Utopia Science Fiction

In this absolutely delightful, funny, and clever story, scientist Jen has discovered** a new species of tiny salamander, and it's completely adorable:

The internet did indeed love the ostolotl. The six-inch salamander had enormous round eyes, a mouth like a puppy, fluorescent blue stripes, and fluffy gills sprouting from the sides of its face. There was fan art. There were uwu ostolotl memes. By the time Pseudonecturus ostolotli was formally described, there was a movie in the works.

Well if that isn't an invitation to produce some fan art, I don't know what is. Behold my version of Pseudonecturus ostolotli



The movie in the works is called Full Throttle Ostolotl:



But Jen doesn't just have an adorable new species of salamander, she also has a morose grad student with whom she commiserates about their funding: "Unless we plan to fund this lab on Patreon, we need to get some non-meme-based science done." And at home, she's got Madison, the prickly eight-year-old daughter of Kira, Jen's roommate from their college days. Kira and Madison came to stay after Kira's marriage fell apart, and now the three of them are tentatively becoming a family--but it's not easy when Madison is still angry at having to uproot her life. She's also sharp as a tack and asks good questions. When Kira says Jen won't like the headline about the new salamander ("Northwestern University Research Team Discovers New Species of Cave Salamander"), Madison asks what's so bad about it:

"[The salamander is] new to us. But the people who live there have known about it for thousands of years. They have their own name for it: ostolotl."

"So what should it say?" asked Madison.

Jen considered. "How about 'Cave Salamander Discovers Northwestern Research Team'?"

But soon the police require Jen's herpetological expertise for entirely other reasons: a security guard turns up dead in standing water in a YMCA basement, his chest crushed and his body covered in slime. Uh-oh!

In addition to being funny and all-around charming, the story touches on the issue of exploitation of wild animals, responsible pet ownership, and other things I can't mention because spoilers. Also, Kira is nonbinary, and that's handled completely naturally.

To read the story you need to buy the magazine, but it's worth it for this story alone (and it contains several other intriguing ones, as well as poetry and artwork).

PS: the author has also written a YA novel, Among the Red Stars, about an all-female Soviet aviation team during World War II. There's also a gallery of the author's own amazing art depicting characters in the story.

Twitter was tempting me yesterday with a story about an Australian sheep, lost in the wild for a long time, that was encumbered by its huge fleece. It really looked like a **person** in very capacious outerwear. So I drew that:



Really, though, domesticated sheep are no longer like wild sheep--they need to be shorn periodically--and this poor guy was underweight from not being able to eat much because all the fleece around his face interfered with his eating.

Now he's been shorn, and he must feel positively weightless. (Picture, as the stamp indicates, is yoinked from Reuters. The picture I screencapped above was from CNN, I believe).



Here's a Huffpost story on it, or you can just Google "wild Australian sheep" and stories will turn up.

I saw this odd little scene two days running, a very tiny makeshift stand by the side of the road, a rainbow umbrella, a sign, a cinderblock (and probably a moneybox somewhere, but I didn't notice--I was in a car), so I made a cartoon (?) about it:





Flowers: a flexible term!

I went running this morning, and the sunlight through the clouds was turning parts of the hills into pure gold, while around them the shadowed hills were still winter purple-gray. I didn't have a camera, and it would be time-consuming to try to draw, but I discovered that MS Word has a very rudimentary drawing function. And so I created a picture! This... doesn't really capture what it was like at all, except for the contrast, and not even that. The dark was darker, the bright was glowing.

Last week's prompt for the students in Holyoke was "This cat is very strange ..." I did a couple of illustrations to go with some students' descriptions:

This cat looks like a dog. The cat ears are hanging to the floor, has a long tail but the cat skin is red and blue.

Then there was this cat:

I was in the park and I seen a cat with three eyes looking at a bird.

What did you think when you saw this three-eyed cat?

He has a better chance of catching the bird! LOL

A few students were suspicious of black cats, though when I asked one if black cats were bad luck, she said,

No, cats are not bad luck, they just cats. They are good of seeing ghosts around, though.

When looking for an image to illustrate that woman's writing, I found this fun story about Sable, the crossing-guard cat, who comes out every day to watch the kids safely cross the street to school in the morning and leaving school in the afternoon.

Sable has been watching over the students from across the street for about a year. Tamara Morrison owns the cat. She says one day, Sable just walked outside to greet the students, and he's been doing it ever since ... [Tamara] has now bought a safety vest for Sable to make him an honorary member of the Enterprise Safety Patrol.

Is it a human person or a fairy being, imprisoned behind the leaf-vein bars? What was the crime, or were they falsely accused? When and how will they be freed, or will they free themselves?

(I'm skipping October 14: teeming)

Yesterday's prompt was "screech" and today's is "gigantic"

I think another fun way to do "screech" would be to do a reaction to someone who's hearing a screech. (Also, something like this critter might do more of a peep than a screech, but...)

"Gigantic" was a lot of fun.