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Photos du Jour: Fir

30/7/2018

 
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This prolonged exposure captures the essence of the teen poodle's infernal spirit: play play play yap play play steal play rubbish rummage play play drag person 5 K play play sleep play.  At eight months his testosterone is off the charts and it's fair to say that Fir is a fiend for action.
​A wee trip to the vet is due: don't tell him that.

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Fir will find your bladder and stand on it at 5.30 every morning with unfailing accuracy.  His opposition-pull reflex is off the fucking charts.  He gets up on the sofa behind you while you're lighting the fire, positions two paws on your shoulders and presses a sloppy toy to the back of your head.  His recall might be getting (slightly) better but he'll still fly across the yard and disappear into the unfenced bushes or frolic on the road if he gets the chance to bust out of the side door.  He pulls everything onto the floor and jumps up and down on his back legs screaming like furious toddler in a supermarket if I dare leave the room without him.  Doorways are for pissing in when it's cold and windy.  The rubbish bin = lunchbox and don't ask what he does with high-quality poos if given a chance.  Just... don't.  

Fir loves citrus, persimmons and almonds, which is weird and annoying because you have to give him yours, goddammit.  He bounces on the spot barking hysterically at the prospect of R's fried egg sandwiches.  I've realised I don't really know how to raise a normal dog.  They always end up like this.

Also- highly recommended for extreme-chew dogs with squeak fetishes; the Kong rubbery squeaky bones.  The noise isn't too maddening, ours has lasted over a week now and doesn't show signs of disintegrating into atoms, unlike almost every other toy we've tried.
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Fir growls at rearranged furnishings.  He is cute, though.

Photo du Jour: Distant fire sunset, Sawyers Bay

27/7/2018

 
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from the front yard.  I love the bay in winter.

Feeling somewhat better, mentalhealthwise.  It's easy to forget how much exercise levels you out if you've been skipping days; if you're feeling low, start with some hard walks or go back to the gym.  Seriously.

liked these Planet Monsters

24/7/2018

 
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there's a short film, yo

The Blackthorn Orphans Serialization:  å Kata Mehtra 9

17/7/2018

 
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The colour that had opened her eyes rose from the wrinkled floor of her tent, a nebulous Pleiadian blue glowing on the back of her hands and what she could see of her own face in the darkness.  Beside the foot of her sleeping bag, as though surprised in the act of encroachment, a string of lights lay crowded on a knotted black cord, emitting the powdery glow that had roused her.  With her eyes narrowed she saw that it passed through a gap at the base of the zippered door, and slid out of her sleeping bag, crawling with them into the quiet night.  

The bulbs ran tendril-like along the ground between trees heavy with a felted nocturnal blackness; through them she could feel the sound of water scouring stones, its lapping babel translated into pulses expressed by the globes in a strange, staccato transcription.  The venous cord diverged like some engulfing tropical vine, climbing and hanging in snarled loops from the branches, dry violet dust spilling from their frayed ends as she passed beneath them.  A scent fell with it and lit upon her, of mingled, pungent lilies and a sliced and sappy green, strangely unrelated to the glow that deepened to the flickering hue of holographic shade on her arms and in passive trees fruited with bulbs blooming almost as round as her head.  The cable had begun to express the same cyanic hue, lighting the undergrowth until the leaves gave way to round grey stones where the lights climbed down and ran between her ankles into sable water.  It swallowed and slowly dimmed them; she stared into the depths while they spiraled around the cord, its luminescence pulsing slowly, the water rising in slippery black fingers, tendrils swaying before her like a hundred eyeless serpents.

No birds chimed the hour as cold soaked through Susan's socks and lapped her feet.  Dawn pierced the dilettante mist over the river of her luring dream and cast its spiritous gold through her lids while she stood, shivering fitfully, no glowing vines slithering between her ankles when she looked down.  Her teeth clattered together in her head; the forest ran up a slope behind her that she did not remember, though the mud streaking her knees and forearms recounted her descent of it.  She waded back toward the shore over clinking river cobbles blue with cold.  Her own weight brought her down on a boulder while cloud shouldered out the sun, its condensing mass once more portending rain.  In their shadow she felt her eyes well, bled by a despondency that pushed up through her throat, and she leant over to weep into her lap.  

William wiped at his own face when it began to stream in sympathy with hers, sitting amid grass-green aigrettes of ferns at the edge of the trees.  She heaved a broken sigh at the sight of him, shifting to make room on the stone and nodding slowly to the sleeping bag he lay over her shoulders.  They sat while she pondered his unquestioning constancy.

"Something blue was glowing... I think it wanted to talk to me." she murmured.

"The river... they do that sometimes.  What did it say?"

Shrugging, Susan shook her head and gazed down at her arms amid the quilting.

"Yesterday, when I was by myself... I found out why your brother wears suits."

"Long sleeves." he admitted, surprising her with his grasp of the allusion.  "If I had told you, would you have believed me?"  She shook her head.  "He stopped doing it for a while, I think, with Helaine, but..."  He suffered a moment of conflicted silence.  "Is it better to know?"

​She shrugged again, unable to assort the wreckage of her own sentiments.  

"I don't know... but I don't think I can call you William any more."  

He leant over to puff the dew from the length of their last cigarette.

"Ala'il sha bai.  I don't think I ever was one."



Her feet forced her to a halt at noon when she was tripped by a web of buried branches into a crackling mass of bramble canes.  Sachiin lifted her out of them and set her down, plucking the broken lengths free of her parka and leggings.  The birch bark dressings dropped off in heavy rose-pink wads as she peeled away her socks.  

"Fuck!" she shouted, enraged, lying back in the ferns with her eyes closed while he swore softly to himself at the sight of the damage.  As quickly as her heels mended the new skin was soaked and bitten away, leaving wet pits of angry scarlet flesh to reproach him.  The sight of him poring over her extremities as though they were dying animals proved briefly, obtusely amusing, though she screamed when he ripped open a stretch of dead skin crammed with debris.  They both looked up at the sight of his brother emerging from the slope before them, rifle in his hand, exclusively intent upon their captive.

He shoved the youth onto his knees and tore a sleeve from the latter's wet pullover, stuffing half into his mouth and knotting the remainder around his head as an emphatic gag.  Frowning, he kicked the scout hard, satisfying himself that he was unable to emit any significant vocal response.  

"How many?" Sachiin sighed, getting up.

​"Twenty five, thirty." 

Susan pulled on the heavy khaki anorak she had abjured thus far when it was handed to her, keeping a close watch on the far more subtle visual elements of the brothers' exchange.  

"Alujha." Sachiin admitted.  "Have a look for my balls in your bag... I'm going to need them back for a bit."

"Could we not just... go round them?"

​"They know we're here and they're sitting on the only way through this shit in any case.  If we front them they might jump us but if we don't, they definitely will."  He began to look over his weapons; Susan gazed around herself, expressing dismayed expletives, rolling onto her feet and sucking an agonized breath through teeth clenched against any further exclamation.  On his knees beside Edward, the scout smirked around the fabric in his mouth, shoulders shuddering in a gloating chuckle as he watched her deplore her own failing flesh.  She grew still, staring back at him, then took up her boots, sitting down to stuff her bleeding feet into their sodden confines. 

Edward's fist drove their captive down the steep, greasy descent, through a last stand of jostling saplings and onto the floor of a valley crowded with great skeletal copses of black-fruited bramble, shaded even from the glimpse of sunlight allowed by a rift in the clouds.  Walking behind him, Susan found in the hard-blown sound of her own breathing and Sachiin's murmured appeal to those antediluvian objectives still enjoying his regard an almost somnambulistic state; it drew from her companions and even from their captive, his hatred permuting into a fuel that set her bitten feet down and picked them back up again.  The smell of smoke through the trees troubled the chains that circled the eidiré's black piles and conjured the sudden, airless notion that she might find their wretched inmates amongst the party they approached.  It crashed into her obliquely, opening her eyes wide, grinding against the impetus that pushed her onward, every step she stamped down in the alujha's muddy wake threatening to crack her bones.

A clearing, like the hollow of a bird's nest, had been fashioned using dead limbs to pin back the thorns, rendering it almost invisible from without.  A creek wound, a flat, sluggish shade of bronze, past the salix that overhung the bivouac, the camp divided by a narrow course of smoking, half-green logs.  On it lay the remains of a doe, the foul smell of its scorched hide rising from the pyre.  The blackened corpse lay torn in two, innards raveled over spitting branches, and strung along this focus were the alujha themselves, squatting beneath dappled cowls like the members of some barbaric mendicant order.  Their faces were pasted with soot so that the whites of their eyes glared in glassy contrast, the variances parceled out by nationality and fortune as shallow as the pigment smeared over their skin as they ate from their hands, chewing blue flesh and sucking dripping marrow from fractured bones.  The nearest rose at the sight of their youngest member staggering before the strangers as the scout was thrown down on his face at the end of the blaze, discarded as soon as the gesture he embodied was perceived.  He sprang to his feet and wiped off his gag, scowl contracted around a furious denouncement that brought the rest of his tribe off their haunches as Susan stepped down between their mirrored ranks.  Their blackened faces crowded out the sky, the youth's rage left behind in slurring pantomime.  

He was the smallest of them.  The remainder were limned in unwonted clarity by her survivor's gaze; the colour drained from their eyes at the sight of her, hands knuckling up and curling under, their breath and bodies stinking of spilt seed and offal and oily, unheeded sweat.  She saw the clear ground at the distant end of the hearth disappear behind their heavy shapes and almost faltered, forced to step into the embers by a shoulder that struck her own.  Though her hood secluded her face, the milk-white smell of her body lofted from her clothing with the heat of the coals, lapped and swallowed by those crowded on either side.  The brothers' great forms framed her own; their strange affinity and the crystalline animus foiling their gazes prompted the older alujha to make protective gestures, passing the peril of their stare over their shoulders.

"Yásta utut na ábita... jáma wel hasitt sha sittra náfan." one of them advised his fellows, displaying more complacency than the rest, his silvering hair and short, striated beard an obvious device of seniority.  To their astonishment one of the intruders replied in passing, his grasp of their secretive tongue like a blow to their faces.

"Kút ifa ján, in sejju na mujjin sootcha hastná vech wel ídv." Edward warned them.  "Na nachát isin na najún if íyet hahdra, jáma sin itujrr lá Belyaev na vampyr."   

"Ídv tuj vech plajúr kuchani na Lúnar." the alpha replied, containing himself. 

"Shata kushir ján mitha nán vech." promised the stranger, something more personal confided by his eyes and the teeth that had shaped the acuate contention.  The hood flapped back from Susan's head with the wind that broached the trees, her damp hair, woad-blue, pressed to her neck.  A guttural response passed about her as the creatures seized upon the glimpse, tongues creeping from their mouths, hands glowing hotly through her clothes as they snatched at her, eyes crawling over her skin and dragging her stolen shape behind their faces.  Thick fingers rose at her face, groping for her mouth, but she punched them away and Sachiin shoved the offender back.  Another caught her trailing hood; she threw herself forward, wrenching free of the last of them and ploughing into the mud and rushes at the edge of the stream.

Susan thrashed her way over the slimy rocks and dragged herself out on the far side of the water, terror marching her on up the face of the abutting hillside like some sadistic numen.  With both hands she hauled herself over the slick, latticed roots and twining creepers, tearing her bleeding feet free and snapping what remained of her nails against the buried rock.

"Christabel, slow down or you'll blow something..." Sachiin called, catching her leg.  She jerked it free and pushed on, scrambling up onto a game trail that cut across the slope between the narrow tiers of trees.
"What did they say?" she urged.
"Nothing you want to hear."
"What did he say?"  

He thought over Edward's address, climbing alongside her.

"Fuck with us and it'll be the last dumb shit you do... this woman is my brother's wife, we're guests of Belyaev."
"And?"
"He flipped them off with something.  Christabel..."  In the light of her comprehensive disregard he watched her pull up before a fallen trunk, then squeeze under it where the roots had propped the bole clear of the ground.

Midnight passed before a moon yawning almost to the full began to set, remaining all the while in an ironic, starless purdah, leaving them only with the promise of her next appearance.  In the ensuing darkness Susan conceded to his demand for surcease, crushing whorls of bracken as she keeled onto her side.  He spoke her name and waited for any sign of comprehension before collecting her bag and summoning his brother.
​
​
CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce

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Photos du Jour: Port Chalmers- more random views

16/7/2018

 
From earlier in the year.  We're sitting on a tonne of images that never got posted because of the build and Felix's illness.  I will get round to putting up the better ones.
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Port Chalmers, New Zealand   *   Our Photography


RubyHue Lipstick Review: Bite Beauty Cin Cin & Vento Luminous Créme

13/7/2018

 
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Been on a leeetle bit of a mini Bite Beauty binge over the last month or so, scoring some shades in a couple of bulk buys that I would not have normally considered.  I paired Bite Cin Cin + Vento (both Luminous Creme formula)  in this review with the thought that they will both probably be of interest to the mmmm... less dramatic amongst us.  

​I'm not talking 
Duchess-level Basic here because let's face it; those hos might be freeqs in the sheets (BIG question mark) but they're not bringing much to the damn streets.  Just saying.  

​
I think it's a lack of consistent nutrients thing.  Just saying.
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For the uninitiated, Bite Beauty's Luminous Creme is, broadly speaking, forgiving and wearable in contrast to their more matte/saturated Amuse Bouche and Crayon product.  It's a formula for people who sort of hate lipstick but are trying to get into it, out of boredom or a sincere desire to reform their homely ways or whatever.  Easy to apply, delightful to wear and unlikely to inspire fear in the unwary.
So: Cin Cin.  It's the gelato-gingery-orangey one in these pics.  I've been wearing it a lot since I took them, which is something of a surprise as it's not a massive shade.
Like almost all Bite product, Cin Cin is a pliant, non-feathering dream to wear with far longer persistence than you might expect from this kind of formula.
If you loved MAC Giambattista Valli Margherita and share my abject sadness at not being able to really pull that shit off, Cin Cin is like an answered prayer you didn't even know you were mumbling.  It has the same pastel-esque tangerine-y loveliness, but with j u s t enough depth to bless the darker lip-haver with something more satsuma lite than glue residue. Whereas Margherita suffered the technical difficulties inherent in white pigment+lip, the Luminous Creme formula rides to the rescue by not cock-blocking any natural affinity with our native schema.
Cin Cin provides slightly less coverage than say, a Nars Satin Pencil-type situation, hence the wearability. The only conceivable downside to this paragon may be its tendency to look pretty no on most cool-coloured citizens; obviously, these shades play best when referring to those yellow, red and brown tints present in the warmer face.

Edgelords might consider flipping this gack potential into creative wtf with 
Cin Cin + clown-coloured hair + a cool face; one could certainly play up the uncomfortable combination.
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On to Vento.  I'm just going to say right now that this shade could not look more fucked on my face if it consented to some sort of whole-Smurf-village gangbang.  We may not be simpatico but I will put on my objectivity cap and review it in that noble light.  

Though it is a wee bit difficult to accurately represent, we are dealing with a light-medium, blue-leaning rose pink satin and a moderate degree of translucency (think MAC Lustre).

​
Vento is not quite as ghostly-pastel as it may appear against my pasty hand, so subtract a wee bit of the white cast and take your lip colour into account.  It'll still look like this to varying degrees though- it is definitely a thing for arctic blondes, ash-kissed brunettes and lovers of soft-focus, just because it's so modest and blue-leaning.  
It clashes with the broken veins and redness on my sad old face, so consider any scarring or pigmentation issues you might have before splashing out.

Vento's charm lies, counterintuitively, in its lack of graphic heft; it is subtle, casual, vintage, conventionally pretty, completely SFW and a nice foil to a big eye.  It offers a nice alternative to those of us wanting a bit of polish without the slimy grossness of lip gloss- Vento's lustre is low, satiny and durable.  It's just the smidgen of sneaky pastel that strikes the wrong gong for the warmies; oh well.

I wear it around the house anyway, purely for the pleasure of its sublime texture.  This shit be angel grease, second only in my experience to the crushingly expensive Chantecaille stuff (which I must get around to reviewing) as far as conditioning and comfort are concerned.   And Vento is so visually lightweight and stable that I also sneak it under all those chalky-arse mattes that will suck you dry if you don't amend, which is why it's staying in the stash.
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​L 2 R, MAC unless stated: Russian Red, Bite Cin Cin, Nars Iberico, Chili, Bite Vento,
Girl About Town, Bite Amarone, Nars Afghan Red  natural outdoor unflashed
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