First Thing I Do After Recovering From a Cold

I spent nearly all of last week with a monster cold and was in desperate need of some fresh air and adventure. We went up to Callahan, about a 1.5 hour drive away, where a friend invited us to help him take some hogs off his hunting lease. As you can see below, we had success. I was hoping to take something with a bow, but I ended up using my .243 to harvest a fine little boar-hog. These guys were about 50-60 lbs and fairly young. I gotta admit, hogs are A LOT harder to shoot because they move around like Pac-Man while deer tend to stay still for a long time! No way I'm going to take a hog with a back-tension release on my compound! It was really neat going into a pine plantation and realizing that I still remembered the materials from the forest mensuration class I TA'ed last year.

Inspiration Comes From Weird Sources...

Right now I'm at home with what some of the Medieval folks would call "the fluxes" and I've spent most of this week down with the cold from hell, courtesy of some of my colleagues who I won't name. In any event, being feverish and congested and now dealing with post-cold digestive fluxes has given me strange bits of inspiration. I blame it on how being sick seems to shift my musical preferences a bit and I think the Test of High Academics did shift me a bit too. To this day, I still can't listen to Erasure without cringing.

Just to give you a sample of what's inspiring me these days, particularly with respect to the academics & sorcery story (The Shadowhawk), here's a few video clips that are giving me new ideas. I'll let you come to whatever conclusions you want to but suffice to say, I'm steering a bit away from the usual stuff that's inspired my writing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pkLDEEs20U (Ohne Dich: "Without You")
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXsKWi9FIjY (Du Riechst So Gut: "You Smell So Good")
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW03c4Vmr0k (Bueck Dich: "Bend Over" -- watch out, things get really amusing about 3 minutes in, not for the easily offended)

Brief Blip

Not much has been going on besides the usual stuff with school and trying to stay at least halfway fit. I'm still working on the sequel(s) to The Lay of Imladrien and Tinuvion with limited progress thanks to my soil-landscape modeling class.

As of now, on the first idea, tentatively titled Swan-Song, I'm at a standstill. Ilithara has just been seriously wounded by a spy for the Clawed Fury after wandering around where she wasn't supposed to. Tindariel and her friends, including Killer Parakeet, are ready to administer Frontier Justice to the Clawed Fury for all she's done in the last several years.

The second idea, tentatively titled The Shadowhawk, is also at a bit of a halt. I'm pretty much standing alongside five socially inept university students, ranging in age from twelve to twenty seven, and all happen to be taking an archery class that focuses on the compound. Some of these students have already been visited in their dreams by a mysterious entity known only as the Shadowhawk, particularly the twelve year old, whose ancestry traces back to her.

Who knows where the next story will go...

Hoggetowne Faire 2009

As always, click on the title for the full suite of pictures. My camera was acting up a fair bit so I didn't do my usual photography. The other photographer in our group managed to sit on his camera and not take very many pictures either. In any event, the Hoggetowne Medieval Faire was a real blast despite the cold.