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I love this baby so much!

Poldine's Hike, Vol. II

(^ people who said this on my last post, I sure hope you meant it !)

I went on a few more walks with her (though not all the way to the stream) since the one I talked about yesterday, so here's some bonus Pampoldine-on-a-walk content :)

She's a little bit devious sometimes (trying to make her mum proud) (without actually breaking any laws. It's tough) and in the first 10min of each walk she pretends to be stumped by every branch or shrub that even slightly blocks the path, in the hopes I'll go "oh no, an insurmountable obstacle, guess we'd better go home then :( " No one buys that you can't deal with a branch in your way, Poldine. There are trees in your pasture. You know what a branch is.

(I love that she rewards herself with some leaves after the strenuous feat of ducking under a branch. I'm not sure if the cheek kiss I got was apologetic or just an unthinking reflex as she walks past someone with a face. I should change this post's title to Poldine's Kisses: Vol. I)

2. Pirlouit has a new job! A fixed-term contract. The farmer who owns the barn near my pasture always cuts the grass around it in the spring and this year I offered Pirlouit's services to spare him the trouble, and he said it was a good idea. So I moved Pirou to a small enclosure around the barn, and he's taking his mission to clear all the grass seriously.

(well, here I caught him on a union break)

He can see the llamas (and my house) from where he is so he's not in exile, but he's still by himself at the moment so we went to pay him a visit. Poldine immediately did what she does best.

3. I also spent some time walking on the road with her so she'd get used to cars (that was the initial plan but since cars are rare it turned into me sitting on the side of the road reading a book to Poldine as we waited for a car to show up). One car stopped and the driver & passenger rolled down their windows to ask if they could take pictures of Poldine, which they did, and then I asked them if they would like a bise greeting from a llama and they looked pretty delighted and leant out of the window so Poldine could kiss their cheek. (I'm trying to teach her to give more than 1 bise because we're not in Brittany but she prefers quality over quantity.)

She was still a tad bit nervous about being so close to a car with the engine running, but she came closer of her own volition when she realised she had the opportunity to distribute kisses.

I might just introduce a tollbooth on this road. Little kiosk with Pampoldine inside (wearing some kind of official hat), you take a ticket and a long llama neck slithers out and a fuzzy kiss is deposited on your cheek, then the automated gate goes up.

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mademoiselle hedgehog, what are your thoughts on ambition? it seems like such a harsh cutthroat drive, but at the same time, shouldn't we all have something that pushes us to be our best selves? is it possible to find a soft and gentle ambition within ourselves, like a slowly rising tide?

Thank you for this very interesting ask! I’d never really reflected on this, but my gut feeling is that ambition has done more ill than good in the world. If I were sitting my high school philosophy exam and drew this topic, my opening quote would be Minerva from the opera Daphné "How you torment yourselves, ambitious mortals—desperate and frantic—enemies of leisure, enemies of yourselves." But I like your water imagery—maybe you naturally have tides carrying you towards higher goals while I am stagnant water—the word stagnant comes from stagnum, a pond, I don’t mind it. Maybe some people are seas and enjoy tidal rising while others are ponds and enjoy pondering.

If I had to visualise a soft and gentle ambition I wouldn't picture a slow tide rising towards something greater but rather wavelets, setting small projects for myself that don’t disrupt too much (or for too long) the at-rest state that I am content with. (If I were not content with my at-rest state, then yes, a stronger, 'tidal' ambition would help change this situation, but even then I would tend to perceive this ambition as a necessary evil...) One such project could be learning a new language, which possibly fits your definition of a gentler kind of ambition ‘within ourselves’—but I don't know if I would see this as striving to be my best self. Am I a better version of myself if I spend my free time learning a language rather than doing a stagnant activity that doesn't rise towards a goal (like watching my animals live their lives, which makes me happy)?

If someone has an ambitious goal, say, writing a book, that they feel will bring something of value to themselves and/or the world at large, and the idle activities that take time away from this goal are of comparatively less value to them (or inherently less joyful or healthy—insert critique of smartphones here) then I would say ambition is a positive force that helps them better their life and their self. But I deeply value idleness and fruitless pursuits, I think they often bring us great joy and do no harm, and trying to infuse them with more ambition in the name of self-improvement can ruin them (like trying to master a hobby in order to monetise it).

At heart I am wary of ambition—of the way it is lauded as 'striving to be your best self' even when it brings us less joy, and is more detrimental to our health and the health of the world than being content with our current self and enjoying pondlike activities—idleness, contemplation, amateur unproductive hobbies. "Doing nothing is here intended as a positive proposal"—I just went in my idleness tag to fish out this Ruth Levitas quote—"Politicians may declare that ‘we need to do more and we need to do it faster’. The opposite is true. We need to do less, and we need to do it more slowly. Doing a lot more nothing, including sleeping, would reduce resource consumption, lower stress levels and enable social relations more conducive to dignity and grace…"

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The Least Intimidating bakery in the village has closed for good so now I’ve got to go to the Intimidating Bakery, it’s awful. If you don’t have a PhD in being French I don’t recommend going to that bakery, here’s the humiliating account of the 3 times I’ve visited it so far:

the first time I went in there I pointed at one of those extra-skinny baguettes and said “a flute, please” feeling pretty sure of myself, and the baker said “… that’s a ficelle” (you idiot) (was implied) “a flute is twice as large as a baguette.”

That’s insane, first of all, a flute is a skinny instrument. Call your fat baguette a bassoon, lady—I made some timid remark about how it would make more sense for a flute to be a skinny bread and the baker said, “In Paris it is. I thought you were from the South?”

oh, that hurt

I guess I’m from the part of the South that’s so close to Italy the bread’s waist size matters less than whether it’s got olives in it, but I left the bakery having an existential crisis over whether living in Paris had made me forget my roots

the Least Intimidating Bakery just had normal baguettes vs. seedy baguettes vs. horny baguettes (easy mode, some have seeds, some have horns), while the new bakery has breads that are only different on a molecular level—there’s a good old loaf and then another, identical loaf called a bastard? google told me a bastard is “halfway between a baguette and a bread” but denouncing them like “those are not regulation-sized bastards” would get me banned from the bakery for life

on my 2nd visit (while I stood in line discreetly googling baguette terminology) there was an English tourist who asked for a baguette while pointing at what was either a rustique or a sesame and I felt a bit worried for them, but the baker just clarified “this one?” to waive any responsibility if they found out later it wasn’t a classic baguette, then handed them the bread without educating them in a judgmental tone and I felt envious

I know it’s because she thinks the English are beyond saving but still it made me want to come back with a fake moustache and an English accent so I wouldn’t be expected to play bakery on expert mode just because I’m French. I asked for a pastry this time and the baker asked “no bread with that?” which felt cruel, like she wanted me to sprinkle myself with ashes and admit out loud that my level of bread proficiency isn’t as advanced as I once believed it was

The third time I went, I had lost all self-confidence and I hesitantly pointed at a bread and said “I’d like this, uh—what is it called?” and the baker looked at me in disbelief and said “That’s a baguette.”

God.

for the record, if that stupid bread had been flanked by a skinny bread (ficelle) and a fat one (flute) then yeah of course I would have known to call it a baguette, but in the absence of reference points I now felt lost and scared of being called a Parisian again

it’s hard to express the depth of my suffering so I’ll just let the facts speak for themselves: this morning a French person (me) stood in a French bakery in France surrounded by French people and pointed at a baguette and said “what is this called”

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Oh yes, this is very much IT. The thing that I want.

🐌🌿🍄🌻🌞🌾

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Photo by Volodymyr Martyniuk

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The bones bog from the other side of the bridge. Saw some cute eels, but they're very hard to photograph. Since eels are really just sentient sticks as far as a phone camera is concerned. They weren't very big eels though. Might take them some more bones next time I visit. This bog is kinda in a fancy residential area though and I'm a bit concerned someone will see my hauling bones into the bog and call the police..

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Update:

My future is a complicated mix between bougie homewares and bog aesthetic and I honestly don't know how to reconcile the two entirely diverse dreams into a cohesive reality.

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We could be made of stars

Credit : Hubble Space Telescope

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-jean little

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For those days when it's good to be me, because they can be so few and far between 🌻

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My fav whaling logbook phenomenon is when their keeper opts NOT to use whale stamps and instead hand-draws very ornate whales to indicate when he sees them, but then as time goes on the whales get progressively shittier looking because that’s too much work. I know how it feels to get locked into an artistic bit later regretted, man.

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No more minimisation. Speak out and make it loud.

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Quote by Sarah Kay

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To do: Dandelion Honey

I made some dandelion honey for my mum’s birthday—I used 400 dandelion flowers, 1 and a half lemon, 1 grapefruit, 800g sugar and 1 litre of water. It tastes bright and fruity!

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