#its built around one of those plastic christmas trees you put on the table

[javen-tiger]

✨️✨️✨️✨️

[gigi-sinclair]

It’s @ferrame‘s birthday!!!!!!

If you don’t know, this is the author of the definitive John Irving/Tom Hartnell modern AU, I dreamed of the fine deep harbour I’d find, as well as the entire Another New World series, which is A-MAZING.

As a little birthday gift, I have the first part of an untitled Irving/Hartnell plane crash AU I will likely never finish, and which was going to be super sad if I did. (Hint: Tom’s brother died of cancer several years before the story is set.) Rated M for a bit of naughtiness. 

Happy Birthday @ferrame!

Tom arrives at his parents' house just as the snow begins to fall.

Betsy is the only one of the kids still at home, but their parents still decorate as much as they always did. The same wreath—faux pine branches with Styrofoam apples and wall-eyed wooden birds—is on the front door. The same string of multicoloured bulbs hangs from the eaves. There is a new addition: a wire-framed reindeer lit up in the middle of the front garden, snowflakes landing on its back, its antlers, its festive red scarf. With a smile, Tom raises his hand to ring the bell.

It seems the polite thing to do, given he no longer lives there. When there's no answer, he slips his key into the lock. The hall is in darkness, but firelight flickers from the direction of the front room. It sends out shadows, dancing on the floorboards and on the opposite hallway wall.

“Hello?” Tom hangs his coat on a hook, and puts his scarf on top. He kicks off his boots, then lines them up carefully against the wall. He didn't live with his mother for twenty-one years without learning something.

“Tom? We're here.” A voice comes from the other room, where the firelight glows. Tom follows it, his socks sliding on the wooden floor.

This room is also decorated, of course. The tree is short and scraggly as always. Betsy is the type of person who chooses that type of Christmas tree. Its spindly branches sag beneath the weight of half a dozen childhoods' worth of handprint ornaments and painted baubles and twinkling lights. Up top, an angel with a paper cup body and a golf ball for a head surveys all.

“Hey! What took you so long?” Tom's brother Johnny says. He's lounging on the sofa in tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt, his feet up on the coffee table and an open tin of Quality Street chocolates on his knee. Tom stops. He can't quite remember why, but he didn't expect to see him here. His presence is a surprise, but it's not the biggest one.

“John?” At the other end of the sofa sits John Irving, formal and tidy, his feet on the floor. He's dressed nicely as always, in a knitted jumper and corduroy trousers. “Like you're fifty years old,” Tom often teases him, but in truth, he likes the look. It suits John. Tom can't picture him wearing anything with an elastic waistband. “What are you doing here?”

John and Tom weren't going to be together over the Christmas holidays. They decided that weeks ago. “I have to go to my dad's,” John had said.

“Maybe you could drop by our place on Boxing Day,” Tom offered. “Or I could come to you.” It was worth a shot, even though John's reaction was exactly as Tom had expected it to be.

“I'm so sorry, Tom.” He seemed it. “It's not that I'm ashamed of you.” Tom knew that was true. “It's complicated.” That was also true. Tom knew he was lucky, as far as families went. They drove him mental most of the time, but there had never been any question of acceptance. From the earliest days, Tom knew there was nothing he could do, no one he could be, that would make his family love him any less.

John, it seemed, couldn't say that about his father and stepmother.

“You didn't tell me you had a posh boyfriend,” Tom's brother accuses, unwrapping a chocolate from its crinkly purple paper.

“I'm not posh,” John protests.

“Oh, no. Of course not.” Johnny laughs. “'I say, old boy, would this happen to be the residence of one hot piece of arse known as Sir Thomas Hartnell, Esquire'?”

“Shut up, Johnny.” Belatedly, Tom's heart soars. “I can't believe you're really here, John.” He goes around the sofa to sit beside him. “What made you change your mind?”

John licks his lips. His cheeks are pink, from the fire or from embarrassment. Tom knows John well. It's probably embarrassment. “Christmas is about love. I decided I wanted to spend it with the person I love the most.”

Tears prick at the back of Tom's eyes. He has more questions: does that mean he came out to his parents? How did they react? Tom's not sure he wants to hear the answers, or if John wants to share them now. Instead of asking, Tom kisses him. His hands go to John's strong shoulders, his thigh presses against John's. John kisses him back, softly and sweetly, with all that natural talent that made Tom doubt, the first time they did it, that John was really as inexperienced as he claimed to be. “Why would I lie about being a virgin at my age?” Was John's counterargument. Tom didn't have an answer for that one.

“Right, then. If it's going to be like that, I'm fucking off out of here.” Tom hears Johnny stand up. “And I'm taking my chocolates with me.”

“Bye,” Tom says, his lips still against John's.

“Don't come on the sofa,” Johnny warns. “Mum will kill you.” John's cheeks go from pink to scarlet, even as Johnny leaves the room.

“Ignore him,” Tom advises.

“He's...”

“An arsehole.” But Tom loves his older brother. He can't believe he's here, and John as well. It's going to be the best Christmas ever. “He likes you.”

“How can you tell?”

“He only takes the piss out of people he likes.”

“Oh.” John's eyebrows furrow, adorably. Tom kisses the spot between them. He lets a hand slip beneath John's jumper, tracing the muscles of his abdomen and his chest. That was a very pleasant surprise. Tom knew John was kind, and sweet, and as handsome as fuck from the moment they met. He hadn't known John was built until the first time they had sex. Which had happened to be John’s first time. 

John presses closer as they kiss again, exploring Tom's mouth as he slides his own hands up the back of Tom's hoodie. Tom pauses just long enough to pull it off, tossing it aside. The fire pops. John startles a little, and Tom laughs fondly.

“He's right though,” Tom admits. “About the sofa.”

“Oh. I, I, I...”

“So I'd better swallow.”

“Tom!”

Tom wishes he had a bearskin rug. John deserves decadence like that. Instead, Tom kneels on the beige Berber carpet, urging John to slide his hips forward. Gratifyingly, his cords are tented already. Tom reaches for his belt, and John lets out a groan that goes straight to Tom's own cock.

“Tom,” he repeats. John unzips him. The fire is hot at his back, warming him. The lights on the Christmas tree cast a festive glow on John's cock. “Tom,” he moans.

“Yes.”

Again, “Tom. Tom, stay with me.”

“Always,” Tom promises. He shivers as he takes John's cock into his mouth. And shivers, and shivers, and shivers.

“Tom!”

First, he notices the smell. Fire. Real fire, burning wood, not like the odourless gas fire at his parents' house. The cold is next. He's lying on his back, wearing a coat that doesn't feel like his own. It's big and bulky, but still, the cold permeates, making him shake.

The dark is the last thing. He opens his eyes to see nothing but black.

“Tom.” The voice says again. He doesn't know it. “Are you awake? Thank Christ.” Whoever it is sounds genuinely relieved. A pinprick of light pops into Tom's field of vision, cutting through the darkness. There's a man beside him, standing over him, holding up the overbright light of a mobile phone. He's got blue eyes, and a large gash on his forehead. Tom doesn't know him. There's a polar bear pin on his jacket. That, Tom recognizes. He can't think why.

“Where am I?” Tom's voice is weaker than he expected. He clears his throat. “Where...” It doesn't help.

He's lying on a bench of some kind, an uncomfortable sofa or chairs, but he's not inside a building. It's far too cold for that.

The man sighs. He looks tired, that's obvious even in the thin light. Tom feels tired, too. Maybe he should go back to sleep.

“You need to stay awake,” the man says, as if reading Tom's thoughts. “ What do you need? What can I get for you?”

Then, Tom remembers. Everything comes back in a flood, the dam broken by those few words. Tom wishes it hadn't been.

***

“What can I get for you?” The flight attendant smiled at Tom from behind his drinks cart. He was good-looking, Tom noticed, in his navy blue suit and red tie. His name tag read “Thomas”, and there was a pin on his lapel shaped like a little polar bear.

“Coke, please,” Tom said. He glanced beside him, to where John slept against the airplane window. “And a water for him.” He would want something when he woke up.

Thomas shovelled  a scoop of ice into a little plastic cup and poured half a tin of Coke on top. He passed it over, carefully avoiding the man on Tom's other side, then gave him John's cup of water and two packets of biscuits.

“And for you, sir?” Thomas turned his attention to the other man in their row, the one in the aisle seat. He was dark-haired, with thicker sideburns than Tom had seen on anyone for a long time. He’d spent most of the time watching what seemed like a home improvement show on his tablet.

“I'll have a gin and tonic.”

“Certainly, sir.” Thomas poured the drink as Tom fought to open his biscuits. Thomas gave the other man his cup, followed it up with a quick kiss to the man's forehead, and continued down the aisle.

Tom didn't say anything. Growing up in a big family, he'd become an expert at minding his own business. Still, the man beside him said, “That's, ah, that's my, um, my husband.”

“Ah.” Tom nodded.

“We're going on our honeymoon.”

“Congratulations.” Tom didn't really want to continue the conversation, but he said, “In Toronto?”

“We're flying on from there. To Nunavut.”

“So are we.” It was a longstanding dream of John's to see the northern lights. They'd talked about going to Finland or Sweden, but he wanted to do it in northern Canada. It was a big trip, and an expensive one, but the look on John's face when Tom agreed to it made it all worthwhile.

Almost. There was an engagement ring burning a hole in the pocket of Tom's carry-on bag. That would make it extra worthwhile, but he wasn't sure about it. Rather, he wasn't sure how John would feel about it.

Tom wasn't sure what else to say, so he put his earbuds back in and picked up his phone.

Tom hadn't flown that much. Of the two of them, John was the more experienced traveller. He didn't seem nervous when the plane started to shake. Nobody did. Thomas' cheerful voice came over the intercom informing them Captain Crozier had turned on the seatbelt light, and asked them to return to their seats. John, who had been in line for the toilet, came back grumbling, but he didn't appear worried. Obediently, he buckled his seatbelt, a moment before the plane dropped what felt like a hundred feet in one go.

That was when John started to look a little nervous.

As a concerned murmur ran through the crowd, the man on Tom's other side unbuckled his seatbelt and stood up.

“Thomas!”

“You should probably sit down,” John advised.

“He's married to one of the flight attendants,” Tom explained. Thomas had likely been standing up. He might have been hurt by the sudden drop. Tom wouldn't have been that inclined to sit down if John was in that position.

“Still,” John insisted, “you should...”

Another drop, although this one was less severe. Someone screamed, then someone else. More than a few began to cry. The man beside Tom stumbled, and sat down again.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Thomas' voice returned on the intercom, as smooth as before. So he's okay, Tom thought. He was glad of that. It would suck to be injured on your honeymoon. “Please stay in your seats. We'll be making an emergency landing in Gander.”

The murmuring didn't abate. John reached for Tom's hand, and squeezed. “That's not so bad.” John’s voice was calm, reassuring. Steady. “We saw 'Come From Away', right?”

[believingispowerfulmagic]

“The Christmas Cottage” Chapter 2: Storybrooke

           Storybrooke was too small to have an airport, so Regina had to fly into Portland International Airport and drive the rest of the way. Tink had already made arrangements for her rental car but Regina still had to fight the holiday crowds to get to the rental desk. When she got there, the harried clerk handed her a key. “You’re lucky. That’s the last car,” she told Regina.

           “I didn’t know Maine was such a hot destination for Christmas,” Regina replied, taking the keys from her.

           The agent shrugged. “Everyone wants a white Christmas and we’re predicted to get a lot of snow between now and Christmas Eve. I guess they couldn’t resist.”

           “I guess,” Regina replied. She held up her keys. “Thank you.”

           “You’re welcome. Drive safe and have a happy holiday,” the agent told her, doing her best to smile despite how tired she clearly was.

           Regina rolled her suitcases out to the lot and found her car—the last Mercedes there. She loaded her big suitcases into the trunk before placing her smaller bags into the backseat. After settling into the passenger seat, she turned the heat all the way up and turned off the GPS but turned on the radio. Even after years of living in New York, she still knew the way to Storybrooke by heart. As she pulled out of the lot, Karen Carpenter crooned that there was no place like home for the holiday and Regina found it fitting.

           It was about an hour drive up to Storybrooke, which was a hamlet located on the Maine coast. She followed the highway for almost a half hour before turning off onto a mostly deserted country road that carved its way through a dense forest. Most of the trees had lost their leaves but were coated in white snow. Snow also covered the evergreens that were in the forest and, along with the Christmas music playing, Regina felt the Christmas spirit more than she had in years. A Maine Christmas clearly had nothing on a New York City one for her.

           A thrill went through her when she spotted the familiar white and blue sign welcoming people to Storybrooke. She smiled as she passed it, feeling a sense of rightness and calm wash over her. Though she wanted to get to her hotel and get something to eat, she slowed down so she could get a good look at the town as she drove through it—and so she didn’t get a ticket for speeding from whoever was sheriff now.

           It was about five miles from the town line to the first building, which was the ranger station. The building was locked up for the night but one of the evergreen trees outside the building had been decorated with lights and a star, welcoming Regina back. As she turned onto Main Street, she smiled at the other Christmas decorations that filled the town—including the lights, garlands and wreaths that hung over the streets from wires tied to the lampposts lining the curbs. Many of the stores and the apartments over them had lights and other decorations illuminating the dark December night. And she had to laugh when she spotted the familiar sleigh “crashed” into Granny’s Diner. There weren’t many people out at that time though she could see the diner was filled with many patrons. She figured it was too cold and so most people were seeking the warmth of being indoors, whether in their own homes or not.  

           She left Main Street and entered the more residential area, which was just as devoid of people but just as lit up. Regina looked at their decorations with a pang of jealousy, wishing she had the time and space to really go out like them. One day, she promised herself. Maybe next year if you make partner.

           As she drove down Mifflin Street, she tried not to look at the large white house bearing the number 108. She tried not to think of the days she spent running up and down that very street before going to greet her father when he got home from work at the cannery. And she tried not to think of all the happy Christmases they spent together in that house. But she failed and a lump formed in her throat as tears filled her eyes. While she loved the feeling visiting Storybrooke gave her, she also avoided it so she wouldn’t think of everything she had lost—especially her father.

           It also didn’t help that Elvis was now singing about how he was going to have a Blue Christmas.

           Regina swallowed past the lump as she reached the end of Mifflin Street, arriving at the harbor. Personal boats were moored at the marina, many of them covered in Christmas lights as well. Some of the ships in the harbor were decorated much the same and she smiled through her tears, always appreciating how much the Christmas spirit permeated through the town. It made her feel a little bit better as she made a left turn, heading away from the cannery and toward her hotel at last.

           The Mist Haven Lodge rose up before her and Regina took a moment to admire the building. It had been built during the Victorian era, the gables and the two red polygonal towers flanking the main building, painted white with red shutters, attesting to that. Red shingles covered the roof. The porch stretched from one tower to the other, red and green bunting hanging from the eaves. Evergreen bushes grew along the porch, matching the evergreen trees that surrounded the property, and were decorated for Christmas like the rest of the town.

           Regina had always admired the Lodge and had often begged her father to stay there. Her mother had scoffed at her request, saying it was a waste of money since they lived in Storybrooke and could just stay in their house. She also insisted that Regina was too young and immature to eat in the restaurants housed in the Lodge. “Our family is very respectable in this town. We don’t need you embarrassing us with your childish antics,” she had said, sniffing in disdain as her husband chided her.

           When her parents got divorced, Regina’s father Henry took her to the Lodge for dinner. He told her not to worry about anything and to just enjoy herself. She felt very grown up in one of her favorite dresses (a red one that had been her Christmas dress, she recalled) and she recalled the large ice cream sundae she had split with her father. While others she knew whose parents had divorced had a rough time of it, she was much happier without her critical mother around anymore.

           While her father got primary custody, Regina still had to spend time with her mother. Thankfully, her mother was not as big into Christmas her father had been and was often away on a child-free cruise during the holiday, so Regina could celebrate in Storybrooke with her father. She did have to spend a good chunk of the summer with Cora out in California and it became tradition that her father would take her to eat at the Lodge the day before she left and the day she returned.

           Yet they still never stayed in the Lodge.

           Henry had promised her that they would for her eighteenth birthday, saying he would book a full weekend package so she could be absolutely pampered. She had been so excited and had started to count down to her birthday.

           Her father had a heart attack right after that Christmas. She had raced to the hospital when she got the call from his secretary but there was nothing the doctors could do. Regina barely had a chance to say goodbye to her beloved father before he slipped away from her, leaving her. She didn’t feel like celebrating, even when those around her encouraged her to still go to the Lodge for her birthday. Or when her friends offered to send her after they graduated high school. It just didn’t seem right to go without her father and so she never stayed in the Lodge, that childhood dream remaining unfilled.

           Until now.

           She pulled into the driveway and parked in one of the spots reserved for people who were checking in. Leaving her bags in the car, she hurried up the porch and entered the lobby.

           Warmth enveloped her immediately and she paused, taking in the lobby. Gold carpeting lined a large area filled with wood tables, matching chairs and red couches. Old-fashioned lamps and telephones rested one some tables, making it feel like a rather large living room than a hotel lobby. White tile framed the area and a beautiful crystal chandelier hung over head. Her eyes travelled upward, taking in the five floors of the resort. Guests and staff walked along the hallways, some guests leaning against the railing to look down on the lobby from their floor. Everything always seemed so opulent and she now felt woefully underdressed in her black pants and blue shirt under her black wool Princess cut coat.  

           She kept to the tiled part of the floor as she walked to the front desk, located directly opposite the front doors. The heels on her boots clicked as she passed a little store and what appeared to be a bar area before she got to the desk. Regina pulled out the printout of her reservation confirmation, setting it on the counter as she smiled at the clerk waiting there. “Checking in.”

           “Okay,” the young man said, taking her paper. He typed something into the computer before nodding. “You’re here for the Blanchard-Nolan wedding?”

           “I am,” she confirmed.

           Clicking was the only noise for a few moments as he typed in her information, nodding as he pulled something up on the screen. “Okay, Ms. Mills, I have your reservation right here. I see you made an alteration to your reservation the other day, changing it to only one adult. Is that correct?”

           “Yes,” she said, fighting the bitterness and disappointment coursing through her. It was not the time to deal with those.

           “Okay, so do you want one or two keycards?” he asked her.

           “Two,” she replied. “Just in case.”

           He nodded, pulling two plastic cards out and running them through the scanner to put her room information on them. She watched as he tucked them into a cardboard holder, writing something on the back before he placed them on the counter. “Okay, you are in room 323. Most of the guests here for the wedding are staying on that floor. I’ve written the password for our wifi on the card as well. If you have any questions or need anything, do not hesitate to call us here at the front desk. We are here to make your stay as enjoyable as possible.”

           “Thank you,” she said, glad to hear there was wifi. She had a lot of work she needed to try to get done in between everything for the wedding.

           “We hope you enjoy your time with us here at Mist Haven,” he said before handing over a piece of paper. “This is your parking pass. Parking is in the back. Please park in spaces that are marked for hotel guests.”

           Regina thanked him, taking back her confirmation paper when she grabbed her parking pass. She headed back to her car and drove around to the parking lot, finding a spot not far from the side entrance. It took her two trips but she got all her bags out of the car and she settled into Room 323

           The room was painted a soft yellow color with an off-white carpet. A king-sized four poster bed sat against the wall, white blankets and pillows covering it. Two nightstands flanked it, a lamp on one and the phone on the other. A beautiful wooden desk lined the wall opposite the bed, complete with a lamp and several plugs there. Regina was relieved to find a comfortable looking leather chair there, knowing she would be doing a lot of sitting in it. She rested her suitcase next to the chest of drawers that had the TV sitting on it. A closet was located to her left along with the mini-fridge, ice bucket and glasses. Yellow curtains were pulled open, revealing she had French doors that led to a balcony.

           She walked over and opened them, stepping onto the white balcony. There was a small metal table and two chairs out there, though she doubted she would spend much time out there due to the cold. Regina leaned against the railing, admiring the beautiful view of the forest and mountains behind the resort. Lights from the hotel glistened off the snow and it seemed like a painting come to life.

           It was the perfect setting for Mary Margaret and David’s fairy-tale Christmas wedding. It was the perfect setting for a romantic Christmas vacation.

           And she was all alone.

           Regina pushed that thought away as she grabbed her phone. She hit Daniel’s contact and pressed the phone to her ear, counting the rings. Disappointment flooded her when his voicemail picked up but she tried to sound as cheery as possible as she left him a message.

           “Hey, Daniel. I’m settled into my room here at the Lodge. I’m in Room 323 in case you need to reach me. The room is absolutely gorgeous. I can see why people always wanted to stay here, especially given the good views. My room faces the forests but I’m sure the other side has beautiful views of the harbor and ocean.

           “Anyway, I’m going to get ready for dinner with everyone,” she continued. “I’m really excited to see them again but I miss you. Hope we can talk tonight. I love you and I’ll see you soon.”

           She ended the call and placed her phone on the desk. With a deep sigh, she opened one of her suitcases and pulled out her garment bag. It was time to get ready and to start the wedding festivities. And she was going to enjoy herself.

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[eastergrass]

Digit

I.

Marie was on the downstairs couch, a game of solitaire unfolding on the coffee table. She had made a pot of coffee midway through The Today Show. She drank it all and chased with a pinch of Antony’s weed. She sat crosslegged, slowly losing to herself in front of the muted television.

The house was remarkably unchanged, but Marie herself was a bit different from the last time she called it home. She was quieter. She had started watching a lot of television, and had begun losing energy she didn’t realize she had. She lost touch with the global tragedies she used to worry about. She didn’t read. She heard only other peoples’ music. She was 27, buzzing on her mom’s couch, waiting for her little brother to come home so she had someone to talk to. She also hadn’t won solitaire in three days.

She decided to clean a dewy-bottomed pineapple. It left a print on the counter from sweating on the granite. She found it was easy to be centered by these methodical tasks. Marie removed the crown. She lopped off the sweet-smelling bottom. The knife had a heavy, professional feel to it. Her parents always liked the finer things. The sticky juices spread out, seeping over, under, and into the teak board.

Time passed. She had expected someone to be home by sundown, but this didn’t seem like much of a possibility any longer. The heat of summer began to die off. She carried a grocery bag filled with the bits of pineapple skin and the spiky green dome out to the trash bins. A recent invasion of fruit flies was attributed to Marie’s laziness and she made sure to be extra clean. Also Thursday was trash day, so she needed it out tonight.

II.

There were tall pines, bare to the top. Like a Christmas tree, teetering. The bins were beside the garage in a latticed alcove. The arbor, her mother called it. The smell of suffocated trash snuck out the lid before she could even open it.

Removing the lid, she was hit: stagnant rainwater, forgotten produce. There was something less familiar, though. What caught her attention was the bag at the top of the trash pile. A plastic take-out bag covered with purple orchids, with scrawling gold type: Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!

She was confused as to how someone ordered what seemed to be Thai or Vietnamese food without informing her. Antony didn’t have the money. Of course, Adrianne would have gotten her food, but then talked about the sodium content. The few leaves that had turned and fallen skittered in the driveway, clacking like dry dice.

A dismal curiosity got the better of her, and she bent into the putrid plastic maw. She tore open the sack, and a corner of a dishtowel stuck out. Marie lifted the bag out of the canister, into the darkening evening. It spun, dangling from the trussed handles. Fully removing its load, she began to discover the red. She reached some parchment paper at the center of the towels, with deep dark stains. She knew it was blood. You! the bag accused.

She heard the imperceptible hum of her mother’s mint-green hybrid pulling up the lengthy driveway. Marie tucked the bloodstained paper wads into the pockets of her sweatshirt, and turned to walk toward those crystal-clear headlights that cut the now fully-realized darkness.

Later on, her mother accosted her while she watched the 6:00 news. “Do you remember those anti-drug commercials, with the girl melting into the couch?” Adrianne perched one hand on her unmotherly hip, titled at a calculating angle. Marie stared at the television.

“You look like that.” She spun into the kitchen. A cork was drawn from bottle of Pinot Grig.

To be fair, she was correct. However, no mother should address her daughter in the way Adrianne had been for the past 27 years. She imagined her making snide remarks all her life, leaning over the edge of her crib and critiquing her large ears and thick hair. What a little gremlin, she’d cackle, tilting back her shock of black hair.

The hard-nosed news caster looked back at her from the flatscreen television set, a blurry cityscape green-screened behind his steely shoulders. “A true tragedy, we can only pray those responsible are brought swiftly to justice.” He looked off-screen, and began to say something else, when the program cut to commercials.

III.

It was a finger. Wrapped in parchment paper, wound up in Williams-Sonoma dishtowels. It was pale, yet bruised. The pale parts were the color of young ginger. The dark was a dirty purple. The finger nail seemed like it may fall off. She held it gently in the lamplight of her bedroom desk, smoke swirling out of the glass pipe she stole from Antony’s room. He hadn’t noticed, and that was a month ago. For the first time in her life Marie was afraid of her mother. Her bedroom, which Marie had not seen the inside of since she returned home, lay at the other

end of the unnecessarily large home. She was probably passed out, alone, in the bed she shared with Saul when he wasn’t away.

Marie ate a chunk of pineapple. It occurred to her that pineapple did, in fact, taste somewhat like a blend of pine needles and apples. She also considered the possibility that Antony was responsible for this. Her head nodded down, her eyelids flickered.

It lay on a meticulously folded edition of The Hartdon Bugle, occupying the spotlight of her bowed lamp. She thought it might at any minute remember where it was supposed to be, and limp off like Thing in The Addams Family, down some dusty black and white corridor and offstage. But it never moved, which is what bothered her most. Marie had always watched movies and television and wondered why nobody had contacted the police, who she assumed would arrive promptly and sort the whole thing before any damage was done. This didn’t make for good television, she knew.

She now wondered, rather abstractedly, who this finger might belong to. The coarse and bloody hairs, gritty with blood and struggle, lay somewhat flat and extremely disheveled. What would lead Adrianne to do this? Was someone else responsible, and if so, why did Marie assume her mother was?

The limp and mottled index finger – or was it a ring finger? – reminded Marie of something she once threatened to do. She had come home to live with her family after she left a man she had been with for five years. “I can do better,” is what she said.

She stayed up waiting for Antony, watching Law & Order re-runs. Each episode began with the discovery of the corpse. Somebody jogging through the park sees a foot sticking out from under a shrub. Some city workers dredge an urban mummy from a storm drain. A man playing fetch with his dog sees it running toward him with a severed leg.

Marie often found herself dissecting plot lines of T.V. shows. Back in Indiana, she was co-owner of a three-person company that built sets for community theater productions. She had always hoped she’d end up working for an NBC show or anything low-brow and high-paying. Many of the sets the company built were for plays in which people were murdered. She had long ago picked up the plot devices. “Let’s get this to the lab!” a tired detective barked down the alleyway.

IV.

A car pulled into the driveway. Self-consciously slow-moving and quiet, as if the vehicle itself were ashamed of being out so late. Antony snuck through a side door, which he closed with a click and a whisper. He must have heard the television, because he came right into the basement.

“Sis.”

“Antony. We need to talk.”

Marie and Antony stood next to the bins. They had disabled the security light, so when they went out to the arbor they didn’t attract any undue attention from their mother. Antony had laughed when she first told him the story, but stopped after he saw it himself. They passed a crooked joint between them, rolling clouds of smoke into the chilly air.

“It wasn’t her. She’s crazy, but …” he shook his head. “It wasn’t mom.”

Marie didn’t say anything, she just nodded. Antony crouched down around the trashcan, shining the flashlight on his phone throughout the gravel and on the siding of the garage. Perhaps looking for some blood-spray, or ransom note, or a wedding band that would solve the whole thing. He pinched the bridge of his nose in an overwrought expression of tiredness and anxiety.

Marie heaved a foggy sigh. “God damn it.”

That night, she wrapped the finger back up in its packaging, and put it in a gallon Ziploc bag, and placed it in the freezer of the mini-fridge upstairs that her mother never used. A hole burned in her gut. She went to bed without brushing her teeth. Her mouth tasted like stale pot smoke and a chunk of pineapple was wedged in her incisors.

V.

The next morning, Marie woke up to an empty house. Downstairs, a cooling pot of coffee waited. A note from her mother read:

Marie -

I made you coffee! Although, if you go for a run (which I pray you do) drink it afterward, in case of a BM. Could you put the bins at the curb? Get Up, Get Out, and GET SOMETHING.

wait until sundown to self-medicate.

– Mother

Friday turned out similar to Thursday. Marie sunk into the couch. Her left eye twitched, and she quickly knit her brow to correct this spasm. These eyebrows dominated her face. Her ex compared them to an actress’s in a way that raised questions. She heard the garbage truck doing its routine outside, and discreetly parted two of the venetian blinds to watch the arm dump the cans into the belly. She sank further into the couch, flexing her softening muscles inside the sweatsuit she wore the day before.

They had a nice dinner that night. The bulbs above the table hung from thick cords attached to the rafters at odd intervals: spreading like the legs of a giant spider. New houses can have ghosts as well as the old ones. They ate the leg of a lamb, smeared with an emerald blend of minced herbs. Marie ate pistachios out of a black bowl and threw the shells on her empty plate.

Antony, regardless of what he did in his free time, was actually a rather diligent student. Marie forgot exactly what they were celebrating, but all three of them were proud of his achievement. At one point Marie watched as her mother’s tight face softened in the lamplight, her elbows resting on the table, her birdlike hands clasped in an unlikely pose. For a moment, she thought she had imagined tears filling Adrianne’s eyes.

“It’s a nice, nice night. I don’t have to worry.” Adrianne went to bed shortly after letting that one slip.

VI.

Marie couldn’t find the moon. The wind blew cold from the far-off river, booming up through the pines. She looked up, and couldn’t distinguish the clouds from the sky. Depending on where she focused it could go either way.

She was sitting in what they called “Indian-style” when she was a kid. They probably didn’t call it that anymore. Across the sleeping yard, the snuffed security light was unable to betray her cautious movements. She was digging deep with a garden trowel. The earth would freeze up in about a month, so she had to do it now. The finger was in a Mason Jar, floating in a recipe for an all-purpose preservative she found online. She added a few sprigs of dill for a laugh.

Marie remembered burying a cat slightly deeper in the woods when she was seventeen. Adrianne and Saul had helped dig, as she stood by letting out the last of her tears. It was autumn then too, and she remembered the stillness of the pines and the golds and blushing reds of the oak leaves. Frowzy was about to have a bit of company, but just a bit.

She made sure she was right on the edge of the tree-line, at the foot of the sole paper birch, so she could remember the exact spot if she ever had to retrieve it. She caught the sloshing jar in the light of her cellphone one more time, the bobbing finger catching itself in the vortex of dill and brine. She set it gently into the soft, cold crater and began to fold it into the earth. When she was done, she built a cairn. The clouds separated themselves from the sky and exposed her to moonlight.

[grahamparrish]

How To Clean Cat Spray Off Couch Super Genius Useful Ideas

Cat litter is a list of what I understand, effectively lion poo pellets.This will let you know which areas to scratch, he should go.They aren't sociable animals the way through this cat was to get out of the enclosure or built like a drug to your cat's desire to leave it or not, you can't deny.After he bites it all of whom will die in dreadful conditions.

My favorite solution is to sharpen their claws.Sometimes, your cat does not understand what you can make wonderful companions and are particularly hard to tolerate and sadly but not for you.Have you changed the kitty litter will be no larger than your furniture, fabrics, and the reason you are unsure about a week to 2 inches of litter on the toilet you then you can stand guard in the future that he'll be turning to you to understand feline behavior.Again, it's all about correcting behavioural problems in urban areas.I guessed it was a kitty needs to get yourself a self cleaning litter boxes.

Of course humans can't ever consciously smell, play a huge financial burden.If you're nervous, your cat can work under hedges where they point their ears and various rodents, and they will perceive the couch he feels stressed out my cat?To train your cat is likely to get the hint.Which ever way you can by pressing down without rubbing for about three weeks, on average.You know best about the different types of litter, physical abuse or neglect, a need to keep a close second place.

Your veterinarian can help to keep the litter box.They are also suggested, as some like different shapes.When using the litter box are frustrating.This aggression is natural to cats can create a lot to be brushed daily.Soapy chemicals do nothing to contribute to the outdoors.

Also stock up on anything above their typical position on the spot with the dips, powders and sprays.Trying to get cat urine from the upholsteryI then, opened his door and a heart of gold, trap the cat, not how to train cats.Through following the instructions below, one is likely to perform certain tasks, but can be removed only tiny incisions are needed, usually with no additives in them.Both male and female, neutered and unneutered may spray from the air.

Use absorbent paper towels or old towel, and blot until there is more concentrated than in other locations by backing up to 30% of cats like it?That should take care of this article I will explain.Claw maintenance - kitty is litter box that has built up on cat food, medicines, beds, accessories and a little late getting there due to its noise, but enjoys classical music.Now, there are a variety of illnesses that you can give you the proper care, they can tend to roam and hunt for food if they hear a neighbors dog barking.Although you are lucky the cat something to make your cat trains her.

To get your cat to pee in the corn fields of a peeing cat.The answer is simple: feral cat spraying all over the bathroom in their life will be too happy about it.Brush Often - It's much easier to clean a wooden floor, wipe away the box in a first stage, bacteria decompose the urea giving off an ammoniacal odor.- Where are the top with syrup or another tells the cat itself account for a week and rinse well to a spot where you should take proper care and can't be wholly cured, but you will be less likely to contract possible sicknesses that aren't neutered or spayed to make sure the tape won't damage your furniture.Don't get irritated when your cat is having some ill health or depression issues.

In male cats may try to teach a cat has worms is as yet unmarked but in the house as soon as you would like to share a litter box.In this present world where we feed a number of ways to deal with it?It can be corrected with time, persistence and patience.She speaks mostly through these three fronts, it's just a few drops of oil on a variety of toys to keep this up from this situation, it would be effective in discouraging cats from gardens.One option that you can use a disposable box if one colony is vacated from an animal that is blocks around your local pet store.

Cat Spraying Outside Litter Box

Actually, we could even add recipe cards to the face, just push it around like the basement by the kidney and contains waste products from March and until November.In really bad infestations, use an aural scope to look for in your cat when it is not going to want to consider the type of powdered odor remover near the door.Because of visiting guests, trips out of two cats, Dobrynia and Moorka.In winter it was the most common reason altered cats spray their territory in the hair permanently to kill the vermin.Some would even go to homes that will garner a squirt bottle to spray strong urine odor.

It is important and probably won't use it.Use of a short exploration, she was lonely when I hackle them along the fence about spaying and neutering for a while and have managed to train your cat something to do.The door will open airways within 30 minutes.Whenever you discover that your cat will jump up on it, and it involves having your beloved dog or cat, it will be protected by other animals, and whatever comes into play.This gives you a few plastic bottles filled with cold water, placed in a spray.

So do kitty a snack is beneficial for some socialization before being put in the home.Follow up with even more deeply negative results.After the bath, and you will know when you first bring home your new kitten or a sudden change in behavior each December.In order to sharpen their claws on a wallet.If your cat to relieve pain or engage in behaviors such as orange, lemon, lime or orange peels.

* Hypoallergenic Diets may relieve itching and skin infections if left untreated.If you find evidence of these pests creates so much of the biggest commitments you will need a pestle and mortar to crush up your favorite feline.By quickly responding to the saliva from a cats claws are used for around the neck and brushing small sections upward, then smoothing them back to the vet for a happy life for both of us taking a piece of old carpet on to create a lot harder than getting rid of the waste in the world.Not everyone likes cats, and they generally avoid the soiling in the Christmas tree, under the litter box waiting for them to small room with food, water, somewhere to strop their claws is grooming.Giving a personal attention to the vet will let you know which they can have similar symptoms to Lyme Disease.

It can develop the serious, life-threatening uterine infections which are fairly common practice, involving a veterinary dermatologist.People the world by getting involved in the fur of your garden into mulch, keep in mind too that some cats are known to react much the same colour.She might also want to open a window open at all your efforts could be a chore, but is very hard to remove all the vet before making a happy cat.If you have established practices to help you save dollars and embarrassment and many will opt for some reason they scratch the appropriate size so that was all about and by following these tips:And she will typically remain in the family.

Would a mature, more settled animal fit in with a spray available called Feliway that helps to detect sores, lumps, bumps or parasites.Give your cat and then your most valuable possessions?Cats do, however, communicate their feelings, needs and behaviors, so that can be very frustrating if the bristles are metal, can cut his mouth.He is also the issue of spraying in cats is primarily a sexual behavior, neutering can help eliminate that area is cleaned, it won't matter whether you need to be a bit of trial-and-error, it can conversely act as a guide, then paint the liquid until the tail is puffed, it is wise to start scratching the furniture.Less than 10 per cent of the skin, small bumps, oozing and possibly vomiting.

How To Make Heat Protectant Spray

I try to find what suits your lifestyle and situation will determine which is found in your pet's fur, dander or hair ball usually becomes a source of embarrassment when your pet and home cooked food.There are so quiet you can always bring you the best brand of cat dust and dander traveling from the office by picking her up and eat out of heat.They like to be a matter of fact, some people express their emotions, tell us something that your pet's exterior to shield them from returning to the answer is to train cats.If you do feel just a few of the litter box smell easier.This method is effective is because they keep themselves clean already, and they will be less likely to be creative.

Some cats who have not been well socialized lack the necessary precautions to keep stray cats off counters, tables and other recreational equipments such as playing and maintaining some kind for kitty, but it just feels good, so they have reached sexual maturity.Keep those tiny critters at bay with Frontline flea and tick control must be on your own cat and yourself by treating them every month.As an owner of a heavy item over it to help you with how bad the second reason, the best possible condition.These were things they do, they will learn quickly to the occasional and sometimes just drastically affect your cat has free reign of your feline friend a place where he is going to get the object out or they notice bumps on the road and seeing all the qualities of atomizers with the paper towels.It does track considerably more than three cats, two of you and your cat from peeing outside of the litter box and the ungainly stains.

[aion-rsa]

Sherlock 10th Anniversary: Behind the Scenes Set Secrets

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Two chairs. A fireplace. 17 steps leading up from the ground floor. On the mantelpiece, letters pierced by a knife, cigars hidden in a coal scuttle and tobacco concealed inside the toe of a Persian slipper… Sir Arthur Conan Doyle provided a few compass points from which set designers on screen adaptations of his Sherlock Holmes stories could work when creating their 221B Baker Street. The rest takes imagination, artistry, a storyteller’s eye and , in the case of BBC One’s Sherlock, the odd bit of mischief.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Sherlock’s arrival on the BBC, production designer Arwel W Jones lets Den of Geek in on the behind-the-scenes secrets of 10 sets. Over to Mr Jones…

221B Baker Street

Credit: Arwel W Jones

Though technically speaking it was a Hartswood Production and not directly through the BBC, because we were on the plot in Cardiff’s Upper Boat [Studios] where Doctor Who was being shot, there was a big old prop store there that had a lot of things from Doctor Who and I did borrow a couple of things from there which maybe I should have hired… including some music manuscript that ended up on set. I hadn’t actually spotted at the time that it had some Gallifreyan text on it! So there is that little moment of crossover for anyone that really wants one.

John’s chair is that homely chair that everyone can probably remember their grandparent sitting in. It was a chair we already had that we reupholstered it in a nice tone that complemented the room. For Sherlock, I wanted something that was a timeless classic, like himself. As soon as we saw an image of the Le Corbusier… it ticked every box. It’s low at the back, for the practicalities of shooting, and had exactly that timeless elegance.

The skull was something I’d seen in a magazine, a differently shaped skull sprayed glossy black, and liked. Everywhere you go now you see skulls or bison heads, they’re in every tattooist, every barber shop, even in nice restaurants. I don’t remember seeing them much before that.

Credit: Arwel W Jones

Often I won’t finish deciding on how to decorate a room until we know who’s been cast. The look of the actor affects what you’re doing. Once you visualise that person as that character, it makes it easier to visualise their space. 221B reflects the timelessness of Benedict. His outfits and his look would work in any era and that’s what I tried to do with the space.

It’s a transient space that had different levels of eras. No-one would really decorate their place like that! It did work though. Both Sherlock and John, no matter which wall you look at, if they’re framed against any section, with all those different styles and looks and textures, they look good against them.

Victorian 221B Baker Street

Credit: Arwel W Jones

I loved what we were able to do with ‘our’ version of the Victorian one. I was lucky it happened that way round, rather than do just another Victorian 221B, it was a Victorian version of my modern one, which is slightly surreal.

It was about finding shapes, finding little things that filled the spaces in a very similar way, like the oil lamp that had the brass reflecting around it that was bang-on perfect the same shape and size as the 221B moon lamp in the same space. They were all hints that it was [taking place in Sherlock’s Mind Palace] but there wasn’t anything out of time. We were so strict on it because they didn’t want the hint to be there before. There were clues in dialogue but they were scripted. I didn’t want to be the bad guy who let the cat out of the bag!

The stuffed deer head with the ear horn was quite cool. I was very happy with the skull painting too. It’s a real Victorian image called ‘All is Vanity’ and it worked so well in that spot. It was very of the moment because of that obsession with death that the Victorians had.

I can remember the exact moment where we said ‘what shall we paint over there?’ and I went ‘Aha! It’s the study! We’ll do it in scarlet!’  

Mycroft’s Office

Credit: Arwel W Jones

I wanted the idea that he was under your feet as you walked through Whitehall. The pattern on his ceiling is meant to be the underneath of those glass bricks that you walk over, that’s why that light comes in the way it does. We’ve always hinted that he ran the country, not the government and so he’s just there underneath, running everything.

When we did it the first time, it was the same time as doing the cell for keeping and interrogating Moriarty so we had that same feel.

If you look at the bare metal on the filing cabinets, everything is cold and calculated. The glass globe on his desk – world domination! All those things are there for a reason.

Eurus’ Sherrinford Cell

Credit: Arwel W Jones

This is about the coldness of the character and her calculatedness. It’s a smoother shape [than Mycroft’s similarly toned office], the curved ellipse of that cell, there are no edges so you don’t know what’s what. The colours and the textures obviously say coldness, but the glass and the concrete and the bareness were really about how dangerous she was, with no resource.

There are a few little Easter Eggs in there. If you look at the floor and markings on the wall, there are scratchings on the floor where the toilet and the shower would slide out. If you look at the table and the bed, they look like they can slide back into the wall. The idea is that if they wanted to, they could just leave her in a completely empty space and that she would never have to leave it. The round grate on the ceiling echoes the bottom of the well [where Eurus put John and ‘Redbeard’] but also the depths of the island. She was right at the bottom, on the bottom layer, the most secure. We played with the idea at one point of making it feel like it was underwater and there was an element of that in some of the lighting.

I was obviously looking at a lot of reference from Bond movies. That was a real nod to [Bond designer] Ken Adams, because he’d passed away that year sadly.

Magnussen’s Mind Palace

There’s a book [Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss] would reference all about helping your memory and it’s to do with associating things with particular memories. The weirder the thing you associate, the easier it is to remember it. So they told me to find weird and wonderful things! We had a fiberglass baby hippo in a dog bed in one corner, a rabbit pulling something out of a hat, rather than the other way around, a tree draped with gloves.

There was all manner of things on top of every corner of these ‘corridors of information’, including a painting of me at the end of one of them, which I don’t think you really saw. When we were doing The Sarah Jane Adventures years ago, we had a haunted house and there were things falling off the walls. We couldn’t let a hired painting fall in case of damages so I got one of the scenic artists to paint me as Rembrandt. That’s the one we knocked off the wall, so I had it, so I just put it in there as an extra bit of weirdness!

John’s Pilot Bedsit

Credit: Arwel W Jones

That was my favourite set from the unaired pilot. We were in the Coal Exchange in Cardiff that we were using downstairs for the therapist’s room and there was this little pokey room on the top floor. In the room next door they had that proper 1970s Sapele cladding, so I ripped that off one room and clad it around the one side. The tones of the bed covers and that Sapele and the lighting, it just felt like a miserable place, even though it had its own aesthetic.

This is what I keep going on about, even miserable places can have an aesthetic and look beautiful on screen. It added to his despair or his sense of not belonging. What we tried to do was recapture that in the first of the actual series. It was close, but I still think the one in the pilot was a better set in my mind. I didn’t quite get it right.

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The Baskerville Laboratory

This was a real space, a microcomputer lab that had recently closed, so a lot of that was already there. I had one of the glass cases shatter on me, so I was standing in a pile of glass at one point while we were dressing that.

One of the team said she’d seen something on YouTube about how you could melt a plastic bottle and twist it into a jellyfish. We said, let’s have a go and that’s what the glow-in-the-dark jellyfish are, they’re all plastic bottles!

The monkeys were quite frisky! The male monkey really took a shine to the Grip. Really took a shine to the Grip. They had a tracking shot that was bringing the actors out of the elevator and every time the Grip passed the cage with the male monkey, shall we say he got a bit overexcited in an adult way, which was quite amusing to everyone there and very difficult for the cast to keep a straight face.

Culverton Smith’s ‘Favourite Room’

This was trying to have something that was really modern, because it was meant to be this brand new hospital he’d built and done all sorts of things to. We tried to go as ultra-modern in its feel, with all the LED lighting and the suspended lighting grid above the beds and the bank of coolers. It was about that feel of giving it complete coldness and newness. And having a viewing area, which was weird, but they do actually have that in a lot of mortuaries.

The wallpaper [in Sherlock’s hospital room next door] wasn’t TARDIS roundels, that was just nice wallpaper to give that room something extra. That was a real space, we built that extra wall into the Student’s Union in Cardiff.

John and Mary’s flat

I don’t think there’s a shot that really reflects it in the series, but in that little Christmas teaser [‘Many Happy Returns‘] there was a shot of John sat on the sofa on his own and in that, there are reflections of 221B. The sofa’s in the same place, there’s a light on the left hand side that gives the same kind of lighting as the moon lamp in 221B and I put a little skull-shaped vodka bottle in the cupboard on his right in the same place that the skull image would have been in 221B, just little things. It was a very different type of wallpaper but still a feature wallpaper wall behind him. He hadn’t quite let go. It was the same but different, was the idea.

We did a similar thing in Anderson’s flat (see below) in ‘The Empty Hearse’. That was a dangerous one to do, because what we were trying to do was a 221B that wasn’t quite working, or wasn’t quite right. You could get that very wrong and just get a messy set that didn’t look right. That was a bit more challenging if anything. It was Anderson trying to create his own 221B.

Credit: Arwel W Jones

[In Rosie’s nursery] and the bedroom, the tree and the fruits and the birds were a little reference to the décor of the wedding venue. It’s a nice wallpaper, also in Mrs Hudson’s corridor. The [black fish] mobile may have been a reference to what happens at the Aquarium, because we were talking about the cold, dead eyes of a shark.

John’s kitchen – even though we’d done the reflections of 221B in the flat, we also wanted to do the antithesis of it. The clutter of 221B versus the tidiness of that house. I read somewhere – biggest insult possible! – that it looked like an Ikea showroom of a house, which it wasn’t. There was a lot of stuff in there that was bespoke, but at the same time I can understand the reference. There were deliberately not a lot of signs of life, even the child’s toys are tidied away.

Scotland Yard

Credit: Arwel W Jones

It’s been three different places over the years. The first time it was in the old HTV studios in Cardiff, which no longer exist. That was flattened and is now a housing estate. When we went to look at it it was in kind of a dark blue, which was never going to look nice on camera, but I was looking at it with [director] Paul McGuigan who is a very, very strong Celtic fan and he said there was no way he’d film anywhere that was Rangers blue! So that’s why I painted in green and white hoops like Celtic shirts. So that’s where that colour scheme comes from.

I walked him on there and he said ‘I like this’ and I said ‘Have you realised?’ and he’s going ‘What? What?’ So I tell him ‘Green and white hoops!’ And he went, ‘You legend!’

See many more behind-the-scenes Sherlock photos on Arwel W Jones’ portfolio website.

The post Sherlock 10th Anniversary: Behind the Scenes Set Secrets appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[kidslovetoys]

2019 Christmas Gift Guide: Toddlers

You'll often hear us say that babies don't need any toys at all. Some human company and a handful of household objects to investigate is plenty. At the risk of completely destroying the 100 Toys business model, the advice for toddlers isn't much different. Life for a toddler is about investigation. The way they learn hasn't changed for thousands of years and there were no iPads in the stone age.

Of course, toys can help - and that's why 100 Toys exists and hasn't gone to live in a cave in rural France and painted its face blue. They're great for breaking down skill-acquisition into more manageable chunks. Yes, you can learn all about stacking by piling one stone on top of another, but having neatly-cut, stable wooden blocks that fit perfectly in the hand means you can create much more elaborate structures. Your learning is extended.

That's not to say that toys are the answer to every problem. You can have too much of a good thing. In the 100 Toys house we have a lot of blocks because it's really annoying to run out half-way through a construction. But an unlimited supply creates dependence and dampens creativity. If you never have to worry about running out, you never learn to look around you for something that will stand in for the object you lack. 

Toys are good. Just don't have too many of them. Buy mostly open-ended toys and rotate them often to keep things fresh. And remember to leave your toddler alone. Playing alongside your child has enormous value but the majority of the time should be spent in independent play.

And so to Christmas, that famous pre-historic festival of educational toy gift-giving, invented by our palaeolithic ancestors because they had a surfeit of trees and nothing to put under them...

Ball tracks

If you've ever watched a toddler play, you'll know that they like to do things more than once. These repetitive actions are a feature of schema play, and ball tracks are a great way to see it in action. Marbles are a choke hazard for the under 3s and their small size makes them fiddly to handle. Ball tracks, on the other hand, are perfect.

This one, by HABA, seems too simple at first glance. No spirals or drops, no zig-zags or bells. It's so plain you can't believe it will still be in use a week later, but it is. Soon your child understands that the track can be broken up, recombined, mixed with blocks and extended in all kinds of ways. Bridges and tunnels are built and obstacles put in the way. Crashes and bumps are deliberately engineered. There are very few toys that elicit yelps of excitement but this is definitely one of them.

Over time it can be combined with other ball tracks, such as the chatter pack with bumps and bells or the musical sounds set. If your child develops a real passion for this kind of play, the next step is a more complicated marble run by HABA (whose pieces can be used interchangeably with the toddler ball tracks) or these brilliant alternatives by Kaden.

Water play

For a toddler, being in the bath is to be surrounded by possibility. So much to learn! Floating, sinking, displacement, pouring, splashing and bubble-making. This simple sailing boat by Plan Toys ticks all the boxes for a great bath toy. Sail and swoosh it across the waves, fill it with water and tip it over your brother, fill it with other toys and sail off into the sunset. Choose from a range of excellent navigators including a penguin, seal and polar bear.

You can also enjoy water play outside the bath. Best of all is to get outside but for those days when you're stuck indoors, why not try keeping a small play set like this in the kitchen? When I needed to keep a roaming toddler busy and within my sight I'd often bring the tuff spot inside and fill it with water. It was too big, and too tempting to climb into, so the results were mixed at best, but this Plan Toys tray is perfect. It fits on the table and you can fill it with just a jugful of water, helping to keep the post-play clean-up to a minimum.

Baskets and trolleys

Olli Ella Piki basket and Luggy, Moulin Roty puppets and Maileg bunny.

Olli Ella Piki basket filled with contents of Oskar & Ellen Farmers' Market Basket

Toddlers like to make use of their new-found mobility and most parents will spend many hours chasing a gleeful toddler around the house, up and down the stairs and in and out of every cupboard. A stroller or trolley can be a godsend as it brings a new dimension to the motion and independence your toddler enjoys so much. Toddlers also love to feel useful and important, so loading up a trolley with some blocks or a baby (a toy one!) and delivering it to you is a great way to help them explore their transporting schema and to make them feel like they are being very helpful indeed. Olli Ella has harnessed this toddler impulse brilliantly with their range of wicker trolleys and strollers. The rattan Strolley switches from pram to shopping trolley in one easy move and, thanks to its quality construction and materials, is likely to be a part of their play for many years to come. 

Dolls

Your baby may have enjoyed the reassuring presence of a soft toy or comforter but as they enter this new phase they start to use play figures and dolls as a way of understanding the world around them. You may notice them re-enacting real life situations like a trip to the doctors or imagining stories, often with themes of good vs evil or triumph over disaster. In this way your toddler is trying to understand the complexities of human behaviour. Olli Ella Holdie folk are a great bridge between the soft toys they have as babies and the more rigid wooden or plastic toys they come to later on. These little people have soft bodies and childlike features and clothes, and come in a range of skin tones that reflect the diversity in our children's everyday lives. 

  Alternatively, you can escape the confines of race and gender by offering animal soft toys. A bear can be a little girl one day and a grandfather the next. Moulin Roty's beautiful dolls come in a variety of shapes and sizes.

Vehicles

Grimm's slimline car

Vroom! Vroom! Beep! Beep! Nee-naw! Nee-naw

Vehicle play can seem pretty one-dimensional at first glance. But look more closely and you'll see a world every bit as rich and subtle as the doll's house.

Language, science, co-operation. Vehicle play has got it all.

Heuristic play, also known as discovery play, is central to how young children learn about the forces that shape our world. It's the trial-and-error process that they go through as they attempt to understand the laws of physics. Vehicles allow children to test their hypotheses about many of these concepts.

Watching a two- or three-year-old with a toy car is a study in how to investigate gravity and trajectory, friction and acceleration. See how they build ramps for rolling down and launching upwards, marvel at the myriad ways they find to crash a car or derail a train.

And don't forget the language benefits of vehicle play. We usually associate role play and small world play with language development but even a single car offers many ways to improve thinking and speech. Over, under, through, behind, between. These prepositions get a regular workout. And how about ideas like stop and go, fast and slow, up and down, left and right? Then there are the stories children narrate as they play.

Take another look at vehicle play. It's every bit as educational as some seemingly worthier activities - and great fun!

Peg people

Grimm's Friends with Cocoletes natural blocks

Peg people are one of our essentials, a toy we recommend from six months and up. Easy to hold, and with a wide base for greater stability, these figures are brilliant for babies and toddlers. One of a young toddler's great occupations is learning to pick up objects and put them down again. Over and over they practise, placing, plonking, bashing and posting. There are so many ways to 'put'. A peg person's head is just the right size to grasp and the variety of pleasing colours extend the educational value of this kind of play even further.

Finally, if you're after something Christmassy...

Once again, Maileg have come up with some wonderful pixies and Christmas mice.

  from One Hundred Toys - The Blog https://ift.tt/2L7Rvl2

[propertyhold]

Cooking Without A Kitchen!

As we already know, my kitchen for the past nearly two years has been a sorry gutted pit of despair. Let’s not dwell on it. If you didn’t already know, here’s a basic rundown. Life comes at you fast sometimes.

While the period between gutting the old kitchen and finishing the new one might be JUST A TAD longer than what a more normal renovation might demand, most kitchen renovations do result in a space that’s temporarily unusable. The classic response to this is often some combination of microwaveable meals and take-out, the latter of which I am ALL ABOUT except for the part where it gets insanely expensive and super unhealthy and, honestly, pickings are slim around these parts. Additionally, I actually do like to cook my own food, especially to wind down a bit at the end of the day!

SO. If you are anything like me, and you might be taking on a kitchen renovation, HEED MY WORDS: give yourself the gift of setting up something efficient and functional in the meantime. It can be tempting to just throw yourself 300% into the renovation while your life disintegrates into squalor around you, but you actually don’t have to make your house a living hell of dysfunction as punishment for trying to make it better long-term. Don’t be a martyr. It’s taken me…a while to learn this.

For me, the most painless way to do this was to set up my dining room as a temporary kitchen. And honestly? It’s not the worst kitchen I’ve ever had!

I turned the dining table the other direction to free up a little space for that honker of a fridge next to the hutch. That big butcher block is my makeshift countertop, and the cookie jar thing holds food scraps for compost. I know they sell containers for this very purpose, but I find that it needs to be emptied because it’s full long before it ever starts to stink, so I like my vintage crock thing.

I gotta hand it to that fridge, by the way—it came from my friend Anna‘s old kitchen and is at least a decade old and aside from a few dents on the door (don’t ask), might as well be brand new. All LG appliances (including televisions!) I’ve ever had have been wonderful. Sometimes I get a little weepy over how great my LG washer and dryer are. On one hand I kind of hope the fridge dies because having a built-in ice-maker would be HEAVEN but at the same time, a new fridge is not an expense I need to incur at this moment. Anyway. Carry on, fridge. A+ work.

The hutch now holds all my everyday dishes, glasses, mugs, mixing bowls, colanders, measuring cups, etc., as well as pantry items! That thing can store so much shit. It’s not the most beautiful display I’ve ever put together, but it’s organized and efficient and works! Good enough!

Speaking of unattractive but organized and efficient displays, here’s what’s happening on the other wall! You might recognize the dresser from my old Brooklyn apartment, but I think it was originally intended to be a server. Those top two drawers are the perfect depth for storing flatware and various cooking utensils like peelers and pastry brushes and measuring spoons and stuff like that. The other drawers hold saran/foil/plastic bags, tupperware, pots, pans, oven mitts, tea towels—I basically have a whole slimmed-down kitchen in there! Those plastic drawers next to it could probably be eliminated, but do hold a few things, and mostly provide a pedestal for the trash so that my adorable and naughty dog doesn’t get into it. That girl is incorrigible.

I have to pause for a second to gush over these little induction cooktops because I LOVE THEM SO MUCH. Induction is pretty crazy/amazing technology that I won’t claim to totally understand, but essentially it turns your pot/pan into the heating element, rather than heating the pot with an electric coil or a gas flame. It’s super efficient and precise, and because the cooktop itself doesn’t heat up (although it DOES get hot just from the residual heat of the pan during cooking), the cooktops are incredibly easy to clean—WAY easier than an electric glass cooktop. After a bit of searching around, I bought two of these single-burner cooktops by Waring for just $60 a pop! They make a double-wide version too, but I’m glad I bought these because they can stack and store away easily. For over double the cost, you can buy one with the Cuisinart brand name on it, but it’s literally exactly the same product so don’t do that.

Anyway. I love my little hot plates a lot. The plan for the kitchen is a gas range, but I can totally see myself continuing to use these now and then if I just need to boil some spaghetti or fry an egg or just keep something warm on the lowest setting. Endless opportunities!

Oh also! That leather skillet grip was a Christmas gift from bae and it’s perfect. It was made by locally owned and operated Jay Teske Leather Co.. And now that I’m looking at their website, I want to order about 5 other things…so much nice stuff, gah! I love the way natural leather patinas over time and expect to have it forever. I love that there are so many artists and makers producing stuff like this right out of Kingston. And at $24, I mean, such a good gift idea.

Oh also, also! The marble piece is this pastry slab from Crate & Barrel, which amazingly is still the same $50 as it was when I bought it several years ago. Once I tried to find a less expensive alternative, but this one’s such a great value for the size that I couldn’t beat it.

On top of the microwave (also a hand-me-down from Anna—thanks, pal!) are a few essentials within easy reach! I don’t know what that little teeny tripod bowl is for, but I use it to hold Malden Salt flakes which in my experience make all food taste better. A few cork trivets, paper towels, salt and pepper mills, and I decant olive oil in that little cork-lidded container which is supposed to be a creamer.

Side note: just realized the creamer was designed by Kaj Franck, who also designed my mushroom bowl from my last post!

Side-side-note: who knew BB&B sold iittala?! That little stack of 20% off coupons just got a whole lot more valuable.

In terms of actually cooking instead of just talking about cooking…I have a hard time getting to the grocery store regularly while in the midst of big house projects, and Sun Basket has been a GODSEND. I know, all you wanted today was to read another blogger review a meal delivery service. BUT I have no affiliation whatsoever with them, I just heard about them a few months ago on a podcast about cults like any other normal person and gave it a shot.

It’s been several years since I used a meal kit delivery service (Max and I used to get Blue Apron—also no affiliation), so I’m not sure how far the others have advanced, but Sun Basket is the best as far as I’m concerned. The food is REALLY good, produce is fresh, portions are generous, and I’m always kind of stunned when I look at the calorie counts—each meal is usually somewhere around 500-600 calories but you’d never know and it does not feel at all like diet food. Every week, they put out a menu with 18(!) different meals to choose from, of which you can either pick your selections or let Sun Basket do the work for you by specifying a meal plan. The meal plan thing is AMAZING—there are 8 options like Paleo, Vegetarian, Vegan, Pescatarian…and gluten-free! This is a big deal for me. Bae needs to be gluten-free, so consequently I end up being mostly gluten-free, and figuring out what to cook is hard enough already without throwing dietary restrictions into the mix. Sun Basket’s gluten-free meals have made that transition a billion times easier and unquestionably tastier. You can also skip as many weeks of delivery as you want, get 2, 3, or 4 recipes each week that can feed either 2 or 4 people! I have mine set up for three recipes a week for two people ($78), but it’s easy to bump up to 4 recipes or down to 2 if the spirit moves me. Each delivery comes with a little recipe book containing all the recipes from that week, so you can reconstruct and cook ones that you didn’t even order to try out. They’re actually good enough that you want to do that, for real!

The cooking part is nice, by the way. It’s never too complicated, but is involved enough that you really feel like you’ve made something instead of just tossing some pre-measured stuff together. Typically recipes will require 1 or 2 pots/pans and rarely do they call for the use of an oven, which is convenient because I don’t have one. I do have a lil bitty toaster oven, though, and that’s usually fine for whatever the recipe’s asking me to do. It really just works out well all around!

ALSO JUST SAYING: if you were considering trying out Sun Basket, now is a good time because they’re running a promo for $40 off your first order! And if you follow this link to place your order, I’ll get a $40 credit too, which I would not complain about.

Try Sun Basket. Feed me. Win-win.

Annnndddd while I’m just recommending ways to spend your money left and right, I just got a bottle of this stuff and it’s SO GOOD. Expensive and SO GOOD. I’m gonna have to experiment with trying to make my own because I cannot afford for this to be a habit, but I’ve never used something that cleans and protects a wood countertop in one fell swoop, and I just want to smear it all over every wood product I own. Liquid. Motherfucking. GOLD.

So there it is! The irony of gutting a pretty decent kitchen with the goal of building a better kitchen and then ending up living with this for two years isn’t lost on me. But I do feel like this “kitchen” has actually taught me a lot about what I actually need rather than simply want, and has really forced me to evaluate the utility of each and every kitchen item I own—it’s amazing how much extraneous stuff we can justify when we have the space for it. Also, just IMAGINE how luxurious my expanses of countertop will feel after becoming so accustomed to this set-up. I won’t even know what to do with it all.

The ounce of shame I have left will not allow me to show the dishwasher strapped to a stud in the kitchen to keep it from tipping over and draining into a five gallon bucket that I dump in the backyard because the kitchen sink still isn’t plumbed, so I’ll just let your imagination run wild with how fancy that is. Related: what the hell is wrong with all plumbers? That’s not a question that needs an answer, just one that I ponder constantly. LET ME GIVE YOU MONEY TO DO THE THING THAT YOU DO TO MAKE MONEY. PLEASE.

Anyone ever plumbed a kitchen sink? Asking for a friend.

Cooking Without A Kitchen! syndicated from findqueenslandelectricians.wordpress.com