Thirstiest Bitch Alive

1. Potatoes. Best starch and caloric yield per acre of just about any food.

2. Tomatoes. Easy to can or dry, tasty, high in nutrients.

3. Corn, beans, and squash, planted Three Sisters style. All are nutritious, and planted this way the beans put back into the soil the nitrogen the corn uses. If you plant dent or flour corn and dry beans and sun-dry the squash, all store well. 

4. Mint. It’s useful for minor aches and pains in salve, it’s good for upset stomachs, and it’s quite tasty.

5. Hot peppers. Tasty, and also useful for aches and pains.

If you have the room, fruit and nut trees appropriate to grow zones. They're hard to find in some areas (*seethes in Texan*) but if you can get dwarf citrus trees they do great in pots and can be overwintered indoors in places with cold winters. Great source of vitamin C.

Blackberries are hard to kill, there are thornless varieties and you can train them up against a wall or fence so they take up little space. They freeze well and add some good variety to your diet.

The Backyard Homestead is a book with good ideas for making the most of small spaces to garden.

If you want to raise animals for protein, chickens can provide eggs and meat, and rabbits take up little space and grow fast. Only problem with the latter is they may just be too cute when the time comes.

If you have a bit of room, Nigerian dwarfs are miniature diary goats. They don't take up a lot of space and while they don't give as much milk as the full sized breeds, what they do give is very, very rich.

Also; Egyptian walking onions. Grow them. They’re PERENNIAL ONIONS. That taste super onion-y. That you plant once, and then can pick onions off the top forever.

Disabled Person: *is ambitious, career oriented, and serious* Ableists: An inspiration! Even though they should have just laid down and died, they decided to have a life instead! They’re handicapable! They do normal people things despite being so abnormal. Gosh I feel so empowered right now.

Disabled Person: *is contented, self care oriented, and easy going* Ableists: God they don’t even try. They’ve just accepted their fate and have resigned themself to never achieving anything. They’ll be a burden on their family forever. It’s so sad. What’s the point of being alive is you don’t do anything?

Disabled Person: *finds their symptoms frightening, painful, embarassing, or unpleasant* Ableists: We must save them! We must find a way to end disability forever! We must find a cure for everything! Their life is such a horrible misery. We should make sure that nobody is ever forced to be like them ever again.

Y'all are thinking of the water as n ingredient- what you gotta do is think of it like an oven.

Think about baking cookies- you can have all the best ingredients, all the perfect measurements, all the right consistency- but if the oven is too hot or you leave the dough in for the wrong amount of time, you don’t have cookies, you have sludge or charcoal.

With tea, the water is the oven.

White and green teas are delicate and prone to scalding- IE, the cookies burn easy. Put the water to a low boil, with small bubbles- tiny, like pinheads- and pour the water onto your leaves in the teapot to steep for 1-2 minutes- one teaspoon of tea per cup of water. Then strain the tea without squeezing the leaves- squeezing and crushing releases more of the natural tannins, which are healthy for you but taste bitter.

Likewise, the shape of the leaf can alter the taste- whole leaf teas are more expensive and take longer to steep, but have a subtle, pleasant taste that can have a lot of layers to it.

Read which are granular and crushed up are called Fannings- they’re typically cheaper, as they’re the castings that come from whole leaf tea processing, and they steep faster, but they also turn bitter easily and cloud the tea’s color. Fannings usually have a strong, bold flavour compared to whole leaf variations, but lack complexity.

Next are oolong teas- oolong teas come from the same plant as white and green teas, as well as black tea. The difference between the four is the oxidization of the plant- the Tea plant.

Oxidization is the process that causes the leaf to change color- white teas are the least oxidized and black teas are the most oxidized.

An oolong is a tea leaf that isn’t quite oxidized enough to be called a black tea. It usually has a reddish color to it, and can steep any color from amber to deep red. It also has a good but of caffeine in it, and a more bitter taste than green or white tea. I personally enjoy oolongs because the ones sold in my area tend to have a sort of woodsy-fireplace kind of taste.

To prepare an oolong, take one teaspoon of leaf per cup of water, and bring your water to a medium boil- the bubbles should be the size of the tip of your finger, no bigger. Pour the water onto the leaf and steep for 3-5 minutes.

Again, be sure not to squeeze the leaves while straining.

Black tea is the most oxidized leaf, and also contains the highest concentration of caffeine.

Black tea is also sturdy and hard to bruise, so to prepare it, you can bring the water to a full rolling boil and steep it around 4-5 minutes.

Black teas also tastes the most bitter of all the variations I’ve listed, so be aware of that. Depending on how they’re processed, though, they can have a wide range of warm, smoky flavors.

The darker the leaf, the longer it usually needs to steep, and the more bitter it is, but the more caffeine it has.

The smaller the leaf, the cheaper, faster, and stronger the flavor, but also less subtle the taste.

Good green teas are typically bright, vibrant green.

White tea, contrary to the name, produces pale yellowish or greenish tea.

Herbal teas are 1 to 1.5 teaspoons per cup of water, at a rolling boil, and should usually steep at Least 5 minutes.

Again, contrary to the name, Herbal Tea isn’t technically Tea, as it doesn’t actually contain Leaves from the Tea plant- these are called tisanes by detail-oriented nerds like me.

Herbal teas can be made of anything from dried fruits to flowers to vegetables, spices, and garden herbs, and don’t have any caffeine unless intentionally added.

Herbal tea also doesn’t release the tannins that green, oolong, and black do, so it doesn’t typically turn bitter with time.

Do be careful not to steep too long, though, because it can turn too strong and pungent to drink.

Each tea blend is different, and is specifically designed to be prepared a certain way to get the intended taste, so these guidelines will vary from tea to tea, but the important thing is that you find something you genuinely enjoy.

It doesn’t matter if what you like is some fancy expensive matcha or a cheap dollar store chai; as long as you enjoy it, there’s no wrong choice.

To beat the metaphor: Please don’t force yourself to eat burnt cookies!

backstory: I have been afraid of dogs since I was in first grade and two of my classmates both independently got hospitalized for dog bite injuries within a week of each other. ever since, I have been attempting to get over this fear. it’s going pretty solid lately. it helps that at my bus stop, there’s a large and fenced in property with a dog that is afraid of humans. he’s a gorgeous german shepherd?? who I have taken a few sneaky photos of and always manages to look angelic.

so this pup is scared of humans and I’m scared of dogs. but for months we see each other every day. and we nudge closer and closer. and one day I’m feeling brave and pick up a stick and hold it out to the fence and this good good doggo gennnntly takes it between his teeth and runs off with it. since then it’s been a game we play every day and this buddy’s tail starts wagging when I come down the street towards the bus stop and frankly it adds life to these brittle old bones of mine.

today however was the reckoning… I was a bit distracted by school stress when I came down the street, and so I take a moment for myself and when I look back up, the puppy is GONE. I look around the yard, seeing if he’s behind a tree, then see him leaving the yard and merrily skipping down the sidewalk, where he suddenly stops. I ask my group chat for advice.

trick question by the time the answer comes I’m already walkin towards him. he’s sitting still, tail wagging. right in front of him on the ground, with no one in sight? a $20 bill. 

I slooowly bend down and pick up the money and a nearby stick. put the money in my pocket. put the stick out to my doggo friend who gently takes it as always. and then awkwardly I kinda “well, thanks for the money! you should get home now, my bus is coming and your person won’t like you being out of the yard.” and just like that. the dog just trots back to the yard happy as a clam and slips in through the gaping wide bars of the fence. meanwhile, three high schoolers on the way to school are staring at me and laughing but like. okay what am I supposed to do, not thank this blessing dog. I actually tell him thanks once again for good measure before the bus comes.

I walk in and it’s as good as dead. there’s two people in line in front of me, four people behind the counter, and two employees wandering the store. it’s gorgeous. clean as anything. a fireplace with a burning fire (nice as it’s the dead of winter in pennsylvania at this point), and smooth jazz playing softly on the speakers. it’s huge. there are armchairs. the windows have curtains and a lovely view of downtown. it’s immediately the kind of place you could stay forever but I have a bus to catch in like half an hour so I walk up and get in line.

as I do, I see the first two behind the counter employees. one looks dead. one looks angry. the dead one… and I call her this because she literally looks zombified. not normal min wage worker dead but like her brain was removed dead… asks what she can get for me and I place my normal order. it begins to go down the line. it gets to the second person, the angry one, who says with the most INTENSE STARE to Dead Eyed Girl, “if we all had to come in and we don’t get busy, I’m burning down the city.”

Dead Eyed Girl, eyes still dead, says “Except for this store, of course.”

“Of course not, we can’t burn down this store.”

Dead Eyed Girl literally echoes “We can’t burn down this store.”

this is when I start to go from curious to a little freaked out. angry one takes my subs out of the toaster and begins to put veggies on it, then shoves it over to the person at the register who is, according to the logs I looked up to make sure I remember this accurately, remarkable for one reason…  I was paying attention to EVERYTHING and yet I can’t remember what they looked like at all. I pay and I get my sandwiches and my drink cup and go to fill my drink up.

standing near the drink machine at this point are two more terrified looking employees who are talking quietly to themselves. I fill my cup up with sprite and am about to put a lid on it when one says “oh. that machine… doesn’t work.” note: at this point I have the drink already and it looks and smells right. “here, let me go replace that for you. don’t drink that! one second!”

he looks TERRIFIED as he goes to the cooler and pulls out three bottles of sprite and looks TERRIFIED as he holds them out to me asking, terrified, “here, is that enough?”

and so I just “yeah… thank you?” as he takes my cup and gives me the bottles. it’s more sprite than I paid for.

I sit down as far from the counter as I can and begin to eat. my first toasted sandwich? cold. according to my phone I’ve been in here for five minutes only. I didn’t see the customers who were in here when I entered leave. nobody else has come in. I’d planned to get out my laptop and wait here out of the cold for the bus, but even as I eat the sandwich time seems slow so I just devour it and leave. it’s not even been ten minutes since I came in. just take my second (cold) sandwich and my bottles of sprite and book it.

and I ask around about this subway. everyone I know says it’s perfectly normal and they’ve been there several times and it’s fine! and sure enough when I work up the courage to go back in two weeks later, the fireplace is not operational (in fact it’s blocked off), the music is staticky and pop, there’s no armchairs, and it’s not very clean at all. is there a possibility they cleaned it up for the event and redecorated in two weeks? yes. is it more likely that I wandered into the fey realm for a bit? perhaps.

Had a thing like that happen with a hobby shop once.

I had thought the place was closed and gutted, but saw to my delight that it was open and occupied while driving by one day. Of course, I had to stop in.

This place is immaculate, although something about some of the displays seemed slightly off.

A guy there was making custom dice. I commissioned one from him and he made it on the spot. Damn beautiful thing, and the luckiest die I own (not weighted, just super lucky… for me… and basically cursed for anyone else).

We had a very in-depth conversation about the presentation of fey in various contemporary novels while he made the die. I paid him (plus extra, cause I loved the work he was doing), browsed, bought some MTG cards, and left a couple of dollars in a donation box as I walked out the door (I think it was for supplying dice and other ttrpg stuff to local schools or something and I thought it was a very worthy cause).

One of the employees said something like “pretty decent for a person” to dice guy, and he replied something like, “yeah, I gave him a good one.”

I realized after I got home that the displays for the current set hadn’t had any letters on them that I could recognize, but my ADHD brain had parsed something on them as writing that said “Magic the Gathering” anyway and moved on (and I don’t mean, like, it was Arabic or Chinese or something. I mean nothing, in hindsight, even resembled writing).

The cards practically show up at the top of my deck when I call them, and the die is, again, fabulously lucky, but only for me.

Tried to bring a friend to the shop literally two days later and it was back to being abandoned and gutted. My friend didnt believe that there had really been a store there, although he has since admitted that those cards and that custom d20 are weirdly good for me… and only for me.

Honestly, I’m super glad not to be the only one to have had such a word experience, and glad to have a better explanation for it than “that time i lost my mind and somehow came out of it with physical items that appear to be more or less +1 ebchanted.”

A fallen merman taking his last breaths, for some, the stuff of nightmares, for others, the stuff of dreams. Hauntingly beautiful scupture ‘And then I saw Colby on the Street and my fantasy died’ by  Cameron Stalheim.

☆.｡.:*　Space Inspired Sweaters & Dress　.｡.:*☆

Zuko’s like no, yeah, I totally get it, and just makes her one of his advisors. At first it’s just so she has a good excuse to stay but after the first meeting Toph storms out shouting about how EVERYONE was lying why would you even need to lie about what kind of tea you want??

Zuko: I mean they’re politicians.....but also who, and when, and in what way

They make a subtle Morse code system so Toph can warn him when someone is lying to him without tipping anyone off that she can sense lies.

[ID: Two doodles. The first features Taako, his expression changing from the first text emoji in the post, to the second, to the last, his face becoming increasingly kitty-like and mischievous. The second doodle shows Magnus and Merle looking very concerned. End ID.]

more disabled icons merle and taako from a couple weeks ago!