Dog Days...
Did you know? The phrase, “Dog Days of Summer” isn’t only due to the hot, humid weather of mid-summer in the northern hemisphere. It’s also because Sirius, the dog star, is brightest from 3 July to 11 August. Still, dogs do pant a lot during this time. (Humans would, too, if it would cool us down any more!)
Once again, I’m disagreeing with the drought monitor for our area. Parts south have gotten horrendous downpours…sometimes 5-6” in just a couple of hours causing flooding. Here, we’ve had more rain this month than the previous ones (2 days of 2”), but it’s still not enough to keep my red maple from drooping in the midday sun. I’m continuing my water conservation efforts and thankfully, our water pressure hasn’t dropped. Yet.
Essential Oils to the Rescue!
Living in the woods, we have a lot of creepy-crawlies that bite/sting. Wood scorpions (little guys - only a couple of inches long), various spiders, and centipedes all inhabit our property. Outside? Their domain. Inside? Sorry, guys.
Our pest control folks do as good a job as they can but some make it into the house. I welt up and itch from any bug bite and the cats think they’re toys - until they get stung. Spiders can and do make it all the way into my bed.
It’s known spiders don’t like peppermint or lemon*. I can’t exactly strew herbs around. The cats would just eat them then vomit them back up. But, I can spray a peppermint voile on my bed linens every couple of days to keep them out.
While this works, I have to be careful where the spray goes. Cats can’t metabolize essential oils. And I have another problem: Mischa loves mint. He’ll give kisses at the drop of a hat but if you want or need your chin and lips well-exfoliated, all you need to do is eat a peppermint candy.
Once I missed the bed and the ceiling fan wafted the voile onto the floor. Mischa immediately started cleaning the floor… Good thing there wasn’t a lot of esssential oil in that spray!
I also added a drop of peppermint oil to some lotion. That works to keep spiders from biting, too, and the mint calms itching, but Mischa started licking my arm. In the middle of the night. So, I had to abandon that idea.
A cedar oil voile sprayed on baseboards does a good job of keeping creepies outside where they belong as a help to what the pest control folks spray outside. Scorpions and centipedes have a hard exoskeleton that makes it difficult for the poison to get to them.
The other day, I went to investigate why my digital rain gauge was registering rain when I knew we hadn’t gotten a drop. Spiders do make it inside and trip it on occasion. This time? No spiders. I failed to look under the cover/collector. Wasps were building a nest inside! For some reason, they were pissed at being disturbed and one got me on the finger. I would have run down to the yard and grabbed a couple of plantain leaves for a poultice but since moss has taken over, I haven’t seen any plantain in quite a while. An ice cube at first, then some lotion with helichrysum oil in it helped calm the pain. Three days later, I still have an obvious hole on my finger!
* Did you know? Lemon Pledge no longer contains real lemon oil!
Eye Update Number ??
In case you missed my post on social media (dontcha love algorithms?), I have more eye laser surgery upcoming. My ophthalmologist found something (totally foreign language to me) that needs to be lasered off in the hopes it’ll clear my sight. But the surgeon isn’t available until late September. So, I get to deal with blurry vision in one eye for another couple of months. Sigh.
What I’ve Been Listening To
No reading this month - for obvious reasons. Audiobooks are my best friends.
Federal Bureau of Magic (Books 1-3) by Annabel Chase, narrated by Elizabeth Saydah. About a paragraph in, I figured out I’d read this series. Looking back at all my Kindle purchases, I had (back in 2019), but as I didn’t remember it… Eden Fury is a…well, a Fury. She’s the daughter of a Vengeance Demon and a (Evil) Witch who tries really hard to ignore her upbringing/tendencies and be a good person. But when her siphoning magic makes her a vampire for as long as that magic lasts and she bites her FBI partner, she’s reassigned to the FBM in the hometown she so desperately left several years ago. What follows is her figuring out which type of demon is invading her territory (one per book) and her lust for the new sheriff. Like most of Ms. Chase’s books, they’re light reading and in book three, I figured out what was happening long before Eden did. But it killed time so…
Arcana Academy Book 1 by Elise Kova, narrated by Anna Burnett. I’ve read Ms. Kova’s books before and, although it was a while back, remembered them as enjoyable. This one? Read it. Ms. Burnett is, quite honestly, not worth whatever money the publisher paid. There’s nearly no differentiation between characters’ voices. The premise of the book is good: magical powers are assigned to the different cards of the Tarot. Magical folks can wield the cards of the suits but only one can wield a major (so one person is the Hierophant, one is the Chariot, etc.). The World card (which is currently missing) can remake reality. At the beginning of the story, Clara is rescued from prison by the Second Prince of the ruling family. She ended up there because she’d been illegally inking cards when she hadn’t officially been trained to do so. She and Kayliss (sp?) have an enemies-to-lovers relationship. Kayliss runs Arcana Academy, where (rich) Tarot wielders go to learn their craft. There are three disciplines: inking, reading, and wielding (as in combat). Kayliss gets Clara into the Academy by claiming she is the long-lost heir of a destroyed clan, and his betrothed. Then Clara finds out she’s a major – the Wheel of Fortune. The King and First Prince are evil. Long story short, Clara works with Kayliss to get all the major cards together so they can get the World card and remake the current reality into something better. Book one ends with Clara being thrown back into prison by First Prince.
I have a couple more complaints apart from the narrator: first, it’s long. Print is 576 pages; audio is 20 hours. I’m pretty sure a hundred pages or more could be cut by dialing back on the scenery description. It got tedious. Second, the editor evidently knew nothing about Tarot. (This book is obviously based on the Ryder-Waite deck.) There’s a paragraph where Clara is doing a reading and the King of Swords comes up twice out of the same deck. Then, a couple of sentences later, one of those cards is the Prince of Swords. Finally, around chapter 45, the cards are corrected to Page, Knight, Queen, and King.
It’s a good story if you can stomach the length and overlook the errors.
The Plot to Save Socrates by Paul Levinson, narrated by Mark Shanahan. What an odd book! In 2042 C.E. New York, Sierra Waters, a Ph.D. student, is drawn into a time-travel plot by her college mentor, Thomas O’Leary, who shows her a new Plato “Dialog” purporting to show someone visited Socrates in jail with a plot to save him from his well-known death by hemlock in 399 B.C.E. Then Thomas disappears and Sierra tries to track down the origins of the document he’d shown her – and Thomas. She discovers a time machine in a gentlemen’s club in New York and travels through time, trying to unwind the mystery of who and how and, as with most time travel, tries desperately to avoid paradoxes. This one might be easier to read than to listen to. It jumps around a lot between 399 B.C.E. and 2061 C.E. Then there’s the odd, sometimes irritating mood music between…I’ll call them sections because it does have chapters but very few. It’s an interesting concept but hard to follow due to all the jumping around. Also might be difficult to follow if you’ve never studied the Classics and don’t know all the ancient players.