Blessings Darlings!
I spent much of the last waxing moon making my first batch ever of magical chalk. Today I tried out the finished product. Clearly my skills in this still need some work. The chalk is too hard - I can use it on concrete, and probably asphalt, but it fails on wood, plastic, and cardboard.
I will try new proportions of ingredients, vary the ingredients some (corn starch should work the same in magic as white flour, shouldn't it?), etc.
A witch's work is never done. Just like tweaking recipes for food, recipes for magic take practice and I don't know if I'll ever call them 'perfect'.
Frondly, Fern
Showing posts with label Celtic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Celtic. Show all posts
Monday, October 8, 2012
Monday, September 10, 2012
Battle Cry!
Blessings Darlings!
I was just clued into a neat blog by woman who works with the Morrighu. It's a WONDERFUL read. Skitter your butts over there.
http://shield-maiden.blogspot.com/2012/09/why-we-fight.html
Frondly, Fern
I was just clued into a neat blog by woman who works with the Morrighu. It's a WONDERFUL read. Skitter your butts over there.
http://shield-maiden.blogspot.com/2012/09/why-we-fight.html
Frondly, Fern
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Who's Green?
Blessings Darlings!
Earth hour was March 31. I KNOW I wrote about it a few years back, but I can't find where. It might have been somewhere other than my blog. Oh well. I find it rather a feel-good gimmick, similar to clicking 'like' on a picture on Facebook thinking that's going to change something.
But it got me to thinking about how environmentally 'green' most neopagans are, by looking at me.
By most of those 'measure your environmental footprint' things .... our family uses less resources than 'average' in America. Which of course means NOTHING, since the 'average' American uses a disproportionately high amount of resources. And those measurement tools don't count how many resources your job uses. We're lucky that way - since we work at home at least it DOES take that into account for us.
But .... if we used our fireplace for heat, using the 100% non-fossil fuel of wood, it would be GREAT for helping stretch out the end of oil .... but it would be TERRIBLE for air quality, pumping incredible amounts of particulates and carbon dioxide into the air.
I'm online a HECK of a lot, as a part of my work. That means that I share responsibility for the raping of the groundwater in Silicon Valley, the work conditions in factories in Asia, environmental damage from mining and refining rare earth elements used in the batteries and such.
It's not like my coven is in the town I live in, either. It's 65 miles away. The denomination covenstead is 190.
I can, and pretty much do, recycle every scrap of paper, every bit of plastic, every bottle, etc. than comes into the house. That does not negate the energy that went into making them, the pollution they generated, the mining/drilling/etc. Heck, recycling some of them take more water than creating them from scratch. Recycling doesn't mean not consuming.
Right now my dishwasher is running. In part because it uses less water than washing that many dishes by hand, and in part because it sanitizes the dishes better than I can do by hand. Saves water, saves electricity used for heating and pumping water, but uses electricity to run.
The fact that I cook from scratch actually causes me to use MORE energy than if I didn't. It woul be FAR more energy efficient to have a central bakery do all the baking, a central kitchen do all the cooking. Cafeteria food is efficient. It is not what I'd like to eat. It is not HOW I'd like to eat, giving up deciding what to feed my family personally. But environmentally - not having every house have a kitchen thus saving on all the appliances, cooking in big batches not individual family servings - is better for the environment.
All this before even looking at the coffee and chocolate issues. Or citrus issues (that's sure not a locally grown item, either). Or my beloved avocados.
Yeah, I only spend 12 minutes a week showering - I time it. In, wet down, turn off water, soap, rinse, do the same for the hair. Rain water, mostly, for the garden - tho' right now we're kind of droughty already so who knows what this summer will be like. Clothes line for laundry, but I can't afford to get the washer fixed and the cold water line is blocked .... so it's washing with warm to hot water, not cold.
Everything has trade offs. We have cats, how much less can I vacuum without cat hair being everywhere? How many holes in my husbands underwear before we have to toss it? Bleaching the tighty whities isn't happening, the better to make them last longer. They are now tighty off-whities.
The freezer that saves me HUGE amounts of money on food ... uses electricity to run, and wasn't great for the environment to manufacture. Two cycle engines, like on tillers for the garden, are TERRIBLE for polluting the air. Deer netting is made from plastic - other mesh is from metals that involve mining and refining, too.
The 'measure your footprint' things say I'm green. I look at my life and know I'm not. At all. "Relative to other Americans' is a foolish comparison.
Frondly, Fern
Earth hour was March 31. I KNOW I wrote about it a few years back, but I can't find where. It might have been somewhere other than my blog. Oh well. I find it rather a feel-good gimmick, similar to clicking 'like' on a picture on Facebook thinking that's going to change something.
But it got me to thinking about how environmentally 'green' most neopagans are, by looking at me.
By most of those 'measure your environmental footprint' things .... our family uses less resources than 'average' in America. Which of course means NOTHING, since the 'average' American uses a disproportionately high amount of resources. And those measurement tools don't count how many resources your job uses. We're lucky that way - since we work at home at least it DOES take that into account for us.
But .... if we used our fireplace for heat, using the 100% non-fossil fuel of wood, it would be GREAT for helping stretch out the end of oil .... but it would be TERRIBLE for air quality, pumping incredible amounts of particulates and carbon dioxide into the air.
I'm online a HECK of a lot, as a part of my work. That means that I share responsibility for the raping of the groundwater in Silicon Valley, the work conditions in factories in Asia, environmental damage from mining and refining rare earth elements used in the batteries and such.
It's not like my coven is in the town I live in, either. It's 65 miles away. The denomination covenstead is 190.
I can, and pretty much do, recycle every scrap of paper, every bit of plastic, every bottle, etc. than comes into the house. That does not negate the energy that went into making them, the pollution they generated, the mining/drilling/etc. Heck, recycling some of them take more water than creating them from scratch. Recycling doesn't mean not consuming.
Right now my dishwasher is running. In part because it uses less water than washing that many dishes by hand, and in part because it sanitizes the dishes better than I can do by hand. Saves water, saves electricity used for heating and pumping water, but uses electricity to run.
The fact that I cook from scratch actually causes me to use MORE energy than if I didn't. It woul be FAR more energy efficient to have a central bakery do all the baking, a central kitchen do all the cooking. Cafeteria food is efficient. It is not what I'd like to eat. It is not HOW I'd like to eat, giving up deciding what to feed my family personally. But environmentally - not having every house have a kitchen thus saving on all the appliances, cooking in big batches not individual family servings - is better for the environment.
All this before even looking at the coffee and chocolate issues. Or citrus issues (that's sure not a locally grown item, either). Or my beloved avocados.
Yeah, I only spend 12 minutes a week showering - I time it. In, wet down, turn off water, soap, rinse, do the same for the hair. Rain water, mostly, for the garden - tho' right now we're kind of droughty already so who knows what this summer will be like. Clothes line for laundry, but I can't afford to get the washer fixed and the cold water line is blocked .... so it's washing with warm to hot water, not cold.
Everything has trade offs. We have cats, how much less can I vacuum without cat hair being everywhere? How many holes in my husbands underwear before we have to toss it? Bleaching the tighty whities isn't happening, the better to make them last longer. They are now tighty off-whities.
The freezer that saves me HUGE amounts of money on food ... uses electricity to run, and wasn't great for the environment to manufacture. Two cycle engines, like on tillers for the garden, are TERRIBLE for polluting the air. Deer netting is made from plastic - other mesh is from metals that involve mining and refining, too.
The 'measure your footprint' things say I'm green. I look at my life and know I'm not. At all. "Relative to other Americans' is a foolish comparison.
Frondly, Fern
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
New Cauldron.
Blessings Darlings!
It being THAT time of year again - like, winter - I did the annual refresh/re-dedication of my Healing Cauldron. And, due to the fact that last year the cauldron ended up literally overflowing with healing requests, I swapped out the old cauldron for a bigger one.
For how I use the Healing Cauldron, look at this post from last year http://fernsfronds.blogspot.com/2011/01/healing-cauldron.html. This year, since I refreshed the healing altar AFTER the coven's Bridget ritual (referenced last week), I have the Bridget's Candle I took home from the ritual on the altar. Since I do daily work at that altar that candle won't last very long. But I'll do a flame-to-flame handing down Bridget's fire to each candle in turn. It's all great.
Frondly, Fern
It being THAT time of year again - like, winter - I did the annual refresh/re-dedication of my Healing Cauldron. And, due to the fact that last year the cauldron ended up literally overflowing with healing requests, I swapped out the old cauldron for a bigger one.
For how I use the Healing Cauldron, look at this post from last year http://fernsfronds.blogspot.com/2011/01/healing-cauldron.html. This year, since I refreshed the healing altar AFTER the coven's Bridget ritual (referenced last week), I have the Bridget's Candle I took home from the ritual on the altar. Since I do daily work at that altar that candle won't last very long. But I'll do a flame-to-flame handing down Bridget's fire to each candle in turn. It's all great.
Frondly, Fern
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