Kindness Is The Sweetest Magic Spell.

Every post just makes this better

A Holiday Story

So this is a Chistmas story my mom told me while I was home recently and i thought y’all might enjoy.

So, one Christmas back in the 60′s, my great-grandmother was reminiscing about Christmas in England, and how they used to have pheasant for Christmas, but Ohio sucks and they’d never get to do something like that.

Well Shit!  goes my grandfather,  them woods are full of pheasants, I’ll get you one.  So grandpa and a dubiously related man named “uncle popeye” went out with shotguns to get great-grandma a pheasant for Christmas dinner.

They’re gone for a LONG time.  according to mom, they were basically expecting grandpa and Popeye to be gone for a few hours and come back with a store-bought chicken and apologies.

Instead, they come back eight hours later, covered in mud and freezing cold from the Cleveland winter, but Surprise!  they have a Pheasant.  Great-grandma gives them a lecture about staying out so long and worrying her, but agrees to dress the bird so they can all have a traditional English Roast Pheasant.   Grandpa and Popeye retire to the living room to drink beer and talk about what great woodsmen they are when Great-grandma screams from the kitchen. “TOM!!”  She bellows and literally every male in the house jumps because literally every man has been named “Tom” for three generations at that point.  “THERE’S NO BULLET HOLE IN THIS BIRD.”

They both look massively sheepish and eventually admit that they hadn’t had much luck finding pheasants in the woods and were about to go to the store to get her a chicken when they… backed over the pheasant.

“Then what were you idiots doing in the woods for eight hours?” “We weren’t out there for THAT long-” Popeye starts before grandpa decks him.    Grandma and Great-grandma have to menace them with wooden spoons to get the truth out, but eventually they take thier oversize hiking boots off to reveal bandages. Turns out they had only been in the woods for Two hours looking for pheasants before LITERALLY tripping over one, and they both reflexively aim at the ground and… Shoot each other in the foot.  They hadn’t backed over the Pheasant in the woods.  They’d backed over it in the Hospital parking lot.

And that’s the story of how my great-grandmother made a Roast Pheasant and the ladies of the house got to eat the whole thing while Grandpa and Popey had to watch.

Warmth

Chapter 2

It had been a normal day for Michelle, until she found the Russian giant on the sands of her favourite beach.

Now, Seychelles had not had the quietest upbringing. Her history, especially after her independence, was dominated by coup after failed coup, more a spectacular mess than anything else. Not surprising, really, considering who her parents were. But, also being who they were, there had been lessons - dozens of boring, boring lessons - on, apparently, How To Survive ( it was more, she thought, How to Best Pick Fights and Not Make Friends, but meh. Europeans.) She’d been given a handbook too, underlined and highlighted, with stapled-in pages no less dog-eared that the rest, probably something passed down among her various pseudo-siblings, but that was besides the point. The point was, Seychelles did not follow most of the rules, but some she did, if only to be particularly safe.

So, naturally, the last thing she was expecting was to run into one of the countries on the ‘Avoid At All Cost’ list, lying on her beach, not realising that he was well on his way to getting very nicely sunburnt.

Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away ten vintage paperback classics by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Harper Lee, Walt Whitman, George Orwell, and others. Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on April 22, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

Hello! Catch-up vocabulary number 1 is for Week 5! I’m writing out week 6 as soon as I’m done typing this so I’ll probably queue it up for tomorrow. Week 7 will come after the Kanji for weeks 3 and 4, then we’ll work on getting caught up on Kanji! I also haven’t done any practice exercises that I would post here in a while, so maybe we’ll get to some of those once we’re caught up! 

Vocabulary

Week 5

[Day/Night Continued]

きょう - Today

きんようび - Friday

からい - Dark

けさ - This Morning

けつようび - Thursday

ごご - P.M. / Afternoon

こんばん - Tonight

じ - O’Clock

じかん - Time

すいようび - Wednesday

すぐに - Immediately / At Once

そうして / そして - And Then… 

それから - After That

それでは - Well Ten

ちゅう - During / In the Middle of

つかれる - Tire / Become Tired

つき - Next

とき - Time

どようび - Saturday

ながら - While

にち - Day

にちようび - Sunday

ねる - Sleep (verb)

ばん - Evening / Night

ひる - Noon

ふん - Minute

まいあさ - Every Morning

まいにち - Every Day

まいばん - Every Evening

もくようび - Thursday

やすむ - Rest / Take Time Off

ゆうべ - Last Night

よる - Evening / Night

Year

いつも - Always

おととし - Year Before Last

Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away ten vintage paperback classics by William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Alice Walker, George Orwell, Richard Wright, and others. Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on January 22, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

You got that right @thinknshine ⚡️💖

you’re damn right they have (x)

follow @the-movemnt

A truly strong person does not need the approval of others any more than a lion needs the approval of sheep.

Vernon Howard (via my-lifestyle-of-meow)

Artist Documents Tender Notes Over Acrylic Illustrations From Her Travels on a Moleskine Notebook

American artist Missy H. Dunaway documents her travels across the US, Europe, Turkey, and Morocco with extreme romanticism and poetry. Dunaway illustrates on her Moleskine journal a beautiful scenery with acrylic paint from her time in a specific location, then autographs each painting with a sweet excerpt of nostalgia.

She often composes goodbye notes on her journals, as she bids adieu to each city. Each cityscape portrait reveals a tender thought or memory of heartbreak or a desire for wanderlust.

Some of the lovely anecdotes read:

“Standing in Asia. Looking at Europe. Thinking of New York.”

“I moved to Istanbul (alone). I’ve been looking out my window more than usual.”

“I’ve discovered I have the gift to feel at home jus about anywhere.”

“I’ll press you in a book.”

“I was staring at the blinking lights  of an airplane and waiting for sleep when a shooting star passed across my view, clear as day. I haven’t seen a shooting star in a whole decade.”

We highly urge everyone to click on each image to read the stunning passages. You can find these notebooks and more of her original work in her Etsy shop.

View similar posts here!

What is the most devastatingly beautiful thing you have ever read?

This passage from Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. *sigh*

How about you?