#shasta park

[rabbitcruiser]

California was admitted as the thirty-first U.S. state on September 9, 1850.  

California Admission Day

California Admission Day is observed on September 9 each year. It commemorates the day California was admitted into the Union as the 31st state in 1850 after it was ceded to the United States by Mexico in 1848. California became one of the few states to become a state without first being an organized territory. California Admission Day is not a federal holiday. Rather, it’s a local observance in the state, which implies that businesses, schools, and government offices remain open. In times gone by it was celebrated with great pomp and ceremony with parades and pageantry. Though low-key now, the day still marks an important part of Californian history.

History of California Admission Day

The Mexican-American War began in May 1846 when the U.S. declared war on Mexico. American settlers who lived in the territory of California in Mexico revolted against the Mexican government in what is known as the Bear Flag Revolt. The Americans captured Sonoma, hoisted a Bear Flag in the area, and declared it the California Republic. On July 9, 1846, Navy Lieutenant Joseph Warren Revere arrived in Sonoma and replaced the Bear Flag in the territory with a United States flag. Lieutenant Revere officially declared California a possession of the United States. In February 1848, Mexico and the U.S. signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to end the war. This treaty meant that Mexico had to yield a large portion of its Southwest territory — including present-day California — to the U.S.

As of the signing of the treaty, California had a meager population that was not up to the 60,000-inhabitant benchmark a territory needed to achieve statehood. Earlier in January 1848, gold was discovered on the American River near Sacramento, and the territory witnessed a massive influx of immigrants looking for work and good fortune. Thanks to the Gold Rush, a huge increase in population and wealth followed, thus necessitating the need for civil government and local policies.

In 1849, Californians demanded statehood, and California became the 31st state on September 9, 1850. California joined the Union as a free, non-slavery state by the Compromise of 1850 in just about two years of the territory’s incorporation. Its first capital was in San Jose before it was moved to the city of Vallejo for lack of necessary facilities. The capital was later moved to Benicia, a small town, and subsequently to the riverside port of Sacramento in 1854.

California Admission Day timeline

1846

The Bear Flag Revolt

American settlers in California stage a revolt against Mexican authorities.

1848

A Treaty for Peace

The United States and Mexico sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to end the war between the countries.

1850

The Compromise of 1850

The Compromise of 1850 is signed and California is admitted as the 31st state to the Union.

1911

Adoption of the California State Flag

The California State Flag, based on the original Bear Flag, is adopted by the state legislature.

California Admission Day FAQs

Is California Admission Day a federal holiday?

California Admission Day is not a federal holiday. It’s a local observance in the state of California. Schools, businesses, and government offices remain open.

What are other names for California?

California is also known as ‘The Golden State, ‘The Land of Milk and Honey,’ ‘The El Dorado State,’ and ‘The Grape State.’

What is California famous for?

California remains one of the most popular destinations throughout North America. The state is especially famous for Hollywood, Disneyland, and the Golden Gate Bridge. Other unique landmarks in California include Coachella, Silicon Valley, the Wine Country, and Surf Culture.

California Admission Day Activities

Visit the Golden StateIf you’re a history buff, today’s the perfect day to visit California. Museums around California offer various resources and artifacts to help you learn more about the state’s rich history. Take a day trip or make a holiday of it and travel to more than one.

Enjoy the special eventsCalifornia Admission Day is observed with special events at schools, museums, and organizations throughout the state. Public officials often grant special addresses about its history and significance.

Take a trip to SonomaCalifornia Admission Day has been observed particularly in the Sonoma area since 1850. It would be nice to visit the area where it all began. Don’t forget to enjoy the state’s beautiful beaches, valleys, and mountains as you celebrate with them!

5 Fun Facts About California

Originally named “the Grizzly Bear State": California has renamed the Golden State from its initial name “the Grizzly Bear State” as the bears went extinct.

The state motto is ‘Eureka!’: The Greek word means “I have found it!” and alludes to the discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada.

Redwood is the official state tree: California’s official state tree is the redwood, as designated in 1937.

It’s called ‘The Grape State’, too: Over 300,000 tons of grapes are grown in California annually, and the state produces more than 17 million gallons of wine each year!

Blue jeans: In 1873 blue jeans were imported for miners from Europe, making San Francisco the first place in the U.S. where jeans were worn.

Why We Love California Admission Day

Becoming a recognized state in the U.S.This event celebrates the day California officially became a state in the U.S. It was a protracted struggle but thanks to the peace treaty that ended the Mexican-American War of 1848, it was a done deal.

A tribute to the war heroesThe struggle to acquire California as a possession of the U.S. was not an easy one. It took a war, diplomacy, protests, and legislation to make it possible. This day celebrates the memories of everyone who fought to make it possible.

The population boost that came with the Gold RushCalifornia’s low population would have hindered its prospects to become a state and admittance to the Union. Thanks to the Gold Rush, the territory was able to have the 60,000 inhabitants it needed to achieve statehood.

#Mount Shasta #California #31st US State #9 September 1850 #Pacific Ocean #San Francisco #Sierra Nevada #Yosemite National Park #Morro Bay #Sonoma #Big Sur #San Diego #Humboldt Redwoods State Park #Los Angeles #Napa Valley #Death Valley National Park #travel #original photography #vacation #tourist attraction #landmark #architecture #cityscape #landscape #USA #Lake Tahoe #Santa Monica #Santa Barbara #anniversary #US history

[stastrodome]

Stevie Nicks and Shasta, the University of Houston cougar, in Central Park in 1979.

#houston #texas #htx #go coogs #university of houston #stevie nicks #central park #shasta

[broke-painter-blog]

#video #photo #national park #national forest #Shasta #Shasta trinity #forest #ca #cali #California #mountain #travel #road trip

[wereonlyalittlelost]

Oregon Road Trip - Day 9

Aw man! The trip had to come to an end eventually :(

In Bend, we started out day out getting breakfast at The Sparrow Bakery Northwest. The original location ap... Read more

#Oregon #United States #Roadtrip #Bend #California #Castle Crags State Park #Mount Shasta #pictures #trip #travel #adventure

[sinceileftyoublog]

Jolie Holland Interview: Refractive & Layered

Photo by Chris Doody

BY JORDAN MAINZER

When I called Jolie Holland last summer to talk about her then-upcoming new album Haunted Mountain (Cinquefoil), the LP had just arrived. Lying in her house was, in her words, "a mountain of Haunted Mountain." She had just finished boxing up a limited edition vinyl of her debut album Catalpa, sent to her supporters on Patreon, and a friend was coming over later in the day to help box up some more vinyl. The DIY and direct-to-consumer approach suits Holland and is certainly consistent with the themes of Haunted Mountain, an album that at times looks back at Holland's earliest years and contextualizes them within society's current fights against capitalism and the patriarchy.

On Haunted Mountain, you can hear battles in every aspect of Holland's experiments. Take the spacious electronica of "Feet On The Ground", its deep bass groove and panning, skittering beat tangling with Holland's soulful vocal and whistling, and buzz-saw guitars that cut in and out. On the surface, its lyrics recall protest, but to Holland, it's her first "anti-patriarchal dance" song, using bodily movement as a means to a more just end. Piano ballad "Orange Blossoms" lays side-by-side natural imagery and soundscapes to chide human effect on climate change while being careful not to delve into the world of self-righteousness or eco fascism. "Every single soul on this spinning globe / Is captive to this dick measuring contest," she quips with her trademark smoky, jazzy vocal. The galloping Buck Meek duet "Highway 72" references Holland's experience as a homeless teenager, piercing violin rubbing against gentle acoustic guitar, pedal steel, and Mellotron, the sonic manifestation of the daily struggle to live on the streets. The song uses the Nyabinghi rhythm, named after an anti-colonial Rwandan freedom fighter, Holland's subtle way of connecting the fights against colonialism and austerity.

It's no coincidence that Holland's first album in years came as her creative relationship with Meek flourished. She first met him at the Park Slope Food Coop, where they both worked. "The stairs to the office are lined with cheesy personal advertisements of people offering different services," Holland said of the Coop. "It feels like a college campus in the 90's." She decided to advertise songwriting coaching and music lessons, and Meek saw it and decided to get in touch, as he was a fan of her music. The rest, as they say, is history: Holland bared witness to Meek's burgeoning relationship with Adrianne Lenker, the formation of Big Thief, and both his and his brother Dylan's resulting success.

Yes, it was a coincidence that in 2023, both Holland and Meek released albums named Haunted Mountain. Holland co-wrote five of the songs on Meek's album, including its title track, a tribute to active volcano Mount Shasta. Guitarist Adam Brisbin, whom Holland introduced to Meek, plays on both records. Yet, that both albums deal with "reciprocity with nature"--a phrase Holland said that Meek used to contextualize his title track--and a sort of cosmic telepathy is a tribute to Holland and Meek's intertwined creative partnership. Right now, Holland is getting ready to tour the UK and EU in March and April. Read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity, about Haunted Mountain, working with Meek, nature, protest music, and conversational songwriting.

Photo by Chris Doody

Since I Left You: This cosmic collaboration between you and Buck is years in the making.

Jolie Holland: I was super charmed. We've known each other for over 10 years. I love writing songs with him. We've never done it in person--it was just literally texting and videos that we sent each other.

SILY: On "Mood Ring" from his album, he sings about telepathy. Even if he's singing about it from a romantic standpoint, that he titled the album the same thing is even further coincidence.

JH: He didn't know I was naming my next record Haunted Mountain. I always was. I never questioned it. It was this very simple vision for me. It's such a straightforward thing to name a record after a song and clearly, it's a very evocative title. Who knows what it means? I don't exactly know what it means. It has this nice refractive multi-faceted character. It's also a soft rhyme that has a nice rhythm to it. It was unquestioned to me that was gonna be the title.

There was a similar thing going on in Buck's circle. He kept coming up with different names for his record, but everyone in his circle was calling it Haunted Mountain. They assumed that was the name. He thought, "This isn't moving. Everybody is into this." He sent me this extremely thoughtful email that explained the process. He said, "Can I name my record after your song, [but] only if you're not going to name your record the same [thing]?" I said, "Yeah, well I am [naming it Haunted Mountain]." It only took us a few hours to come around to the fact that [the coincidence] was awesome. [laughs]

SILY: He sings about the idea of "reciprocity with nature" on his title track, a humbled relationship with it, and so do you, especially on "Orange Blossoms". Can you talk about your personal relationship with nature and singing about it?

JH: I said that phrase, "reciprocity with nature," and then I completely forgot having said it. Buck was texting me, "What was that you said? Something about something with nature? What was it?" We finally both remembered my having said it.

Are you an Indigenous person?

SILY: No.

JH: Me neither. My grandmother had a Choctaw last name but wasn't tribally affiliated. She had a family background of being Indigenous. They lived in New Orleans. She was Black and French, and the spelling of her last name is typically only Choctaw. When I was a kid, she told me in a very strong New Orleans accent, "I'm half Black, half French, and half Indian. That makes me Cajun." It's some ridiculous shit. Did you read Braiding Sweetgrass?

SILY: No, but I'm familiar with it.

JH: It's so beautiful. It's written by an Indigenous botanist named Robin Wall Kimmerer. The audio book is so...gorgeous, hearing the cadence and the weight of meaning in her voice. I haven't even finished the book. It's very, very long, 15 hours or more. I've just dipped my toes in. But she tells this incredible story of being a young botanist student. She had this hypothesis that traditional harvesting methods were positive for propagating certain plant species. Her professor, who was not Indigenous, was not into the idea of her doing this experiment. He said, "That's clearly wrong. How could human behavior be good for these plants?" She did the experiment and proved that traditional harvesting practices were positive overall for the plant. There are these intensely unanalyzed perspectives in European and settler culture that humans are a curse on nature. It has so many deep repercussions.

I reference that Malthusian perspective on the record. There's a voice of nature on "Orange Blossoms" that says, "We throw this party every year whether or not you motherfuckers are around." [The line is, "We throw this party every year / Whether or not you humans are here."] [laughs] It's talking about spring. But that's a real settler colonial European attitude, that humans are not part of nature. It's obviously ridiculous. It's just a philosophical conceit.

SILY: Your references to fascism in that song are interesting. It reminded me of the very online debate during COVID about people staying inside and "nature healing" being an ecologically fascist point of view.

JH: I heard the line, "Every superhero is a fascist," through leftist comedians, Francesca Fiorentini and Nato Green. I found many examples of that analysis. There's a great couple chapters in the book The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber where he gets into that idea. He was friends with a lot of my friends, but I never met him. He died of COVID complications. His biggest macro-cultural hit was the book Bullshit Jobs, and before he passed away, he wrote The Dawn of Everything, which is extremely wonderful. He's an anthropologist, and the person he cowrote the book with, David Wengrow, is an archaeologist. They did an enormous global analysis of the systems of democracy and social organization that are not authoritarian. It's brilliant. I think it's going to be really important tool moving forward. It resets the picture on a lot of things.

Photo by Chris Doody

SILY: Do your views on colonialism and nature jive with the anti-colonial bend of "Highway 72" as well?

JH: Why do you say it's anti-colonial?

SILY: I thought the juxtaposition of imagery in the line, "Great-horned owl slipping by the overpass / I feel like every year might be my last," was referential to systems of oppression constantly threatening to kill us. Is that song auto-biographical?

JH: [laughs] Yeah, I was a homeless teenager, and there's a lot of imagery of that time in my life in that song. My friend called it an anti-colonial hymn because the rhythm, Nyabinghi rhythm, is an anti-colonial rhythm. It's named after the Rwandan female military leader. I've loved that rhythm for a long time. There's this movie Land of Look Behind made by Alan Greenberg, who was a cinematographer who worked with Werner Herzog. He was friends with Bob Marley and happened to be visiting him when he died. There's all this beautiful footage of Marley's funeral and footage of backwoods Rastafarians hanging out and playing music. There's a band Keith Richards produced called Wingless Angels, and it's some of my favorite gospel music. It's so moving to me. It's been an important part of my musical vocabulary for 20 years. I forget how deeply embedded it is in my way of thinking about music. One of my best friends, one of the first people to hear the record, said something so beautiful about the rhythm: "It's slower than my grief." I said, "Wow, I don't know what you're talking about, but I love it!" [laughs] I think he was trying to say it helped him move through a certain healing process.

I looked up the beat because I wanted more concrete information about it. I forget anything I've learned about it because I've been into it for so long. Keith Richards said something so amazing about it: "It's purposefully slower than your heartbeat." [I thought,] "Is [my friend's] experience of the song related to Richards was saying about it?

SILY: It requires an active participation or listening.

JH: What do you mean by that?

SILY: When something is that slow, it can't be experienced passively. To stay engaged, you have to commit to it.

JH: That's interesting. It's like Bob Dylan getting really really quiet when the audience is loud.

SILY: Definitely similar. I was intrigued, though, when you were just talking about the relationships between humans and nature, because the song is about you living outside.

JH: More and more of us experience that as capitalism fucks us up. [The song isn't about homelessness, but] about [my] experience of homelessness. A lot of people look at me, clearly a fucking intellectual, and they think I went to college and had a family. I'm a white lady, so there are assumptions about my socioeconomic background. They're wrong! [laughs] I didn't want to be taken as a ghoul, bloodlessly discussing so-called social problems, looking at it from an external viewpoint.

SILY: "Feet On The Ground" seems to be describing the relationship between protesting and activism and our emotions.

JH: That's interesting. It's not. But I like your analysis.

SILY: The line I highlight is, "When you've taken all that you can handle / Every act of tenderness is a frightful gamble." What does that mean to you?

JH: I've been working on this project of trying to make anti-patriarchal dance music, and this is the first [song]. It's more about interpersonal relationships. It's very inside-out. It's from deep inside of relationships with men.

SILY: Which is a political statement in and of itself, inherently.

JH: Totally. I love that you saw it that way.

SILY: Have other people heard the song without knowing what it refers to and interpreted it other ways?

JH: My friends who have heard it have been overwhelmed by the production. I was really excited to talk with people about what it means, but everybody I've played it for, Buck included, have thought it's such a crazy soundscape.

SILY: Somewhat of an anomaly for you.

JH: It's my first dance track...It's listed as a different genre.

SILY: What's your relationship with The Painted Bird, and why did you frame "One Of You" around that book?

JH: Have you read that book?

SILY: No.

JH: Don't read it! It sucks! [laughs] It's so fucking intense.

SILY: It's one of those books where I haven't read it, but I'm very familiar with the discourse around it.

JH: I read The Painted Bird when I was 13. I didn't know what it was. How could I have? I don't even know where I found it. Probably in the library, or I borrowed it from one of my mom's friends. It's the story of a little blond-haired Jewish boy walking out of rural Poland in the aftermath of WWII, who encounters repeated creepy atrocities. There's a lot of sexual violence in the book, which I really wish I hadn't been exposed to as a child. The central image in the book is when the kid sees these country boys that capture a bird and paint it in these bright colors and release it back, and the flock kills it.

SILY: Because they think it's an intruder.

JH: It's this extremely visceral metaphor for genocide and the process of othering. "Feet On The Ground" and "One Of You" were kind of the same idea for a minute. It was really hard to write "Feet On The Ground" because in one sense, it's protest music, but I'm not interested in writing protest music that's accusatory. I want to write music that actually gives people an ability to consider things from a more basic level than just an oppositional state. That's always been my criticism of oppositional protest music. If it's just accusatory, the person being accused is not listening to the music. I totally value a lot of music that is accusatory and is that kind of typical punk rock anthem-type stuff, but I've [long] been interested in how to write in a different way. Daniel Johnston was a big influence in moving in that direction. He's somebody I think a lot of people wouldn't naturally identify with, somebody with mental illness. But he presents himself in a way where it's impossible not to identify with him.

"Feet On The Ground" is based to a degree on that William Onyeabor song "Better Change Your Mind". Another discursive protest song I found amazing is, "Can't Blame The Youth" by Peter Tosh.

SILY: Accusatory protest songs, in my experience, exist more as cathartic than wanting to make actual change. They serve that purpose, even if delivered to an echo chamber. However, I was listening to the latest Bully album, and the final song, a punk song called "All This Noise", is what you think of when someone says, "protest music," but the song before that, "Ms. America", is much quieter and has a basic premise of, "I want to have a kid, but I don't want to teach a kid how to fight." It turns protest feelings inward. I found it to be a more effective protest song due to it eliciting more empathy than what you would think of as typical protest music. Is empathy a part of what you're trying to achieve?

JH: What do you mean by empathy?

SILY: When you look inward a bit more in your protest songs, essentially, you're trying to uncover some more universal truth that other people can identify with, as a means of making change, rather than being accusatory.

JH: Do you mean empathy with the people you're trying to change?

SILY: With anyone listening.

JH: Probably. I'm definitely not interested in preaching at people, so it's about talking with the people listening and trying to be part of a bigger conversation with anybody who might be on board, as opposed to something intended to be strictly cathartic and outwardly directed.

SILY: "Me and My Dream" references some legendary songwriters. Can you talk about the weight that carries?

JH: I always loved the songs of Lou Reed's where he's referencing his friends. We don't even know who these people are. "'Margarita told Tom,' 'Kennedy says.'" Those aren't famous people. Those were his friends. Or maybe they were famous. It doesn't matter in the song. It's so beautiful. I remember when he talked about his orientation with writing lyrics, he wanted it to sound like the kind of things he wanted to say to his friends. An interpersonal conversation. I love lyrics like that. This was me approaching that idea. I'm always thinking about other artists' work and the ways it affects me and how I respond to it. Blind Willie Johnson, [Tom] Waits, and Richards are the namechecked artists, but I also reference Betty Davis' "I Will Take That Ride".

SILY: What's the story behind the cover art?

JH: I love this artist Jo Bird. She's a metal viola player I know from Houston. She has a band called Fiddle Witch. She moved from Houston to Galveston, which is the beach I grew up with as a child where I got sunburnt to fucking hell. Another one of my songs, "June", on Pint of Blood, talks about imagining mountains out of clouds. I grew up in the fucking swamp with no mountains, but the sky is incredible with cumulus clouds and rainbows and thunderstorms and tornadoes. I loved seeing her pictures all the time, how this goth photographer gets these scary pictures of the beach. [The cover] was a picture she took on her iPhone. We had to use some magic to get it big enough to use on the cover. We still chose to keep it kind of small so we didn't have to distort it to get a good image of it.

SILY: What instrument do you write most of your songs on?

JH: I write most of them in my head. I don't want the music to be limited by whatever I know or don't know instrument-wise.

SILY: Do you find adapting them to a live performance a totally different artistic endeavor than writing and recording them in the first place?

JH: No, it's all really creative and an opportunity to see different stuff in the music. We've been playing "Haunted Mountain" a lot of different ways. One way we've been doing it is synth, bass, viola. I love how it breaks down to just the elements. I love presenting songs in a lot of different settings.

SILY: Are you the type of songwriter who is always writing, or do you need to set aside time to sit down and write?

JH: I'm always collecting ideas, but I do need to sit down to make them come all the way through. I woke up and wrote some lines a couple mornings ago, which is great, because I'm so busy with everything else that it starts to feel weird to not have time to write.

SILY: Is there anything else upcoming for you?

JH: I put out Catalpa on vinyl in an extremely limited release that I offered to my Patrons. I'll do [a wider] re-release. It was never mastered at all, let alone for vinyl. Larry Crane, the editor of Tape Op, an awesome engineer, prepared the files. [The originals are like] a sketch on a cocktail napkin. They're made out of pure garbage. Larry's colleague Adam Gonsalves mastered them. They sound incredible. Adam mastered Haunted Mountain and Escondida for vinyl. I've been working with him for a while. My friend Jason Tavares, who runs a hi-fi Shop, listened to Catalpa on a hundred-thousand dollar system and said it sounds amazing.

I wish people had access to better systems. So many people don't even have a record player. I didn't even have a decent record player until I moved to L.A. 10 years ago. Before that, I was moving around so much, so it didn't make sense. Larry Crane played bass for Elliott Smith and did similar work for his shittier recordings, turning them into something that could take production. He's such a fabulous nerd and knows all the new things. He happened to hear those recordings of Elliott's while out and about, and said, "I would have done it differently now." He learned a lot of stuff before Catalpa, so I'm glad to hear Jason said it sounds good.

SILY: Did you start a Patreon over COVID?

JH: I did. I couldn't figure out how to access unemployment and was real fucked. I was about to go on tour in February 2020, so it was great to get into Patreon. I did something super gimmicky the other day that people fucking loved. I said, "I'm going to release a Tom Waits cover every week until I reach this many patrons." People responded to it so fast I had to keep moving that number until it made sense. It's been interesting engaging with people on that level. I'm glad there's platforms like that. Marc Ribot helped start Music Workers Alliance, and they did an analysis that streaming has taken 20 billion dollars a year out of artists' pockets, [so] it's great we have these direct support systems [like Patreon].

#interviews #jolie holland #buck meek #haunted mountain #chris doody #cinquefoil #patreon #park slope food coop #adrianne lenker #big thief #dylan meek #mount shasta #adam brisbin #braiding sweetgrass #robin wall kimmerer #francesca fiorentini #nato green #the utopia of rules #david graeber #bullshit jobs #the dawn of everything #david wengrow #land of look behind #alan greenberg #werner herzog #bob marley #keith richards #wingless angels #bob dylan #the painted bird

[hardly-an-escape]

what's in a name? | Dream/Hob | 9300 words | rated E

this is my submission for @designtheendless's 3K commission giveaway: a Dreamling fic based on their fanart above!

tags: alternate universe - human, photographer Hob Gadling, artist Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, model Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, strangers to lovers, snowed in, only one bed, light dom/sub, oral sex, face fucking, anal fingering, anal sex, anonymous sex, Dream of the Endless is a horny little weasel, and Hob is no less of a horny little weasel, brief Princess Bride references, alcohol consumption, impulsive decision making, callous disregard for the geography of northern California, they go from 0-60 because they’re both nuts, neither of them are in a great place but they do make each other better rather than worse

Hob is on an ill-fated road trip through California. He’s making his way slowly down the coast toward Los Angeles when, trapped by a snowstorm in a small town near Mount Shasta, he meets a mysterious stranger in a diner. They share a night of anonymous passion – but when the sun rises, Hob finds that he can’t just leave the stranger behind…

this story developed partially from Picture Perfect, one of my Fluffbruary 2024 fills. I also incorporated some of designtheendless's other suggested image prompts, so do make sure you check their original post! and thank you so much for extending the deadline, it meant I had time to get my CHBB fic submitted before pivoting to finish this... and even so I'm still barely getting it done in time just because of who I am as a person :D

Hob leans forward over the steering wheel, brows furrowed as he peers through the driving snow at the street ahead. The windshield wipers are going like mad; he’s seen a plow or two out, but they seem to barely be making a dent, so traffic has slowed to a crawl. Which is, frankly, for the best, since the weather is bad enough that only a true nutter would be out in it at all.

Well… nobody’s ever accused Hob of being sane.

His GPS instructs him to take the next right and informs him that his destination will then be on his right. He can just make out the neon sign through the thick flakes: Townhouse Motel. “Vacancy,” it says below the old-timey script, blinking on and off. In the distance, the sun is just beginning to settle behind some mountains that he’s sure would be beautiful if they weren’t hidden behind such inclement weather.

He pulls in the driveway. The lot is nearly empty, so he parks right next to the office door and jams his winter cap on his head before hurrying through the flurries.

The bored teenager behind the front desk barely looks up from the reality show playing on her tablet as she runs Hob’s credit card and gives him his door key – an actual, physical key. Room 1389. He decides it’s not worth it to ask why the room number has four digits when the motel has maybe a dozen rooms total.

He does ask if there’s somewhere nearby to get a bite to eat and a drink.

“There’s a diner across the street and down a block,” the teenager says, “but they don’t serve booze.” Then, finally looking up, perhaps seeing the bags under his eyes and his generally downtrodden demeanor, she relents. “There’s a liquor store about two blocks past that. You can bring stuff back to your room, I guess. It’s not like anybody is going to ask questions around here.”

That, Hob thinks as he heads back outside and moves his rental car a little closer to his door, is obvious. There’s a general air of neglect clinging to the motel, and indeed to the whole street, from what he can see: the buildings are a little more weatherbeaten than can be plausibly explained by a cute vintage aesthetic, and at least one storefront seems to be permanently boarded up. The recession has clearly hit Northern California just as hard as it has the rest of the United States.

What a time to be playing tourist. What a time to be – well, he won’t think about that right now.

His room is clean, at least. Someone, at some point in time, has made a half-hearted attempt to decorate it with a seaside theme. The bedlinens are various shades of blue, rather than your typical beigey-white. There’s an unfortunate painting of a mermaid hanging over the outdated television, and a slightly less unfortunate painting of a lighthouse above the bed. The bathroom wallpaper has little seashells on it.

Hob leaves his camera bag on the desk and his duffel on the end of the bed, grabs his wallet, turns his collar up against the cold, and heads back out into the snowy evening.

The diner is, as promised, only a short walk down the street, but Hob is shivering by the time he gets there. The wind cuts right through him – silly British man that he is, he thought California would be warm, even in winter. He hadn’t really reckoned with unpredictable mountain weather, or with the cold front that was chasing him down through the southern end of the Cascades. The weatherman on the radio had been calling it “freakish.”

A little bell tinkles merrily when he pushes open the door. A waitress calls out a greeting, tells him to sit wherever he likes and she’ll be right with him. There’s only one other person in the diner, a slender man dressed all in black who is hunched over a cup of coffee at the counter. He glances up and immediately back down as Hob stomps the snow off his boots and takes an empty booth far enough away from the front door that he won’t feel the rush of cold air if anyone else comes in.

The waitress bustles over, bringing him a cup of coffee without even asking. Hob wraps his fingers around it gratefully. He doesn’t normally drink coffee this late, but it’s been the kind of day that calls for it: so cold, so uncomfortable and distressing, that the sturdy ceramic mug is exactly what he wants. The bitter note of slightly burnt coffee is tempered by the cheap, artificially flavored vanilla creamer he only ever uses at this kind of greasy spoon diner. He breathes deep and feels something inside him start to thaw.

When the waitress comes back with a menu, he warms up even more. She is middle-aged and comfortable, nice and no-nonsense, the sort of person with an indeterminate American accent who could have come from anywhere: Illinois, or Florida, or five minutes down the road. She recommends the olive burger with fries, and a side of fried pickles, because they’re the best in the county, and then her excitement simply bubbles over.

“I’m just so darn tickled to have two Brits here in the same night!” she enthuses. “Oh gosh, is that okay? Can I call you Brits or is that rude?”

“No, no, it’s fine!” Hob laughs. “Two of us, eh? That is a coincidence.”

“I know, right? Okay hon, lemme just get your order in and I’ll be back to warm up your coffee in a sec.”

She bustles away again, and Hob looks curiously at the man at the counter. He must have heard her comment, but he hasn’t turned around, or indeed acknowledged Hob in any way since he came in. He shrugs mentally and turns away to look out the window at the thickly swirling snow. It’s dark enough now that streetlights have come on, casting cones of light in which the flakes dance like a very slow sodium-tinted tornado.

He wishes he had a book. Or a crossword puzzle, or one of those packets of crayons they give to kids at restaurants. Something to keep his hands occupied and his mind off of everything that was threatening to consume it, off of the last few days, off of her –

Then the man from the counter slides into the booth across from him.

“Hello,” Hob says.

“Hello,” the stranger says. His voice is surprisingly deep and resonant, coming from his slim frame, and he looks to be in his late twenties, perhaps a few years younger than Hob. He is very pale. His dark hair is sticking up rather wildly and his eyes are a cold, clear blue that reminds Hob of the way the sky had looked this morning, before the clouds had descended.

“Who are you, then? Aside from a fellow Brit?” asks Hob.

“No one of consequence.” He’s lugging around a small backpack, which now rests on the bench beside him.

“I must know,” Hob says in a very bad Inigo Montoya accent.

“Get used to disappointment,” the stranger says with a smirk, and Hob laughs.

“Oh, we’re going to get along just fine,” he says, holding his hand out across the table. “My name’s Hob, yes that’s my real name, and yes, it is a long story.”

The stranger shakes his hand briefly. His palm is warm from cupping his coffee cup, but the tips of his fingers are cold. “Pleased to meet you, Hob.”

“And do you have a name, stranger?”

“I do. Several, in fact.”

“Any of them for public consumption?”

The stranger shrugs. “Will you forgive me if I maintain a certain level of mystery?”

Hob shrugs too. “That’s your lookout, mate. No skin off my nose.”

They chat. About the weather, and how odd it is, and how different to England. About books – the stranger appears to be a voracious reader, and Hob had loaded up an old iPod with audiobooks in preparation for a lot of driving, which sparks a lively debate on the merits of printed books vs reading aloud. In the midst of this, Hob’s food arrives, and he is derailed momentarily from the conversation by an overwhelming need to unhinge his jaw and stuff as many chips into his gob as humanly possible. The stranger watches in amusement.

“Hungry?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Hob says, muffled by his burger. “Been driving pretty much all day and I didn’t really want to stop, so…”

He’s suddenly self-conscious, very aware that the man sitting across from him is slender and willowy and dressed all in black, and that he himself is very much… not that. Dressed for comfort and warmth in slightly baggy jeans and a flannel shirt and his puffy jacket balled up on the bench beside him. But the stranger seems unbothered, simply smiling slightly and snagging a fried pickle off the plate between them, which Hob had invited him to share moments after it had arrived.

They are good; crispy and salty and uniquely American. Hob is certainly prepared to believe they’re the best in the county.

“So are you staying here in town, or is that shrouded in mystery as well?” he asks, once he’s slowed down a bit.

“I’ve been staying in a cabin up the mountain, a little way out of town. With my family.” He said the word family as though it is faintly dirty. “One of my siblings thought it would be good for us to get away together. But I have found it… trying.”

“Up the mountain, eh? Are you going to be able to get back in this?”

Hob tips his head toward the window. It is very dark now, and the snow is falling more thickly and wildly than ever. A crease appears between the stranger’s eyebrows.

“To be honest, I had not thought that far ahead.”

“Do you have much experience driving in the snow?”

To Hob’s surprise, the stranger actually blushes, just a gentle stain of pink across his cheekbones. “I… walked.”

“You walked?”

The waitress, stopping by the table to warm up their coffees, echos Hob’s surprise.

“Oh, honey,” she says. “In this? How are you fixing to get home?”

“I was planning to walk back,” the stranger says with some asperity. “But I admit I was not anticipating this kind of weather.”

“Let me check on the roads for you,” the waitress says kindly. “Which cabin did you say you’re at? My brother-in-law lives up that way, I’ll give him a call. I’m sure we can find you a ride.”

She goes back behind the counter and picks up the phone.

“I’m happy to give you a ride,” Hob says quietly. “If she thinks it’s safe.”

“You do not have to do that.”

“‘S okay. I want to.”

“Bill? It’s Jan. I have a question for you,” says the waitress.

Hob realizes, suddenly and with some surprise, that it is quite true, that he is not just being polite: he does want to help this mysterious stranger, who talks like a 19th-century Byronic hero and dresses like a college goth. His stomach is doing the tiniest little swoop every time they make eye contact, and he doesn’t want it to stop.

The waitress calls over to him.

“You got four wheel drive, hon?”

Hob thinks about the little Honda Civic in the motel parking lot. Thinks about mountain roads and snow. Shakes his head no.

Scraps of the waitress’s conversation float across the diner and Hob takes another bite of his burger.

“– well they’re foreign, Bill, they don’t –”

He snickers just a little; can’t help himself, really, because the waitress is just so kind and helpful and also clearly more than a little bit befuddled by their presence in her diner. These two Brits, total strangers, so unalike one another – and yet here they are, sharing a booth and a plate of fried pickles, five thousand miles and change away from home. He exchanges a look of camaraderie with the stranger and eats some more chips. They’re good too.

“– and tomorrow? What’s the overnight –”

After another minute or two the waitress thanks her brother-in-law and hangs up the phone. Her face is serious when she comes back to their table.

“Well, boys,” she says, “I don’t think anyone is going anywhere tonight. Bill says it’s pretty bad up there, and only getting worse. The plows aren’t even going out yet on account of the snow’s still coming down so hard, it doesn’t make sense to try and clear anything. You going to be able to find a place to stay?” she asks the stranger.

He looks at Hob. “Did you mention a motel?”

“Yeah, the Townhouse?” Hob says, and the waitress nods along. “I don’t know for sure if there are rooms available, but it didn’t look like the parking was full.”

“Probably not, this time of year,” interjects the waitress. “It’s a fine place, and Paulie can certainly use the business. I’ll bring your checks by in a minute, guys.”

She leaves them again. Her sensible sneakers squeak against the floor tiles as she walks.

“Thank you again for your offer of a ride,” the stranger says quietly. “That was very kind of you.”

“Course. I’m just sorry you won’t be able to get home tonight,” Hob says.

“It is my own fault. I should not have behaved so impulsively. But my siblings…” The man frowns. “As I said, they can be difficult. I would have done something regrettable, had I remained in the house.”

Hob waves a hand. “Ah, it happens to the best of us. Especially around family. You should hear some of the fights I’ve had with my sister, we can scream the paint off the walls when we get going.”

“Indeed,” the man says darkly.

“I’m glad you did come to town, though. It’s been kind of nice,” Hob says tentatively. “Having someone to talk to tonight.”

“Indeed,” his stranger repeats. But this time one corner of his mouth lifts in a tiny smile. “It seems to have worked out in my favor.”

Hob smiles back. “So, are you really not going to tell me your name?”

“Where’s the fun in that?”

“Fun, eh?” Hob glances down at his own hands, folded on the table, back at the stranger. “Is that what this is?”

The stranger smirks. He leans forward and plucks another fried pickle from the plate. He opens his mouth, sticking out his tongue just a little bit farther than necessary to pop the slice into his mouth. He chews, and smirks some more, and gives Hob an unmistakable up-and-down appraising glance, and underneath the table he presses one ankle against Hob’s instep.

Oh. Hob feels a surprising but not unfamiliar spike of arousal in his gut. So that’s where this is heading – has been heading, since he pushed open the door and the stranger had glanced up at him. Had he blushed, when his eyes met Hob’s? Or is he applying more detail to that brief interaction after the fact, now that he thinks he knows what his stranger is thinking?

And when had the man become his stranger?

“I see,” he says, and presses back against the bony ankle under the table.

Ten minutes later, they’ve settled their bills – his stranger had apparently eaten a club sandwich before Hob had arrived, and he’s weirdly relieved that the man has consumed something more substantial than coffee this evening – and are gearing up to head back into the cold. Hob is zipping up his coat when he realizes the other man appears to have only a thick black hoodie and a knit beanie (also black, of course). He glances out the window, where it’s still snowing pretty hard, and raises an eyebrow.

“You going to be okay in just that?”

“You said it is only a couple of blocks? I will be fine. I tend not to feel the cold. And,” he adds defensively, “when I originally walked down the weather was not quite so… inclement.”

“If you say so,” Hob says as he opens the door. The waitress calls out a good night and he waves to her over his stranger’s shoulder. Wonders, just for a moment, what she thinks of the fact that they’re leaving together, or if she will ever think of them again at all. They step out into the snowy evening. “The girl at the motel said there’s a liquor store down the street. Mind detouring there? I was thinking of picking up some whiskey, or something. Something to keep a man warm.”

The man chuckles and they head down the street. It’s not until they’re away from the diner windows that he takes Hob by the elbow and gently draws him just outside the circle of a street lamp.

“Surely,” he says, voice low, stepping into Hob’s space, “there are many ways for a man to… keep warm.”

And he kisses him.

His lips are warm and dry, a little chapped. It’s a simple kiss, a chaste one, just their lips touching and the barest pressure of the stranger’s belly and chest pressed against Hob’s, swathed in layers of winter gear. It lasts for a heartbeat, two, and then the man steps back with a hum of satisfaction.

“Oh?” says Hob, giddily. “It’s like that, is it?”

“Obviously,” responds his stranger.

“Well, I don’t know, mate,” says Hob as they make their way down the street. He resists the urge to link their arms together. “Maybe you play footsie with every guy you meet in random diners in Northern California.”

“Perhaps.”

The liquor store is a brief respite from the wind and the snow. Hob selects a mid-range bottle of whiskey and they trudge back to his motel room. The snowflakes and the streetlights and the swirling wind make everything feel more than a little bit surreal, like something out of a dream or a fairy tale. The two of them could be adventurers, explorers, wading through an arctic wasteland in search of shelter. The mountain looms behind them, dark and mysterious, like a great castle or some monstrous beast.

“Do you mind if I take a shower?” asks his stranger, kicking off his boots dropping his backpack by the desk. “I’m afraid I did get rather sweaty, hiking down earlier. I wouldn’t mind cleaning up.” His gaze, beneath his long eyelashes, feels heavy and significant.

“Go right ahead.” Hob gestures toward the bathroom. “I’m just going to nip down to the lobby and get a bit of ice.” He retrieves the ice bucket from the desk, brushing close to his stranger as he does. The brief contact jolts him back to the real world. They’re not in the arctic waste; this handsome, ethereal man is here, in his motel room. He is pulling off his somewhat sodden hoodie and draping it over the back of the chair, and sniffing dubiously at the sweater he wears underneath it. He is real.

Hob waits until he hears the shower turn on to slip out the door.

Although he has his moments of cluelessness, Hob is not a stupid man. He knows where this is going. He recognizes the signs, the coy little dance they’ve been doing around each other for the past two hours, and no, he’s not a stupid man, but if he were a better one he might be able to resist the temptation of falling into bed with a beautiful stranger who won’t even share his name.

But there’s something about this man. Hob wants him. Already can’t resist him. Wants to wrap him up and keep him warm and kiss his collarbones and, yes, wants to fuck him, wants to feel him shudder and moan and wants to watch his cheeks flush and his head fall back in ecstasy. He hasn’t felt like this for a long, long time, and now it’s come out of nowhere to slam into him and hook into his gut, this wanting.

He throws a few scoops of ice from the machine in the motel lobby into the bucket and goes back to the room.

He’s kicked off his boots, unwrapped one of the shitty plastic cups, and poured himself a couple fingers of whiskey by the time he hears the shower shut off. There’s the usual shuffling noise of towels, a brief blast of the cheap hair dryer mounted to the wall. Then the door opens and the stranger emerges, and Hob is slammed from the real world right back into a surreal dream.

The man is even more beautiful without his clothes on: Hob would compare him to an elf or a fairy prince, but he’s too busy choking slightly on the spit that’s suddenly flooding his mouth at the sight of long, slim limbs, a narrow waist, and a temptingly well-defined Adonis belt that disappears under the cheap motel towel wound around his hips.

There’s a long moment of silent eye contact. Hob’s leaning up against the desk, cup cradled in one hand. His face heats as he watches his stranger’s eyes travel slowly down the length of his body and back up, pursing his lips slightly. His mouth is very pink, with the kind of full bottom lip that’s made for nibbling on, and the rest of his skin is as pale and smooth as… well, as snow, with just a touch of redness from the heat of the shower spreading across his chest.

Hob downs half of his whiskey without even thinking about it. He can’t look away. He can’t think, can’t even blink. He’s afraid that if he does, this vision will disappear and it’ll just be him, alone, a saddish man alone in a motel room with a bottle of booze and a bag of expensive camera equipment, and then who knows what will happen?

His stranger gives him one of those tiny half-smiles, suggestive, not quite a leer, and stalks across the room toward him.

He widens his legs and his stranger steps in to stand between his feet. He takes Hob’s drink out of his hand and tosses back the last swallow of whiskey before setting the plastic cup aside. Then he hooks one finger into the collar of Hob’s flannel shirt and pulls him into a kiss. His mouth is a study in contrasts: warm from the whiskey and cool from the ice, soft tongue and sharp teeth. They sink briefly, gently, into Hob’s bottom lip, and Hob pulls the man close against his chest and returns the favor.

The kiss is turning wet and messy when the man pulls back far enough to start fumbling with Hob’s shirt buttons. He’s pulled the tails of the shirt out of Hob’s jeans and has it about halfway unbuttoned when a phone starts ringing.

It’s not the room phone – it’s coming from a pocket of the man’s backpack.

“Ignore it,” he mumbles into Hob’s neck. “We are busy.”

The phone rings three times; four times. The stranger has finished with Hob’s shirt and is pulling the tee beneath it out of the waistband of his jeans by the time it finally stops.

His fingers are toying with Hob’s belt buckle and ghosting over the seam of his fly when it rings again.

The stranger groans audibly.

“Do you think,” Hob says with the carefully deliberate cadence of the very turned on, “that your family might be worried about you?”

“I do not care,” his stranger grumbles, and sinks gracefully to his knees.

Eventually the phone stops ringing again.

He’s worked Hob’s belt and fly open and is nuzzling into the opening of his jeans, nosing at the base of Hob’s cock through his underwear and Hob is panting, his stranger’s hot breath so close to where Hob wants him most – when the phone rings a third time.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” snarls the stranger, and stands.

He fishes a slightly battered-looking BlackBerry out of an outside pocket of his backpack and stabs at the call answer button.

“What.”

He turns away, so all Hob can see is the furious, stiff line of his stranger’s back. He can’t hear the other half of the conversation, and he doesn’t think he wants to; every fibre of the man’s body radiates anger and discomfort and perhaps a little bit of shame. Hob adjusts himself discreetly, rezips his jeans, and tiptoes over to sit down on the edge of the bed.

“Obviously I am alive. I am fine.” A pause. “I took a walk.” Another pause. “Yes. Yes, I know what time it is. No, I am assured that the roads were too bad to make it back to the cabin. I am in a motel room in…” He looks over to Hob. “What is the name of this place?”

Hob supplies the name of the motel, and that of the town as well, just for good measure. The man relays the information into the phone. There is another long pause.

“That is none of your business. Shut up. You have no idea what you’re talking about. And if you speak to me like that again I will hang up the phone.”

There is another, longer pause, during which the stranger’s face grows progressively redder. He is very deliberately not looking at Hob.

“No. I said no. I will arrange for my own transportation in the morning. I –”

The person on the other end of the phone must say something truly outrageous, because his strangers eyes bug out in a way that looks almost uncomfortable.

“Do the entirety of the known universe a favor and crawl back into whatever slime hole you emerged from and leave me alone,” he hisses. “Goodbye.”

Hob can’t quite muffle a snort at this crowning line. Siblings.

His stranger hangs up the phone with a vicious jab of a button and slams it down on the desk; then seems to reconsider, retrieves it, and shuts it off entirely before throwing it into his backpack. He sighs, a surprisingly tired sound.

“I will have another drink, if you don’t mind,” he says. “And then I would like it very much if you would fuck me. Please.”

Hob’s cock, which had been feeling distinctly neglected, gives a twitch.

“I think that can be arranged,” he says. “Are you –”

The stranger waves a dismissive hand. “I am quite sober enough to have sex with you. And I could easily afford my own room, if that’s a concern. I am here because I want to be.”

“Glad to hear it, but that actually isn’t what I was going to ask,” Hob says mildly.

“Oh,” the man says. A faint blush rises on his cheekbones. He scoops up the whiskey bottle and uncorks it, taking an unceremonious swig. The towel hangs dangerously low around his hips. “What were you going to ask?”

His stranger pauses with the whiskey bottle against his lips. Hob watches the long line of his neck work once, twice, as he swallows, and figures he may as well put his cards on the table.

“I was going to ask if latex condoms are okay. For when I fuck you into the mattress in a minute here.”

The man clears his throat. “Oh,” he says again. “Yes. Latex is fine.”

“Good. Anything you don’t like? Hard boundaries?”

He pauses. “I do not enjoy being choked. Or having my hands restrained in any way. But I like… I like it a little bit rough. It feels good. To be used.”

Hob leans back on one elbow. “Is that what you want me to do? Use you?”

“Yes.”

The word drops into the quiet room like a handful of snow might drop off a tree branch – soft and muffled and sending the same delicious shiver down Hob’s spine.

“I can do that.” Oh, yes. Hob can use this beautiful man, if he is offering himself up to be used. “C’mere, then.”

His stranger walks slowly across the room to where Hob is half-reclining on the bed, feet still planted on the floor. He kneels between Hob’s legs and runs his hands slowly up and down his thighs from knee to hip. “And you?” he asks. “Your boundaries?”

Hob considers. “I’m with you on choking, not a fan,” he says. “I’m not big on pain, generally, but I can give it to other people, if they need it.”

“Alright.” His hands are still rubbing up and down Hob’s thighs, a slow, hypnotizing rhythm. When he speaks again his voice is thick. “Would you consider the preliminary negotiations to be concluded now?”

“Don’t you have anything better to do with your mouth than spout off like a horny nineteenth century robber baron?” Hob counters.

His stranger smiles, a proper smile that crinkles the corners of his blue eyes, and unzips the fly of Hob’s jeans.

In short order he’s pulled them open and pushed Hob’s boxers down just enough that he can get his cock out. He’s not quite hard, not yet, but he gets there quickly between his stranger’s gentle, surprisingly soft hands and the way he immediately buries his nose in Hob’s pubic hair and breathes deeply as he looks up through his eyelashes.

Then he opens his mouth, and wraps his tongue around the head of Hob’s cock, and Hob’s brain makes a noise like radio static.

Oh, he is good at this. Unfairly good. Supernaturally good. He teases Hob for long, long minutes, working up and down his shaft with light touches of just his lips and tongue, ducking down now and then to mouth gently at his balls, until Hob is twitching and swearing and straining, perched on the edge of the bed. When he finally has mercy and takes Hob’s cock fully into his mouth, it is barely a relief. He is so wet, so hot, and he sinks down on Hob with no resistance, no trace of a gag reflex. Before he can stop himself, Hob’s hips jerk forward that final fraction, and suddenly his stranger’s nose is brushing his pubic bone and his throat is contracting around the head of Hob’s cock.

He’s expecting the man to pull back, to splutter in indignation, but instead he makes an encouraging noise and squeezes Hob’s thigh before folding his hands almost primly in his lap.

“Fuck,” Hob mutters. He makes an experimental shallow thrust into the tight, wet heat of his stranger’s mouth. “Really?”

His stranger can’t nod, not with Hob’s prick in his mouth, but he moans. Hob feels it vibrate all along the length of his shaft and has to stifle a whimper of his own. He sinks one hand into the soft riot of the man’s hair, still a little damp from the shower, and cradles the back of his skull. The bone feels sweet and finely formed in his hand.

“You want me to fuck your pretty face?” he asks, soft and just a tiny bit mean. “Yeah? That’s what your mouth is good for, isn’t it?”

He thrusts again, in and out, and the stranger’s eyes roll back a little in his head, so he does it again, and again. Soon he really is fucking his face, not too hard but deep, fingers tightening in his stranger’s hair as his eyes fall nearly shut, narrowing to crystalline blue crescents.

Hob pulls back briefly to let his stranger breathe. Runs his thumb along his bottom lip, dripping with spit, before he pushes back in. He doesn’t stop until he can feel the first tendrils of orgasm beckoning to him; but as tempting as it is to keep going, to empty himself into this perfect mouth, he’s made a promise. And Hob is a man of his word, so he pulls the man off his cock by the scruff of his neck. He makes an obscene noise as he goes, and another thing string of saliva dribbles from his puffy mouth. His eyes are slightly glassy as he looks up at Hob.

“Get up on the bed, baby,” Hob orders gently.

When the man stands up the towel is just barely clinging to his narrow hips, and his erection is stiff and straining against the terrycloth. He’s so hard, Hob thinks wonderingly, just from having Hob’s cock in his mouth for a few minutes, and his own prick throbs in sympathy.

“Hands and knees,” Hob says, and the man crawls up on the bed. The towel falls away as he goes, languid but obedient, so that he’s entirely naked when Hob positions himself behind him. The contrast between Hob’s clothes and the other man’s nudity is delicious – Hob’s rough denim against the man’s soft thighs, Hob’s hairy wrists poking out from worn flannel as he runs his fingernails along sharply elegant shoulder blades.

He allows himself one long, gentle caress, from the nape of his stranger’s neck down to the shallow dimples in the small of his back, before he grabs at the man’s buttocks and unceremoniously spreads him open.

His hole looks surprisingly loose and relaxed already. Hob runs the pad of one thumb over it.

“Were you prepping yourself in the shower?” he asks, delighted. He presses gently and the furl of muscle gives, just a little, pink and fluttering.

“Hng,” says his stranger, shuddering. “Yes. I thought – I thought about your hands. Oh. I liked the thought that you were just outside the door. While I had my fingers inside myself.”

“Impatient little minx,” Hob says fondly. He kisses one of the lovely knobs of his stranger’s spine and pinches his backside for good measure before pulling away. “Stay here.”

He has to dig down to the bottom of his duffel bag in order to find the box of condoms and the little travel sized bottle of lube. He’d felt a little self-conscious when he’d packed them back in his flat in London – like he was presuming something – but then again he had been preparing for a supposedly romantic road trip with his girlfriend.

He’s glad, now, that he has them.

His stranger has remained on his knees, pitched forward to rest on his elbows, face pressed into a pillow and cock hanging heavy between his legs.

“Good boy,” Hob praises, and runs his hand along the man’s flank. “Beautiful. Oh, darling, I’m going to make you feel so good. And then you’re going to make me feel so good, aren’t you? You already have,” Hob coos, drizzling lube directly onto his arsehole. “And I know you’re going to keep being a good boy for me, aren’t you?”

Before the man can answer, Hob slips a finger inside him, right up to the first knuckle. He’s rewarded with a whimper and the feeling of his stranger pushing back against him, silently begging for more.

And then not so silently. “More,” moans the stranger. “Fuck. More, please.”

Hob strokes his finger in and out, petting the velvet inside his stranger.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “You’ll get more.”

He tries to spend as much time torturing his stranger with his fingers as his stranger had spent torturing him with his mouth, but by the second finger he finds his resolve dissolving like so many snowflakes on warm skin. The man is making such wanton sounds, and his knees skid wider and wider on the slippery motel bedspread, opening him inexorably to Hob’s hungry eyes and questing hands.

“Oh. Oh,” he says. “Oh, yes, fuck,” he moans. No more well-crafted phrases or erudite words; the only thing dropping from that perfect mouth are noises, guttural and breathy by turns, only half-muffled by the pillow his face is smashed into.

“Please,” he begs, “please, in me, I – please, I need –”

Hob obliges.

He’s pretty sure he’s never been harder in his life as he shoves his jeans down around his thighs and rolls the condom on. He has to do it one-handed, clumsily, because some frantic corner of his brain is convinced that if he lets go of the stranger’s hip then the man will disappear, between one blink and the next, and this whole night will turn out to have been some snowblind fever dream.

But his stranger stays where Hob has put him, desperate and writhing, begging for Hob’s cock, and when he finally pins the man down to the mattress and pushes into him, that first hard thrust is enough to silence both of them.

The room is utterly still for a heartbeat, and then another, and then one more, until Hob pulls out in order to thrust in again and his stranger wails and then Hob is fucking into him in earnest, fucking him hard, until the sound of their skin slapping together almost drowns out the sounds his stranger is making beneath him.

Almost.

His stranger moans and pants, and Hob answers him, thrust for thrust and moan for moan, Yes and Ah and Christ and Fuck, fuck me, use me, yes. He grips his stranger by the hips, so hard that his fingers leave little white divots behind when he shifts his grip, so hard that he worries he might leave bruises, and still the man pushes back against him and begs for more.

He comes, when he finally comes, untouched, rutting gracelessly against the mattress. Hob stills, grits his teeth, not wanting to overwhelm the other man as he seizes in pleasure, but his stranger continues to move against him, if anything even more desperate, even in the throes of orgasm.

“Don’t stop,” he gasps, “don’t, oh God, fuck me through it, don’t stop –”

So Hob hauls him up and pushes him down, one hand on his waist and one shoving his chest down into the mattress as the man’s hands scrabble at the sheets and he sobs and Hob pistons into him until he empties himself, until his prick is oversensitive and his stranger is twitching around and beneath him, and the room is finally quiet.

Then Hob takes the condom off, knots it and tosses it towards the wastebasket. He rolls them both away from the wet spot with only middling success, but he’s too tired to care. He shucks the rest of his clothes off. He is boneless and spent, and his stranger is inserting himself relentlessly into Hob’s personal space. They lie there for a long, long moment, sweaty and panting, until their breathing starts to even out and the desperate closeness has receded into normal cuddling. Hob presses a kiss to his stranger’s sweaty temple and marvels at his luck.

“I realize I neglected to ask you why you find yourself in Northern California,” his stranger says, tucked against Hob’s side, voice drowsy and hoarse. “Do you care to share?”

“It’s a long story,” Hob says. “I was – well, I am – on a road trip. With my, ah. With my girlfriend. Well. Ex-girlfriend, now. Actually.”

His stranger tenses slightly, and Hob doesn’t blame him; he knows how it must sound. “It sounds like there is a story there?” the man says, almost tentative.

“Yeah, we… we came over together, about two weeks ago. We flew into Seattle, were planning this whole big trip, right down the coast and all the way to Los Angeles. See the redwoods, do some wine tastings, the whole bit. I’m a photographer, I was thinking I could turn the whole trip into a photo essay, maybe even a book.” He sighs. “Then she heard about this yoga retreat, ashram sort of place. Bit culty, I don’t really go in for all that, but she absolutely had to check it out, so we did. Two days later, out of the blue, she tells me our chakras are misaligned and gives me the boot. Turns out Guru Todd Thingummy, who ran the retreat center, was very aligned with her chakras. As well as other, less… metaphysical things.”

There’s a sound from the vicinity of Hob’s armpit that he realizes with delight is a snort. The snort blossoms into a chuckle, and then his stranger is laughing, a frankly horrible honking sort of laugh, shaking in Hob’s arms with it, and Hob laughs along.

“I’m sorry,” his stranger gasps. “I shouldn’t – I shouldn’t laugh at you. It’s just… Guru Todd.”

“I know!” Hob snickers. “You can picture him, right? White boy dreadlocks and a fucking… shell necklace. Utter tosser.”

“I feel like I’ve probably met someone almost exactly like him, truly.” Eventually his stranger’s horrible laugh subsides. He shifts against Hob, playing idly with his chest hair, curling it around one finger. “In a way, I am also escaping a recent ex. She was the first person I dated after some… difficult experiences I had about a year ago. But in the end I was far more invested in the relationship than she, and she became. Uncomfortable. With my ardor.”

“She’s a bloody idiot then,” Hob says automatically, and his stranger looks up, startled.

“Do you think so?”

Hob briefly considers backpedaling. Don’t come off like a madman, he thinks to himself. Not when he’s finally talking to you. But there’s no hope for him. “Well, yeah. I mean, I’d say your ardor is my favorite thing about you so far.” He lets one hand drift down and gives his stranger’s arse a cheeky squeeze, and is rewarded with a squeak and another snort.

“You are kind to say so,” the man says, and interrupts himself with a yawn.

“It’s true. I… I’m really glad I met you,” Hob says honestly. Too honestly. He can’t help himself; the man is just so beautiful, mouth kissed red and limbs loose, fucked out and soft everywhere he’d been hard and prickly before.

Hob still doesn’t know his name.

“I’m glad I met you, too,” the man says softly.

Hob snuggles them both down into the lumpy motel pillows and pulls the blanket up firmly around their shoulders. The wind blows outside, he reaches up to switch off the lamp, and they fall asleep.

He wakes in the night and stumbles to the bathroom to take a piss. When he comes back, his stranger has starfished out and is taking up a full two-thirds of the bed, sleeping like a stone. Hob manages to reinsert himself into the remaining third and then simply lies there for a long few minutes, looking at the other man.

The skies must have cleared, at least a little, because there’s a few strips of moonlight filtering through the blinds. The pale light turns his stranger into marble, a work of art; he practically glows against the blue sheets. Hob’s fingers itch for his camera.

“You’re going to fuck me up,” he whispers. “I’m going to wake up next to you and never want to leave, and it’s going to fuck me up so bad.”

The sleeping man does not respond, of course; doesn’t even stir. Hob lies there, and gazes at him, until he slips back into sleep himself.

When he wakes again it’s fully morning. The sun is that peculiar thin shade of blue that you get on very cold mornings, but when Hob peeks out the window, the sky is clear and the snowplows have clearly been out making the rounds. He tries to tamp down a sudden feeling of disappointment.

He gets a drink of water, and when he returns to bed his stranger is stirring. First one blue eye opens, then the other.

“Morning,” Hob says.

The man hums and stretches luxuriously, rolling from his belly to his back. The sheets fall down around his hips, revealing one elegant hipbone and a tempting glimpse of dark curls. His pale skin practically glows against the blue sheets in the morning light.

“Enjoying the view?” his stranger asks, and his voice is rough with sleep and slightly hoarse.

“You could say that,” Hob says. He puts one knee on the bed, reaches out to run a hand lightly down the long, lean line of the man’s thigh. “God, you’re… you are so beautiful.”

“Come here to me,” the man says, beckoning to Hob.

Hob ducks his head and kisses up the ladder of the man’s ribs, takes one pert nipple gently between his teeth.

“Can I take your picture?” he says suddenly. “Not in a creepy way. I can even keep your face out of it if you like, I just… there’s something about you, in this light.”

“I don’t mind,” the man says.

Hob’s heart leaps.

A few minutes later, he’s gotten his camera out and adjusted. The room is so quiet, so still, that each click of the shutter sounds almost sacrilegious. He shoots in black and white. He thinks the sheets will show dark, almost black, and the man’s skin will show light and luminous against them. His stranger poses like a dream, languid and biddable, moving here and there on the bed, wherever Hob arranges him.

“You’ve done this before,” Hob accuses. He’s kneeling above the other man, shooting straight down, and his stranger has one arm thrown over his face so only one eye is visible. “Posed, I mean. You know how to move for a camera.”

“I have,” the stranger admits. “Mostly for life drawing classes, though I imagine the principle is more or less the same.”

“Incredible. Are you an artist, then?”

“I suppose.”

Hob tugs the sheet a little lower, so that it’s just barely covering the stranger’s prick, which has plumped up a little – whether from the attention of Hob himself or of the camera, he’s not sure, but it’s one of the sexiest things Hob’s ever seen. The neat patch of dark hair blending into the dark sheet. The gentle swell beneath it. His mouth waters.

“You suppose?”

“I find it difficult to call myself an artist. To claim that title. But I make art. If that is the same thing.”

“Hmm. I reckon so.”

Hob pulls the sheet another fraction of an inch lower. He can feel himself getting distracted. The itch he’d felt to photograph the beautiful stranger, now mostly satisfied, has transformed into an altogether different kind of impulse. He takes one more shot, barely paying attention to the framing. Catches himself licking his lips.

“Hob.”

“Yeah?”

“Put the camera down.”

He hastens to obey.

He’d pulled his boxers back on at some point last night, but they do little to hide his arousal as he slides under the sheets and slots himself in behind his stranger, rubbing his nose in the riotous bedhead and kissing his neck as the man tilts his head to one side to give him better access.

“I like how you say my name,” Hob murmurs. He grinds against his stranger’s narrow arse and reaches around to make a loose fist around his hardening cock. “You’re really not going to tell me yours, are you?”

“Mine?”

“Your name.”

“I –” The man’s breath hitches as Hob tightens his grip, stroking slowly up and down. “I haven’t – decided yet.”

“Well,” Hob says against the smooth skin between his ear and his shoulder. “Let me know what you decide.”

They writhe together under the sheets for a few minutes, until they’re both fully hard, until Hob’s chest is slightly tacky with sweat where it’s rubbing against the stranger’s sharp shoulder blades. He’s grunting, underwear pulled down, making quick little thrusts in the crease of the other man’s thigh, sticky and warm and so good.

“Fuck me again,” his stranger says. “Please.”

“Don’t be a madman,” Hob chides. “You’ll be so sore.”

But he doesn’t say no. And he slides a finger between the man’s arse cheeks and pets over his hole, still a little loose from the night before.

The stranger twists his neck around to look Hob in the eye. “I don’t care. I want you,” he says. “I want to feel it.”

And Hob tries his best to be a good person, he really does, but when confronted with this bald-faced desire he is only, after all, a man. So he mumbles Fuck, okay, yeah, okay against his stranger’s shoulder, and tears himself away to retrieve the lube and a condom. He fingers him open, as slowly and as carefully as he can bring himself to do it, and rolls the condom on, and he fucks him again. Face to face, this time; one knee hooked over his elbow, and long arms clinging to him like a drowning man, and panting, open-mouthed kisses that are as much simply breathing the other’s breath as they are real kisses.

The stranger comes first, his beautiful face screwed up in ecstasy, and Hob follows him over the edge mere seconds later.

The other man falls back into a doze almost immediately, drifting off as soon as Hob has disposed of the condom and wiped them down with a handful of tissues, but Hob is buzzing with too much energy to lie back down. He cleans himself up, splashing water on his face and brushing his teeth quickly, before dressing quietly and creeping down to the motel lobby to look for breakfast.

There’s a coffee machine, a few muffins – prepackaged, not fresh – and a rather sad fruit bowl with some mealy-looking apples. He assembles what he can and shoves some creamers and sugar packets in his jacket pocket. He asks the bored teenager at the front desk (a different one than the night before, although bearing a distinct family resemblance) about the weather report, and learns that although it’s supposed to stay cold, no more precipitation is in the forecast. Then he goes back to the room.

His stranger stirs again at the rush of cold air when Hob lets himself back into the room.

“I come bearing provisions,” he says, setting the coffees on the bedside table and dropping the rest of his meager bounty in the man’s lap.

“Foraging for our survival?” he asks dryly.

“Something like that. It’s slim pickings out there, I’m afraid. But hey –” he picks up a muffin and wiggles it “– chocolate chip!”

His stranger snorts and mutters something about being spoiled.

Hob is very careful not to say anything about how he’d like to spoil this man very much, actually, for the foreseeable future and possibly beyond that, because Hob has so longed for someone to care for, and because this man so obviously needs it. Hob eats his muffin, and very carefully does not say anything reckless or emotional.

They finish their motel snacks, and drink their coffees (Hob’s with a little creamer and one sugar; the stranger’s with no cream and an absurd amount of sugar). And eventually Hob broaches the subject that’s obviously hovering between them.

“So,” he says. “What do you want to do now? I’m still up to give you a ride to your cabin, if that’s what you want. The roads are supposed to be cleared by now.”

“I suppose I should,” the stranger says, fiddling with his styrofoam cup, not meeting Hob’s eyes. “I did tell my sibling that I would return in the morning.”

“Okay.” Hob clears his throat. “Alright then. Whenever you’re ready.”

It takes them another hour to leave the room. Hob showers, and then his stranger decides he needs to rinse off as well, and then there’s a frustrating search for car keys that turn out to have been kicked or dropped halfway under a bedside table at some point the night before.

Then the stranger stops Hob in the doorway with a hand on his elbow and kisses him, long and slow and wordless, before they step out into the brilliant snowy sparkle of the late morning.

The drive is very quiet. The stranger directs Hob out of town and along a rather steep road that winds up the thickly forested mountainside. It’s certainly not a road that Hob would have wanted to drive in last night’s weather, and even with clear skies and plowed roads he takes it slow, acutely aware of the grip of the rental car’s tires on the snowy highway.

Only one time does the stranger wince and shift uncomfortably when Hob cannot avoid a bump in the road. Hob smiles, and swallows his smile, and deliberately wrenches his mind away from the vivid memories of just why his stranger might be wincing and shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

His stranger is silent, except for when he briefly tells Hob when and where to turn. The farther they drive up the mountain, the stiffer he becomes, until he’s gripping the seat with white knuckles and his mouth is one firm line.

Hob doesn’t think it’s the wintry roads that are making him so tense.

They pull over, eventually, at the base of a long driveway. Through the trees Hob can see a large house – not really a cabin by any stretch of the imagination, but built of logs, and with a wisp of woodsmoke floating up from a picturesque brick chimney. They both gaze up at it through the trees. Hob puts the car in park but doesn’t turn it off.

“Well, here we are,” he says.

“Indeed,” his stranger says, and his voice sounds tense and slightly strangled. “Thank you.”

“Of course.”

Hob waits for him to open the door and walk away.

The man does not move.

A minute stretches by, and another, and another, and still his stranger has not opened the car door.

Hob dares to hope.

“Come with me,” he says suddenly.

His stranger looks up, startled.

“I mean it. Come with me. Go get your stuff and we’ll just. Drive away. Go down the coast, find somewhere it’s actually warm. Or don’t even get your stuff,” he adds hurriedly, aware that his voice is sounding increasingly unhinged. “Say the word and I’ll just turn the car around. We’ll go. Anywhere you want, just… come with me.”

The man looks at Hob with an unreadable expression for a long moment. “You know nothing about me,” he says finally.

“I know I like you. A lot,” Hob says. “I know last night was one of the best nights I’ve had in a long time, maybe one of the best nights of my whole life. I know I’d regret it if I didn’t at least ask. So, I’m asking. Come with me.”

“I haven’t even told you my name,” says his stranger. “I could be a serial killer.”

“You could be, yeah. But I don’t think you are. I think… I think you just want someone to want you.” Hob reaches across the gear shift and briefly touches his stranger on the cheek. The man’s eyes flutter closed and Hob doesn’t think he’s imagining the way he leans ever-so-slightly into the gentle touch before he looks down. “I want you.”

There’s another long silence, punctuated only by an occasional call from the chickadees flitting through the trees.

“My name is Morpheus,” he says to his hands, clenched in his lap. “But some people call me Dream. People – people close to me. Call me Dream.”

Hob smiles. “Can I call you Dream, then?”

Dream nods. “Let’s go,” he says. Hob’s smile widens.

“Want to get anything from inside?” he asks.

“No. I think not,” Dream says. All of a sudden it’s like the tight strings of his body are loosened: he leans back in his seat, crosses his ankles, looking relaxed for the first time since they’d gotten out of bed. He lolls his head to one side and peeks at Hob and his face looks fey and happy in the afternoon light. “I believe I have everything I need for now.”

Happiness wells up in Hob’s chest, a rushing feeling like a mountain spring swollen by melting snow. He puts the car in gear and reaches over to take Dream’s hand.

“Right then,” he says. “Let’s go.”

Read on AO3 >>>

#dreamling #the sandman #my writing #designtheendless

[libraford]

Day 19/50

More Pickleball drama.

Whoever have the Head Complainer the keys to the bathroom must have also given him a key to the storage trunk, which is for parks use only, but I guess when you're 65, paid 750k for a house, and your only joy in life is to play oversized table tennis for 8 hours and complain about minor inconveniences, I guess they give you keys to the city.

Our horticulture crew was working around the bathrooms- removing poison ivy and the like, and planting something fondly called "Arties party mix" which is a completely random assortment of flower seeds that Artie throws together. (Its mostly Shasta daisies, cosmos, sunflowers, and pinks).

Head Complainer walks through the mulch that was just laid down and gives them a sort of indignant look. "Do not plant anything along this path. It's how I get to the trunk."

Artie is pulling up a plant that's been stomped on and puts 2 and 2 together.

"Theres a sidewalk three feet that way that we'd prefer you stay on."

"I dont want to use the sidewalk. I want a sidewalk put HERE so I dont have to go around."

"Ah. I see. Well, thanks for letting us know that you're the one that's been walking on the mulch."

Head Complainer grumbles something in Olde English Typeface and heads back to the tennis court that is now used exclusively for pickleball.

"Hey Sarge," Artie says to the head horticulturalist. "I think we should plant a tree right here."

#parks and wrecks #life as a temporary twig pig

[20th-century-railroading]

High noon at Hotlum

Far above the Shasta Valley, a westbound lumber drag rolls through Hotlum in July 1988. I wish I had better understood back then why savvy railfans spend summer hours between 11 am and 4 pm taking siestas in their cars, parked in the shade.

#sp #southern pacific #1988 #trains #freight train #history #hotlum #california

[tsunadadudi]

Hi, I need to move by the end of April or I’m gonna be homeless

Remaking because my older one is outdated, messy, and a lot happened very fast.

Fund count -250/1750

My trans ndn ass is so tired. So, many of my longtime followers and mutuals know that I recently moved in September out of an abusive household. This was a massive boon to my mental health and freedom, but unfortunately my current rental cannot hold me any longer.

I have to move by the end of April or I will have nowhere to go.

Thankfully, my best friend has a room open for me back in NC, but I have to get back to NC.

And right as I was prepping to do this, I ran into a slew of car troubles.

I had a parking lot accident and was down $775, and then someone hit me and knocked off my driver side mirror. Thankfully, they paid for the repairs, but during those repairs I was told about issues that will be at least $500 at a normal mechanic because the dealership is a nightmare.

My original plan was to get a hitch installed on my car, but right now I've decided to just shove everything I possibly can inside Saint Pepsi and hope most of my stuff fits.

Before I can do that, she needs maintenance work done. I'm going to do a full fluid flush, take care of her loose spark plug, and try to see if the coolant leak is an easy fix. I have an appointment at my local mechanic on the 8th.

My dad gave me $500 to help with parking lot accident costs, but now with the addition of other troubles that has been swiftly devoured. My goal is the same, just with his contribution nixed because life is a nightmare.

My p@ypal is [email protected]/chromacrow (just take the @ out)

My venm0 is @Chromacrow

Anything sent in is a help, as I have my meds to refill and expensive allergy friendly cat food to get for my old lady who lives on the floor.

Here is my soft girl Shasta as a reward for reading this.

#NEW PINNED because the old one is so bad and was written in the midst of an anxiety meltdown

[moose-a-licious]

Mount Shasta- April 2022

“DJ(JD?) was hung today. He was a good boy.”

The first time I read that line was on the first trip I brought Erin up to spend time alone with my grandparents. On the bottom shelf of the bedside table in the room we slept in, that’s where the book was.

That’s my grandma’s aunt’s journal she kept on their homestead. Both my grandma and grandpa grew up there. I can’t remember if his name was DJ or JD -I should have written it down- he was my grandma’s cousin. Johnson was his last name, that is my grandmother’s maiden name too.

It was the books we bought on this trip together that I think helped me solve who he was.

It was another fire that brought us to where we live today. A literal fire. The 2021 Greenwood fire. The lake we live on now is a seaport, the lodge needed people to help feed the firefighters they were housing. They were still open and operating as well. I served in the restaurant, we saved up enough to take our first vacation alone together.

I wanted to see the ocean. I’ve never seen it before. We were going on a road trip to California. First stop would be Omaha to see family, and Jimmy/his girlfriend. We rented a car and drove the first 13 hours.

This squirrel didn’t want Erin’s trash in the can.

In Iowa we drove next to a tornado. The winds at the rest stop were so strong they tore the flag.

We spent the night at Jimmy’s and his now fiancé’s place our first night. Jimmy constantly brings up how embarrassed he is of their dog, Lemon, and how she treated me when we finally met in person for the first time. Just stared at me and made grumbling chirps. Single barked, and left uninterested. Sour. She warmed up, you just have to be patient.

The four of us shared food, went to the zoo, then parted ways. Erin and I went to my parent’s house. My brother and his wife came too. We all looked together at some pictures my dad put on a flash drive for me to take with.

One of those was of the golden orb weaver that would visit us at our garden year after year, I was thrilled. Vibrating. I didn’t even ask him to do this, and it was one of the few “photos of a photo” that he put on that flash drive.

My dad taught me about leaving bread crumbs.

He loves symbolism. He also has to process and communicate differently than when I was a child, has for almost two decades now. There’s nothing wrong with that.

My dad taught me to catch grasshoppers, and give them to the orb weavers. The grasshoppers were eating our vegetables. It was such a rush pouncing on them, and fascinating to watch the orb weavers spin around and around.

Spiders spin their webs with intent. They are traps for fuel. Some people are scared of spiders, but they are good omens. Blood drinking insects, vegetation eating insects, things that steal from humans… all can fall into an orb weaver’s trap.

What was my dad telling me. Was he wanting me to become the orb weaver? Evolve and spin my dreams and webs to help people? Trap the bugs myself?

It doesn’t feel right.

Did he want me to find an orb weaver? Offer them grasshoppers that would in some weird way, help humanity? Protect the gardens.

My mom’s voice is warning me. The first nightmare I ever had was when I was around four or five. In real life, she caught me in the garden feeding the orb weavers. Panic and scolding.

“What are you doing?! Spiders are venomous, if you get bit you will die.”

She didn’t give me time to explain. Dad taught me how to identify an orb weaver versus a black widow by their bodies, legs, and webs. I knew what not to feed.

We went inside and washed my hands. That night I had my first nightmare, a giant tarantula the size of a t-rex was crushing all the trailers in the park. I was so afraid, when I woke up I felt silly though. Tarantulas can’t get that big, can they?

I have to find the right type of spider. I don’t know how to find my orb weavers, my dad’s mind changed before we could graduate from identifying spiders to people.

Pt. 1/6

[tpeakphotos]

This shot captures the center span of the Pit 3 bridge over the dam of the same name. It was shot from just to the north, looking across Lake Britton. The water at the top of the dam reminds me a great deal of an "infinity edge" swimming pool when the lake is full and I thought it looked wonderful reflecting fall tones in the October late afternoon light.

Lake Britton is in Shasta County, California. It is popular among anglers targeting trout, bass, and crappie. It is fed by the Pit River, Hat Creek, Burney Creek, and Clark Creek. The main body of the lake is very near The McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park.

#original photographers #photographers on tumblr #northern california #original photographic works #original photography on tumblr #fall colors #shasta county #burney california #mcarthur burney falls

[rabbitcruiser]

International Mountain Day

Towering, majestic, and beautiful. Mountains are some of the most beautiful of nature’s structures, stolid and regal they stand against the sky, of such a size that they can catch entire countrysides in their shadow, and turn back the ravages of storms against their unflinching sides.

Learn about International Mountain Day

A mountain is basically a huge landform that rises above the land that surrounds it in a limit area, typically forming in a peak at the top. Mountains are generally deemed to be steeper than a hill. Mountains are formed by volcanism or tectonic forces. The force can raise the earth’s surface locally. Glaciers, weather conditions, and rivers can slowly erode the mountains. There are a few mountains that have isolated summits. However, most tend to be part of big mountain ranges.

International Mountain Day has been created so that we can embrace the wonder and magic of the mountains around us. There are some truly spectacular mountains all around the world. You may have even had the pleasure of climbing one or several of them. Some of the most famous mountains include the likes of Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Fuji, and Mount Everest. On this date, we appreciate all of the world’s mountains. It is also a good day to take some time to reflect on those who have lost their lives while attempting to do dangerous mountain climbs and to pay tribute to them.

Mountains are the source of recreation and resource, with snow-covered sides providing ski slopes to enthusiasts, and minerals in abundance to those brave enough to delve into their stony sides.

In certain areas of the world, they are also a source of unique agriculture, providing ample space for the production of those products that grow best on their slopes. Coffee, Cocoa, Herbs, Spices, and the form of handicrafts that spring from the minds of those who live in the unchanging protection of these towering edifices to geology.

International Mountain Day is your opportunity to head out and appreciate these unique landforms, and all they have to offer. There are a number of reasons why International Mountain Day is loved by people all over the world. This includes the fact that mountains are scarce in some areas of the world, which makes them precious to a lot of people. In fact, you can spend hours reading up about different folk tales and legends about different mountains around the world. This is certainly one of the most fascinating and interesting ways to learn more about the world on International Mountain Day. Plus, International Mountain Day gives you the perfect excuse to climb that mountain that you may have always wanted to climb!

History of International Mountain Day

Established in December of 2003, the United Nations General Assembly created this day to help bring awareness to all of the things we rely on mountains for.

Whether it’s all of the glories mentioned above, or how necessary they are for the health and well-being of the flora and fauna that call them their home, International Mountain Day promotes them all.

How to celebrate International Mountain Day

International Mountain Day can be celebrated in a cavalcade of fun and educational ways. Head out to your local mountain to discover all the things it has to offer. Whether it’s a day in the numerous parks and hidden places that can be found in their craggy terrain, or amazing tourist towns like Leavenworth, WA, get on out there and explore.

Hiking enthusiasts will find the many trails and secret places a joy, as well as being able to enjoy the far flung places that so few ever visit. Due to the challenges of developing them, there is almost always an opportunity to enjoy nature in all its glory.

Even better, once you’ve hiked your way into the far reaches of untouched wilderness, you can settle down to camp away from the light pollution and noise of city life.

Or maybe you prefer to drive, the twisting winding roads that navigate the mountainsides have some of the most beautiful country that can be found, near or far. Snugged down between the rising cliff-face and the sheer drop into the valley, the view is simply unmatched, and such a thing can be refreshing to the human soul. International Mountain Day is a call to get out into the wild and see what it has to offer!

You could also take your mountain bike out on this day, rather than going for a climb or a hike. After all, there are lots of different ways that you can enjoy the spectacular sites of the mountains in your area. Taking your bike and exploring them is one way to go about it! However, do make sure you prioritize safety. Always wear a helmet and it is a good idea to give your bike a check over beforehand as well. This is especially the case if you have not used it for quite some time now.

You can also use International Mountain Day to go camping. A weekend camping in the mountains is an incredible experience. Depending on whether your an outdoor person or not, you may want to go for the full camping experience or you may want to choose somewhere that has some facilities on offer. The choice is yours. There is nothing quite like looking at the mountains around you and the stars in the sky. It is an incredible experience, and definitely one of the best ways to spend International Mountain Day. So, grab your other half or your bestie and enjoy a great camping weekend.

Source

#British Columbia #Yukon #Alberta #Jasper National Park #Coast Mountains #Rocky Mountains #Canada #USA #Alaska #California #travel #original photography #vacation #landmark #tourist attraction #landscape #countryside #Mount Shasta #Mt. Bailey #Broken Mountain #Washington #Oregon #Diamond Peak #International Mountain Day #InternationalMountainDay #11 December #summer 2023

[beardedmrbean]

Eight children who were abducted from Arkansas were found in the parking lot of a restaurant in California over the weekend, according to police, who said they arrested the children's mother.

Trista Fullerton, 36, is accused of kidnapping her children from their foster homes after she lost her custodial rights, the Anderson Police Department in California said in a news release.

Fullerton, of Rogers, Arkansas, remains behind bars at the Shasta County Jail in Redding, California. It's not clear if she has an attorney who can speak on her behalf.

Anderson police were called to the parking lot around 12:30 a.m. Saturday after a person saw a "woman displaying bizarre behavior." A welfare check requested for her and the six children with her. The family was found to be "associated with" a Dodge pickup truck with an Arkansas license plate, the news release states.

Officers learned that Fullerton had a felony warrant for her arrest in Arkansas for the abduction of eight children. She was taken into custody and through an interview, police learned that the other two children were at a home in the area of Cottonwood, California. The Shasta County Sheriff’s Office helped retrieve the two children from the home.

All eight children were placed in the care of the Shasta County Children and Family Services and will be reunited with their guardians in Arkansas, authorities said. It's not clear when they were allegedly abducted.

NBC News reached out to police in Rogers, Arkansas, for more information.

#nunyas news

[plethoraworldatlas]

The Center for Biological Diversity today petitioned for federal protection of Sierra Nevada red foxes in the Oregon and California Cascades, from Lassen Peak to Mt. Hood. The petition asks that the fox be listed as a threatened or endangered species under the Endangered Species Act.

“These precious mountain foxes need our help if they’re going to have any chance at survival in our rapidly warming world,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center. “The problems facing the Sierra Nevada red fox are complex and mounting, as they are for so many species in the mountains of western North America.”

In response to a previous Center petition, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service protected a fox population near Sonora Pass in the Sierra Nevada as endangered. But in 2015 the Service denied the fox protection in the Cascades, citing lack of information.Since then, considerable research has shown that fox populations in Lassen, Crater Lake National Park, the Central Cascades and Mt. Hood are isolated, exceedingly small and facing multiple threats.

The fox once ranged throughout high-elevation areas of the Cascades in forests and alpine meadows. But the species has been lost from large portions of its range, including Mt. Shasta. Poisoning as part of historic predator eradication efforts and trapping were primary drivers of the fox’s historic decline.

Today the fox is threatened by habitat loss caused by fires, logging, livestock grazing and development, increased recreation and climate change, which is pushing the fox’s habitat off the top of mountains.

An additional threat is competition and predation from coyotes, which have proliferated in the Cascades in the absence of wolves. Coyotes are likely to move uphill as snowpacks recede with warming.

“The harms we’re doing to the natural world are accumulating and interacting in complex ways to the detriment of animals like the Sierra Nevada red fox,” said Greenwald. “Historic killing of predators, including wolves and the fox, have left the fox vulnerable to coyotes and risks inherent to small populations. And now, increased interest in outdoor recreation and global warming represent new and growing threats to the fox.”

The fox’s surviving populations are critically small. The population found in the Lassen area, for example, was recently estimated to contain fewer than 10 breeding adults. The other populations are not much bigger.

#ecology #enviromentalism #foxes #sierra nevada #red fox #oregon #california #cascade #endangered species act #endangered species #mt hood #lassen volcanic national park #let wolves live

[bullet-prooflove]

For the radio show prompts:

43. A thousand rainy days since we first met w/Ivan Hernandez, please 🙏🏻 💕

Ivan met you whilst running in the rain. He ran every day, it didn't matter if the sun was blazing or if it was blowing a gale, he was up and out the door in his running clothes, trainers slapping on the pavement as Meredith's dog Shasta loped beside him. A silent companion as he excorised the demons in his head.

As usual they'd stopped for a second at the park. He needed to stretch and Shasta loved spending a few minutes sniffing around the area, investigating new smells. He was wiping the rain from his face with his palm when a small beige coloured ball of fluff with tiny white paws threw itself at his knees, splattering mud up his black jogging leggings.

It was a corgi, tongue lolling out of its mouth as it snuffled at his skins.

"Hey little one who do you belong to?" He asked crouching down to pet the corgi and search for it's collar. The little dog placed its paws on his knees, sniffing his hands.

"Penny..." he heard a female voice calling, he looked up with a smile on his face and there you were. In a yellow mac over jeans and yellow wellies to match. A ray of sunshine in an otherwise drizzly day.

"Shit I'm sorry," You said crouching down to hook the lead onto the corgi's collar. "I've tried to explain stranger danger to her but she just loves meeting new people."

"You're alright." He told you as you both rose to you feet. "No harm done."

"You're covered in mud." You fretted.

"Nothing that won't wash off in the rain." He said gesturing to the sky.

"At least let me buy you a coffee or something." You said, jerking your head to the cafe on the corner. "It's the least, I could do."

He looks at you for a second and he wonders if this is what normal people do. If they accept invitations from women they've just met, he wants to but he's unsure. He wavers too long he thinks because he sees the disappointment in your eyes and he hates it.

"Let me rein in Shasta." He tells you. "Then we can grab a cup."

#law and order svu #svu #dutch tears #ivan hernandez x you #ivan hernandez x reader #ivan hernandez #ivan dutch hernandez #dutch x you #dutch x reader #dutch

[trivialbob]

Tonight I wanted a new shower curtain liner.

With little better to do, I removed my maroon sweatshirt (because I was also wearing tan pants) and went to the second nearest Target. I’m willing to drive 1.5 miles farther to the Target I prefer.

A clear liner is $3.00 if you don’t care about metal grommets, $6.00 if those rust-resistant metal rings make you happy. You know which liner I came home with.

Because it’s Target, the always available crying children were there. One was a tired or hungry infant. I get it. Sometimes a parent needs to get food or diapers, and a baby sitter isn’t practical or affordable. Run in, cry a bunch (baby and parent), shop, pay, run out.

The other wailing came from a hate-crying toddler. It was a battle: How loud could the little fucker scream vs. how long would a parent put up with that shit. I swear to Gaia, if someone had bought that kid a toy to appease it, I’d rip the toy out of the kid’s hands in the parking lot and drive over it (the toy, not the child).

The Target people are too nice to take my suggestion, but were I in charge I’d eject that toddler. If mom or dad wants to stay and shop, fine. Or they can leave too so the kid doesn’t get run over in the parking lot (by someone else, not me). Either way, that kid needed to go.

Target also should consider my idea of Adult Swim. 9:00 PM to close: adults only.

I have the Target app on my phone. Not like I need another app, but sometimes there’s a sale or deal you get if you activate it on the Target app. Tonight I realized it will also tell me if something is in stock and even what aisle to find it. I’ve never met a bad person on the red shirt/tan pants team, but I like locating stuff without having to find an employees.

The best flavor Goldfish crackers were in stock tonight, in aisle B33 according to the app. You know what the app didn’t say? Bottom shelf, beneath Original (AKA unflavored (oh gross!)) Goldfish and next to an extra row of cheddar ‘Fish (which were also on an eye-level shelf. The pizza-flavored Goldfish get the same respect as Gibley’s gin, Karkov vodka, and Shasta cola.

#who needs grommets? #You know what else is rust-resistant? Not having metal grommets in the first place #Colors Goldfish? Good grief stop it already #I really do like Target