scrubjayspeaks

For those wishing to give this year the metaphorical boot, may we suggest contributing to our winter footwear drive, which is still looking for donations of new shoes and boots suitable for the wet and cold months ahead. Fairy cobblers will be donating their time and skill to enhance the waterproofing, anti-slip tread, and warmth of the shoes, and a few lucky people may get rarer enchantments like water-walking or prince-attracting. We can’t promise that participating will kick out the current year any more forcefully, but it will help members of our community start the new year on the right foot, which is sometimes the best we can hope for.

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LL#1205

As midwinter approaches, we have received increasingly frequent reports of floating candles in the night sky throughout the Lewisia area. While floating lights are, of course, a common occurrence year-round, it is rare for them to be attached to actual candles, lanterns, or other conventional sources of light, let alone what appear to be hand-rolled beeswax candles. These may be invitations to someone’s solstice festivities, the festivity itself, or just a case of unusually late candle migration to the southern wintering bogs.

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LL#1199

For those who use wood for heating their homes or cooking this winter, we remind you to obtain firewood locally and avoid transporting wood across regions. Invasive insects, parasites, and evil spirits can hitch rides in firewood, allowing them to spread to previously healthy and unhaunted woodlands. And in the event that you mistakenly obtained wood from sentient trees and are about to be subject to their wrath, it is actually easier to cope with attack by a walking tree spirit in the open woods than it is in your living room.

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LL#1193

For those who will be traveling over the holidays or any other time of year, we encourage you to seek out a housesitter to look after your domicile in your absence. Housesitters provide peace of mind for you and valuable enrichment for your home by maintaining its normal routines of opening doors, creaking floorboards, endlessly adjusting the thermostat, and making little comments to the furniture when you bump into it. This is particularly important for older houses or those with structural issues, as these can be more vulnerable to hauntings and possessions if left unoccupied, leading to unpleasant surprises at the end of your travels.

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LL#1187

As the wider world has raised concerns about election integrity, we thought it worthwhile to address Lewisia’s voting policies. Provisions have been made to ensure that nationally acceptable ballots are available to those lacking in traditional identification (feral humans, fae folk, sentient trees, etc), on the grounds that living here is reason enough for your voice to be heard. Ballot counting is conducted by traditionalist vampires, which satisfies their arithmomania, with the added benefit that anyone attempting to tamper with ballots will provide a much-needed snack break for these civil servants.

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LL#1181

This is a final reminder to those who craft poppets that we are fast approaching the end of the season for magically imbuing them with life and purpose. If you find, as crafters often do, that your project is nowhere near completion when you need it, there are a number of crafty sorts around town selling or trading for completed poppets--remember, if you can’t make your own, locally bought is fine. When all else fails, you would be amazed at what you can accomplish with some twine-bound corn husks and dried acorns for your humanoid-based rituals, emergency soul vessels, and scrappy supernatural offspring.

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LL#1175

As we all dust off our warm jackets and coats for the cooler weather to come, it is a good time to check the pockets. Most outerwear, left unattended for much of the year, is known to spontaneously generate artifacts in its pockets, such as mysterious phone numbers, vague yet menacing fortune cookie slips, and lucky pennies. It's always best to address these findings at home, rather than waiting to pull them out in the middle of a conversation or have them found by a partner who will wonder why you needed the number for Madame Mulgrove's Pest Removal and Private Investigators.

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LL#1169

Anyone, amateur or professional, who grows pumpkins or gourds knows the disappointment of checking on a developing squash only to find it has been hollowed out or split open by some marauding, burrowing rodent. This year, however, gardeners are reporting finding some of their crop pecked open from the inside by egg teeth unknown, hatched like some carotenoid-rich shell. Whether avian or reptilian or otherwise, the hatchlings themselves have not been found, so keep a watchful eye on both vine patches and the sky.

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LL#1163

Noted sculptor and deliberate eccentric Shrike, late of nowhere in particular, will be passing through Lewisia this week and will create several of its living sculptures for us to enjoy. Its technique involves encouraging live trees and bushes to grow rapidly in specific patterns, which might mistakenly be trivialized as mere topiaries. With assurances that past incidents of people being attacked by flowering plum trees in the shape of bears were caused by inappropriate use of pesticides, we are looking forward to these new artworks.

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LL#1157

The next round of Message in a Bottle pen pal matching will be taking signups this week, ahead of the weekend beach cleanup and bottle recovery trip to Rocky Head. If you’ve always wanted a pen pal but the social pressure of talking to another human seemed like too much, the slow, drifting pace of Message in a Bottle (and the eldritch nature of the replies) might be right for you. While we cannot guarantee that your message will be received or that a bottle will be sent back to you to wash up on our nearby shores, past rounds have yielded high response rates and only occasionally life-altering revelations.

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LL#1151