Look! There is a thing!

 
I saw an oriole visit the nectar-feeder on Monday.   \o/   (4/18, noted for when to look next year.) I started putting out grape jelly again; I see the orioles there occasionally, but the house finches are really scarfing it down. And this morning I saw a hummingbird at the nectar-feeder.

"Spring" is a protracted season in this corner of New Mexico. The "winter wheat" started greening up around the middle of January. It used to drive my mom crazy -- "The fields are getting green, why isn't our yard?" Dad tried to explain that it was more cold-tolerant than our Bermuda-grass yard, but I don't think she ever quite got it. It's a variety of Canadian wheat, I believe; many ranchers use it as an in-between crop. Once it's growing well, they turn the cattle out to graze on it for a a couple of months, then move the cattle off, let it mature, and harvest it. THAT used to drive my dad crazy, that the wheat would keep growing while being eaten, but I figured it's the same thing we do to grass -- if you cut it before it goes to seed, it keeps growing. After the wheat is harvested, they'll generally plant field-corn or sorghum. After those are harvested (late July to early August), there's a lot of cotton growing; it gets harvested November/December.

More or less -- note that I see these things as I drive by, and my attention to time is erratic at best.

Then around the first of March, the alfalfa starts to green up. That's a permanent crop -- nothing else gets planted in those fields, but they get 3 or 4 cuttings a year (depending on how high they let it grow before cutting and baling it).

The willow trees start sprouting leaves around the first of March, the elm trees a couple of weeks later, and finally -- historically a sign that the last freeze is past -- the mesquite leafs out. I have known the mesquite to be wrong once or twice, but it's usually accurate; this year it started turning green around April 10th -- and we did have a light freeze (31 degrees) the week before.

The whole state is at drought levels of 'severe', 'extreme', and some 'exceptional'. After good rains from January to July last year, the rain basically stopped. Between August 25th and November 20th, I had 1.2 inches of rain, and nothing measurable since then; I don't expect much in the way of wildflowers this year.


In other news, I found the clock on Kindle in my new iPad -- under "Font" instead of "Settings". Weird. But it makes reading more "comfortable", somehow. Unfortunately, toggling between light or dark background isn't there, either. Ah, well.

And now I've nattered on long enough, and used up enough screen-space, so this week's recs behind the cut.




Fandom: Original Pro-fic
Fanwork Links: The Conqueror
Creator Links: Mark Clifton at FadedPage.com
Category: Gen
Rating: Gen
Length: 3,200 words

Summary: The dahlia grows wild in Guatemala, and through the centuries has self-seeded into endless mutations. It is reasonable to assume that one of these mutations might have peculiar properties -- most peculiar indeed.

Reccer's Notes: My dad had a thick red book of science-fiction short stories. I read the whole thing when I was 11 or 12, and he let me have the book a few years before he died. There are a lot of good stories in those pages (44; I just counted), and quite a few authors whose works I've enjoyed in other places. But this one story has stuck in my head all these years. Something brought it to mind a few days ago, and I dug out the book to share it with/read it to Cindy. But the print is small (difficult for me to read), so I searched for it online. Yay, success! And Cindy liked it too.

The language and telling has a sort of fairytale feel, and the story hinges around an improbable "what if". But it's so charming that we're left with a feeling of, "Gee, if only..."

Characters: Original Characters
Relationships: Family Unit, many mentioned in passing.
Themes: Family, What-if, Societal changes
Content Notes: Eating of beneficial, narcotic-like substance.
Warnings: None
Status: Complete

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Fandom: NCIS x Sentinel x SGA x SG-1
Fanwork Links: Something Beautiful on the Horizon
Creator Links: Morraine
Category: M/M, Multi
Rating: Explicit (author says 'Mature', but it starts with a pretty explicit sex scene, and there's another later.)
Length: 135,700 words.

Summary: Nearly all of his life, Tony DiNozzo had known that he was only weakly latent and would probably never come online. As he's comfortable with himself and not terribly interested in change, it comes as a shock when an intimate moment during a sexcation with an old friend turns his life on its head. Out of the blue, his sleeping potential awakens ... and immediately draws the attention of the Alpha Prime Pair of North America. From there on out, it's one surprise after another for Tony, not all of them good, and he has to decide whether going through with his emergence is worth the promise of finding something beautiful on the horizon.

Reccer's Notes: When Tony DiNozzo starts to emerge as a guide, he's not just strong... he's so ridiculously powerful that his mental connections can stretch to another galaxy, and he's able to do things that astound his teacher, Blair Sandburg. This is a stellar (sorry!) story of personal growth and discovery, very Tony-centric, with Sentinel and SGA characters in strong, but definitely secondary roles. But it's fun and totally absorbing, high up on my list of stories worth reading again.

Characters: Anthony DiNozzo, Blair Sandburg, Jim Ellison, Patrick Sheppard, Rodney McKay, John Sheppard, Jack O'Neill, Daniel Jackson, Atlantis

Relationships: Tony/OC, Tony/Rodney, Tony/Rodney/John, Jim/Blair
Themes: AU Sentinels & guides are known, Crossovers, AU Canon divergence, Competent!Tony, Novel
Content Notes: None
Warnings: None
Status: Complete

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Fandom: The Old Guard
Fanwork Links: For Roses, Too
Creator Links: sindirimba
Category: M/F
Rating: Explicit
Length: 112,800 words

Summary: Nile and Booker meet up mid-exile, get into productive trouble, and go on a journey (metaphorical and literal).

Reccer's Notes: Nile goes to visit Booker because [a] she's worried about him and [b] she feels he understands better what she's going through and can help her adjust in more relevant ways. As they get more comfortable with each other, then go on an undercover, non-violent mission together (her idea), we see a very long, very slow burn, each attracted to the other and not saying anything because they don't want to seem too "needy", until they finally admit it. Sweet, slowly-developing friends to lovers, quiet, realistic, absolutely beautiful.

Characters: Nile, Booker, OCs
Relationships: Nile/Booker
Themes: Friends to lovers, Post-canon, Canon character of color, Mission fic, Novel
Content Notes: None
Warnings: None
Status: Complete