My sister has written a book, and now it has been released.
The title is ‘The High-Heeled Guide to Enlightenment’, and it’s a wide-ranging guide to spirituality for modern women. I haven’t read it yet (am waiting on my signed copy to arrive) but I know she put at least a year of active spiritual experimentation (reiki, sweat lodges, tarot, meditation, etc..) into a blender along with her life experience as both a modern woman and daughter of a wiccan high priest, and came up with something unique and truly fascinating. I can’t wait to read it, and am enormously proud of her accomplishment. To be awesome readers of this site- go buy a copy right now, and a few extra copies as gifts.
We took the coast route around the hill, trying to find a road that would lead us to the Seminar House Paul had seen from the train. At the top we rolled around wealthy summer homes for 20 or so minutes, peering over the edge, constantly wondering if we were too high, too low, too far round. We got out to walk.
Despite Cray Upson’s best efforts, Milo Pendolino refused to sell him a home on Moresca hill. He always claimed the homes were already full, but Cray knew better, so he plotted out a plan. He knew Milo owed the bank thousands for his construction costs as well as the mortgage on the land itself. Plus he had no outside income. He only had the homes he’d built, way up there on Pendolino Lane with the simple gravel track running up the side of the hill, and they never sold. Pendolino’s follies, they called them down in the town.
Cray checked. Milo’s homes were unlisted with real estate agencies. They were all wooden structures hand built by Milo himself. He was known as an excellent craftsman, dovetailing his homes into jigsaw perfection, but he never once tried to sell them. Cray heard reports of visitors trudging up the hill to look at the homes, and marveling at their outright beauty. 8 Victorian style homes arrayed along the cobbled Pendolino Lane. When they tried to view them, walk the Lane, Milo would appear from nowhere and shake their hands warmly.
The S.S. Maheno was an Edwardian liner on the Tasman Sea crossing between New Zealand and Australia, and was used as a hospital ship by the New Zealand division of the Royal Navy during World War I. The word Maheno means ‘island’ in Maori, which is the native language of New Zealand.
“Our children live in France,” plump Algernon volunteered.
Snug at her faux-marble desk, the heavy-shouldered director studied him. “Have they been notified?”
“Yes, I called the twins as soon as poor Mildred got certified.”
“And you?”
“I didn’t want to leave her,” he said blandly. “We’ve been married thirty-two years.” Hunched on the bench beside him, Mildred studied the ceiling’s lo-burn bulb, and her silvery mouthpatch twitched.
“You’re very generous, Mr. Shipley. Few adults arrive at the home attended. Mildred, you should be grateful.”
The gaunt, grey-haired prisoner made a choking noise.
First off- Welcome to all new readers of this site!
Secondly- Thanks to all old and continuing readers. Things have changed a fair bit round here, with a new design and a new emphasis on an old direction, with still a change or two yet to come, and I thank you for sticking with me.
Today’s Programming Note concerns what you can expect on this site in the future. The main announcement is that Out of Ruins (outofruins.org) will now be featuring short stories (and possibly poems) from authors besides myself (MJG). I’ve long wanted to set up my own weird fiction e-zine, and now I have. Boom. I’ll still be posting my own stories up here, but will be careful to delineate which are mine and which are from that week’s featured author. I’ve already had several submissions, and am in the process of accepting a few. They’re weird, and dark, and that’s awesome.
So, future programming, the schedule looks like this:
Mondays– New fiction from featured author.
Tuesdays– New ruins re-post featuring creative commons text and photos sourced from around the net, on cool ruins locations.
Wednesdays– Short fiction from MJG, if I have any.
Thursdays– New original ruins photos and text, from MJG.
I hope in the future to feature dark weird art on this site, as well as interviews with authors/photographers/explorers, and reviews.
The derelict Taro mine lies at a generational crossing point- once a place where raw sulfides were dug from the earth, now it functions as a cosmic ray laboratory for a nearby University, capturing electrons from outer space in several large heavily wired pools. It was the first of four mines on our Iwate shopping list, ranked number 3 in all of East Japan.
Down on the Great Hall, from the third tier.
From the outside Taro looked like a live site. There were new signs for Meisei University, and several new-ish buildings. We parked on the verge outside and wandered in, gawking at the huge ray-vats with their arrays of jacketed transformers.
The Grand Hall was breath-taking, just as I’d hoped.
Great Hall, from the second tier.
On the second tier Mike whisper-shouted to me.
“Mike! There’s something moving down there!”
Immediately I thought it might be security.
“Is it security?”
“I don’t know.”
I padded over and stared down into the weird bollard lines. Something was moving, but what?
“It’s a pig!”
“Is it a pig?”
“It’s a giant pig!”
“Or it’s a goat. Maybe it’s a deer?”
The goat-deer-pig thing looked right up at us, and we looked right down at it. Nobody moved. Then I gallivanted off to get a zoomier lens, and it raced back the way it had come.
Mike identified it later as a kamoshika/serow, a goat-like antelope, apparently very rare.
Kamoshika/serow.
On the second tier.
Fuses without a spark.
At the top tier Mike looked to a rusty walkway and declared his intention to climb it.
“I’m going to climb it.”
“You must be mad.”
I messed around trying to film a cluster of twittering bats while he shifted chunks of metal-work around to get to the stairs. Eventually I followed him- the stairs proved quite sturdy.
Ar the top we could cross a rickety bridge, look around the control room, and see down into an adjoining hall.
A side hall.
Ext.
There were a lot of other abandoned buildings nearby, but these days we’re less interested in penny-ante ruins. One exception was the community centre.
Listen up, you!
Where will we go next? For ruins as striking as this latest set, we’ll have to go even further afield. Osaka area is feasible, perhaps even beyond. If you know of any great locations- please let me know.
People who follow this website will probably know I get most of my location information from one book- Nippon no Haikyo. This is really an excellent book, with 200 ruins locations listed with maps, subdivided into 2 top 100 lists for East and West Japan.
When the orders came down that all the gold was to be digested by the end of the day, Efren couldn’t believe his ears, despite their unusual and rather floppy size.
“All the gold?” he asked his co-consumer Ricky Shay, the fattest stupidest pig in the sty. “I mean, that’s some heavy stuff right there.”
Ricky Shay ignored him, mostly. Ricky Shay was stupid, and didn’t understand English. He could grunt, and he could eat gold, and when it bust out through his system, it was, yes, it was thoroughly what it should be. But he didn’t speak a lick of English. Sometimes Efren felt he was working with an idiot.
“I mean,” said Efren, speaking in his piggy grunts. “That’s some heavy stuff.”
Ricky Shay said nothing. The orders stood. The gold before them stood, mounting up to the ceiling with nuggets as big as your fist. Efren, an optimist, shrugged his haunchy shoulders and tucked in.
Image from here.Read More
Bodie is a ghost town east of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in Mono County, California, United States, about 75 miles southeast of Lake Tahoe. It has been administered by California State Parks since becoming a state historic park in 1962, and receives about 200,000 visitors yearly.
Matsuo mine in the north of Japan opened in 1914 and closed in 1969. In its heyday it was the biggest mine for sulfur in the Eastern world. It had a workforce of 4,000 and a wider population of 15,000, all of whom were accommodated in a make-shift city in the mountains of Hachimantai park. The city was known as the ‘paradise above the clouds’ for its comparatively luxurious apartment blocks and near-constant ebb and flow of mist. That same mist nearly prevented us from finding the place at all.
My sister has written a book, and now it has been released.
by A.K. Sykora.
When the orders came down that all the gold was to be digested by the end of the day, Efren couldn’t believe his ears, despite their unusual and rather floppy size.
