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ysabetwordsmithThese are the footnotes for "Everything That Is Real About Us."
"We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins."
-- George Bernard Shaw
Local-America has Merced where Terramagne-America has Mercedes. The Finns are going to a beach in Santa Cruz. Here is a map of California for reference.
IT Beach (T-America) / Its Beach (L-America) in Santa Cruz, Westbord, California. In T-America, IT Beach is the most popular geek beach in Santa Cruz. This is a south-facing beach on the west side of Point Santa Cruz. Here is the beach looking toward the lighthouse. Read about the lighthouse. In this picture you can see part of the smooth concrete skirt around the building. This is the teleport pad.
In T-America, the beach building has a large showerhouse on the first floor and an office floor above that. In this picture of the beach lift, you can see the beach building behind it.
The arch is called Backbone Arch in T-America. This part of the beach has all three types of tidepools. Here is a closer view of a tidepool. This one has ochre sea stars (Pisaster ochraceus) and giant green anemones (Anthopleura xanthogrammica).
Seashells come in many kinds. Shiv found this shell from a California mussel (Mytilus californianus).
California blue dorids (Felimare californiensis) are quite rare here, but a little more visible in T-America.
Kellet's whelk (Kelletia kelletii) is a common shell.
Threaded abalone (Haliotis kamtschatkana assimilis) is uncommon and valuable to find intact.
Surfgrass (Phyllospadix torreyi) is a common beach plant.
Steamer Lane is another beach adjacent to Its Beach / IT Beach.
This is the St. Elmo Sankofa Home. In the basement, the rec room has activities aimed at teens and adults. The patio by the rec room is often used as a semiprivate teen hangout. The media room is for everyone, with multiple sizes of furniture. The storage area has been turned into a playroom. The upper square area is for older children, the side rounded area for preschoolers. The walk-in closet of the houseparent bedroom has been set up as a nursery for special-needs infants. The long rectangular space below the closet/nursery is a quiet room, accessible through new doors from the bedroom and the mechanical room. The mechanical room has the machinery walled off behind a masonry wall with a heavy, locking door for safety.
On the first floor, the open floor plan is highly accessible. A ramp wraps around the deck to reach the sliding glass door in the hearth room. The master bedroom customarily belongs to one or two houseparents. The bedroom adjacent to the porch can be a nursery or ADA bedroom. There is a piano between the great room and the hearth room. The mud room has cubbies and lockers to store personal items. The nook has built-in bookcases between the windows to serve as a library. The two garage bays closest to the house hold a car and a lift minibus. The third bay has been walled off and turned into a workshop.
On the second floor, the master bedroom with the rounded end customarily goes to a houseparent. The niche between the closet and the stairs is a sitting area. The bay window in the hall has a windowseat and built-in bookcases.
The St. Elmo Sankofa Home accessory apartments have variously been used by houseparents, older teens who need a halfway situation before moving out, live-in help, and aging parents. See the exterior, interior, and floor plan.
The driving factor behind the technological differences between L-America and T-America comes from gizmologists, super-gizmologists, and super-intellects. They have amassed a lot of wealth and power, and they put it into their fields of passion. (The big names are running about 60% male and 40% female; although the gift manifestation is gender-equal, they still have a leaky pipeline problem.) Due to this concentration of wealth, the actual amount of money feeding into those industries is even bigger because they aren't just supported by government funds. The world's three richest people are all gizmologists (Bill Gates in America, Carlos Slim Helu in Mexico, and Annunciata Ortega in Spain); the fourth is a super-gizmologist (Aaron Buffer in America); the fifth (Lars Wilson in America) and sixth (Cheryl Kocinski in America) are super-intellects. Ordinary people bitch about this all the time, but the plain fact is, talent pays off sometimes. The seventh (Midas in Greece) has Master (+6) Wealth, which he uses to equip himself as a supernary hero.
Adobe Systems, Inc. is a software company appearing in L-America and T-America. X Marks the Spot is a Kraken-owned subsidiary which creates GPS and other locational supplies, including locative jewelry.
This is the booth Hatters Gonna Hat. See Shiv's safari hat and Edison's propeller hat.
cynosure [sahy-nuh-shoo r, sin-uh-]
noun
1. something that strongly attracts attention byits brilliance, interest, etc.:
the cynosure of all eyes.
Here is Cynosure Seas Gift & Beach Shop. These are the Finn family beach treasures.
The beach toys are all made from recycled plastic. If you don't want to keep them, you can turn them in and get $1 rebate on a bucket or $.50 on a tool. IT Beach customarily allows each guest to take home one nonliving treasure from the beach; people who want more can buy a small ($10), large ($20) or family ($50) size bucket marked "Beach Treasures" and take home that amount of beachcombing finds. Some beaches also offer a work-trade option where you can fill a bucket with trash, turn it in, and get the same size to fill with treasures. The number and size of buckets available is based on an assessment of available materials. Right after a storm, people can pretty much take as much as they want, but if it's picked over too much, the beach stops selling those buckets and may close the one-per-person opportunity too. Proceeds from the sale of beach supplies go toward maintaining the beach. See the Beach Bucket Bargain ($5), Beach Bucket Basic ($10), Beach Bucket Toys & Treats ($10), and Beach Bucket Deluxe ($15). Here are the Sand Brick Molds ($5), Sand Castle Molds Bargain ($5), Sand Castle Molds Basic ($10), and Sand Castle Molds Deluxe ($20). The Finns have Sand Castle Molds Wonders of the World. This cost $15 for the whole set, but is made of much sturdier plastic than the cheap recycled stuff available at the beach booth. They also have the deluxe set so that everyone can build at the same time. But they often sculpt their own freehand anyhow.
In T-America, some beaches allow guests to make permanent sand castles, and others don't. There are actually a few sculpture beaches where the idea is to make architectural quality sandcastles using bacteria, and leave them in place. Usually people just pick up their sandcastle and take it home. The price of the supplies will go into beach maintenance, which includes trucking in fresh sand if they need it. But they monitor the sand levels, and stop selling the perm supplies for a while if the level gets low. You can make your own with cornstarch and glue.
GeekSqueak is an online community with a website, chat boards, and other options that facilitate communication among smart, curious people.
See the Finn family sandcastle in progress and complete. This one is impermanent. This is Edison's sandcastle hardened with a bacterial solution. This is Shiv's sandcastle hardened with superpowers. He is quite the artist already.
The Finns have plenty of beach accessories. See the beach mat when it's spread out, the Sport-Brella shelter, and the umbrella table with sand anchor. These are Aida's sperm whale beach towel and the starfish towel that Shiv uses. The Finn house rule is that things left in the open are for sharing, and things not for sharing should be put away.
See Molly's beach bag essentials. She uses a large makeup organizer case to hold several varieties of sunscreen, Sunspotz, cash and cash cards, bandaids, antiseptic, lip balm, bug repellent, snacks, and other stuff.
Beachcombing is one of many fun things to do at the beach. There are general tips for success and where to look for specific things.
California beaches have a wide variety of wildlife. Here you can see the ochre sea star (Pisaster ochraceus) and giant green anemone (Anthopleura xanthogrammica). This is an East Pacific red octopus (Octopus rubescens), which can crawl between tidepools.
"Although it is often supposed that octopi is the ‘correct’ plural of octopus, and it has been in use for longer than the usual Anglicized plural octopuses, it in fact originates as an error. Octopus is not a simple Latin word of the second declension, but a Latinized form of the Greek word oktopous, and its ‘correct’ plural would logically be octopodes."
-- What Are the Plurals of Octopus
Here is the cold treats vendor. Mobile food is very popular in T-America.
Matisse is a brand of French yogurt, made in individual glass pots which can be returned and reused. The plain ones sell for $3 per pot, but you get $1 back if you return the jar. However, they make yogurt in mugs, holiday cups, and other styles that people often keep. These typically go for $5 with a $2 buyback. Although they make plain, vanilla, and a few other single flavors, most of their yogurt has a blend of two or more colors. So for instance, the blackberry-red raspberry flavor has swirls of purple blackberry and pink raspberry interspersed with white vanilla. Their slogan is, "It's good for you, and pretty too!" This is the raspberry vanilla.
Popsicles are available with plain water, coconut water, almond milk, fruit blends, or fruit chunks. See the Coconut Vanilla Creamy Popsicles, Coconut Water with Fruit Popsicles, and Banana Blueberry Almond Milk Popsicles. Here is the Healthy Unicorn Smoothie.
The Finn family recipe for Strawberry Power Bars is similar to this one, with the addition of 8 scoops Miracle Reds powder instead of the powdered strawberries. The 8x8" pan is cut into eight 2x4" bars, so each of them has about one serving of Miracle Reds.
This is the mesh hamper.
When people look different, they may feel different. Rude comments or other behavior regarding their appearance may turn into bullying. In this case, Shiv is being nosy not out of active malice (which he sometimes does) but because he doesn't know any better. In many ways, he acts much younger than his chronological age, because adverse childhood experiences prevented him from learning many things at the usual age. So Elisabeth just handles it the way she does for her younger children -- Edison hasn't really learned this stuff either. For people who look different, finding out more about their conditions and options can help. Collie is learning how his superpower works and how to shape his body the way he wants. It also helps to learn confidence skills. Collie hasn't gotten very far with this yet.
Plains Indian Sign is a trade language that once spanned all four coasts. Here are signs for "sun" and "water."
Hum-Dinger is a brand of energy gel that is liquid enough to put in a sport bottle. A caffeinated line is called Hum-ZINGer. The base ingredients are honey and brown rice syrup, plus various flavors. The Salted Caramel flavor includes sea salt for 200 mg sodium. Cocoa Rush has clinical-grade dark chocolate and 20 mg caffeine. Oolong Race gets its 50 mg caffeine from black tea. Winning Matcha gets its caffeine from powdered green tea, and has the highest dose at 100 mg. All the Hum lines have 110 calories per 1.45 oz. packet. The Fruity-Goo line is made from real fruit juice and puree, with a consistency similar to apple butter. The FruityZOOM line adds caffeine. Each packet has 100% of the recommend daily dose of Vitamin C. All the Fruity lines have 100 calories per 1.75 oz. packet. You can read a comparison of energy gels from various places. PowerBar makes assorted kinds including Strawberry-Banana PowerGel, Apple-Pear-Raspberry FruitGel, and Tangerine Performance Energy Gel with caffeine.
Tea lights are cheap and pretty. You can get a bag of 100 for around $5. This kind of candlelit beach service is common in L-America for honeymooners. In T-America, you can ask for an Ace of Spades outline instead, so that people will know it's platonic rather than romantic and not pester you with the wrong kind of service or remarks. Here's an example of a Finn family sandcastle with tea lights.
Beach sand is worn smooth by the waves. Sand can also be created by industrial means, but this produces "sharp" sand with a very different character than beach sand which has been worn smooth by wind and water. The smoothest sand is actually quartz that has been recycled many times from rock to sand and back again. Because human activities have radical impacts on sand formation and redistribution, beaches may erode faster than they can be replaced. This requires adding fresh sand from elsewhere in order to maintain beach health. T-America supports beach maintenance by collecting funds from beach users (such as the sale of sand toys and sandcastle-perming kits) and from disruptive projects such as sand mining and urbanization. Taxes encourage mining sand from inland sources like poor-quality deserts instead of riverbanks. Sand is also moved from undesirable locations such as reservoirs and harbors to desirable locations on shrinking beaches. A soup named Saltation, who has Water and Earth Powers, works for the California Coastal Sediment Management Workgroup to transport sand along or up the coast for beach replenishment.
I had one hell of a time finding a good wilderness microscope until I tried searching "pocket microscope," and the science catalogs were extremely critical of anything less than an expensive bench model. Screw you, science snobs, my pocket microscope was my favorite vacation toy ever. Look for a good one in the gift shop of a museum, zoo, or arboretum. Mine was very similar to this 30x model, and here's a more powerful 60x-100x version. Check out these ideas for experiments.
Looking at sand under a microscope reveals its composition. Beaches around the world have very different sand. These samples come from California. Shiv's sample is similar to this. Hawaii has gorgeous sand.
It is abusive to lock a child in a small enclosed space. Parents have been penalized for locking children in closets. However, schools often get away with it. Here is the kind from Shiv's flashback, closed and open. Notice that it is the size of a refrigerator, too small to lie down in, and the only place to sit is on the floor.
Beach glass is broken glass that has been polished by the waves. Among the best places to find some is Glass Beach. In T-America, people were so charmed by Glass Beach that they decided to continue the tradition, albeit with improvements. There are now places where towns dump trash glass and pottery (minus the toxic junk found in earlier dumps) into beaches too small for regular recreation and not environmentally sensitive. A dump beach is maintained as such until it fills up with a massive cache of glass. Then it is closed for at least 10 years, and the dumping moves somewhere else. At the end of that period, the mature glass beach is opened for beachcombing and other activities. Sea glass takes anywhere from 5-50 years to form, but 7-10 seems typical. Older beaches with more mature glass are more valuable, so a few artist colonies have purchased their own with the intent of curing them on a 25 or 50 year cycle. This idea is catching on in the Maldives, which has a huge garbage problem, so some folks glean glass and ceramic out of the dumps there and move them to nascent glass beaches.
Read about collecting beach class. It comes in various colors and qualities.
Look for beach glass near boulders. See Aida's green piece, Shiv's light blue, and Edison's white heart. Occasionally you find unusual pieces like this blue swirl.
Glass bottles often break roughly in half, with a top and a bottom piece. When these get buried in the sand with the sharp end up, they are very dangerous.
Note that you rarely see as much litter on T-American beaches as on L-American beaches. Partly this is because profits from the sale of toys and privileges go toward upkeep. Also they have paid workers and community service workers to pick up trash. Visitors often make a game of it by assigning each person a different color to collect, and then you see whether you can find more yellow than your friend finds pink.
People make fake beach glass at home. Here is an example of machine-tumbled brown glass. Shiv gets closer to the real thing, but still can't replicate the chemical weathering that makes beach glass so distinctive.
Beach entertaining includes a variety of recipes such as seafood boils and fruit salad.
Pacific razor clams are large edible molluscs. The name is no joke; they will cut you if you're not careful. Learn how to dig and clean razor clams.
The Finns are probably making this recipe for Razor Clam Chowder by the gallon with four pounds of meat, which is 12-15 clams -- one person's daily license limit in a typical season. The original version is a quarter of that, which would feed maybe two Finns, if one of them was Edison or Halley and neither was Aida. Enjoy some other razor clam recipes.
L-American clam management is patchy. It requires buying a license, and I've seen parameters saying both that there is a minimum legal size (as for fish) and that you have to take all the clams you find regardless of size until you get your limit. T-America has a legal minimum size, so the baby clams can grow up. Anything below that size has to go right back into the sand. The season is still variable because it's based on safety -- sometimes the clams have too many natural toxins for safe eating -- as well as the availability of clams big enough to eat. Most often the open season runs November-April. During the closed season, marine biologists hunt for the biggest clams and move those to protected beaches where they can breed, which avoids driving down the species size by killing all the best clams. During the open season, individual limits and total take are calculated based on the current population. If licenses haven't sold out, the general public is allowed to hunt for clams on some beaches, generally free on public beaches but often for a fee on private ones. IT Beach is run by geek companies as a public good, so they sell licenses and have free clamming. People buy licenses to support the wildlife, but also for the perks, because it gets them first claim on the clams. Usually the licenses sell out and then there's no more free clamming. But T-America is a lot more serious about offering some "natural opportunities for labor," in which anyone can go out and get food or other raw materials free for the hard work of collecting them. Eating size clams are big and meaty, ranging 1/4 to 1/3 pound of edible meat. They range anywhere from $5 to $40 per pound. Inedible meat can be used for fish bait (about $7/half-gallon), and the shells are popular as craft items.
Elisabeth Finn has a trench tool similar to this but hers has three positions: fully folded, angled shovel as shown, or straight shovel with the pick flat against the handle to brace the shovel.
Enjoy a recipe for Raw Chocolate Energy Bites. Molly makes hers with organic ingredients including clinical-grade cacao nibs and cacao powder. You can see why she is getting Shiv's complete respect with these.
"We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins."
-- George Bernard Shaw
Local-America has Merced where Terramagne-America has Mercedes. The Finns are going to a beach in Santa Cruz. Here is a map of California for reference.
IT Beach (T-America) / Its Beach (L-America) in Santa Cruz, Westbord, California. In T-America, IT Beach is the most popular geek beach in Santa Cruz. This is a south-facing beach on the west side of Point Santa Cruz. Here is the beach looking toward the lighthouse. Read about the lighthouse. In this picture you can see part of the smooth concrete skirt around the building. This is the teleport pad.
In T-America, the beach building has a large showerhouse on the first floor and an office floor above that. In this picture of the beach lift, you can see the beach building behind it.
The arch is called Backbone Arch in T-America. This part of the beach has all three types of tidepools. Here is a closer view of a tidepool. This one has ochre sea stars (Pisaster ochraceus) and giant green anemones (Anthopleura xanthogrammica).
Seashells come in many kinds. Shiv found this shell from a California mussel (Mytilus californianus).
California blue dorids (Felimare californiensis) are quite rare here, but a little more visible in T-America.
Kellet's whelk (Kelletia kelletii) is a common shell.
Threaded abalone (Haliotis kamtschatkana assimilis) is uncommon and valuable to find intact.
Surfgrass (Phyllospadix torreyi) is a common beach plant.
Steamer Lane is another beach adjacent to Its Beach / IT Beach.
This is the St. Elmo Sankofa Home. In the basement, the rec room has activities aimed at teens and adults. The patio by the rec room is often used as a semiprivate teen hangout. The media room is for everyone, with multiple sizes of furniture. The storage area has been turned into a playroom. The upper square area is for older children, the side rounded area for preschoolers. The walk-in closet of the houseparent bedroom has been set up as a nursery for special-needs infants. The long rectangular space below the closet/nursery is a quiet room, accessible through new doors from the bedroom and the mechanical room. The mechanical room has the machinery walled off behind a masonry wall with a heavy, locking door for safety.
On the first floor, the open floor plan is highly accessible. A ramp wraps around the deck to reach the sliding glass door in the hearth room. The master bedroom customarily belongs to one or two houseparents. The bedroom adjacent to the porch can be a nursery or ADA bedroom. There is a piano between the great room and the hearth room. The mud room has cubbies and lockers to store personal items. The nook has built-in bookcases between the windows to serve as a library. The two garage bays closest to the house hold a car and a lift minibus. The third bay has been walled off and turned into a workshop.
On the second floor, the master bedroom with the rounded end customarily goes to a houseparent. The niche between the closet and the stairs is a sitting area. The bay window in the hall has a windowseat and built-in bookcases.
The St. Elmo Sankofa Home accessory apartments have variously been used by houseparents, older teens who need a halfway situation before moving out, live-in help, and aging parents. See the exterior, interior, and floor plan.
The driving factor behind the technological differences between L-America and T-America comes from gizmologists, super-gizmologists, and super-intellects. They have amassed a lot of wealth and power, and they put it into their fields of passion. (The big names are running about 60% male and 40% female; although the gift manifestation is gender-equal, they still have a leaky pipeline problem.) Due to this concentration of wealth, the actual amount of money feeding into those industries is even bigger because they aren't just supported by government funds. The world's three richest people are all gizmologists (Bill Gates in America, Carlos Slim Helu in Mexico, and Annunciata Ortega in Spain); the fourth is a super-gizmologist (Aaron Buffer in America); the fifth (Lars Wilson in America) and sixth (Cheryl Kocinski in America) are super-intellects. Ordinary people bitch about this all the time, but the plain fact is, talent pays off sometimes. The seventh (Midas in Greece) has Master (+6) Wealth, which he uses to equip himself as a supernary hero.
Adobe Systems, Inc. is a software company appearing in L-America and T-America. X Marks the Spot is a Kraken-owned subsidiary which creates GPS and other locational supplies, including locative jewelry.
This is the booth Hatters Gonna Hat. See Shiv's safari hat and Edison's propeller hat.
cynosure [sahy-nuh-shoo r, sin-uh-]
noun
1. something that strongly attracts attention byits brilliance, interest, etc.:
the cynosure of all eyes.
Here is Cynosure Seas Gift & Beach Shop. These are the Finn family beach treasures.
The beach toys are all made from recycled plastic. If you don't want to keep them, you can turn them in and get $1 rebate on a bucket or $.50 on a tool. IT Beach customarily allows each guest to take home one nonliving treasure from the beach; people who want more can buy a small ($10), large ($20) or family ($50) size bucket marked "Beach Treasures" and take home that amount of beachcombing finds. Some beaches also offer a work-trade option where you can fill a bucket with trash, turn it in, and get the same size to fill with treasures. The number and size of buckets available is based on an assessment of available materials. Right after a storm, people can pretty much take as much as they want, but if it's picked over too much, the beach stops selling those buckets and may close the one-per-person opportunity too. Proceeds from the sale of beach supplies go toward maintaining the beach. See the Beach Bucket Bargain ($5), Beach Bucket Basic ($10), Beach Bucket Toys & Treats ($10), and Beach Bucket Deluxe ($15). Here are the Sand Brick Molds ($5), Sand Castle Molds Bargain ($5), Sand Castle Molds Basic ($10), and Sand Castle Molds Deluxe ($20). The Finns have Sand Castle Molds Wonders of the World. This cost $15 for the whole set, but is made of much sturdier plastic than the cheap recycled stuff available at the beach booth. They also have the deluxe set so that everyone can build at the same time. But they often sculpt their own freehand anyhow.
In T-America, some beaches allow guests to make permanent sand castles, and others don't. There are actually a few sculpture beaches where the idea is to make architectural quality sandcastles using bacteria, and leave them in place. Usually people just pick up their sandcastle and take it home. The price of the supplies will go into beach maintenance, which includes trucking in fresh sand if they need it. But they monitor the sand levels, and stop selling the perm supplies for a while if the level gets low. You can make your own with cornstarch and glue.
GeekSqueak is an online community with a website, chat boards, and other options that facilitate communication among smart, curious people.
See the Finn family sandcastle in progress and complete. This one is impermanent. This is Edison's sandcastle hardened with a bacterial solution. This is Shiv's sandcastle hardened with superpowers. He is quite the artist already.
The Finns have plenty of beach accessories. See the beach mat when it's spread out, the Sport-Brella shelter, and the umbrella table with sand anchor. These are Aida's sperm whale beach towel and the starfish towel that Shiv uses. The Finn house rule is that things left in the open are for sharing, and things not for sharing should be put away.
See Molly's beach bag essentials. She uses a large makeup organizer case to hold several varieties of sunscreen, Sunspotz, cash and cash cards, bandaids, antiseptic, lip balm, bug repellent, snacks, and other stuff.
Beachcombing is one of many fun things to do at the beach. There are general tips for success and where to look for specific things.
California beaches have a wide variety of wildlife. Here you can see the ochre sea star (Pisaster ochraceus) and giant green anemone (Anthopleura xanthogrammica). This is an East Pacific red octopus (Octopus rubescens), which can crawl between tidepools.
"Although it is often supposed that octopi is the ‘correct’ plural of octopus, and it has been in use for longer than the usual Anglicized plural octopuses, it in fact originates as an error. Octopus is not a simple Latin word of the second declension, but a Latinized form of the Greek word oktopous, and its ‘correct’ plural would logically be octopodes."
-- What Are the Plurals of Octopus
Here is the cold treats vendor. Mobile food is very popular in T-America.
Matisse is a brand of French yogurt, made in individual glass pots which can be returned and reused. The plain ones sell for $3 per pot, but you get $1 back if you return the jar. However, they make yogurt in mugs, holiday cups, and other styles that people often keep. These typically go for $5 with a $2 buyback. Although they make plain, vanilla, and a few other single flavors, most of their yogurt has a blend of two or more colors. So for instance, the blackberry-red raspberry flavor has swirls of purple blackberry and pink raspberry interspersed with white vanilla. Their slogan is, "It's good for you, and pretty too!" This is the raspberry vanilla.
Popsicles are available with plain water, coconut water, almond milk, fruit blends, or fruit chunks. See the Coconut Vanilla Creamy Popsicles, Coconut Water with Fruit Popsicles, and Banana Blueberry Almond Milk Popsicles. Here is the Healthy Unicorn Smoothie.
The Finn family recipe for Strawberry Power Bars is similar to this one, with the addition of 8 scoops Miracle Reds powder instead of the powdered strawberries. The 8x8" pan is cut into eight 2x4" bars, so each of them has about one serving of Miracle Reds.
This is the mesh hamper.
When people look different, they may feel different. Rude comments or other behavior regarding their appearance may turn into bullying. In this case, Shiv is being nosy not out of active malice (which he sometimes does) but because he doesn't know any better. In many ways, he acts much younger than his chronological age, because adverse childhood experiences prevented him from learning many things at the usual age. So Elisabeth just handles it the way she does for her younger children -- Edison hasn't really learned this stuff either. For people who look different, finding out more about their conditions and options can help. Collie is learning how his superpower works and how to shape his body the way he wants. It also helps to learn confidence skills. Collie hasn't gotten very far with this yet.
Plains Indian Sign is a trade language that once spanned all four coasts. Here are signs for "sun" and "water."
Hum-Dinger is a brand of energy gel that is liquid enough to put in a sport bottle. A caffeinated line is called Hum-ZINGer. The base ingredients are honey and brown rice syrup, plus various flavors. The Salted Caramel flavor includes sea salt for 200 mg sodium. Cocoa Rush has clinical-grade dark chocolate and 20 mg caffeine. Oolong Race gets its 50 mg caffeine from black tea. Winning Matcha gets its caffeine from powdered green tea, and has the highest dose at 100 mg. All the Hum lines have 110 calories per 1.45 oz. packet. The Fruity-Goo line is made from real fruit juice and puree, with a consistency similar to apple butter. The FruityZOOM line adds caffeine. Each packet has 100% of the recommend daily dose of Vitamin C. All the Fruity lines have 100 calories per 1.75 oz. packet. You can read a comparison of energy gels from various places. PowerBar makes assorted kinds including Strawberry-Banana PowerGel, Apple-Pear-Raspberry FruitGel, and Tangerine Performance Energy Gel with caffeine.
Tea lights are cheap and pretty. You can get a bag of 100 for around $5. This kind of candlelit beach service is common in L-America for honeymooners. In T-America, you can ask for an Ace of Spades outline instead, so that people will know it's platonic rather than romantic and not pester you with the wrong kind of service or remarks. Here's an example of a Finn family sandcastle with tea lights.
Beach sand is worn smooth by the waves. Sand can also be created by industrial means, but this produces "sharp" sand with a very different character than beach sand which has been worn smooth by wind and water. The smoothest sand is actually quartz that has been recycled many times from rock to sand and back again. Because human activities have radical impacts on sand formation and redistribution, beaches may erode faster than they can be replaced. This requires adding fresh sand from elsewhere in order to maintain beach health. T-America supports beach maintenance by collecting funds from beach users (such as the sale of sand toys and sandcastle-perming kits) and from disruptive projects such as sand mining and urbanization. Taxes encourage mining sand from inland sources like poor-quality deserts instead of riverbanks. Sand is also moved from undesirable locations such as reservoirs and harbors to desirable locations on shrinking beaches. A soup named Saltation, who has Water and Earth Powers, works for the California Coastal Sediment Management Workgroup to transport sand along or up the coast for beach replenishment.
I had one hell of a time finding a good wilderness microscope until I tried searching "pocket microscope," and the science catalogs were extremely critical of anything less than an expensive bench model. Screw you, science snobs, my pocket microscope was my favorite vacation toy ever. Look for a good one in the gift shop of a museum, zoo, or arboretum. Mine was very similar to this 30x model, and here's a more powerful 60x-100x version. Check out these ideas for experiments.
Looking at sand under a microscope reveals its composition. Beaches around the world have very different sand. These samples come from California. Shiv's sample is similar to this. Hawaii has gorgeous sand.
It is abusive to lock a child in a small enclosed space. Parents have been penalized for locking children in closets. However, schools often get away with it. Here is the kind from Shiv's flashback, closed and open. Notice that it is the size of a refrigerator, too small to lie down in, and the only place to sit is on the floor.
Beach glass is broken glass that has been polished by the waves. Among the best places to find some is Glass Beach. In T-America, people were so charmed by Glass Beach that they decided to continue the tradition, albeit with improvements. There are now places where towns dump trash glass and pottery (minus the toxic junk found in earlier dumps) into beaches too small for regular recreation and not environmentally sensitive. A dump beach is maintained as such until it fills up with a massive cache of glass. Then it is closed for at least 10 years, and the dumping moves somewhere else. At the end of that period, the mature glass beach is opened for beachcombing and other activities. Sea glass takes anywhere from 5-50 years to form, but 7-10 seems typical. Older beaches with more mature glass are more valuable, so a few artist colonies have purchased their own with the intent of curing them on a 25 or 50 year cycle. This idea is catching on in the Maldives, which has a huge garbage problem, so some folks glean glass and ceramic out of the dumps there and move them to nascent glass beaches.
Read about collecting beach class. It comes in various colors and qualities.
Look for beach glass near boulders. See Aida's green piece, Shiv's light blue, and Edison's white heart. Occasionally you find unusual pieces like this blue swirl.
Glass bottles often break roughly in half, with a top and a bottom piece. When these get buried in the sand with the sharp end up, they are very dangerous.
Note that you rarely see as much litter on T-American beaches as on L-American beaches. Partly this is because profits from the sale of toys and privileges go toward upkeep. Also they have paid workers and community service workers to pick up trash. Visitors often make a game of it by assigning each person a different color to collect, and then you see whether you can find more yellow than your friend finds pink.
People make fake beach glass at home. Here is an example of machine-tumbled brown glass. Shiv gets closer to the real thing, but still can't replicate the chemical weathering that makes beach glass so distinctive.
Beach entertaining includes a variety of recipes such as seafood boils and fruit salad.
Pacific razor clams are large edible molluscs. The name is no joke; they will cut you if you're not careful. Learn how to dig and clean razor clams.
The Finns are probably making this recipe for Razor Clam Chowder by the gallon with four pounds of meat, which is 12-15 clams -- one person's daily license limit in a typical season. The original version is a quarter of that, which would feed maybe two Finns, if one of them was Edison or Halley and neither was Aida. Enjoy some other razor clam recipes.
L-American clam management is patchy. It requires buying a license, and I've seen parameters saying both that there is a minimum legal size (as for fish) and that you have to take all the clams you find regardless of size until you get your limit. T-America has a legal minimum size, so the baby clams can grow up. Anything below that size has to go right back into the sand. The season is still variable because it's based on safety -- sometimes the clams have too many natural toxins for safe eating -- as well as the availability of clams big enough to eat. Most often the open season runs November-April. During the closed season, marine biologists hunt for the biggest clams and move those to protected beaches where they can breed, which avoids driving down the species size by killing all the best clams. During the open season, individual limits and total take are calculated based on the current population. If licenses haven't sold out, the general public is allowed to hunt for clams on some beaches, generally free on public beaches but often for a fee on private ones. IT Beach is run by geek companies as a public good, so they sell licenses and have free clamming. People buy licenses to support the wildlife, but also for the perks, because it gets them first claim on the clams. Usually the licenses sell out and then there's no more free clamming. But T-America is a lot more serious about offering some "natural opportunities for labor," in which anyone can go out and get food or other raw materials free for the hard work of collecting them. Eating size clams are big and meaty, ranging 1/4 to 1/3 pound of edible meat. They range anywhere from $5 to $40 per pound. Inedible meat can be used for fish bait (about $7/half-gallon), and the shells are popular as craft items.
Elisabeth Finn has a trench tool similar to this but hers has three positions: fully folded, angled shovel as shown, or straight shovel with the pick flat against the handle to brace the shovel.
Enjoy a recipe for Raw Chocolate Energy Bites. Molly makes hers with organic ingredients including clinical-grade cacao nibs and cacao powder. You can see why she is getting Shiv's complete respect with these.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-09-26 09:39 pm (UTC)Glass beach was fun to visit, but with a slight overlay of sadness from its history as a dump. I have no idea where our collection of beach glass went; that was three moves and at least two remodels ago.
Thoughts
Date: 2017-09-26 10:04 pm (UTC)I think that's one I linked to. I have also heard it pronounced "OCT-uh-podes," rhyming with "toads."
>> Glass beach was fun to visit, but with a slight overlay of sadness from its history as a dump. I have no idea where our collection of beach glass went; that was three moves and at least two remodels ago. <<
:D It sounds like a lovely place to visit. I am glad that Terramagne has kept up the tradition of glass beaches but shifted to a cleaner form of production.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2017-09-27 03:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-09-27 01:53 am (UTC)Yes...
Date: 2017-09-27 01:59 am (UTC)Re: Yes...
Date: 2017-09-27 02:19 am (UTC)Re: Yes...
Date: 2017-09-27 02:43 am (UTC)