note - flowers and things

Summer:
Almond tree - hope
Rose - generally beauty, but tons of sweet and beautiful meanings, depending on the color and variety
Fall:
Trumpet flower - separation
Daphne mezereon - I desire to please
Cypress - mourning
Dittany - birth
Clematis - artifice
Nightshade - bitter truth
Colchium - my best days fled
Winter:
Snowdrop - consolation
Love Lies Bleeding—Hopeless, not heartless/amaranth - immortality

...I do have notes on some for spring, though I got caught up in other things and didn't add them in.  In case I do later:

Everlasting pea - wilt go with me?

Rosemary - your presence revives me

Peach blossom - my heart is thine

Pear tree - affection

So, yeah, that took some time to get out!  I'd had a general idea of the paintings, but uh... spent an awful lot of time looking at flowers and meanings, and putting thought into basically everything. At least it's not horribly awful to read, I don't think, for a first draft lol.

On endless loop for almost this whole section: "Hrafntinna", Sigur Rós.  Suited perfectly. <3

note - links and flower meanings

Blaaarrrrgh.  I am intimidated by writing Meres.  (Not as much as Luce - who, luckily, is not a part of this story.)  Also, I have zero clue where that scene is going, thank goodness I hit my word quota when I did. xp I keep getting sidetracked and re-reading old bits from Amaranthus and the short stories I did around '06.  Which does help a bit with getting back into Meres' voice, but, his was always a little harder for me, because it's more of a default p.o.v. for me, as opposed to most of the other Grigori, who have particular personality quirks. Meres' quirk is an artistic eye, which, y'know, is basically my own.

Like Kimber, I have no talent at all for remembering/understanding men's fashion.  Drives me batshit, I have to look things up eeeevery time, and then try and find something I like, and find out whether it makes sense or not given the etiquette and random things like lapel width. ugh.  Today's resource: men's fashion in old photos.


Flower meanings (Meres may actually explain these, but, so that *I* remember what they are):

Peruvian Heliotrope - I love, devotion
Honeysuckle - the bond of love
Ipomaca (related to morning glory) - I attach myself to you
Pulmonaria - thou art my life
Yarrow - cure for heartache  

I'm mainly relying on the book Kimber picked up earlier in the story (whose chapter on flower meanings is here on Gutenberg), since every book lists different meanings, aaaand the website I used to use that compiled several of the books is no longer around. :\

Also, as I was looking up the spelling of chiaroscuro , I stumbled across this painting which I am now minorly obsessed with. Sacred and Profane Love, by Baglione.  (Sometimes also called other things, like heavenly love defeats earthly lust, etc.)

note - old photos and carriage houses

Dumping a few links from the past few days.

Inspiration for photos at exhibition:
http://www.flickriver.com/photos/swindonlocal/4306925524/ (...okay that one I just really like)
http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/whi/feature/bass , and its gallery here: http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/whi/fullRecord.asp


Today, it wasn't until Kimber got closer to the carriage house, that I realized my notion OF carriage houses was pretty terrifyingly sketchy.  Store carriages, stable horses, grooms and folks sleep there too, sure.  But what would it actually look like??

Nicely-kept carriage house (and home) from 1890: http://albany.ebayclassifieds.com/homes-for-sale/cobleskill/1890-victorian-all-brick-mini-mansion-large-carriage-house-extras/?ad=28523517

Random pretty carriage house: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ozfan22/4417860398/

Aaaand my main resource for the day, photoset of abandoned carriage house from 1911: http://www.flickr.com/photos/deposit25cents/sets/72157622327509113/detail/

note - plant and poison and music

Just because, this is the honeysuckle vine. Potentially invasive, so clearly it's tenacious enough to have survived neglect and reseeded itself if needed.

Thallium is, like arsenic, colorless and water soluble and all those good things - and as I was comparing the two, turns out thallium was one of 743902 things used to treat the symptoms of tuberculosis. Which seems preeeeetty convenient to me. ;)  While it caused hair loss with lower doses - thus, its use as a depilatory for awhile - higher doses killed you before that was evident.  Discovered in mid-1800s, so a fairly new and spiffy thing.  Unfortunately for me, it appears there's now a fancy perfume called Thallium, so finding a good reference image for an antique one wasn't something I could do quickly.  (As it was, I went down a research rabbit hole, which I'm not supposed to be doing during November. argl.)

Rat poison, though, led to much better search results, woohoo! Page o' antique poison bottles.

Warned y'all there was going to be Sigur Rós this year, haa.  Lyrics and a (probably very loose, definitely unofficial) translation for "Kolniður" here.  Google Translate actually failed to sort the title for me, so I'm guessing it's not a common (or real?) word.  Roughly, "endless dark" or something to that affect.  "Kolniður og myrkur úti, en í mér, ríkir óveður" something like "Endless dark or darkness outside, but for me, there is a storm"  (From the two or three words I recognize, that seems reasonable.)