This story was written well before the no-no thing started about dogs dying in a story.
[I realize dogs are our best friends. I’ve owned a dog myself and it was a wrench to let her go when that became necessary. She was only nine years old when she developed a brain tumor and could not be saved.]
In this story one of the dogs briefly dies. So, I guess, you can take this as a spoiler alert.
I’ve started learning to put my head in things to get the kibbles out. For a long time I didn’t like my whiskers to be bent backward. Now, because I know there’ll be a kibble at the end of my hunt, I can bear it.
It proves that we cats are just as good at delayed gratification as humans are, don’t you think?
The old woman craftily loads kibbles into my catnip pillow case … I swear I don’t know when … in between me looking here there and elsewhere it must be.
When I walk by the bundled up pillow case and I can smell a kibble or two, that’s when I pounce.
I can even get the kibbles out of a crumpled piece of paper now. We had a lady visiting last night. She said, “My place is much tidier than yours!”
The old woman laughed. She said, “Tthat shouldn’t be hard!“
It’s true that the whole floor is busy with activities, is that necessarily untidy?
Just having a nap here, waiting for my bedtime kibble storm. Once I’ve eaten them, it’s time for me to encourage the old woman to go to bed. She complains it’s too early, but when I bite her ankle she soon goes.
Night times I play with the toys the old woman has put on shelves. Which I can reach now, except for my bird. It lives high on a bookshelf.
The old woman says I can have it back when she’s taken its voicebox out. Apparently there’s a nasty battery in there that’d kill me if I chewed on it.
At the time when I started writing Claire’s and Nalbo’s stories, I titled the manuscript Earth Fall for a working title. History soon caught up with me and there have been a novel, a film and a four-person shooter video game published by that name, and I thought for a while that I would change the name, the way that I renamed the story that became Lodestar.
But Earth Fall still makes the most sense for this story of the alien engineer, in an Earth-centric orbit for fifty years in his spaceship, comes down to Earth for an as yet unknown reason, leaving the majority of his alien and human support system to keep his spaceship in orbit.
His arrival in Earth’s neighborhood caused all sorts of distress to electronic communications and transport, as apparently his spacecraft grazed over the fields of electrical pulses. Communication satellites stopped working on day one, and humanity teetered at the brink of collapse for a decade before things stabilized, minus electronics.
Sounds like a fairly weak set-up in this day and age, though many a film plot has got up and run with much less originality. But it’s Claire’s and Nalbo’s meeting with the Lotor-alien’s life-support system that’s of interest here.
Claire and Nalbo are a pair of fairly ordinary Australian retirees whose lives intersect with a bunch of completely unordinary alien beings. The things happening as a result are necessary knowledge (for you) if later on I decide to also serialize MELD (Part 2 of the Doomed trilogy). They are a prequel, if you like.
Indigo by Daniel Smith is probably the watercolor I use most, and is also my favorite to experiment with … if that makes sense. This indigo is so finely milled it’s the smoothest paint I own and yet it’s capable of amazing gymnastics. Below a wet layer of indigo over a failed experiment (which is represented by the pink tones) with phthalo blue dropped into it.
The Indigo, being smooth and light (weight) allows granulars such as sodalite, and heavier colors such as phthalo blue, to react spectacularly.
Getting shades by dipping a brush into water after a stroke, indigo will last longer than any other color and make the most wonderful greys.
One of the newsletters I subscribe to is Books on Books curated by Robert Bolick (https://books-on-books.com/2025/03/23/books-on-books-collection-louis-luthi/)
This month’s letter took me to a link (https://sites.rutgers.edu/motley-emblem/indigo/) where I discovered some interesting facts about indigo. So far about 200 plants have been discovered that yield indigo, and it is nearly the only color-fast natural plant dye.
The two hundred plants is quite a surprise as the Japanese indigo cloths are quite expensive and said to be made from a rare plant. Several cultures in Africa also use indigo to dye cloths. I’m wondering now whether the original processes make these products expensive, there is bound to be a lot of processing necessary to make dyes from scratch.
My only experience extracting color from wild plant materials to dye wool, has been using lichens to make a dark red, and that was by boiling the lichen and the yarn in ammonia, then setting the pot in a sunny place for three weeks, stirring it daily. Reading how indigo was/is extracted, it seems a similar process.
Following the links, the Brooklyn Museum webpage presented me with Catherine McKinley’s article on indigo’s influence in women’s culture, where Indigo is spoke of as rare … as in “the rare, refulgent dye and the commodities spun from it.” from (https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/stories uncovering_a_womens_history_of_african_indigo) while Bloomsbury Press offered me one of McKinley’s resulting books https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/indigo-9781608195886/
In Asia, cultures such as Javanese batiks and ikats, and Japanese aizome also made indigo famous.
Nowadays ammonia is one of my no-no’s in that I’m allergic to everything with chlorine in it, though fabric dyeing has remained one of my interests. It was only a small hop to watercolor painting on cotton paper.
Wikipedia’s article on indigo, in particular growing the plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigofera_tinctoria
One of those photos I make of a seemingly hidden pic on the TV screen, a god-like figure in the hidden depths of a mysterious pool, inserted … even seeded … in there, perhaps to act as an eventual hook for a new series. I seem to remember that I got it from The Mandolorian somewhere. This camera shot surprisingly clear compared to the original.
Instead of sedately side-stepping back to the original Lodestar story, or going way back to the first or third installments, I’ve decided to skip to part 12. [This is all on the Page about the Lodestar Timeline] Which in a way can be thought of as the very first installment and anyway is a necessary prequel to the Doomed Trilogy.
Claire and Nalbo retired to the valley where the alien engineer, original owner of the spacecraft known on Earth as The Lodestar, decides to spend time on Earth to renew a member of his life support system. Things don’t go well as can be expected when species as different as the alien engineer and his support system, and humans meet.
I was only about fifty when I began writing this installment, and thought I should wait until I was much older to know what it felt like to be old and crotchety. Well, I’m seventy-seven now, high time I tackled it.
Rita de Heer 