Friday, May 12, 2006 - Today, Yuoo worked at a temporary job, delivering flowers for Mother's Day. His car filled with flowers, he travelled all over Loblolly making deliveries. (Yes, it smelled very nice inside the car.) He went to a couple of schools, the homes of several elderly people, and even a day-care center. All of the creatures and places he saw were interesting, but by far, the most interesting place he delivered flowers to was a powerplant. Loblolly has several powerplants, places in which electricity is manufactured. There is an oil-burning plant, a waterfall-harnessing plant, a small sunlight-gathering plant, and most recently a coal-burning plant, but the place Yuoo saw today was a natural gas-burning plant. Even outside, Yuoo could hear the entire building churning and humming.

Yuoo did make one mistake today. He accidently gave a bouquet of flowers to the wrong person! It was only when he tried to deliver the other person's bouquet that he noticed his mistake, but he retraced his steps and corrected the problem. It only cost him a little more driving and a few appologies.

Sunday, May 14, 2006 - Happy Mother’s Day!

Here is a squirrel and a daisy for my Mom, whom I love very much.

Today, Yuoo visited a home for elderly creatures and played the piano for them. (He also went to a place called Lion Abbey to join his friend, Mr. Tires, in a time of worship, but I’ll get to that story another time.)

Anyhow, yesterday Yuoo delivered more flowers. Most of these flowers went to elderly grandmothers living in group homes. Some of these group homes were bright, sunny places where frail but otherwise healthy creatures can enjoy their days sitting on the front porch in rocking chairs, tending to the gardens outside, or playing mock-gambling games in the activity room. The workers and nurses there seemed well-paid, and they seemed to go to great lengths to make the residents happy. The biggest and most expensive place Yuoo visited had large indoor hallways decorated to look like streets, with ornamental streetlamps and trees.

Yuoo visited a different group home which seemed like a sad, gloomy place. The halls were narrow and crowded, and it smelled very bad there. The workers seemed tired and always in a hurry, but they went about from one chore to the next with determination. The elderly creatures living there probably came from poor families, or perhaps their minds had wandered too far. Whatever the cause, their world seemed to consist only of a bed, a meal tray, and their caretakers.

As Yuoo stopped to deliver flowers at these group homes, he always spent some time talking each lady receiving the flowers (and sometimes ladies who didn’t receive any flowers). I asked Yuoo which person he enjoyed talking to the most, and he told me of a lady in the poorest home he visited. To be honest, Yuoo could not tell what kind of creature she was because most of her fur was gone, and she was very weak. Her mind was wandering, but she was glad of the company, and she talked with Yuoo for a while.

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

You might not have known this, but the town of Loblolly is home to the world’s largest Etheratory. This is a place where scholars and magi come from all over the world to study an invisible substance called ether. The building is filled with towering machines that generate powerful clouds of ether. Scholars use this ether to perform all sorts of nifty tricks, everything from finding cures to diseases to making small frogs levitate.

Sunday, May 28, 2006 - Last night, Yuoo had a very lovely dream. He dreamed that his family were together, visiting the town where he grew up. In the course of his dream, Yuoo could not recall how old he was, but seemed like a few years had passed. They went to the house where he grew up, and the place was full of wet leaves and pollen pods, as if someone had left all of the windows during a heavy spring rainstorm. Everyone spent the night there, and the next morning, Yuoo explored the forest near his house. Apparently, someone had built a farm next-door, and inside a grazing pasture was a collection of very strange animals. Though these animals were probably a product of Yuoo’s imagination, they seemed to resemble mammals that had gone extinct thousands of years ago. (This probably has something to do with the ice-age cartoon movie Yuoo watched a couple of days ago.)

Well, Yuoo’s family then visited their old church. In this dream, the church and its people had not changed at all, but Yuoo and his family had changed. Yuoo’s mother came to the front and gave a speech to the congregation. Yuoo’s father told him to the fellowship hall for something good to eat, and Yuoo wanted to bring his brother with him, but his brother was hiding in a corner and didn’t want to come.

Yuoo usually doesn’t have dreams as vivid as these. (Or it would be more accurate to say that he usually doesn’t remember them.) His dreams are usually very fuzzy and deal mostly with emotions instead of events. As Yuoo’s alarm clock activated this morning, he felt his dream fading into the background, and it took him a few moments to remember where (and when) he was.

This morning, during the service at Mortar Abbey, Abbot Rains told about a very interesting experience he had. Last week, Abbot Rains went into a time of seclusion, meditation, and reflection at a monestary called Magnolia. Abbot Rains is a very sociable and outgoing badger, his usual way of life is quite different from that of the monks who live at Magnolia. First of all, each morning the friars of Magnolia get up a good three hours before sunrise, and they rarely ever speak, except in chant. They spend their days following a steady schedule of working, eating, meditating, and singing together, away from the distractions of the world. Yuoo found it a bit strange that Abbot Rains would spend a week at such a place, especially because Magnolia is of a different, more authorative, order than Mortar Abbey is.