Virtual Brush Box

Awareness of the outside world. Lawyers, Guns & Money: On the USS Doris Miller. Farley, August 21, 2026. Background info including international repercussions.

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Milton: Hello.

Me: Oh. I didn’t see you.

Milton: Why not? I’m standing right here, by your shoulder.

Me: I can’t see behind me.

Milton: What! How do you know what is going on around you?

Me: I have to turn my head.

Milton: That’s weird.

Me: I don’t have normal horse vision. I have limited predator vision.

Milton: Must be a hard way to go through life.

Onwards!
Katherine

Pastries of the outside world. Coupe du Monde de la Pâtisserie.

Side note. My desktop translates this page automatically. My phone does not offer the option, at least that I can find. Weird. Also, more interesting visuals on the desktop version. Also weird.

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Pastry Chefs Dessert Table
Elizabeth Moore Chocolate
21 August 2026

As part of my monthly box subscription, I get to take a class. Cooking class? Moi? It is to laugh. I chose one where we sat and ate and admired as Chef Jen plated and explained each dessert. They were both visually appealing and tasty.

Each dessert was plated with an absurd number of ingredients. Yet, nothing was there for mere decoration. Every item added to the favor.

I neither took notes nor remembered what was said. Oooh, food. Pretty! Yummy!

Plated by me from the petit four table.

Onwards!
Katherine

Ice cream magic is, as you would imagine, a subset of food magic. Therefore, it shares in the strengths and weakness of that branch of magic.

Food magic works best with spells of healing, protection, and gentle persuasion. It is difficult to do harm with this branch of magic. Intentions count. Food spells prepared with ill intent do not taste good, often to the point of being inedible. Hard to get people to eat bad tasting food. A few practitioners are undoubtedly working on this, but no one is going to admit to trying to make evil palatable.

Of course, there’s poison, but that’s just chemistry.

Food magic works if the recipient voluntarily accepts and is invested in what the practitioner offers. Deception and force feeding negate the effects. Studies have been done on how much of the positive the effect is due to the spell and how much is due to the pattern bias on the part of the participant. Experiments with placebos are intriguing but have been statistically inconclusive.

Ice cream has been used as projectiles. Turns out enchanted snowballs work just as well. No reason to waste the ingredients.

Enough about the dark side.

As indicated above, ice cream is general used for positive outcomes: healing, strength, calming, community. Sitting down and eating with folks has an inherent magic. Spells reinforce these effects.

You will probably start with prepared ice cream, most do. Eventually will want to churn your own. This is the best way to discover what works for you in terms of flavors, amount and type of dairy, inclusions, and so on. How the spells relate to the ingredients is unique to each practitioner, but there are general rules. Fruit flavors effect the body. Flowers and leaves effect the mind. For example, mint is know to increase mental acuity. Chocolate acts as a general enhancer, which is why you find it in so many flavors. It also explains the popularity of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

Onwards!
Katherine

Art of the outside world. Global Citizen: Everybody Poops, But These Artists Made It Into Masterpieces, 2015.

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In an effort to keep Milton from gorging, his hay is portioned out and served in clean muck buckets. He also eats out of a bucket hanging on the wall.

Therefore, there are often empty buckets lying about waiting to be picked up.

At one point, he pooped in his feed bucket. Other Barn Minion had a brief panic attack thinking the mass was uneaten breakfast.

Nope. Just poop. Dump & rinse.

A few days later, same thing. This time I found a decorated hay bucket.

Water was turned off at the barn. I needed a way to tell Other Barn Minion that the bucket required rinsing before use, in case I forget to mention it in time.

So, I plonked the bucket on top of the previously discarded poop and & draped the hose over it.

Other Barn Minion arrived at the barn. Asked that eternal question.

Is this a housekeeping message or a contemporary art installation?

Onwards!
Katherine

Awareness of the outside world. “She is one of two girls pitching in the 2026 LLWS and the 25th to ever do so.” Montgomery Advertiser: How many strikeouts does Kinley Rasmus have in Little League World Series? Smarr, Tuscaloosa News, Aug. 19, 2026.

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First, Mathilda & I graced the scene. I don’t think she appreciated me in show mode. [Mathilda in Montgomery]

Then, I rode my horse, Seize The Day, aka Caesar. [In Defense of Caesar]

I probably rode in other classes, but the one that sticks in my mind is the Prix Caprilli. That’s when they put jumps in the dressage ring.

I’m riding a jumper. I’m at a dressage show. I shall jump in my dressage test and amaze them all.

Ha!

I stayed in the ring. I did the jumps. Beyond that, not so much.

It wasn’t the jumps.

It wasn’t even the dressage.

It was the arena. Not the dressage ring, but the arena the ring was set up in.

The grounds at Montgomery also hosted western shows, which require cows, which require pens, which were at one end of the arena.

Caesar would have nothing to do with the cow pens. Clearly, dire things happened to horses who ventured near them.

We managed to enter at A. After that, he would not, could not go down to that end of the dressage ring.

He would not get within, say, 10 meters of A. Since a small dressage ring is 40 meters, we were barely able to get past the middle of the long side.

We would trot/canter past E/B, depending on gait and direction. I would ask him to go straight. He would give it a hard pass and swerve back toward the other end of the ring.

When Caesar said no, he meant, No, that is not physically possible. No horse in history has ever done it.

We never got near A again until it was time to leave.

Did the jumps fairly well, as I recall.

Since I was the only one willing to jump my dressage horse, we were the only entry. So, we won the class. Warts and all.

Onwards!
Katherine

Awareness of the outside world. ““AI is not intelligence—it is prediction.” World Economic Forum: What is artificial intelligence—and what is it not? 2023.

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One of our previous horses was Mathilda.

Mathilda. 15.2h QH-cross mare. Mama was a Quarter Horse. Daddy was anybody’s guess. Husband horse. Of her 30 years, 23 of them were spent with us. She lives on in the first 2 1/2 years of the blog. [About, paraphrased]

I showed her once, and only once, if memory serves. We entered an intro dressage test at a local show. I managed to get myself eliminated in a comprehensive fashion.

This was during the time I was riding Caesar, so I was in a bulletproof phase. Sure, I can take this horse and do a walk-trot test. Hand me the reins.

Enter at A. Piece of cake.

Halt at X. This was back when we halted at X.

Proceed Working Trot. Pas de problem.

Track Left. On it.

And then we reached the corner. Whereupon I executed a somewhat less than than 90o turn and we popped neatly over the ankle-high fence.

Husband looked up from reading the test to see us cantering down the long side on the outside of the ring.

Cantering, in a walk-trot test.

Exited the field of play.

Bzzzzzzt.

Thus began and ended our dressage career. [Mathilda in USDF Connection]

No media. This was long before we all carried cameras in our pockets and the show was too small for a professional photographer.

Tomorrow, Caesar in Montgomery.

Onwards!
Katherine

Awareness of the outside world. Scientific American: Scientists calculated how much money and lives ‘Medicare for All’ might save—it’s a lot, by Kovac, edited by Cameron, August 12, 2026.

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Stroll. Saunter. Share space.
Greenery. Cool morning. Ha!
Hard sun. Air soup. Hot!

Afterword

Once, again, this is closer to an exercise in word choice than true poetry. “Another factor to be aware of is that the misguided focus on 5-7-5 syllables in English puts excess emphasis on form, to the great detriment of content and other strategies necessary to writing haiku.” NaHaiWriMo: “Why “No 5-7-5”? I did manage two opposing ideas, if not two images, and a cutting word. Kinda. This is as close to poetic as I’m gonna get.

Re title. While I dislike perpetuating a literary misconception, part of the problem is what else to call it. Presenting a perfectly precise polysyllabic prose poem?

Update: I had the honor of providing inspiration, LtU&E: Presenting a perfectly precise polysyllabic prose poem(s).

Onwards!
Katherine