Friday, May 16, 2025

This is the forty-third installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season.

Today is Friday! This means the end of the week, provided you adhere to the same calendar as the rest of us. Do some people not? I think our cultural drive to be inclusive and attend to everyone can be detrimental sometimes. When a new season begins, I see emails from other authors that begin: “Happy first day of summer, unless you’re in the southern hemisphere, in which case happy first day of winter!” While I understand the reasoning, it just seems clunky. I know from the metrics on both Substack and my other newsletter on Zoho Campaigns that 99% of my readers are in the US or Europe, so will that one Australian reader really be offended if I’m celebrating the beginning of summer and they’re bundling up for the cold? I don’t really think so.

Anyway, that wasn’t the main topic of today. It was the fact that it’s Friday, still, unless you’re reading this on Saturday, and I’d better stop while I’m ahead. Our family is one of those that takes on sacrifices every Friday to make the most of the graces available. My wife, son, and I all abstain from meat every week (meaning beef, pork, chicken, and capybara), while my daughter has so many food issues that alternative sources of protein aren’t viable. So that usually means meals of beans, eggs, and canned tuna.

We also have three cats, so Fridays are feast days for them, since they get to clean the cans for us before recycling. It also can very easily be a feast day for me if I’m not careful. See, I really like fish of all kinds, including canned, cooked, processed tuna. Still pretty good. Add some vegan mayonnaise, a little soy sauce, nutritional yeast, a bit of black pepper, and I end up with… a pretty delicious meal, which isn’t much of a sacrifice after all.

So, no dressings, keep it simple, and that works out alright. Oh, I forgot it’s Frontier Friday also! (Actually I didn’t)

The next short story needs just a little more time in the oven, so we’ll put it back in until it’s nice and crispy around the edges and that little ceramic bird in the middle whistles. In the mean time, you can’t make a pie out of this Florabeast, but you can do a lot of other things with it. It’s also going to be one of the Florabeasts seen for the first time in the newest story!

I’ve been avoiding sharing these featured beasts on purpose. See, with each new story, I take all of the Florabeasts that are even mentioned in passing and write articles, then release them all at once alongside the story. That way when people read it, they can look up each one as they go. I’ve been working on Salty & Sweet Don’t Mix for a few months now, so I could have very easily made each Frontier Friday article be one of the newly featured critters. But I didn’t, not only since there are so many more that haven’t been mentioned yet, but because it helps with that sense of wonder and interest. But, since we’re so close to release, I wanted to share just one. So here it is. Enjoy the weekend!

Spoiler thumbnail image by Hans from Pixabay