Summertime and Trooping with the Fae.

Summer makes me think of full moons, sultry evenings, and faeries trooping through the woods---especially on a Midsummer's eve. 

 According to poet William Butler Yeats, there are distinctive differences between the trooping, the solitary, and the household fae. 

    Trooping Faeries are technically the "faerie aristocracy," and dressed in their finest garments, they go parading through the woods in what are called Rades. 

    They are, in fact, a faerie court, similar to the Seelie court, and they tend to live in packs. Should one stumbles upon a single trooping faerie, more than likely a few others are around.

           But beware...they can be good... 

                    

                           Or naughty.

                                        

                            Regardless......

They like to party. 

 Solitary Faeries are the opposite of the trooping faeries. They do not care to congregate among their kind. They tend to be a bit more malicious than the trooping faeries, but there are exceptions to this rule. Thus, they are also neither all good nor all bad. 

Lastly, there are the Household Spirits, which are usually found as single entities in a household, but they are not necessarily solitary. Some have been found to be participants in trooping activities.

 This summer, keep an eye out for our Fae friends.

4 Stars for Solace from NetGalley

                   Solace 
     earns 4 STARS from
                     NetGalley!
Here's what reviewer Charlie B said...
I love reading paranormal books.  This one is no different! I finished the book in one day.  Luckily it was my day off when I started reading it. 

It was a good story line right up my alley not only is it paranormal but there is an alpha male and warrior women trying to solve a case.  My one complaint is now I have to wait for the next in the series. 

Inside the book...Read extended excerpt here

                    Pick up your copy of Solace at...
Amazon  
Barnes and Noble 
The Wild Rose Press

                                    Coming Soon
                            
                     Bliss: Fae Warriors Book 2

Running the Gauntlet

An ancient expression still used today. Now a frequently and almost flippantly used term meaning to experience severe criticism or great difficulties, or to have to deal with a lot of people who are criticizing or attacking you.                                        

                        

Once upon a time it meant a painful brutal death as a captive was forced to run between two rows of people repeatedly striking him.  






In this case, the specific use of the word gauntlet has a curious history originating from Swedish word gatlopp. Gata meaning lane and lopp meaning running, so running the lane. The English borrowed the term in the 17th century, probably during the Thirty Years' War featuring English and Swedish soldiers fighting in the Protestant armies.

 Soon its pronunciation was influenced by the unrelated French word gauntlet (meaning an armored glove), and with misuse of the pronunciation so changed the spelling. 




In Ancient Greece, a similar practice, called Xylokopia was used as a severe military punishment, and in the Roman military it was a form of execution by cudgeling.
There was also a naval version of the gauntlet, used in the Royal Navy. This punishment was abolished by order of the British Admiralty in 1806.
  
 Notable literary descriptions of the process appear in Tolstoy's short story After The Ball, Stanley Kubrick's film Barry Lyndon and Ernest Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls.




Several Native American tribes of the Eastern Woodlands culture forced prisoners to run the gauntlet. Some notables included Daniel Boone, Lieutenant-Colonel John B. McClelland, Susanna Willard Johnson.

          Here's hoping you never truly Run the Gauntlet.

Those Wacky Wombats, a big hit in Victorian Times.

                                  No, not the rock group... 

the common wombat, which is 
the largest burrowing mammal in existence, and the second largest marsupial. Nocturnal and solitary, they spend most of the day below ground, so it's rare for humans to spot one in the wild. 

Wombats live in the forests, mountains, and heathland in 
Australia, including Tasmania, and central Queensland. The northern species is classified as Critically Endangered.





These chubby darlings, can grow as large as 47 inches in length, weighing 80 pounds.




Wombats have long flat claws that give them a shuffling gait but make them extremely efficient burrowers.
                        click here for baby wombat running!

    They may have up to 12 burrows with a network of sub-tunnels, including multiple entrances/exits, and places places to sleep.                                          Sounds like a hobbit house!

     A group of wombats is called a wisdom, a mob, or a colony.                                                                  
     After a gestation period of only 3 weeks, female wombats give birth to one baby, called a joey. Tiny and undeveloped, the joey crawls into their mother's pouch

 immediately where they remain for about 5 months. 


The mother's unique backward pouch prevents the baby from being covered in dirt and debris as the Mother is digging and burrowing. 

Wild wombats live an average of 5 years. 
In captivity, they can live up to 30 years. 

After 1803, a steady trickle of live wombats reached Europe. There was a wombat among the birds and

animals delivered to the menagerie of the Empress Joséphine Bonaparte at Malmaison.        

        The establishment of the wombat’s Victorian reputation took off with the appearance in 1855 of John Gould’s The Mammals of Australia. And in September 1869, the great artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti bought the first of two pet wombats. 

 He was quite distraught over their passing. 

                                                      

  The wombat diet consists primarily of grasses, sedges, herbs, bark, and roots. And with their unusually slow metabolism — it takes them from 8 to 14 days to digest their meals. Maybe that's why their output is SQUARE. 

               To mark their territory, they leave piles of square                               poohs, even stacking them in prominent places. 

    Threats to wombats include loss of habitat, competition with other animals for food, rabbit poisons, hunting, and road accidents. Adult wombats are preyed upon by dingoes, foxes, and Tasmanian devils. Younger wombats are also prey for eagles, owls and quolls

               Apparently, they are also great fans of the Beatles. 

                               
                                           See ya, wouldn't want to be ya.