My Creatively Random Life

I have used karma  in a previous A to Z challenge but it is a topic that I have a deep connection to.  I have a deep belief that what you put out into the world does come back to you and I try to live my life as much within that philosophy as I possibly can.  I don't want to put anything out into there into the world that's going to come back to bite me in the butt.  It gets a little easier with age. The theory is that good intent and good deeds lay the way for good karma and future happiness whereas negative intent and bad deeds create bad karma and future suffering.  In some religions it is tied to the concept of future lives so what you do in this life effects what happens to you in future lives. Karma is difficult to define because there is so much diversity in the views of the different religions but it does seem to share common themes.   One of the main ones being that like deeds cause like effects, the effects of karma are not necessarily immedia...

As a kid I had a huge fascination with Igloos and every winter without fail I would be out there in the snow trying to make one.  Sadly, my snow shelter attempts never made it very far off the ground.  I blame the fact that I live too far south but I am willing to bet if I'd tried to build one this winter I would have met with a lot more success. Igloos were predominantly constructed by people in Canada's Central Arctic and Greenland's Thule areas.  Some neat things I learned about Igloos include: 1) It's mostly outside the Inuit society that igloo refers exclusively to shelters constructed from blocks of compacted snow. 2) Snow used to build an igloo must be sound enough to cut and stacked in blocks.

So I discovered a few years ago that Emu farming is actually this HUGE thing here.  I'm not entirely sure why, but it's like insanely popular.  Which whatever, I love a good edible meat.  I also saw on a morning show I was watching with my mom the other day that you can feed something like 8-10 people with an Emu egg.  At which point I totally wanted to get one for home because with Ace heading into puberty he eats like a horse and could probably eat an Emu egg in a sitting.   Anyhow, other interesting things I learned about Emus are: 1) They are nomadic and may travel long distances to find food. 2) They can live between 10 and 20 years in the wild.  3) Females are a small amount larger than males and have a wider rump.  4)  They require pebbles and stones to assist in the digestion of plant material. 

 A demon is a supernatural being, often malevolent prevalent in religion, occultism, mythology, fiction and folklore.  In some religions they are considered unclean spirits often fallen angels or deceased humans.  In other religions or occultism demons are spiritual entities that may be conjured and controlled.  Like most of the things I am writing about for the challenge this year I have always had an intense fascination with, not necessarily demons themselves but with all the mythology and lore surrounding them.  I think they are a great  subject for stories much like vampires and witches because there is so much there to work with. Some interesting things about demons are: 1) The Ancient Greek word daimon refers to a spirit or divine power with no connotations of evil or malevolence.    2) Popular Hebrew mythology has demons that are believed to come from the nether world and have various physical ailments ascribed to them such as heada...

When I signed up to do the A to Z challenge this year I completely forgot that I was going to be away for almost the entire first week of the challenge....eek!  With that in mind I decided to go with a slightly less research heavy topic than the one I was holding over from last year.  Which makes me a little sad because I really wanted to do it but really excited because instead I am going to talk about something that really presses on my mind all the time. My theme for this year is going to be a person, place or thing list of stuff I have always wanted to write about.  I don't know about you but I have entire notebooks and tons of scraps of paper everywhere with words, phrases and sentences on them of stuff that popped into my head that I thought would make a good story.  Or at least a good jumping point for a story. So I have decided to make an alphabetical list of them and put a little research into them, with the hope that next year's A to Z will feature shor...