K Kaba

I don't blanche it. I puree and freeze in oil.

I chop it up tiny (or use a food processor) then add enough oil (olive or sunflower usually) to make it pourable and a dash of an acid (usually lime juice.) Then I pour it into something that'll make reasonably sized pucks and freeze.

I store the pucks in a freezer without a defrost cycle. I've no answer for the six months question - they get devoured before that.

Is there space for a line of evergreens between you and the road?

My grandma used to live a bit above and next to a heavily used highway. The line of white pines between her and it would muddle the traffic sounds. If I closed my eyes I could imagine I was at the beach hearing the ocean.

Didn't do much for sirens or horns though!

What I mean is more...
So sometimes the overall idea that I want to make is too vague or big or important or something for what I want to make. It's a bit like that "fear of a blank canvas" or writer's block. The idea of having to do it  and do it right in one shot is the block.

The easiest way I've found around that is like most big problems, eat it one bite at a time. I might do a dozen ATCs (trading card sized) of rat skeleton drawings, or half a dozen quick putty sculpts of rat skulls over a week. Maybe I'd take pictures of that rat skeleton model from a dozen wacky directions and use those as references.

What about making it a series of paintings or drawings?

I absolutely recommend trying things at different scales. Hand and eye skills get used differently, color contrast gets really interesting as you go smaller, and there's a whole world of figuring out what details matter and what don't.

Scenes like a doll or teddy bear maker's crafting space, or someone's mini trains workspace, or a 1:144 dollhouse in a 1:12 space are good ones for scale experiments. Painting galleries and studios can be good ones if you want to try your hand at tiny paintings.

I find I get a bit frustrated at 1:12 and larger, it's too easy for me to make myself unhappy trying to make it all just right, I get lost in the details. I can paint okay at 1:144 and at 6mm and 10mm for gaming minis, but I have an awful time if I want to alter the shapes. Lego frames and magnet frames really help to set right angles at those scales.

I'd lean toward calling most of those dollhouse dioramas or fairy house dioramas. Miniatures are a lot like collage or doll making, they're a great choice for people who like to cycle through hobbies and art forms. Those skills and material understandings you pick up all get used along with new ones.

Upon his bare head
the sun shines very brightly.
The glare hurts my eyes.

It's not just the genes of an individual or population being a good match for the local environment.

There are genes that are passed to offspring with the switches turned on or off.  A generation or three in a new environment will nudge those switches to be more compatible with the new environment. When your starts come from neighbors or volunteers or something that's grown locally for a couple generations, you're getting seedlings that have more of those epigenetic switches flipped to be compatible with local conditions.

If you're managing a landrace and want to add new genetics, it's worth taking in all the first generation survivors, and likely all the second year ones. It's slower, but it'll give you a larger pool of genetics to work with. And if your local environment has a multiyear pattern (occasional drought, or freezing but only some years) it'll help catch any genes in the mix that might help with that.

I had some of those sears tuffskin jeans as a kid. My knees could be skinned and bloody, but those things didn't even get a scratch. I'm not entirely sure they weren't made of some eldrich hide or something.

I've experienced plenty of auditory and olfactory ones. My general rule is to tune in ones that are helpful and tune out ones that aren't. If it's frequent, it can really help to have a trusted person or a good dog around to check if they experience it too.

If they're repeatedly urging you to do awful things, or if your dog is telling you it's the devil? It's time to get some help. Becoming unmoored from reality is dangerous to you and yours.

If they're telling you the gate's unlocked, or the chickens are loose, and it's right? Helpful.

Fevers, headaches, sustained pain, poor sleep for long periods, dehydration, ear ringing, droning background sounds, long periods of silence - there's lots of situations that can induce them or make them more common. And that's before you get into the rare stuff like tumors or oddball infections or tooth fillings picking up radio signals.