Dragon's Garden

Precious metal of a magpie’s tail,
Rose thorns sharper than the finest sword,
Jewel brightness of a beetle shell:
My garden is a dragon’s hoard.


( Note about the poem )

five questions

i got five questions from ursula. let me know in a comment if you'd like five questions of your own!

1. Tell us about a wild animal you see around?
i adore [Eurasian] magpies and can highly recommend picking a favourite animal you're likely to see in your everyday environment – you get lots of little happiness boosts! you can see magpies pretty much everywhere around here, but there's particularly many in my parents' neighbourhood.

another animal i've seen when visiting my parents is one or two of the hedgehogs they've been feeding in the garden. since showing my blurry nighttime photos of vaguely brownish blobs to friends, hedgehogs have become a whole Thing: before we started dating, my current partner bought hedgehog christmas cards because they reminded her of me; i've bought a poster with a hedgehog poem for my wall; and my partner gave me a hedgehog necklace.

2. What's a word you love the sound of?
i'm making a small selection:

• étanchéité [e.tɑ̃.ʃe.i.te] (French)
• người [ŋɨəj˨˩] (Vietnamese, Hà Nội pronunciation)
• järn [jæːɳ] (Swedish)
• чаевые [t͡ɕɪ.jɪ'vɨ.jə] (Russian)

3. Do you have a preferred size or type of notebook?
for my diary, i prefer A5 notebooks with ruled paper. currently i really like Leuchtturm 1917. the numbered pages are very convenient, but the "DATUM/DATE" at the top of each page less so – it gets in the way of... writing the date.
i'm thinking of binding a notebook myself at some point in the near future, that'll be an interesting project!

i also always have a notebook of lists, notes, and doodles. for that, i like an A4 notebook with 10 mm gridlines, the kind i used for mathematics in school.

4. Tell us about a favorite summer activity, now or from your childhood?
back when i was in middelbare school, i used to sometimes go to the nearby petting zoo and look at the piggies.

5. What's your favorite mode of transit?
the only ones available to me around here (out in the province) are trains and buses, but i have a particular fondness for trams. oh, do boats count? something like the Helsinki-Stockholm ferry? i love being on boats.