May You Live In Interesting Times: A Cautionary Tale: Archive of Family Photographs and Documents Circa 1918 to 1945, Ostrogorsky Michael
Автор: Ostrogorsky Michael Название: Blue Tara Trilogy: Princess Tara Chronicles ISBN: 1087863279 ISBN-13(EAN): 9781087863276 Издательство: Неизвестно Рейтинг: Цена: 6550.00 р. Наличие на складе: Есть у поставщика Поставка под заказ.
Описание: What do you do when you discover your parrot is a witch? A witch with a coffee addiction. She needs your help to save your world from a cannibal warlock and his zombie army of the dead. A witch named Princess Tara. And she`s not alone. She leads a coven of witches comprised of a pandemonium of parrots and one black cat.
Автор: Ostrogorsky Michael Название: Kālarātri or Black Night Trilogy ISBN: 1087903513 ISBN-13(EAN): 9781087903514 Издательство: Неизвестно Рейтинг: Цена: 6550.00 р. Наличие на складе: Есть у поставщика Поставка под заказ.
Описание:
A coven of shape-shifting witches comprised of a pandemonium of parrots and one black cat, led by a coffee-swilling blue-skinned goddess named Princess Tara, enlist the help of a trio of Seattle history professors to seek magic to stop a god of war and his goddess of death intent on destroying our world. The professors discover they face a conundrum no book or library can address. How do they defeat a goddess who controls death and time? Can they? Our heroes and villains bounce across the galaxy and dive into the depths of time to search for a solution. They discover that reality and time itself is as fluid as a glass of cold beer.
My earliest memory ever is the first time I successfully walked. Me and my mom. Well, of course, my mom already knew how to walk. But not me. Me and my mom. We were in the kitchen of our first family home. Dad must have been at work. I can't even remember how old I was. Couldn't have been too old. I stood up by myself, leaning against a kitchen counter. My mom walked to the other side of the small kitchen, big to a little tot like me who had never successfully figured out this walking trick before. She wordlessly motioned for me to come to her. I remember feeling scared to death to try, fearing I would plop face down on the yellow linoleum floor if I dared, never to get up.
I desperately wanted my mom to come to me, but my mom kept motioning me to come to her. I finally relented and pushed off against the kitchen counter. One step. Then two. A third. A fourth and fifth. Thinking back on this adventure all these years later I can recall we had a small kitchen. Not too many steps required. I fell into my mother's arms, upright, triumphant. Spent.
That's life. Challenges and conquests. Falling flat on your face on the linoleum, picking yourself up, and trying again. They say death and taxes are the only things you can count on in life. I say bull. Taxes are for suckers. Just ask any politician. And death is a con game dreamed up by holy rollers, preachers and grifters. I have learned that death is just another challenge to overcome. Challenge itself is the only thing you can count on in life. No matter how many challenges you face and conquer, there will always be another challenge knocking you face down on the linoleum. Comes the true challenge when you grow up and become an adult. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. No, not the ones you think. Love. Desire. Ambition. Faith. These are the greatest challenges of all. Overcoming these challenges is what makes life such a bitch. Love. Desire. Ambition. Faith. Without them, life is so simple, believe me.
Years ago I inherited several boxes of family documents and photographs that my grandfather Vassilij (William) Yakovyevich Ostrogorsky collected during the last century. These documents passed down through the hands of my aunt Vera Vassilyevna and father Vassilij Vassilyevich, my mother Jadvyga Ivanuaskas, and my sister Helen Vassilyenva. Once the boxes fell into my hands they sat mostly forgotten gathering dust in a store room.
Over the years I always intended to pull the boxes out of storage to compile a family history. Or at the least investigate the contents. In the words of the great eighteenth century English writer Dr. Samuel Johnson, "Hell is paved with good intentions."
The realization of one's own mortality has a way of focusing the mind. I am now in the last year of my sixth decade riding this blue ball called Earth sailing through the outer reaches of the Milky Way. My grandfather died in the second year of his seventh.
I pulled out the boxes. The contents astonished me. Photographs dating to 1920. Letters. Orders. Official certificates. Nazi work permits. Reports. Post-World War II pleas for shelter and assistance to the International Refugee Organization and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. Military passes. Job applications. Applications to countries around the world in search of a new home. Red Cross medical reports, and even x-rays of all things
But what astonished me even more than the contents of the boxes, was the realization my grandfather carried these documents with him halfway around the world by train, foot, and steamship to a new life in America in the 1950s. By my count, these documents survived two revolutions, a civil war, two world wars, the Great Depression, a couple of military coups, a military invasion or two, Nazi conscription, and the Allied aerial bombing campaigns of World War II.
I am pleased to present to you the Ostrogorsky-Ivanuaskas family history as best I can distilled from the documents my grandfather saved from oblivion, as well as notes my mother compiled in her last years, and family lore. Surviving photos are presented with this history. I am photographing the documents to be published in their entirety in a subsequent volume. I am pleased to report the entire archive will be curated with the Pacific Northwest Collection of the Special Collections Department of the University of Washington's Suzzallo Library.
I used to be a normal person, until I met a parrot. Not any parrot. Normal people don't argue with parrots about coffee drinks. Even normal parrot people don't argue with their parrots about coffee drinks. But Princess Tara isn't a normal parrot. I stopped being a normal person the fateful day I walked into Charlie's Bird Store below Seattle's Pike Place Market and walked out with a gigantic beautiful blue hyacinth macaw parrot with a four foot wingspan.
Sure, she looks normal. Normal as any gigantic gorgeous brilliantly cobalt blue-feathered hyacinth macaw parrot might look. Completely blue from the tip of her lengthy tail to the crown of her enormous head. Completely blue except for that huge black beak and those inscrutable coal black eyes set on either side of her face. Coal black orbs set in rings of stunning bare yellow skin.
Although parrot people are thought to be crazy, I didn't stop being a normal person because I got a parrot. I stopped being a normal person because I got a parrot who just happens to be a princess. And a witch. A witch with a coffee addiction. A witch named Princess Tara.
I must finally have gone over the edge to totally batshit crazy. There could be no other explanation. No other explanation for why the cannibal warlock Hamatsa's procurer of bodies, the svelte seductress Kinqalatlala, stood before me with her razor-sharp hand stabbed through my chest while her tongue pushed into my mouth. No other explanation for why I stood frozen in shock while blood streamed down my legs. My blood. No other explanation for why my girlfriend Jean lay unmoving and unconscious on the pavement. No other explanation for why a tall naked muscular Amazonian goddess with glowing crystalline blue skin and only one eye and one breast let out a screech that threatened to burst my head.
Well, wait. There could be one other explanation. I could be dead. I couldn't discount the possibility that I might be a new resident in the spirit world. Crazy or dead. This day was not going well.
Описание: Couple of Seattle history professors fall in with a coven of witches comprised of a pandemonium of parrots and one black cat. The coven`s leader, a blue-feathered hyacinth macaw parrot named Princess Tara, enlists their help to search for the magic of the tlogwe to stop a goddess of death. But how do you stop a witch who controls death and time?
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