The city is a rather strange locale, one I hesitate to visit. Between the unsettling patchwork of architecture throughout the city and the unnatural features present scattered both inside and out, it's a wonder anyone ventures there at all. I mean, the subway system that carries the past and future along with the present, the winding archways that can teleport you halfway across the damn city, and the trees that shift their shape to show their approval (or lack thereof) of the climber are just a few I can name!

And even with all that, the only things keeping my dear Heather from moving there are her inheritance and my promise to explore with her every week. Her father's cottage in the town is a nice place to make ours, and I got my uncle's observatory up on top of the hill nearby, so all we really need are a stable income and a way of satiating her curiosity.

Unfortunately (and fortunately), the city solves both of these problems: she gets to explore, and we turned the ground floor of the observatory into a shop because, as it turns out, weird shit sells really, really well. It's gotten to the point we get regulars in a group of doped-up lookin' college kids from an org outta town who come by to buy everything they can afford at least once a damn month.

And thus, I'm sitting on an old stump that looks half like a pile of char, acting as a guard and lookout while Heather pokes through the burgundy ferns looking for good cuttings to bring back. We're pretty far out from the city today, since we're only taking this extra run cause those aforementioned college students sold us out of absolutely everything yesterday. Where they even get that kinda money, I don't know, but I'm not exactly complaining.

So far, we've found a few cool rocks, including some hagstones for necklaces, and one good cutting to put in a pot, so I reckon we'll be out here for a couple more hours. I'll go look for something interesting and update this when we're home.

That should be more than enough to keep the locals happy until stock day, so we're covered there. We'll put the stuff up early tomorrow and spend the rest of today relaxing. Heather has a couple new recipes she's been eager to show me, so it's gonna be a pasta night tonight.

Before I stop writing for the day, I might as well put this note down first: There's going to be a section in the back of this journal dedicated to anything strange (from the city, most likely) that I talk about in these entries, as well as any important people or places (aside from the city) I mention. These'll be complete with fully colored doodles, as opposed to the half-assed sketches I do for the entries here. So we don't forget what anyone or anything here looks like, I suppose... Eh, it just gives me an extra excuse to draw my wife more.

Put up all the new stock for the shop just now. It's Heather's turn to run the shop itself, so I get to relax on the top floor until someone comes up the stairs. Pretty good thing, too- if I have to deal with that one lady from Tuesday again I might start maiming.

The observatory building my uncle left me has three floors: The shop on the ground floor, a little museum about the city and all its weird stuff on the second floor, and the observatory itself on the top floor. Each day the shop's open, we take turns so one person runs the shop while the other keeps an eye on the other two floors. People pay for a museum and observatory visit before they go up the stairs, and the person keeping those two floors gets notified whenever there are visitors. Our more casual usage of these walkie-talkies we bought way back when.

This'll probably be a pretty slow day. We usually get the most of our traffic over the weekend, after our stock days on Friday. Some locals will have caught on to our absence yesterday and decided to come by sometime today to look at the new goods, but locals and outsiders alike tend to wait until after stock day to drop on by. Mostly cause it's the weekend then.

Either way, not even on our busy days do we have any business being open after 3 and nobody's called to ask for a late pickup, so I won't be bored for too long.

As it turns out, it wasn't quite as dead as I was expecting. A mother and her three kids stopped by to check out the museum and go bird-watching. I know, not a typical thing you'd expect from an observatory, but there's gotta be something you can do during the day. We open up these neat little balconies my uncle had installed around the top floor and let people use binoculars to view the nature around them. Luckily the hill the observatory is situated on is at the far edge of town.

It's still going to be too cloudy to man the telescope tonight, but that gives Heather and I plenty of time to plan out our excursion into the city tomorrow. She's in charge of figuring out what we want to find and look at, and I'm in charge of finding the quickest way to do that and get the hell out. I don't want us to spend any more time in there than we have to, but I don't want to disappoint her by missing anything on that list just because taking a picture of a weird spire isn't my idea of a fun, safe activity. She gets why I don't like the place, and while she doesn't feel the same she keeps her sightseeing list relatively small for my sake, so I make room for the things she really wants to see.

I'm not going to worry too much about that right now. Heather wants to try this one cookie recipe again, and I'm just waiting for the fire alarm to go off. Something about this recipe in particular is cursed or something, I think. I asked her if she got it from the city and her response was a suspiciously hesitant "... noooo???". Probably won't update this with the plan until tomorrow morning, that way I can revise it with fresh eyes before I rewrite it down here.