The Raven's Roost

Just before we left on our trip, my Chromebook broke. I opened the lid and the screen literally cracked. The drive is fine, and I'm going to (at some point) hook it up to an external monitor so I can get some stuff off its local drive. I usually save important things to the cloud, but sometimes I forget.
Fox has set me up with one of his old laptops, which is a bit janky but works for what I need. I prefer this to buying a whole new computer and creating more e-waste. I think the whole reason I had that Chromebook was that I was going to use it as a Steam gaming laptop, but then Steam and Google couldn't get along and I bought a Steam Deck anyway, so it's a moot point.
We also spent last weekend doing a spur of the moment project Fox had an idea for. He saw this stuff called polymeric sand. You pour this between pavers, and then wet it, and it sets into a substance halfway between concrete and glue. Weeds can't grow through it, and ants can't burrow into it. So we pulled up the bricks in the garden and repaved with this stuff. I kind of wanted to wait until winter, but keeping the weeds down was bothering him. Anyway, it's done now.

A couple of days ago, I was sitting next to the window when a Crow flew down and dropped half a bagel in the bird bath. He returned about an hour later to retrieve beakfulls of soggy bagel.

Every afternoon or evening since then, he's shown up again with hamburger buns and dropped them into the bird bath to soak. This is hugely entertaining for me, despite needing to wash out the bird bath every day so that the water doesn't get gross. I assume that someone is throwing stale bread out for the birds. But it was fun at first to wonder if the Crow was stealing buns from someone's backyard picnic table.

The in-shell peanuts are also a big hit, but I haven't seen a Crow come around early in the morning like they used to in order to load up before the squirrels got them all.

So the test results actually didn't show anything. The appointment was to review that and the doctor wanted to know how aggressive I want to be in pursuing this. She also poked at me some and noted that nothing seems enlarged or tender, so there's literally nothing going on in there. I'm tired of this, and I don't want to pursue it anymore unless my liver really gets pissy and the enzymes go way up. But the fluctuations have stayed under 100 and nothing else is obviously causing it so meh.

This weekend turned out to be extremely busy so I have no writing or art to show off at the moment. I'm enjoying the milder weather we're having - yes, it's in the 80s in the afternoon, but the nights are cool.

The sky was interesting last night. Our west-facing camera saw a helicopter flying low and sweeping a searchlight at around 2 a.m. I would normally say that's Camp Blanding, but the copter came out of the southwest and headed due east. Then there was a Falcon 9 launch, and we caught part of that on the east camera. We didn't get any shots of Artemis because the launch trajectory didn't take them north-northeast, but if it had we'd have seen it. Kind of hard to miss a 20-story building flying through the air.

If all goes well today I hope to have my afternoons back for ukulele practice, writing, etc. I'm feeling pretty stressed out. I keep wanting a THC margarita when I'm making dinner, but I also don't want to numb out all the time, or to burn through my drinks that quickly. I'm thinking of taking up Tai Chi again - I was starting to teach myself many years ago, but there wasn't a lot of English language info online at the time. Recently I've found a description of a warmup set, several English guides to the forms, videos, and there's a teacher in Fleming Island now who occasionally even teaches the sword forms!

There was a pretty good sale at Aldi and I bought this massive pork butt to put on the smoker. It's been out there since about 3 pm yesterday, slow and low. We've built the fire up again this morning, hoping to push it up to "done" temperature since it was sitting at 170 when I got up.

Meanwhile I'm probably going to get some yard work done before it gets warm today. The grass is getting high, and you can pick up a tick just walking to the mailbox.

I got that abdominal ultrasound done for my doctor, and the results said nothing unexpected - thickening of the gallbladder which had been noted before, but everything else normal. Her office called me yesterday at 4:30 saying she "needed" me to come in to discuss the results, so now I get to be anxious and panicky all weekend about that. What does she see that isn't in the write-up? I can't figure out what's wrong and I'm terrified. I found that there's a rare illness that affects both the gallbladder and liver, and it's very hard to treat. I wonder if that's it.

At least my back has healed up and I've returned to running and yoga. No strength just yet, I'm going to give that a few more days. Occasionally I'll be turning over in bed and feel a mild pain, so I'm waiting for that to resolve before I get back into weightlifting. I might get the push mower out to work on the septic mound though. It'll go faster than the weed-whacker, but it's also a little more physically demanding.

I'm looking forward to pulled pork but I'm also not having a great weekend. This cloud of anxiety is stressing me out.

I had intended to update this sooner but we had some eventful times back here. A fire started up the road and spread quickly, considering how dry it is. Someone saw it early and started trying to put it out, the fire department was called, and Forestry showed up soon after. The chatter we overheard on their radios said it started at a trash pile, but it seems no one specifically started a fire - it may have been a discarded lithium ion battery or something that sparked off. As an aside - please dispose of those damn batteries properly.

By the time it was contained it had burned about 350 acres, and it came to within one thousand feet of our house. The winds were sort of working in our favor, as they usually blow west to east, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic, and so they pushed the fire away from our road and the homes of the people who live here. And the trees out in the state forest may actually appreciate the fire - it wasn't hot enough to kill them, and longleaf pine seems to "like" an occasional burn.

Still, it was quite an exciting afternoon. A sherrif's deupty even came out to let people know we needed to be ready to evacuate, and to gather names and contact numbers. Happily it didn't get that bad, though Fox and I grabbed the important things and moved our truck up the road about half a mile. Crowley was not thrilled about being in his crate, but he handled it very well and got lots of kitty treats when we got back home.

The fire also seems to have driven some wild Turkeys out of the woods and they are hanging around our yard. I see three hens and a tom almost every day. I've started putting out extra corn and peanuts for them. The Crows are also enjoying the peanuts and one even waits around in the morning for me to go put food out, and as soon as I'm inside it swoopes down to grab as many peanuts as it can.

I saw my new doctor this week and she had an interesting idea about my elevated liver numbers, especially in light of the fact that nothing but the ALT is out of whack, and I have no hepatitis or scarring. She wants an ultrasound of the gall bladder. While there's not much that can be done about it aside from a low-fat diet, she says it can cause the fluctuating ALT numbers I'm having, and the ultrasound is a more appealing alternative than the (painful, invasive) liver biopsy my previous doctor was pushing for. She suspects that any gall bladder problems are probably sub-clinical right now, and may remain that way if I stick to my generally healthy diet and exercise routine. Despite the impression I may give here, Fox and I actually eat a sort of Asian-ish version of the Mediterranean diet. Same principles, different flavor profiles.

That being said, it's almost time we had a burger night. :)

"What did you say?"
"DOG," Jonesy declared. To the cat, every animal larger than him was a dog, so it could be anything. Albert groaned and sat up, rubbing his eyes. Unless he went to check on this thing, Jonesy wouldn't leave him alone. He tottered to the window and pulled the blackout curtains open enough to see.
"DOG," Jonesy said again.
It wasn't a dog any more than Muffin was a dog, but this creature was much larger. The head region seemed to be a glowing void similar to Muffin's, but no corolla of tentacles surrounded it. Albert's sleepy brain wondered if they were there to protect the void somehow.
The "dog" turned, apparently having stopped to examine something, and lumbered down the road in the direction of the lake.

We've started working on the garden, which I might have mentioned. I put in a seed order with Southern Exposure just now, including potatoes. I've found planting bags that the potatoes will go in, since we have wireworms. I'll need to pick up bags of soil when I go out again at Home Depot, which I blanked on and referred to as the Dirt Store. Which is where the Dirt Man gets some of his dirt, I assume, I don't know as I am not a guy.

Since we have four raised beds I'm not trying to grow everything all at once. I've limited this year's planting to paste tomatoes, basil, black beans, summer squash, and a kind of hot-climate spinach for stir fry greens. I also plan to get some pollinator-friendly flowers to put around in containers. The lantana died back hard with the freezes but just yesterday I saw it peeking back up, so I'll just want to severely cut back the dead stuff and keep it clear so that the flowers can return. I'll also have Mexican oregano in a pot, flat leaf parsley, and catnip.

I've also started practicing some offline hobbies. It's been good for my mental health, honestly, so you haven't seen me online much. Besides writing, I started wondering about using Blender and/or sets of low polygon game assets to build digital art. I can also photograph some of the shrine objects I still own. I haven't made a move on this one yet and I'm still just watching Blender tutorials and shopping asset packs. Just an idea at the moment.

I got out my contact juggling ball and dusted it off. I have a big red rubber ball filled with a sort of silicone oil stuff that deadens the bounce and makes the ball very bottom-heavy and stable, so it's a good practice ball. I actually kind of remember some of the tricks! I grabbed a couple of lacrosse balls and a set of baoding balls that Kitty had. (She said they belonged to her grandfather, and they're a very pretty set, with enameled bats and what looks like a double happiness symbol) All this can improve hand strength, coordination, dexterity, and it looks cool.

And finally I actually did it. I bought a ukulele. It'll be here from Kala Music on Thursday. I know it sounds random, but I have literally for my entire life wanted to play music, but I did so poorly in band and in classes that I assumed my brain was too broken to do it. But then I wondered what I could learn if I just did it on my own. No teacher pushing me or criticizing, no parents laughing at me, no pressure to perform for anyone. I already started a self-paced course in sight reading, which was always one of my weakest areas.

If I really wanted to make a nuisance of myself, I could buy a set of bagpipes and learn that. Honestly when I lived in my apartment in Houma I should have started. Neighbors are going to keep me up at night fighting and shit? Fine, see how y'all like Bagpipe Time. You're going to blast gangster rap, I'm going to play a musical instrument that sounds like someone fighting off wolves with a Shop Vac.

So that's what I've been doing.

Making up song lyrics for "Freeze My Ass Off," which is sung to the tune of "Take the 'A' Train."

We've had a couple of nights this week in the 20s, so when spring comes around, we ought to avoid The Bugpocalypse. You know it's cold when I actually sleep with my window closed. But between my weighted blanket and my bedroom being like a meat locker, I've been getting pretty good sleep.

I don't know what else to post because nothing much has been happening. I haven't gone much of anywhere because I've lost most of my desire to go do anything outside of my weekly errands. I've been cleaning up in my office and boxed a lot of books to donate to the Friends of the Library sale, thrown things out, etc. My new desk pad came in, so I'm enjoying that - I have one for the drawing tablet, and now one for the other desk for typing and mouse use.

I can see frost on the deck railing.

I finished playing Grime recently, and really enjoyed it. Grime's "catch" is that you are a being with a sort of black hole for a head, and your parry mechanic can sometimes become "absorb." That is, you siphon health away from enemies to yourself, and can heal while destroying them. I thought the game was beautifully designed, though the controls felt a little clunky and slow. But I have that gripe every time something isn't as snappy as Hollow Knight, and coming off playing Silksong, where Hornet's movement is extremely fast and responsive, Grime felt like it dragged horribly. I got used to it, however, and once I got the timing of the parry and absorb down, things improved significantly.

Grime has some intense platforming. Most of the really difficult stuff is optional - that is, you can complete the story and the game without certain bosses or platforming segments, but if you do, the game rewards your efforts with good upgrades and expanded abilities. One of the best weapons for a strength focused build is at the end of it's very own Path of Pain, whose pain is only relieved by the fact that there are several respawn points within the area, and dying doesn't knock you all the way back to the beginning.

My main complaint is that some abilities seem inconsistent. Sometimes I had a double air dash, sometimes I didn't. Double jump doesn't work *after* an air dash, but you can break it up into jump-dash-jump. Sometimes double jump seemed to work after pulling yourself towards an object, but at others it didn't. This may all be on me, rather than an actual game issue, but I have never claimed to be an elite gamer. I'm just very persistent.

There is a NG+ that I'm not exploring right now, but may in the future. I wanted to play Hades 2 and found that some of the controls are inverted between the two games, so I'd best play just one or the other. Grime's dash ability is on the same button as Hades' "cast," for example. I played a few hours of Hades last night and finally started remapping my brain to the new controls. Hades 2 is a delight if you liked the first game - I loved it. I finally got to the point of "okay, one more run before I shut down and go to bed," and of course I had my best run yet, clearing the first world and getting about halfway into the second one. It also has another pettable dog, as well as a frog you can talk to. The frog doesn't say anything back except "ribbit," but he's a cute little guy. Maybe he's a toad, I don't know. I like toads, too.

Hades 2 won a Steam award for "best on Steam Deck," so I'll probably load it onto mine. Grime ran decently on the Deck, but it really taxed the battery and got the unit hot. I found it was best to play while the Deck was plugged in if I didn't want to absolutely exhaust my battery.

Oh yeah, and Melinoe addresses the voiceover guy, calling him "Homer," so now we know.