Happy Halfway to Halloween!

I saw on my phone last night that the forecast calls for a low of 49. I thought it was a typo until I heard one of our Google Homes repeat that figure, and she gets her weather from a different service. We're weather nerds, we have like four different weather apps between us. Anyway ... 49! IN MAY. We might open up tonight for a while, just to let all the cat farts out. Anyway, it's 61 right now, which might make for good outdoor running for a couple of days.

I've been nursing a minor ouchie. The ball of my foot and into my smaller toes hurts, and that actually has a name but right now I forget what the actual medical term is. But when you go up on your forefoot to break into a sprint - that part is what hurts. It's not so bad that I can't run on it, but I guess I might as well not exacerbate it. It's actually been hurting for several weeks, but it's never quite bad enough that I can't ignore it. But I don't want it morphing into something worse. I'm considering picking up a shoe insert next time I'm out, one of those that just goes into the toe. Today it feels decent, but there's now an odd pain on top of the foot that actually feels more like a blister though there's nothing there.

Fascinating stuff, yes?

Fox and Jeremy are likely going to be upgrading our tower this weekend. This has become more of a priority as one of the towers nearby is offline and the guy dropped his service. He was feeding two other households off his, so they're moving their service to ours. I think they are "only" going to add two sections, but that's twenty feet of height, and it should allow us to see over the trees well enough to see Belmore, and several other places where, right now, we're still looking at the canopy of some of the taller pines. Jeremy is bringing his crew and renting a crane, so all I have to do is ... nothing. Go watch if I want to. Last time we had to rebuild, Fox and I were doing this ourselves.

Our weekend at Walt Disney World was good. The parks are at about 35% capacity, and you can tell. Posted wait times for rides were often estimated high, and I think our longest was for Runaway Railway, which posted 50 minutes and took about 30. We even managed to easily snag a boarding group for Rise of the Resistance, and got to ride that around 11 a.m. I'll want to do that one again because my nerves were really shot by the time we started the pre-ride show and I would like to actually be able to enjoy myself. New rides stress me out, even if I've watched a video ride-through. One of the culinary highlights was getting cookies from Gideon's Bakehouse - highly recommended if you're ever in Orlando. Holy shit these things are amazing. I got the April special, which was a candied orange praline, and we picked up some regular flavors as well. Fox liked the cookies and cream, which he described as a meta-cookie where someone made a cookie out of other crushed cookies. I preferred the triple-chocolate because of course I did.

We added a third hummingbird feeder but it has an annoying design flaw. When the nectar in the base gets low, for some reason, more doesn't bubble down from the reservoir unless you tap the base. So the birds drink the base down, more nectar doesn't appear, and they stop coming to it. I've put tapping that feeder on my daily routine now but it's very weird how it's not quite working right.

(no subject)

The story behind this image is an Osprey scientist who decides to start studying fish in a local lake that have mutated and become inedible. She flew out to pick up a sample and is heading back to the lab against a stormy sky. It was inspired by a news story about how plastics and other man-made chemicals in the water are acting as mutagenics in fish. I know that most mutations aren't like in the movies and the offspring simply die, but the image felt like something that needed to be drawn.

I also wondered how she's holding the jar without use of her claws, and I decided the gloves are rubber, so they have added grip.

Did you know that sometimes an Osprey can have their claws so deeply embedded in a fish that, when the fish dives deeper under the water to try to escape, they drag the Osprey with them and the bird drowns?

It Figures

I mailed Mother's Day cards for Gina and Carolyn on the same day, and Gina's has arrived, but Carolyn's hasn't. So needless to say, she's been ranting about how awful I am and everything. Gina wonders if she may be developing dementia, which is entirely possible, but not really comforting. I'm sorry she has to put up with Mom's shit like this.

And I do try to get stuff sent out early to head this particular rant off at the pass, but the Postal Service obviously has other ideas.

I guess it doesn't matter that much, she tends to think the worst of me anyway.