'Tis But a Scratch
Oct. 4th, 2020 08:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pshaw_ravenThe Whistling Death 10k yesterday went ... decently well. It was not such a large field of participants that we needed to run in masks, though some of the 5k-ers did. It was interesting to run around the old air base, and the course took us out to a WW2 era ammo bunker, though I didn't stop to poke around at it much. Fox and I may go back out at some point when we have more time. The weather was damn near perfect though.
Around mile four, I strained a calf muscle and had to run the rest of the way on it. I'd chosen an old pair of trail shoes for this, since the course quickly devolved from asphalt, to beat-up old asphalt that had had military vehicles driven over it, to rutted-out muddy jeep trail. But the shoes had been worn and beaten down so much they started making my heel twinge. Then my ankle got in on it, then the pain started in my ass. Finally, since my gait and form was all throwed off compensating for my terrible choice in footwear, I finally pushed off and my calf muscle responded by nearly collapsing under me. I managed to hobble at a decent pace across the finish line and spent the rest of the day stiff-legging it around as best I could.
This morning I was incredibly stiff all over - I can tell exactly how much other muscles were compensating for the out of commission calf. But some restorative yoga and walking around the house has stretched it out some. While not back to normal, the pain level has dropped significantly, and though I'm certainly not running any time soon (maybe not at all this week) I can get around on my own, and get up and down without much drama.
My finishing time was 1:03:45, a 10:15 average pace. Which annoys me, as I know how well I'd have done if I werent' running in pain. But it's a decent time and I am happy enough with it.
Anyway, I have something else on my mind this morning that is far more important, and that is grape ice cream.
I was working on a drawing prompt, "ice cream." My shading was turning the ice cream more lavender than white, but gray looked icky, so I went all in on the purple. As I was drawing I remembered that a few times when I was little, dad would drive mom and I to the next large town and we'd get Baskin Robbins. Our town barely had a stop light, let alone an ice cream place. And I would have sworn I got grape ice cream, because I dinstinctly remember it being purple. According to what I found online, they did have a grape sherbet, but not an ice cream, and there was a lot on nonsense about the FDA banning said ice cream because it might hurt dogs, blah blah blah. Anyway, the reason one doesn't see grape ice cream is that grapes have such a high water content that it's difficult to get the ice cream to it's proper texture. Cherries have the same problem, but people go nuts for the flavor to such an extent that it's commercially profitable to put in the extra effort. Grape doesn't excite the same passion in enough people.
Going off the fact that there is wine ice cream, I assumed there would be a way for the home consumer to make such a dish, and I found it far closer to home than I would ever have expected. In the pages of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' Cross Creek Cookery. She gives a simple recipe for hand churning it, but this seems to me a recommendation for my lazy ass to buy a KitchenAid attachment and let that do the work for me. Ms. Rawlings enjoyed household help, where I prefer to get my arm workouts in the gym. She also had a Jersey cow who apparently produced milk so rich that it was butter-yellow straight out of her, but I believe I will take my chances with something like coconut milk. The recipe is nothing more than grape juice, milk, cream, salt, and sugar anyway.
That book has also inspired me to be somewhat more creative in my uses of calamondins. I plan to try making a marmalade along with my usual cake. I'll need to find something to do with them pretty quickly, since the poor tree has so much fruit on it right now that it's almost bowed to the ground. The Meyer lemon is in a similar state, bearing enough lemons that I will have lemon muffins, curd, and pound cake stacked to the ceiling. And not to count my pumpkins before the pumpkin-ify but there are five or six developing right now, and most seem to have passed the stage where they'd drop if they were going to. Something is getting into the garden and digging in the beds but so far has left the gourds unmolested. I don't wish to take chances and plan to scatter a scent repellent this evening in case some critter decides to chew on my pumpkins. One grew through the chain link and developed outside the fence, only to be promptly gnawed by some small animal, though I don't know if it was a squirrel, rabbit, or something else of the nibbling variety.
Around mile four, I strained a calf muscle and had to run the rest of the way on it. I'd chosen an old pair of trail shoes for this, since the course quickly devolved from asphalt, to beat-up old asphalt that had had military vehicles driven over it, to rutted-out muddy jeep trail. But the shoes had been worn and beaten down so much they started making my heel twinge. Then my ankle got in on it, then the pain started in my ass. Finally, since my gait and form was all throwed off compensating for my terrible choice in footwear, I finally pushed off and my calf muscle responded by nearly collapsing under me. I managed to hobble at a decent pace across the finish line and spent the rest of the day stiff-legging it around as best I could.
This morning I was incredibly stiff all over - I can tell exactly how much other muscles were compensating for the out of commission calf. But some restorative yoga and walking around the house has stretched it out some. While not back to normal, the pain level has dropped significantly, and though I'm certainly not running any time soon (maybe not at all this week) I can get around on my own, and get up and down without much drama.
My finishing time was 1:03:45, a 10:15 average pace. Which annoys me, as I know how well I'd have done if I werent' running in pain. But it's a decent time and I am happy enough with it.
Anyway, I have something else on my mind this morning that is far more important, and that is grape ice cream.
I was working on a drawing prompt, "ice cream." My shading was turning the ice cream more lavender than white, but gray looked icky, so I went all in on the purple. As I was drawing I remembered that a few times when I was little, dad would drive mom and I to the next large town and we'd get Baskin Robbins. Our town barely had a stop light, let alone an ice cream place. And I would have sworn I got grape ice cream, because I dinstinctly remember it being purple. According to what I found online, they did have a grape sherbet, but not an ice cream, and there was a lot on nonsense about the FDA banning said ice cream because it might hurt dogs, blah blah blah. Anyway, the reason one doesn't see grape ice cream is that grapes have such a high water content that it's difficult to get the ice cream to it's proper texture. Cherries have the same problem, but people go nuts for the flavor to such an extent that it's commercially profitable to put in the extra effort. Grape doesn't excite the same passion in enough people.
Going off the fact that there is wine ice cream, I assumed there would be a way for the home consumer to make such a dish, and I found it far closer to home than I would ever have expected. In the pages of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' Cross Creek Cookery. She gives a simple recipe for hand churning it, but this seems to me a recommendation for my lazy ass to buy a KitchenAid attachment and let that do the work for me. Ms. Rawlings enjoyed household help, where I prefer to get my arm workouts in the gym. She also had a Jersey cow who apparently produced milk so rich that it was butter-yellow straight out of her, but I believe I will take my chances with something like coconut milk. The recipe is nothing more than grape juice, milk, cream, salt, and sugar anyway.
That book has also inspired me to be somewhat more creative in my uses of calamondins. I plan to try making a marmalade along with my usual cake. I'll need to find something to do with them pretty quickly, since the poor tree has so much fruit on it right now that it's almost bowed to the ground. The Meyer lemon is in a similar state, bearing enough lemons that I will have lemon muffins, curd, and pound cake stacked to the ceiling. And not to count my pumpkins before the pumpkin-ify but there are five or six developing right now, and most seem to have passed the stage where they'd drop if they were going to. Something is getting into the garden and digging in the beds but so far has left the gourds unmolested. I don't wish to take chances and plan to scatter a scent repellent this evening in case some critter decides to chew on my pumpkins. One grew through the chain link and developed outside the fence, only to be promptly gnawed by some small animal, though I don't know if it was a squirrel, rabbit, or something else of the nibbling variety.
