The Raven's Roost

A few days ago, I spotted one of the Red-Shouldered Hawks in the yard. It had caught a snake, and what got my attention was the snake's thrashing tail. I don't know what kind it was, just something dark in color that seemed slender, rather than thick like a cottonmouth. Perhaps it was the black racer - I liked that snake but raptors have to eat.

I've also seen two different ribbon snakes around, one of which has a stubby tail. It's a fairly large adult, but it's obviously had a run-in with something, because its tail doesn't taper out to a nice point, and though it's healed, it has some obvious scarring. The other snake has a whole tail. I prefer to leave non-venomous snakes alone and allow them to live around the house, since they act as rodent control. Occasionally we do get a venomous one that wants to live close to the house, but they get relocated. So far it's only been pygmy rattlers that want to hang out around the front deck. Maybe because the raised deck is a good place to hide from hawks?

Anyway, I also decided to add a second hummingbird feeder to the rear deck. I think I already wrote about it and it's odd design flaw, but that's been fixed. Now we have at least six, possibly more birds coming around back there, and they're drinking the feeders down every other day. They also don't care too much about us. We come outside and they zip off, but quickly return and continue feeding as long as we don't move around too much. They're even curious enough to check us out - Fox was wearing a red t-shirt yesterday and was closely examined by a female hummingbird, and I have a pair of red ear tunnels that sometimes attract them. So I'm probably going to be buying us a handheld feeder, because I think Fox would really enjoy getting to be that up-close with the birds. I think a ring-style feeder might work well, since that would have them perching on our hands to drink. Anything where we can rest our hands on something, honestly.

In completely different news, I started playing Shovel Knight and it's a hoot. I love it, I'm having a lot of fun with this game. The only frustration so far is that I'm not good at the "bounce bushes" in one section. I can do them almost accidentally but I feel like I should put some effort into actually knowing what I'm doing.

So I have finally looked up the "official" grape ice cream recipe in Cross Creek Cookery and it's ridiculously easy. It isn't, I suppose, what you'd call a true ice cream as it requires no churning.

1 pint bottled grape juice
1/2 to 1 cup sugar, to taste
Juice of one lemon
3 cups medium heavy cream

Blend and freeze.

She recommends using thinner cream of milk for a lighter, more sherbet concoction, and I assume those of us who don't do dairy can sub something like a thick coconut cream. I would even be tempted to try blending this with soft silken tofu. She says the result is fairly tart, making it a suitable dessert after a heavy dinner.

I have yet to try this myself, since I still have some blueberry and acai nice cream in the freezer that I haven't finished up yet.

The 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.

Saturday morning, Fox and I decided to drive up to Keystone and check out one of the State Trails. There weren't many people out on it, and the weather was terrific - cool and overcast. So we boked from Keystone Heights to where the trail crosses highway 100 and back, which is about 5.7 miles, but I paused my Fitbit at one point and forgot to re-start it, so I only got half credit. It was great riding on a paved surface - I still weave and wobble a little but riding on these trails seems like a good way to build confidence. Later we got matcha lattes and a good time was had by all.

Keystone Heights is the location of one of the Moon Trees.


As you can see it's a pretty normal looking sycamore, but the seed it sprouted from went to the moon on Apollo 14. There are a lot of these around the country, mostly in the south and west since those were the species of seeds the Forestry Service sent up. You can read more about them here but as the page isn't up to date, I should let you know that the tree at Kennedy Space Center was blown over and killed in a hurricane a couple of years ago.

There is also a nice bike station in town.

It has air, sets of tools, and rack for parking. Since it's located next to a drugstore and a couple of eateries it's a pretty good location and it looks like it's well maintained.

And I didn't get a photo but there was a friendly tortoiseshell kitty who lives along the trail. She even has her own "Cat X-ing" sign.

Beyond that we haven't been up to much. Fox has been fixing the RAM in my desktop computer since I almost blew it up working on a large painting the other day. I also didn't realize Painter has a "rotate reset" that will return your image to whatever it's original orientation was, so that could have saved me a panic attack. :P The computer runs much better now and while it's a little slow saving, running the art programs is fine.

 I rescued some plants from Home Depot today - hooray for discount racks, right? The poor things just need some water and TLC, and they were cheap. I got serrano and habanero peppers, some flowers, a couple of basils, and a catnip. Once I got home I put everything on a corner of the deck that will stay shady the rest of the day, watered them all thoroughly, and I'll look at transplanting them tomorrow. 

Notice I said I got a catnip plant. You probably wouldn't be surprised to learn that later in the afternoon I opened the front door and surprised my neighbor's cat, Jupiter, enjoying the catnip - even in its dilapidated state! She ran off, but just to go hide under the truck so I'm pretty sure she'll be back. I was planning to put the nip in a pot rather than in the garden, since it's a kind of mint and mints are very hardy and can spread when they get happy, and I'd like to keep it somewhat confined. I think it'll be okay, unless I start finding random cats hanging out on my deck, listening to New Riders of the Purple Sage and talking about how life is like, weird, man.

Speaking of plants, not to jinx it or anything but I have something sprouting. Back over Christmas we went to Orlando to hang out with Fox's parents, and on a walk around the neighborhood they showed me this palm that grows all over in garden beds outside offices and everything. It was dropping bright orange seed pods and they mentioned they'd never gotten one to grow, so I took some seeds to see if I could do anything with them. A little Google-foo revealed these to be Coontie Palm seeds (yes, that's the real name) and there's a specific procedure for making them sprout. So I dried them, scraped off the orange hull, planted them, and abso-fucking-lutely nothing happened.

Unnnnnntil NOW. One's put out a sort of fiddlehead sprout after weeks of neglect. I was watering and pampering them but I started to suspect a native Florida plant might thrive on adversity, so I just started ignoring them. If it actually starts growing into a palm, it will likely end up in the front circle. Coonties seem to be low-growing bush-like plants and I suspect when it's old enough to produce seeds it may very slowly self-sow.

It's 93 outside right now. I don't care what the calendar says - it's summer.

 Not that I want to engage in gatekeeping, but...

Today I have become a Real Runner, for today I have lost a toenail.

My pinkie nail came off. I think it had been slightly loose but the whole thing came off. There was a small amount of blood but it doesn't even look that bad. I just need to remember to bandage up before tomorrow's run. SO! How's your day?

Here in Florida we're having our first "tropical" weather of the season, with a depression or possibly just a "low pressure area" moving in from the Atlantic. By around three or four here it should be pissing rain. We kind of need that at the moment since this is also wildfire season, so any extra rain is welcome, but then again there's ground saturation and the upcoming hurricane season. Anyway it's a pretty quiet day without even a lot of bird and animal activity outside, so I'm doing some weekly chores, making a pot of black beans for Taco Night, and doing my nails. Woohoo! I just noticed the barometer is at 29.7 so something is definitely on the way.

I have never actually eaten at Chipotle, but the black beans I make are supposedly "Chipotle style," and they are pretty simple, with just salt & pepper, garlic, cilantro, and lime juice. But they pair up well with spicy roast cauliflower, and hell they're just good on their own with some cooked rice. Honestly, if I never made anything else with it, it would have been worth buying an Instant Pot just to make beans on the spur of the moment. Not that thinking, "I'd like to have beans" and soaking them in advance is exactly the most arduous thing ever, but it's nice to be able to just throw beans and water into the pot whenever you want. Red kidney beans excepted, of course. 

I haven't been online or on Instagram much lately because I am trying to curtail my mindless web surfing. I feel like I spend too much time farting around on Reddit and shit that I could be using to work on my comics, do yoga, or literally anything else besides argue with a stranger about kale. And I need to trim my Insta account again and get rid of the accounts that seemed real but have turned into selling accounts. I mainly post there to share gardening and cat pics, so I don't want to buy t-shirts and I don't need other peoples' drama, yanno? I like looking at pics of my friends' and family members' pets and yards and stuff. I'm even somewhat into Outfit Of The Day posts, even though my OOTD usually consists of yoga pants and tank tops, and I do like nail polish blogs. But no, I don't want to buy shakes, pills, or a coaching program.

My decluttering and minimalism project stalled a little but I'm getting back on track. I have another load of books to take to Chamblin's, some donation goods, and a bunch of old comforters and blankets & etc. to get rid of. Not sure if I want to put those in a clothes recycling bin or just take them to the dump. I mean, what can they do with gross old pillows? But anyway, I think I'm doing good at the other part of decluttering that people often seem to get tripped up on.

I recently read an interesting think-piece on Marie Kondo, and unfortunately I didn't bookmark it so I can't share. But the writer pointed out that as much as Americans like to declutter, spring clean, and get organized, we often wind up back in the very same situation because once we see all the empty space and realize we've gotten rid of so many old things, we feel like we now have permission to acquire new ones. So a major part of my 2019 Minimalism is "don't go and buy a bunch of new shit." This doesn't apply to obvious things we use like food, pet supplies, or other consumable goods that are meant to be used up. It does mean that I give a lot of thought to new purchases now, even at a relatively low level like clothing and books. If I can get it from the library or get it used, I don't buy it. I don't just buy clothing because I like it or it's a nice color, or it has a kitty on it. Don't just buy $thing because you can. 

And I'm going to leave you with this - Respect Your Elders (Scandinavia and the World)

 I had a peanut butter and tempeh sandwich for breakfast and it was terrific. This is going into my regular food rotation.

So much to do today. So much whining on my part. But if I really buckle down, I can get all my cleaning, tidying, and packing done in about two hours. Neighbor is coming by tonight to pick the house key up. I'm pretty much ready to run - I've even started carb-loading, which is going well based on what the bathroom scale is telling me. It's weird how the part of my mind that would normally flip completely the fuck out at seeing THAT NUMBER on the scale is totally quiet because ... apparently it understands carb-loading, glycogen and water retention, and all that other good shit. By Thursday afternoon "carb loading" will be the running joke of the trip as I shovel treats into my gaping maw while shuffling through the parks. We're FastPass'd up for some fun things up through Saturday, which is pretty much open in deference to my full marathon the next day. But we've even got a spot on Expedition Everest so, yay!

Need I mention that one of the email promotions I get routinely comes from a Tibetan travel agency offering a tour that includes a trip to the Everest Base Camp? And yes I am taking that under very serious consideration, including the fact that my sea-level dwelling ass will be very challenged at that elevation. I mean, I go to Denver, Colorado and I start wondering if they have any oxygen in their atmosphere. 

I lost one of my plugs in bed last night and still haven't been able to find it. I need to evict the cats and take the whole bed apart. Part of the problem is that it's a silvery-aquamarine color with a glass shaft, and my sheets are dusty pale turquoise. I'm wearing one of my silicone ear skins to hold the hole open but I need to find that plug. 

But for right now I'm just trying to warm up and get moving. So I may make another half pot of coffee. 

 When we get back from Tokyo my plan is to make a trash can shed or a storage unit to keep animals out. Normally it's raccoons doing the dirty deed but sometimes assholes let their dogs run loose and they go up and down the road perusing the garbage. I even have some plans downloaded but it shouldn't be too difficult to knock one out in an afternoon.

So a couple of times in the last few weeks my cans have been hit, but like I said, since I'm planning to build a shed I'm not getting too bent out of shape about it, and I try to remember to use a deterrent spray on them. 

I was sitting around this evening reading and heard some activity outside - namely the sound of something moving in the trees. Nana-cat and Feisal both went on the alert, staring out the window into the dark. I got up and switched the living room light off so I could see, thinking maybe I had some late deer visitors. The garage lights were on so I could get a good look, too. Of course, it could be something minor, 'coons, maybe a clumsy squirrel. So I was more than a little surprised to see lumbering out of the forest a motherfucking BEAR. An honest-to-goodness Florida Black Bear. 

Doing what anyone else in my situation would do, I flipped out and ran to tell Fox to come see the bear. Of course it was gone, having headed off around the old dog run and to the rear of the property, possibly to travel along an animal trail that meanders across several human properties just inside the treeline. 

I think I've been blaming raccoons for some bear browsing. All the more reason to get that shed built when I get home. No one else seems to bother securing their trash but I really don't want to be the cause of a bear getting shot. According to the FWC this is an area with a fairly dense bear population, and there are some "bear crossing" signs on the highways but I had never really expected to see one in the flesh. When I was running outdoors last spring some neighbors told me they'd seen a mother bear with two cubs around, so I changed my schedule to get outside after sunup, since I do NOT want to suddenly come upon Mama and her babies. So I knew there were bears around but it was sort of like living in Manhattan and knowing Woody Allen lives there, too, but it's not like you expect to actually SEE him.

I was winding down in hope of sleeping a little tonight - I'm all excited and nervous about the trip. And now this added excitement has me all worked up again. By this time Tuesday I should be in Tokyo - or maybe not? Time zones make my brain hurt. 

THIS IS A LOT MORE EXCITEMENT THAN I BARGAINED FOR

- There is pollen everywhere. The deck is yellow. The truck is yellow. UGH there's tree spooge on everything! Though, knowing Florida, there will be a major cold snap at some point before Spring really gets into gear. So I guess I'll just live with it being uncomfortably humid for a while.

- I was not 100% certain what a "bralette" is but I bought a couple online. My command of the English language tells me it's a diminutive of "brassiere" but not much else. They look like a cross between a tube top and a scarf - at least the ones I picked out did. I figure I've lost enough weight and gained enough definition in my arms to wear something like that, so what the hell. Anyway, they prevent people from seeing your nipples, which is apparently the single most important thing for anyone who is perceived as female.

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I survived RunDisney! Holy shit, it was cold. I have been cold in my life but the morning of the 5k was practically Arctic when you consider this is Orlando/Kissimmee we're talking about. Happily Fox found a huge pack of those Hot Hands things, so I stuffed some in my gloves, in my shoes, and even found the stick-on kinds to burrito myself with while waiting in the corrals. They gave out mylar wraps, too - a lot like the emergency blankets you find in first aid kits, but it was so cold that they mostly served as windbreakers. I managed to fold mine up and use it the whole weekend, but wound up giving it to someone else the day of the full marathon because the lady looked like she was going to actually, literally turn into a solid block of ice.

- I really should get a medal rack for those things.

- Running in the Gate River Run 15k this March! :D Because I have very weird ideas of what "fun" is. But we get to run over the Main St. and Hart bridges, which will be cool. (BEEP BEEP I'M A CAR)

- We're in Spring Cleaning mode here which means each week involves trips to the dump or various donation places. I've got a bed headboard to try to unload this week, plus some musical instruments and more books. I already took so many boxes of books to Chamblin's that I racked up over a hundred bucks in store credit. I'm just sort of at a loss as to what to do with the clarinet, bass clarinet, and guitar. I think there's a keyboard, too. Maybe the pawn shop? No idea. :P