Now I know I'm starting to feel better. I'm obsessing over curry.
Specifically I want lamb vindaloo from Persis on Baymeadows Road. Five out of five chili peppers. "Are you sure you want it that hot?" Light me up, my man.

One of my favorite things is when there's a bunch of dark, stormy clouds piling up, but then the sun rises and its rays are shining beneath that cloud layer, so they're lighting up the trees. The pines look golden and glowing against this iron-gray sky and it's incredible.

I need to stop being amazed by life and go finish mowing the yard though. It's probably going to rain.

As promised I wrote up some thoughts on Lonesome Dove. At one point it was getting too literary, too criticism-focused so I deleted a lot and just wrote from personal point of view, from a personal response. Obviously I have to spoil a few things, so if you haven't read it and plan to, perhaps skip this.

( Read more... )

- After wrangling my digital tablet and getting it working, I found yesterday it wasn't responding to the pen. It turned out that the pen's battery was just low. LOL. Back to drawing, finally. :D

- I'm writing up my 25-ish-years later response to re-reading Lonesome Dove. I'll post that here when it's done.

- Fox is taking his pilot's license exam tomorrow! He's going for a recreational drone pilot license, but this will allow him to legally sell video footage, fly in more areas, and use his drone in business settings. For example, he'll be able to fly it to inspect the radio towers for FastNet.

- I started studying to get my ham radio license. Fox suggested I also teach myself Linux so I can use software-based radios, so I may do that, too.

1. Have you ever been to summer camp? I went to band camp a few times in high school, but I never got to do a real "camping" type thing.

2. Have you ever made a s'more? Yes! I've made real ones over a campfire, and I've made them by toasting the marshmallows over the burner of a gas stove.

3. Have you ever slept under the stars (no tent/tarp)? Not yet but I'm planning to this fall. I want to start getting used to sleeping in a tent on the ground.

4. Have you ever had a member of the opposite sex sleep over at your house? There's one doing that tonight! XD

5. What type of bed do you have (queen, twin, bunk, etc.)? XL twin Japanese futon - on the floor.

We've hit upon something that's currently working rather well in the garden - a fan sprinkler. I put a soil moisture monitor out there, and the sprinkler can get things to about 93%, then we shut it off. Currently we're doing this twice a day, thirty minutes early in the morning and late in the evening - times when the water can actually soak down into the soil without being cooked out by the sun. We have tomatoes, pumpkins, basil, and roselle so far.

Roselle is also known as hibiscus, but this kind doesn't produce the flowers you see on Hawaiian shirts - it produces Jamaican sorrel, or Florida cranberry. This is the stuff you see in Red Zinger tea, and the calyxes you need to harvest in order to make hibiscus jam, something I found was a staple of "cracker" cooking but now sells for a zillion dollars a pint online. That's not to say it doesn't produce pretty flowers - just that it's edible.

We were out this morning on a run over to Jeremy's place and saw a bobcat! YAY! I told Fox there were bobcats around, I see the tracks sometimes in the sand on the road. Or as I told him, it's either a bobcat or a REALLY large house cat. I also got to see a wild Turkey hen while I was out for a run, and she had three chicks following along behind her. And on Sunday I heard some young Crows. They were hard to see, having perched up near the top of a pine, but they had those nasal voices, rather than an adult bird's honest-to-goodness "caw!"

We actually had a busy-ish weekend and I haven't had much chance to write or so anything creative. I also keep forgetting that I need to set up my drawing tablet again. I did go ahead and re-install the drivers and software, but I haven't lugged my computer out of its little spot on my desk to actually hook up the cables. I'm not sure what I want to draw, just thinking I ought to draw something.

In one more month it will be 24 weeks until December 1, more or less.

If that seems like a convoluted statement, I understand, but there's also some method to the madness here. You see, I'm thinking about doing something stupid this fall. I'm considering doing a 40 mile run.

This year we don't have any major races. We weren't able to sign up for Wine & Dine, and Fox's work means we can't do any other out of town races if we wanted to because they're pushing some major changes through and need all hands on deck. So my calendar is open. Normally I would be starting to train with a specific race in mind, usually building up marathon distance, but with no formal racing going on I felt it was time I started training to do something fun/stupid I'd been thinking about.

In 2026 I'm going to turn fifty, and I've had this idea for a while now that I want to complete a fifty mile run when I am fifty. I've done some 50k runs (which is 31-ish miles) and I'm sure that with the proper buildup of distance I can hit forty. That will let me know I can manage fifty the next year. I've found an ultra coach - a woman who lives in the southeast and understands the unique challenges and opportunities of running here (humidity is the southerner's version of altitude training). I've got a 24-week training plan to get me through, and I'd be making my attempt on the first Saturday in December.

I have some very weird ideas about what "fun" is.

At this point my chief concern is WHERE I'm going to do this. I can head into Duval and run around Jacksonville, where there are sidewalks and such, and plenty of support in the form of convenience stores and fast food. I don't know where I could get across the St Johns River on foot, though. The Shands Bridge is being rebuilt, and it will have a pedestrian and bicycle lane down the center, protected from the car lanes, but that's not going to be done until maybe 2028. I know Fox has biked across bridges in Jax, but a bicycle at least has a chance of keeping up with traffic and legally can belong in a car lane. So I may need to just circle around on this side of the river, maybe heading to 17 and coming back towards Fleming Island. I know most of this means diddly-squat to anyone reading, I'm just thinking things through.

My temptation is to sign up for the Daytona 100 ultra in 2026 and put myself in the 50 mile category. I've long wanted to do this race, and I can start working up to a 100-mile distance, but the 50 miler would give me a taste of a road ultra run at night, and Fox could crew for me. I think he could handle crewing for the 100 as well, though I thought I saw the race director recommending two crew members for each runner.

Anyway! That's my big plan. I've got one more month that I can use for base building, though I lost a couple of weeks to being sick. But since I'm not a total beginner the distance should come back to me pretty easily. It does mean I'll have some Saturdays where "long run" really and truly means LONG run.

I have been out of school for a very long time now, and I still enjoy setting up a "summer reading program." Sometimes I decide to read as much as I can of a particular author's work, or I pick a subject. But it's the same kind of buzz as getting to go to the book fair, with adult money.

I'm finally starting to feel like writing again, some of it in a paper notebook, some of it in a Google Document. I liked this piece of advice from, I believe it was Jordan Peele, who said that his first drafts are mainly dumping sand into a sandbox where he'll later build his castle. That's been an immense help. Given the crushing perfectionism I grew up around, if something requires fixing and revising, it's shit and you're a bad person. Writing in a paper notebook also helps with this because it's much harder to edit on the fly.

This summer I'm revisiting Arthurian tales, which were always a major interest of mine. I've got TH White's novels (replacing older copies I lost), and Mallory's Morte d'Arthur. I tried reading Lawhead's Pendragon cycle once and found them kind of tedious, but I may take another run at them. Stemming from Mallory, I've also got my grubby claws on The Medievalism of Lawrence of Arabia because I'm an academic at heart and love dense books I can mark up. And I love Ned.

Utterly unrelated to Arthur, I've also got Michel de Montaigne on deck. Well, he may be unrelated, or he may not be, we'll find out. In the "odds and ends" category, I'm reading 48 Laws of Power as someone who will never wield power over anyone else, but is very interested in knowing when someone's trying to use it on me.

Last year's summer books were a little disjointed and I never picked up on a theme, so it's nice to feel like I have direction this year.

This is a fairly long read on childhood trauma and shame, that actually names and describes something I've felt but couldn't articulate. "Atmospheric shame," or the general, pervasive sense of shame at just existing.

This weekend was also rough because of the holiday. I hate Mother's Day and have for a long time. I'm exhausted from being pulled from trying to be empathetic, to being angry, to feeling lost, to just plain confused. I still don't understand why someone would go through the trouble to adopt a kid and then make them feel like shit for being alive. She wasn't doing the best she could, she was deliberately taking her own pain and frustration out on someone who couldn't defend themselves, or even understand WTF was going on. And as much as I do want to be empathetic and understanding, I'm furious at being used.

There's also this passage from a different article, which feels like it sums my childhood experience up so neatly.

"Dr. Sherrie (Campbell) stresses that the way abusers operate, doling out small doses of kindness interspersed with long bouts of abuse, keeps their victims stuck in a state of relentless hope, seesawing endlessly between the deep suffering of parental rejection and the naive hope that things will eventually change. Dr. Campbell points out that it should not be surprising when this type of emotional torture leads to feelings of hate. She maintains that hate for one’s abusive parents should be looked at as a natural and potentially crucial part of the healing process."

Gestures of kindness or generosity became something I was deeply suspicious of, but I still drank them up whenever one came my way, feeling like an idiot the entire time. I spent most of my life wondering what was wrong with me that made me hate her so much, when it seemed like everyone else had these close, warm relationships with their moms. Of course I think that was one of the goals - to make me feel like it was my fault.

It's only been a couple of weeks since we finished the garden beds and there's already a rogue tomato that's come up.

Cool.