The Raven's Roost

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.

Friday, I am going to the lab to get blood drawn while Fox goes to his acupuncture appointment. That means this weekend I can go back to lifting and running! I have to be sedentary before these tests because exercise spikes my liver enzymes, and I'm tired of my GP pushing for a liver biopsy. I don't want one - they're expensive, invasive, and we already ran a battery of other tests that were either "negative," or "unremarkable." But it's a twice yearly reminder of how much I actually love to run, despite how much I gripe about it. I'm convinced part of the joy of running is sometimes griping about running.

Fox and I have got ourselves into one of our surprise projects. We needed to replace the frames for the raised garden beds, so we went and bought some pressure treated boards and stuff. One thing that didn't help the old beds was grass growing up around the outsides, so we thought, why not use those old bricks to pave around the beds and keep grass down? We have about 200 or so bricks Fox's parents had used to pave part of their backyard, and when they pulled them up, they gave them to us. So we got some leveling sand and laid a couple of paths down. Cool.

Then we realized we didn't have enough to go all the way around and needed more bricks. We pulled the trailer out and started getting it ready to go buy bricks at Home Depot and realized the trailer was in rough shape - some of the boards were rotting out, and the braking system was shot. New project - fix the trailer. A week later, that's all done and we go to buy a pallet of bricks only to find they're on sale for like ... twenty five cents a brick. We bought a pallet and then the next day unloaded it so we could go buy another. It was a manual job - turns out the tractor's lifting capacity is a little under what that pallet weighed and it didn't seem worth possibly blowing a hydraulic line.

So, second pallet acquired and finally unloaded. Take the pallets back to HD for our deposit back. Then we saw this article on UF's website about building raised beds out of concrete blocks. You can guess where this is going.

It's coming along really well, and it'll look great when it's done. We're hoping to finish up by the middle of next week. All that brick will create a heat island, but I'm thinking of dousing the concrete blocks with water twice daily - once with morning plant watering, and again later in the afternoon. Plus nothing much grows in summer's worst heat. I've missed all the spring planting times and won't be setting anything out until September at this point, but the garden will be absolutely top notch. I've also bought and planted a couple of salmon-pink azaleas, because I've wanted new ones for a couple of years. And I didn't want a "standard" fuschia one.

Man I can't wait to go for a run Saturday.

Fox got another set of MRIs done on his leg. Since it's Friday evening I doubt anyone will read them until next week. I'd never really been in the new Baptist Hospital they built out here but it's really nice. My doctor's office is in the building next door, and I've been in some of the offices, but not the main hospital.

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer is amazing. Unsettling. It's ... not quite science fiction, not really horror, but I got so engrossed in reading it that Fox was back out and done in what felt like no time flat. I was recommended it because the "Area X" in the story is probably somewhere in Florida. I believe the author lives in Tallahassee. He's written a lot of other books, so I'll be busy for a while. I'm really curious why the biologist narrator keeps referring to "large reptiles," when she's very particular about other species. Why hasn't she called them alligators yet?

I learned some interesting things about weight manipulation from a podcast about this guy who is a nutritional advisor to UFC fighters. To make weight, they used to starve themselves and go jogging wearing trash bags and shit. He helps them make weight by simply controlling their water weight. And how he does it came in very handy this week because I ate WAY more dandan noodles than I ought to have and gained a comparatively large amount of water from all the salt. I can blather more about it if anyone's super interested, but I find this stuff fascinating. This guy gets these fighters down to their "weigh in" weights, then by the time they're ready to fight, they've gained ten or fifteen pounds, and it's all water. Human bodies are wild. :D

Speaking of salty things I shouldn't be eating that much of, Chili's chips and salsa is great. Just chips 'n salsa. I love it.

I saw an Eastern Bluebird while I was running this morning. They don't usually come all the way back here, but I'll see them closer to the highway. I think they prefer it up there where more people have open yards, where back here we tend to leave more forest and have less open space. But it's still cool to see them. It's the Bluebird of Happiness, y'all.

This is the type of sign I'd be legally required to post when I do get a beehive, but I feel like it has WAY more potential uses beyond just that. So many places I would be tempted to post this.

Gives off vibes of "this box does NOT contain BEES! Please feel free to shake vigorously!"

We're about to go run some small errands and try to get back ahead of the line of storms coming our way. This thing has been spawning tornadoes, and we've been getting emails from NWS-Jax since Friday. And here it comes. The weather emergency alarm just went off. But I also want an iced mocha latte.

Around here, Little Treat Culture is alive and well.

I'm going to try to get my next day of Over the Mountain finished this afternoon. I was also thinking that particular format might be a good way to flesh out St. Felix, though I hate to abandon the first storyline. IDK, what do y'all think? (St. Felix being the fictional Florida town I sometimes write and draw comics about, and where my 'radio station' WFLX-AM is located.)

Off Topic, but Rick Astley did a really good cover of "Pink Pony CLub." Check it out here. Is this a rickroll?

I think I'm going to go outside and look at the paving work we got done yesterday. We laid down two crossing paths that will go between the four raised beds and hopefully keep more of the weeds down. Once we've built the bed frames and put them in, we'll lay another set of paths around the outside, though we might have to buy bricks. We've almost run through all the old bricks we had.