pshaw_raven: (Hiroshi Nagai - palm trees)
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.
pshaw_raven: (The Great Cornholio)
I'm not sure I should actually be proud of this month's journal spread. XD



Anyway!

This past week has been busy. I've spent most of my days outside working on the yard, and this weekend we put in a lot of time getting the shed for the camper built. It's almost done, we just ran out of the small boards we're attaching the sheet metal roof to. But we put in a couple of seven hour days on that this weekend and I'm kind of tired, LOL. But it will be nice to have a place to keep the camper out of the weather - mostly the sun. Sun damage will age it faster than anything. We tried putting a tarp over it, but the tarp got a distressing amount of water underneath it, and that's also not good.

I'm back to running mostly. I've been reading on the Garmin Reddit about how people seem to like the suggested workouts as a base-building plan, so I'm going to try running its suggested workouts this week and see how it goes. Today it wants me to run ... a twelve minute mile. Well, I do run my "easy" workouts far too fast and hard, so maybe forcing myself to slow down might be helpful. Otherwise today I'm just catching up on household stuff left undone from the weekend and all my usual Monday things.
pshaw_raven: (Stormy Weather)


So we built a photovoltaic array.

Shortly after getting home from Disney last time, we decided that, before the tax incentives run out, we might as well get the solar system we've been talking about built. Fox found a company that designed and planned systems for DIYers, and once they got the plans hashed out, we got them approved by the county and got crackin'. We already had that space cleared of trees, but we needed to grade it and do some other site prep.

It's pretty heavy duty. The concrete pilings around six feet deep, supporting a framework of schedule 40 steel pipe. We picked up the actual solar panels themselves (along with all the cables, inverters, and all that good stuff) in Tampa and finally got it all up. It's not switched on yet because our homeowner's insurance is dragging their ass getting the liability increase approved. But Fox fired it up late one afternoon when the sun was almost down - we didn't want it making enough power to alert the meter on the house and potentially cause a shutdown. As it was, it made a little bit of power, but not enough to piss off the rest of the grid. (Ahh! Power is coming in instead of going out! Shut down, shut down!) And everything initialized and worked as expected. There's an app where we can see how much each panel is making through the day and a bunch of other info.

We might even get to turn the thing on before we leave for Disney. :P Not going to hold my breath, since at this point no one seems to be in a hurry to approve anything.

But yeah - the inaugural Springtime Surprise race weekend is coming up in two weeks, and Fox and I are running the challenge. Old-timers say this is what Disney races were like at the very beginning. There's a 5k and scavenger hunt on Thursday night in Animal Kingdom - I've never done anything like this and it sounds like a lot of fun. The finisher's medal is even a working compass that opens and closes. Saturday morning is a 10k, and Sunday is a 10-miler, for a total of 19.3 miles. I assume they're doing a 10 mile race rather than a half marathon so they can continue selling their somewhat generic 19.3 RunDisney merch leftover from the Star Wars and Princess weekends.

In November I'm doing something a bit different, for me anyway. I'm doing a stand-alone marathon. I've never done one that wasn't part of a stage race. In this case I'm running the Florida Legends "Skunk Ape Marathon" down in Debary. At Disney I'm always starting the marathon with a tired body and tired mind, having already done something like 22.4 miles that weekend. Here I get to be fresh - we're staying nearby. I'm spending the summer and fall training for just this race. I want to see what I can really do over this distance when I'm not already worn out. Fox is doing it, too, because he can't let me have all the fun. ;D As we get closer to it, I'll post details about how to track the results, if any of you are curious about that.

Fox is also feeling the itch to try an ultra, and we even found one that's held right here close to home. So we might try a 50k soon, as well. We haven't actually signed up for anything yet, though.

This solar project, along with a lot of little cleanup and maintenance projects that came with it, have eaten SO much of my free time and energy the past two months. It'll be worth it whenever we get to run the system, though.
pshaw_raven: (Perched Raven)
Hi!
So we made it through Irma. The power went out Monday morning at 12:20 and we ran on generators until Thursday evening. The big one could be fired up to run the well pump and the little one handled the house. Fans and lights, no AC, we could still run the coffee maker, microwave, etc, just be careful not to do it all at once. We had some branches down, and a little damage to the rear deck roof but that was it.

Until the wind gusts finally made our radio tower rock so much it pulled two anchors out of the ground and toppled over. So no more internets.
Fox tracked down some replacement sections - they're rohn 20 which is lighter than the rohn 25 most of the tower is built from, but we put them at the very top. The main difference is the 25 will allow you to build a 400 foot tower, while the 20 will "only" get you a 200 foot tower. As our is just 110 feet it isn't a big deal either way. But we borrowed a jin pole (a very simple crane-type tool) and it took us a day and a half but we got it rebuilt.

Fox did the worst of the work on the tower, guiding the pieces into place and bolting everything on. I was Johnny On The Spot on the ground, sending supplies up by pulley, and using the tractor to lift the sections up to him. Each one is about forty pounds, which I can lift, but I could not repeatedly haul that far up in the air reliably.

Fox is currently out buying supplies to start mounting the weather-proof boxes for all the electrical components and switches 'n shit. The tower only has our internet radio on it right now, we'll get the rest of the receivers and antennae and all that good stuff up later.

The 10k trail run I signed up for next week is still on! They emailed me and everything is still go. The 5k beach run, which Fox is doing, is the same, but the 10k has been rerouted due to hurricane damage. They're happening on Anastasia Island, off St. Augustine and in the state park. I was sort of hoping the routes would be the same for a while at least, so he and I could run together, but now I don't know where we're all going. More reason to put some speed on and get across the finish line faster! Plus we're considering an IHOP run afterwards, because breakfast is awesome.

Anyway, it's nice to be back in the 21st century.

I'm doing a 14-mile long run today on the treadmill. If I'd gotten up and out around five I could have done it outside, but I don't have a can of mace yet. I'll be picking that up this week, along with a small cooler to make my own water stop. I'm planning for long runs to just circle Villa Nueva/315/Traiwick multiple times, instead of out and back. That way I can leave a cooler of water and energy gels stashed at the beginning of the loop and I'm not trying to carry all that stuff with me. And between stress eating, not getting a lot of sleep, and being unable to get out and exercise, I put on almost five pounds. Meh. Not the worst weight setback but annoying.

Middleburg actually had some significant flooding - Black Creek backed up and came across Blanding Boulevard, and up into some of the parking lots. A lot of the businesses and buildings in that particular area are built on hills, apparently in case of flooding like this. It's dried out now, but Black Creek is still very high. I'm heading back out Tuesday like normal but I don't plan to go much of anywhere except my "usual" errand stops. That is, I'm not going all the way out to Jacksonville, though I may go up to Jo-Ann's to see what Halloween junk they have.

I'll get back on here later and catch up, but hopefully you and yours got through the storm all right! I'm going to suit up and get my ass on the treadmill. Miles don't run themselves. It would be weird if they did.

July 2025

S M T W T F S
  12345
67 89101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 12th, 2025 06:54 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios