The Raven's Roost

A comment from Fox and one on the RunDisney sub-Reddit made me think of something today. I went back and looked at my runs in Garmin and pulled up the half marathon. The comment was that you can put a lot of extra distance on a race by not following the shortest way around a route - and I typically dodge and weave around crowds of slower people, and fan out wide in curves to, again, avoid people and avoid breaking my stride. I put on an extra three-tenths of a mile at the Disney Half.

Per Garmin and its GPS, I ran 13.1 in 2:07:39. I then ran an extra 528 yards to cross the finish line at 2:11:01. So technically, I absolutely hit my stated goal of running a half marathon in under two-ten. I think I may simply want to find smaller, local races when I am looking to PR, and consider Disney races a different category. Next up- - under two hours for the half.

I made this weird comic riffing on ¨Mean Eyed Cat¨ by Johnny Cash. Why am I like this.

There's another cold front going through, so I'm cozying up in the kitchen and doing some meal prep. Currently I'm roasting beef bones and some shank with veggies for broth. Then a batch of breakfast potatoes for Fox, and if I'm feeling extra chipper, a pan of almond-flour bread.

Feed Your Demons is a short, eight page journal/comic. Might do more of these 'thinky' type comics in the future, but for now, enjoy this one. Click the left-side arrow to go through the pages. Dee is such a fuckin' dork - look how happy he is with his ... whatever Keiko is. ;D

DA isn't the greatest for comics, but I haven't uploaded this to my personal page yet. I'm going to redo the navigation a little, then post this.

I also intend to get this printed physically, but it will need cover art. I haven't done that yet, but I wanted people to be able to read the main thing free. The print comic will cost a couple of bucks, but hey, you'll get additional art! :D

I'm keeping an eye on a pot of marinara, so going to stop here. Plus it's storming like crazy, what is this. I need to mow tomorrow, stop that.

Oh looky, another comic page up! I actually managed to work on this over the weekend, and finished today. So I'm a little off my goal of getting these up on Fridays but hey. We all know life gets in the way.

I survived my blood draw. After going to two utterly wrong places. Just saying "Go to Ascension St. Vincent's" to me meant, maybe I should just go to the main hospital. Which I did, and a nice lady told me to go across the road to the strip mall across from Home Despot. (by this time I have been fasting for about 17 hours, so while not hangry, I was loopy as hell) So I went to the walk in clinic. Nope. Five doors down is a little nook of a space where they do Lab Stuff, and they were able to take me right away! So no sitting around allowing anxiety to build. Then off to go get some breakfast before I became totally non-functional.

I'm used to fasting on a 16-8 schedule, but typically when the sixteen-hour mark comes it's a good idea for me to go ahead and eat. So anyway, the digital results might be available as early as tomorrow, since nothing fancy was ordered, and we'll see what we see.

Someone's friended me on Steam and they keep PMing me, which I don't mind, I'm just not used to people being so friendly on Steam. I'm not active in any of the groups I belong to, and until last week, I hadn't even been on Steam in months. I leave it running in the background so it can do updates, since it's always annoying to log on after a long absence and have to wait for two hours while it installs crap. So I'm afraid this person might think I'm more active than I am, LOL.

I also did my first strength workout since October. I don't remember why I thought stopping weights was a good idea, but I remember wanting to come back with a strategy of fewer reps and more weight, rather than more reps at lower weight. Probably runner stuff. Anyway, some of my muscles feel like jello, so I'll come back and work on more art this evening rather than doing any yoga. And maybe I'll get another page of comics up by the weekend! Who knows.

I started doing a clothing study for these two, and ended up using this stupid joke because I could. I was also playing with how Clip Studio compresses JPGs - I like to work at ridiculously huge resolutions, but that's from years of pen & ink work and having it drilled into my head that you "work for reduction." That is to say, your work's going to be shrunk down in size anyway, and 99% of the time, it's going to look better when it does.

Anyway, enjoy your seafood special.

Art & Drawing - I wanted to share an incredibly useful link I found - I'd never heard of the Etherington Brothers until a few weeks ago, somehow, but they put out loads of art and comics tutorials. Free. Here's about 200 of 'em. They also recently did Kickstarters for physical copies of these, which I missed out on. I'm keeping an eye on Amazon and eBay for used copies, but I also started stalking them on social media in case there's another KS that will let me get my filthy claws on these books. Online tutorials are awesome, and people who give them away for free are doing the world a great service. As they say in their own intro to their "How to Think When You Draw" series, with everything moving behind paywalls or to a subscription model, it's important that there be high quality, free information on how to draw. But I'm also old-school and I like actual books. 

I started yesterday on a new short comic, "The Cat's Inheritance," and I'm currently working on a "splash" page or poster type drawing for it. It started as a personal piece to help me visualize the scene, where everyone is located and how they'll move around, but it's turning out kind of nice, so I'm going to add title and artist stuff and maybe use it to promote the story when it's done. I'm also working on an Iktober prompt, "Overgrown," which has me illustrating a community in Muna where people have built their houses in trees. So literal treehouse dwellers. It's now starting to cook up a story about a hermit who lives in one of the outermost trees and would prefer to be left alone to work, study, and meditate, but unfortunately he's got a reputation as a Wise Old Sage and people keep seeking him out for advice. What's a hermit to do?

Running - Oh man I really did a number on myself. Well, maybe not. My IT band (hip) and calf muscles are still a little achey and stiff, but once I get moving around they limber up. I've done two recovery jogs - slower pace, shorter distance, and I feel okay. But I need to start piling up miles soon, because it's about 60 days until the Dopey Challenge, and I need to be ready for that beast. Now that is a series of races where I really do not aim to PR - the goal there is finish in an upright position, smile optional. I'm looking forward to the cooler weather so I can get outside and run. I suspect some of my hip issues are from coddling myself on the treadmill all year, and that I need to resistance and challenge of outdoor running to strengthen those areas. The treadmill's been great for working on my speed, and it's good to have when it's raining, or you're not feeling too hot but want to get a run in anyway. But I can see that I'll need to balance it with road running.

Gardening - I left my experimental compost pile dormant for the week, of course. So yesterday I went to dump more stuff on it and saw several new "volunteers." Two pepper plants, and a couple of as-yet unknowns. Possibly an avocado (!!!) but also could be ... I dunno, squash? I used to have a really cool plant ID app on my phone that compared a snapshot to its database and then gave you a list of potential matches. I should get that app again, it was dead useful.

I'm considering planting Seminole Pumpkins. They're a local variety that happily tolerates Florida's climate and they're said to be very good pie pumpkins. There's the possibility of having WAY more than we can eat, freeze, or can, but I will address that if and when it happens. There's a guy down the road who runs a small farm stand, selling peppers, berries, and honey who might take my excess, or I could set up a small honor system stand myself at the top of the road. Or just go around giving random people pumpkins. Hi, nice day, like you shoes, here have a pumpkin.

I've also spent a couple of growing seasons trying to get Sheep Sorrel to grow in pots on the deck. I like sorrel in salads and on sandwiches, but for some reason my pots never produced viable plants. Until I started wondering what all those "dandelions" are growing in the side yard. They're everywhere - paddle-shaped leaves, spreading, no flowers to speak of. Then I started looking more closely and realized I've apparently started "wild" sorrel every-freakin-where in my yard. So for whatever reason it won't grow in pots or in the garden but it happy to grow in the Floridian Hellscape that is the yard. Oh well - at least I have sorrel now.

 1. Topping the Random Notes list this weekend, a guide to self-managed abortion. This is a fairly detailed read but a good one, which hopefully none of us will need, but it's always good to have the information available.

2. In much less important news, my treadmill died. Not entirely - it's erroring out when Fox runs, so effectively HE doesn't have a treadmill. Since all of our other efforts at repair have failed, we're going out shortly to look at buying a new one. The motor will be salvaged - it's fine and hey, how often do you come across 2.5 hp electric motors? We think the circuit board is bad, but everything testable by a couple of reasonably electronic-literate people is testing normal.
It seems like a combination of weight and speed. When I weighed the same as Fox, I was not able to run nearly as fast as he can, so I was not pushing it too much. I'd maybe make it up to five mph for a few minutes but that was taxing my heart and lungs more than it was taxing the treadmill. 

3. Recently we both became interested in testing our blood sugar levels. Fox sometimes bonks hard, and a blood glucose meter seemed like a good tool to have for tailoring his fueling needs, pre-run, post-run, and during. We have an assortment of gels, jelly beans, and chewy blocks, along with whatever homemade energy bars I'm making. I feel pretty confident in my own eating and fueling habits, or I did. Because my fasting sugars consistently test in the "diabetic" range. There is little I can do to bring them down, either, so I'm always getting these 120s in the morning, 140s or 50s after eating, and it's stressing me the hell out because the usual advice for bringing glucose down is "lose weight, exercise, and stop drinking sugary sodas." If I lose ten percent of my body weight, I'll end up in the hospital - this is a patently Bad Idea. Exercise more? I mean, I was considering training for a fifty-miler so I guess that counts. And I haven't routinely consumed sodas since the mid-1990s. I don't put sugar in my coffee or tea, I stopped drinking wine, and I normally operate on an "earn my treats" mentality that allows me to have dark chocolate or nice cream if I worked out that day. 
On the other hand, these meters can also have a margin of error that throws readings off by as much as twenty points. 
I started checking on the hour for a while after eating, and rather than spiking, my sugars dip within an hour, then slowly climb back up to fasting levels. This happens pretty consistently. I rarely test out of a sixty point range, even though according to this meter, that range is high. I've decided for my own sanity to stop doing this unless I feel unusually bad and need a reading, because I suspect the meter is way off, and the "high" readings are stressing me out badly. As in panic-attack bad. Fox thinks this is a good idea.
He knows a lot more about diabetes than I do because he attended classes and such along with Kitty. He says since I'm not experiencing rollercoaster highs and lows, spiking into hyperactivity and then crashing out, only to do it again, I'm not diabetic. He thinks the meter is wrong as far as that goes, and it's mainly useful for seeing swings up and down, and that I should ignore the base number and just look at the range of the highs and lows. So, in the interest of not spending any more days losing my shit over this and swinging between trying to find out how to further improve my diet and shopping for prosthetic legs (because that's how bad my Anxiety Brain has been getting with this) I'm going to just drop it for now.

4. This one-shot comic I did. Just FYI, the ravens are mechanical AI constructs. Ruby was programmed (badly) to believe she is a real, living bird. Whirr is a longer-running one that has been "interactively programmed" by watching and responding to the behavior of humans around him, and one of the traits he's picked up, for better or worse, is sarcasm. Partially inspired by Google Home, Alexa, and this. 

5. So Delicious makes a no-sugar-added vanilla frozen dessert from coconut milk that is amazing. It tastes like vanilla and coconuts. That's it. I am all about this stuff right now.