The Raven's Roost

There's an orange and white stray cat that I sometimes see around here. He's an intact male and is missing a decent bit of his tail, so he's been named Bobcat. This morning he was outside when I went to put the garbage out and ... he's super friendly. *sighs* I'm torn about feeding him, since he doesn't seem too hungry, but he clearly likes people. The county animal shelter says they have a TNVR program, but I can't tell the year of the announcement so I may just call them. He'd be easy to trap, and getting him fixed would make his quality of life better.

Crowley, on the other hand, was not at all pleased at this development, and wound up seeing Bobcat out of the sliding glass door. And he YOWLED. I've never heard Crowley singing his peoples' War Song. LOL I guess that answers my question about whether he'd like another cat as a friend.

No. Absolutely not.

Tomorrow is packet pickup for Gate River Run, so I'll be driving over to the stadium, where it's being held on the practice field. The start line and other stuff for race day is all different too. Fox didn't submit proof of time when he registered us, so I assumed we'd be in the back. We've run Gate several times, though, so we're not complete unknowns, and they stuck us up in starting wave 2. Right behind the last of the timed runners. Fox says he supposes that means he needs to really run, and if he feels good I've got no objection, but I'm also okay with this being a party pace run. Beer table? Don't mind if I do :D

I got all my Amazon ebooks downloaded yesterday. I ended up spending a lot more time on the file conversions than I expected, but I finally figured it out. Once my Kindle wears out I've got my eye on a Kobo reader that looks like a good sideways move for me. I don't need color or a write-on screen, just a reliable reader. As I was telling Fox, from this point on, if I can't afford a dead-tree version of a book, I can't afford the book. I won't be buying Kindle versions, at all. Epub or paper, or nothing.

I'm feeling a lot better since my ranty locked post, and I'm not sure what clicked. Maybe just talking about it openly helped, since I tend to sit on things and then blame myself for them. She taught me well, huh? I know there are a lot of people who don't see their families, and it used to be a very common thing - you'd grow up and move away and do your own things. But I think it's very telling that my birth mother is the only one who ever makes an effort to reach out to me.

I'm going on a trash walk today. I meant to yesterday and the Kindle thing just ate up hours of my time. I can eventually figure computer things out on my own, but it takes me a while.

Starting to get antsy about the Gate River Run coming up. I've been having some really good workouts lately and I feel optimistic, but also nervous. I was able to get a spot in early packet pickup, so I need to go to Jacksonville on Thursday. I saw photos of the participant tech shirts, and this year the men's shirt is royal blue, and the women's is mint green. Maybe a sort of dusty pastel, it's hard to tell in the photo. But they did away with the "girl cut" shirts, thank goodness.

We did a lot of outside spring cleaning this weekend. The solar panels were covered with pollen, as is everything else because it's time for The Pollening. It's not really time to start mowing yet, but in a few weeks maybe. The humidity is low, so we're having temperature swings where it's warm during the day and very cold at night. I'm pondering trying to start seeds for my garden or just being lazy and buying starter plants. I'm going to try potatoes again and just be a little LESS diligent about watering, since they don't seem to require a lot of hands-on care. I have enough seed potatoes that I'm probably going to try some in garden beds and some in large planters. My potted oregano has something invasive that's moved in and needs to be pulled out, and the lantanas need to have the dead stems and old grass trimmed out. It was a weirdly busy weekend, and I hadn't planned on doing that much.

Earlier this week, I found all of Hyper Light Drifter's stone monuments and the last of the keys. I then went into the arena horde mode area and have been getting my ass kicked. I've cleared the lake arena and the forest, and I'm currently stuck on the barren hills arena. I'd still rather do this than play the soccer mini-game again. Apparently after you clear the first four arenas, there's a world arena or abyss arena that has invisible floor tiles, so that will probably make me lose my shit entirely. Such is the life of a completionist. :)

I've reduced my coffee enough that I get a nice boost from it, but I haven't stopped entirely. Instead of afternoon coffee I'm now having tea, and really liking the chai. Once I've drunk up most of this I'm going to buy myself a jar of chai masala and try simmering it on the stove, like "real" chai. I'm also wondering if I can bug Fox into taking me to Persis again, and getting their chai. One of his Indian co-workers has family who run an Indian restaurant, and after he brought home leftover biryani and some hot lamb curry for me after a Christmas get-together, I was hooked. We finally got out there and ate lunch, which is where I got to try that Indian soda that I enjoyed so much, and they gave us mango custards. I hadn't eaten mango in a long time after a stupid incident where I ate way too much mango freeze gave myself a stomach ache. The custard was really tasty.

Thums-Up. That was the name of the soda. Spelled like that, without a B.

Anyway. I ought to get some stuff done around here today. I feel lazy but the only self-cleaning things in the house are the cats and they're both asleep.