The Raven's Roost

It's muggy and hot outside, well before sunup, so I'll be doing today's workout on the treadmill. I have five minute threshold intervals, which can go very badly on gross days like this because the hot, humid air makes it so hard to breathe. I return once again to the joke that humidity is the southerner's version of altitude training.

Fox has a follow up appointment this week about his leg. They did an MRI last week, and hopefully he'll get some sort of actionable information out of this. He thinks that he may need to avoid using it at all, and that being told to do physical therapy exercises on it has prevented whatever is going on from healing properly. Space Coast will allow him to drop from the full marathon to the half, if he feels he needs to, and if he does I will do that along with him. I haven't told him that yet because I don't want him to feel like he's preventing me from doing something, but I also don't want him to have to run alone ... or to wait forever for me to finish. Going all the way to Cocoa for "just" a half marathon seems a little over the top, but we've been racing this one long enough we're up for challenge medals - I think it's "Mission To Mars" this year. And depending on how he feels about running on his own, can always use the fast & flat course and relatively light crowds to try to PR. I have PR'd at Disney but they can have some pretty bad choke points with all the runners, so it's never a given that you'll be able to run the whole way.

He helped me turn over one of the garden beds and I got my Everglades Tomatoes set out. I also have an army of tiny basil seedlings where the two bigger plants were so instead of trying to start anything I'm just going to let a few of those get big. I trimmed around the pumpkin vines, harvested two more pumpkins, and found another starting to form. There's one bed that I want to do pest control on (wireworms) before prepping it for winter potatoes. We can get two rows of potato mounds in there, which would provide us with a pretty generous amount of 'taters. I may also set out garlic, because I think the intense summer heat wasn't kind to what I started in spring. A lot of that is vanishing from stores here, because everyone operates on a general timetable, rather than what you can actually plant from region to region. It's probably great if you live in Ohio, but October is when we can really start growing things here. So if I can't find seed potatoes and stuff locally I'll just order some online.

I may try growing ube yams, too, though I think they're technically considered invasive here. But think of the desserts!

Today is mostly baking - sourdough sandwich bread, potato waffles for running snacks, garlic knots.

I started asking around online to find someone who can help me with some seamstress-type work but I have no idea what will come of it. I bought a pair of vintage khakis and decided to replace the buttons with some spiffy old Indian Motorcycle rivets I've got from back when they had their own line of denim. The problem is that they came with absolute crap shafts that collapse when you try to hammer them in. My solution has ultimately become to hire someone else to deal with this and pay them. Of course, if any of you happen to know someone who does a lot of sewing and clothes-making work I'd be interested in talking to them.

In that spirit I also need either a webpage programmer or a decent WordPress guide. Since my web comics are being produced in no particular chronological order, I want a front page for Muna that gives links to each story in order by time. I'd like just be able to shove a link to the first page of each new story arc as it's posted onto that front page, and it would make navigation a lot easier for any readers who happen along. I've tried doing this myself and maybe it's ME, maybe it's WORDPRESS, but I can't seem to get it right without screwing up the rest of the comic. I'd like to think I can master this myself, after all, I used to write all the HTML for my webpages myself, but I'm becoming frustrated and, like with the pants, I would prefer to toss money at someone else to fix it for me.

I'm feeling somewhat less tired today. The leaden feelings of Sunday/Monday have passed and while I still feel a little lethargic, it's not a struggle to get myself to do basic stuff. Monday I had to pep-talk myself into just taking a shower. Yesterday I went for a short run. Today I'd like to get a slightly longer run in. I also had this odd lump in my throat this morning - I really noticed it while I was meditating. It felt like the lump you get when you're about to cry, but I wasn't feeling like crying. It seems to be gone now.

The last two mornings have been too overcast to see much of the meteors. I'm not too upset about it because they come around pretty regularly but it would be kind of nice. There were owls calling to each other, though, which is always nice to hear. I haven't seen them lately, but they have been very vocal this summer.

It's been an interesting couple of days here.

My futon arrived earlier than expected, on Tuesday evening, so I have had two nights of sleeping on it so far. I originally planned to put the futon on top of my memory foam pad, then transition to just futon on floor, but Fox suggested I try skipping directly to the floor, which I did. I think the futon I slept on in Tokyo was a bit thicker, but I'm actually not that uncomfortable. I slept pretty poorly the first night, but the cats were also driving me bonkers. Not only have I moved my bed now, I've got a different bed that's right on the floor, so I have really messed with their Kitty Feng Shui. (or is that fang shui?) But last night I slept well and I'm not suffering any ill effects. And I was able to sleep on my side some, so I'll probably get used to the hardness of the surface soon enough.

The futon also serves very well as a zabuton. Then it rolls up and gets stowed in the closet during the day. I'll probably want to air mine out once a week or so. During the summer it's too humid here to do that outside, but I intend to prop it up on a drying rack indoors and let the AC do its work. I'm also pleased that removing the memory foam pad has fixed the warmth problem I was having. Between that pad and the weighted blanket, I was getting incredibly hot and sweaty at night. Memory foam holds heat, which is probably ideal if you live in a cold place, but it wasn't working out for me.

We recently started repairing some fencing, with one goal being to get the garden fence in good condition before I start growing autumn crops. While discussing things with Fox he asked if I didn't want some more raised beds or mounds made over on the east side of the house, and suggested that with the tractor it would be much easier now to upgrade from a couple of garden beds to more like a hobby farm. So that's going to be fun. We're spending this weekend working on digging post holes and running fence, but mainly doing it in the morning and evening so as to avoid the soul-crushing heat of the day.

And finally, as I feared, the Wine & Dine races at Disney are cancelled. We re-opened too early, but no one was listening to that, and tHe EcOnOmY iS iMpOrTaNt. Anyway, we're passing on the virtual option - I'm not excited about the medal designs, and it's kind of expensive for a DIY race. Of course it's going to be much harder now to stick to my running schedule, so I may look for another, smaller local race. I'm also likely to do the half marathon that weekend anyway, and just stay with my current training plan. I'm just frustrated with all the nitwits in this stupid country - we could have actually been back open and everyone safe if they'd just stayed the fuck at home and done as they were asked.

I know people are losing their lives and losing friends and family to this thing, and I'm over here whining about missing out on an overpriced foot race. :/

Anyway, more fence work today. I'm also trying to get a couple of illustrations done that I'd started before getting going on the new comic. I also have a short thing I'm probably going to self-publish as a zine. Getting back into the zine community has been fun - I used to collect them! I still have a few, and just emailed some artists for copies of theirs. I've got recommendations for a printer that handles small batches of books and comics, and it looks like they will print my thing up for just under a hundred bucks, full color. Anyway, I've got a few more character designs I want to finalize.

My pumpkins are still looking good. There are three out there, one of which is on the small side but it's almost a uniform buff-orange color so it should be ready to pick soon.

We're having rollercoaster weather here, and it looks like we're in for a typical Florida Christmas, in that it'll be in the 70s. Last night a front came through with some really high winds and hard rain, and it even spawned some tornadoes, though we didn't get any here. I would like for it to just stay cold for a while, but that usually happens in January or February.

I don't have a lot planned for the time coming up. Today I mainly am catching up on some household chores, making a batch of lemon kale and lentils, and working on "The Cat's Inheritance." I have my practice Dopey run this weekend - starting on Thursday I do a 2.5 mile run, then a 5 miler, 10, and 20 on Sunday, after which I start my taper.

Man it's cold out there. It's maybe 46 or so, but the winds are sharp. This was supposed to happen yesterday around noon, but it was six in the evening by the time the front came, and the house was still hot and stuffy when I went to bed. Tonight it will at least be good sleeping weather, though it's going to get close to freezing, so I need to remember to put my palm tree friends in the garage.

Since I don't need to pick up my neighbor's daughters next week (they're out for break) I may go over to Chamblin Book Mine like I've been thinking of doing and spend some of that store credit. I could also go to Cinnaholic and get a cinnamon roll, since I am having a serious envie fora big honkin' cinnamon roll with brownie bits and pecans, and maybe fudge drizzle, and I don't know, all the chocolate.

There's tidying, which sounds nice. "Tidy" is a word that actually sounds tidy. And then there's the Life-Changing Magic of Just Fucking Throwing Shit Away, You Are Never Going To Use That in a Million Years, It's Garbage. Or as stupid_cat suggests for an "extreme KonMari," just grab your phone and your pets and set your house on fire. There, don't you feel better? 

Okay, enough of that. LOL. BUT as the lunar Year of the Earth Pig kicks off I am having an excellent tidying and minimizing day. I tackled some spaces in my studio and "released" a lot of items I know I will never need or use. Some were in good shape so I stacked them neatly by the road for the trash guys - I know they scavenge stuff so I try to make it easy for them. Anyway, the atmosphere in the house feels progressively better week by week, and in the studio now it especially feels like I can breathe and think and ... create.  It was challenging before, since sometimes I'd take a break and come back with my coffee or whatever and start looking around at all the clutter and thinking, oh god I should get rid of that thing, when am I ever going to need that, did the cats puke in that holy crap that's gross y'all. 

So I may have mentioned I laid out pieces for a new Shrine -  "Reykjanes," - unearthed a couple of works in progress, and have been able to start on my webcomic. Fox has even purchased the domain, we just haven't set anything up and I don't yet have finished content to share but we're moving forward now! 


Tomorrow early I get to go ahead and do my mammography appointment. (whoooooo) But best to go ahead and get the stupid thing done, I really don't want to be up against any follow-up biopsies too close to the Gate River Run. When they had to do the last one I was perfectly fine the next day, but it's just not something I want to deal with mentally while I'm trying to focus on running. So to reward myself for going ahead and doing a Good Thing, I'm planning to get a white chocolate coffee on my way home. The appointment's a 8:30 so I'll be in and out in no time, and hey! The tech will (hopefully) be fresh first thing in the morning, too. I still haven't gotten my login to access my files with my GP so I guess I gotta call their asses tomorrow. I don't remember exactly but it seems like I had trouble setting up an account last time and just said "Oh fuck this" and didn't follow up. 

Also, I have decided that I am really for real this time going to learn to ride a bike this year. First, I'm going to need a bike. Hmm. 

For a couple of nights/mornings now I've been hearing a very talkative kitty outside. This morning I actually saw him on the front porch just after sunup - a big, fuzzy black kitty! Lots of meowing. He seemed scared of me but not totally terrified, so I may be able with some patience get him to trust me enough to trap him. The idea is to take him for a feral wellness visit to a vet in Keystone who does that sort of thing, maybe even spay or neuter (I'm just assuming he's a male right now though I actually have no idea what the cat's sex is) and let him back out here to do his thing. Well, one less thing to do if he gets fixed, but you get the idea. And continuing to assume the cat is male his name, for now, is Marvin. We also have an opossum visitor who has been named Diogenes.

The only thing I have to take points away from myself for is that I have been slacking off on Japanese. I'm going to set myself a goal to practice every day starting from Sunday. I'm kind of amazed at how many characters I recognize, but I have yet to start putting everything together in a coherent way. 

 I know a lot of people are probably doing their "new year, new me!" posts, whether here or on more frenetic social platforms and this post is kinda more of the same. But, I am also chiefly making this post for my own reference (hence the 2019 minimalism tag). If you see something here that interests you or you want to do something similar you're obviously welcome to comment! Anyway, I think I mentioned my overarching goal for 2019, the Year of the Boar, this particular span of days ahead of us, is decluttering and minimizing. So I'm going to take this post to discuss my definitions, specific goals, and give a general lay of the land.

While I like aesthetic minimalism, it's not really a reasonable goal for me. A. I have cats. B. I like colors. C. I have cats. Having a monstra plant, all white walls, and a few strategically placed books on architecture would make me feel like I live in someone's Pinterest board. So when I say "minimalism," I don't mean that. I also don't mean the types of radical minimalism that have been rightly criticized for their classist and other problematic standards - like that guy who says since you can only write with one pen at a time you should only own one pen? Dude. I like multitasking devices, I like being able to digitize and reduce the amount of things I'd need to carry for, say, a weekend out of town, but I don't want to slash my items down that much. Besides, I'm an artist, so having "only one pen" is heresy to me, LOL. What I DO mean is that I want to assess the material items I own and find a way to donate, repurpose, or dispose of things I don't actually need, want, use, or like. 

I already tend not to accumulate knick-knacks, but we do have a lot of "little things" around. Fox, for example, has a lot of little porcelain and other types of fox figurines. These aren't slated for disposal. But I do tend to acquire books, which need to routinely be thinned out. I also have a fondness for t-shirts so I'll either be turning old, too-big ones into cleaning cloths or possibly having a quilt made, etc. I do have a lot of clothing I can sort through - since I've maintained my weight for a year now (officially!) I think I can safely get rid of "what if I get fat again" clothes. And since I have a very raven-ish brain I pick up interesting shiny objects, but then a month later can't remember why I liked it, where it is, or in some cases, what it is. 

In a week, we head to Disney for the race weekend, so I'm spending this week mainly planning. I'll be assembling a cleaning schedule, a decluttering schedule (room by room) and looking up places to donate or dispose of items locally. I will be doing SOME picking up and tossing out this week but we're not officially ready to start yet. But the general idea is to start by decluttering, then set a cleaning schedule for each day of the week in place so that I can spend a little time each day on the house and easily keep everything clean and tidy. I'll start in the exercise room, declutter it, then move on to the master bathroom the next week. I'm giving myself a whole week in each room to make sure the job is thoroughly done. And I'm also making sure I am not pushing myself to cleaning burnout, decision fatigue, or the other pitfalls that plague large-scale projects like this.

I kind of hate to say it but I think Kitty was a hoarder. With Fox and I around it didn't get too out of hand, but she didn't seem capable of parting with anything. I forget who originally said that if you need things to organize your things you have too many things, but that was Kitty. She was always trying to organize her stuff, when it seemed to me it would be a lot simpler to just get rid of it. But, it wasn't my stuff and wasn't my decision. Well, it is now, but I think it's highly unlikely she's going to come back and haunt me because I got rid of her crochet stuff. I never managed to learn to crochet, I didn't like or enjoy it, and I have exactly zero reasons to keep any of it.

Today's plan is to do my usual weekly floor cleaning, pick up around in the exercise room, break down the old weight bench to store it, and set up a "Household" digital notebook with schedules and stuff saved to it that I can change to suit my home and goals. I'm considering whether to break up my kagami mochi and grilling it up or leaving it until the weekend when I can make a pot of soup to go with it.

 I'm finally getting to where I don't feel like an absolute amateur with my tablet. My scheme of spending one hour drawing each day is paying off. The idea is that I do at least sixty minutes. I can do more, but I don't have to necessarily, so if I have a lot of other things to take care of, I can. It's helping me build familiarity and develop skill, since I've done next to NO digital art before. But I've already been able to do much more than I could have with traditional media, which for me also has to include markers dying and waiting on replacements to be shipped to me, or simply not having a color I want and having to work around that. I've also started a half dozen different pieces and haven't finished a single one, LMAO.

I also still have lots of pencil sketches I'd like to scan and work up digitally but I'll get through those. I'm mainly looking right now to finish a short side-story comic, get it posted, and start my running webcomic. I'm going to aim for thirty pages done before posting anything so I have a very comfortable cushion if I can't work at some point. I may also talk to Fox about a custom domain - I know almost nothing about hosting or setting up a site for a comic though. I should probably just stick to posting shit on Tapastic for now.

Is it possible to live on smoothies? I feel like just having smoothies lately. Green smoothies, fruit smoothies, etc. Currently my favorite choice is green smoothies with chocolate, though I made a smoothie bowl that was key lime flavored and had avocado as a base - it was so freakin' good. And between the avocado and spinach it was this wild shade of bright green, like I'd used food coloring in it.

Baby Sheba goes back to the vet tomorrow for her booster shots. But ... she's developed a lump on her back right leg, where they give one of the vaccines. It hasn't gotten any bigger this week - it's still about the size of an almond. It really threw me when I found it, though. I know vaccine induced sarcomas are rare - as in one in between ten and thirty thousand cats - so it's extremely unlikely that I have another cancer case on my hands. It's statistically most probable that it's just a lump that some cats develop in the injection site and it'll go away after a few more weeks. That doesn't mean I won't worry, of course. Little Sheba having to make those trips out to the specialist vet ... she'd be miserable. (The surgical specialist is almost all the way to Jax Beach, it's a hell of a drive from here.) I know it'll be an extra expense but not much of one to get them to check it out tomorrow. 

I'm kind of just waiting to go work on the water softener at the moment. I hate waiting around but I also don't want to get involved in another project or task, so this is entirely my own fault. Although I'm considering going outside an picking blackberries for a while. Smoothies. *nods*

They just called with my test results - that was seriously fast. It's benign - no cancer! YAY!!

I'm supposed to go back in December to have a follow-up ultrasound, but otherwise I'm good to go. Yes, I did a couple of fist-pumping kick boxing moves in the kitchen, then made some herbal tea because I'm a total badass like that.

Mondays are my major housecleaning days and most of my stuff is finished for now. I haven't gotten my walk in yet, but I may do that after dinner. I'll go back to running Tuesday with an easy three miles. We don't have anything much planned for the Fourth here. We don't get into "doing" holidays that much, but I'm using it as an excuse to cook up some ribs. And since there aren't a lot of people who live around us the fireworks won't be bad. The cats, of course, hate them, and they mildly annoy me. Especially since I can hear them but they rarely go high enough for me to see any of them.

I'll be hoisting a glass of kombucha to toast my continued existence on this planet.