The Raven's Roost

 Starting Tuesday afternoon and continuing into right now I've been dealing with some sort of infection and have felt like Ass. Mostly I have muscle aches and weakness, sore joints, and exhaustion, along with some minor GI problems that are mostly "don't wanna eat." My resting heart rate really reflects what's been going on - it hasn't been this high in a long time. I've skipped my runs this week and missed a strength training workout, but I am planning to do some easier strength work today. I feel better. Not 100% but a lot better than Wednesday when I spent most of the day asleep.

My garden isn't really doing anything spectacular and I think it's because this sandy Florida soil is awful. I'm letting what's already growing just continue with what it's doing but, depending on how I feel this weekend, I may plow under the other two beds and start directly composting them. I found a new to me method of composting that makes utter and complete sense when you think about it. In nature, when something dies, it falls on the ground, and then it rots, put very simply. So ... why not just put stuff on the ground. I'm trying this in one of the beds that only has a few plants growing now (all the tomatoes died for some reason) and while I haven't been doing it long enough to see a result yet, I haven't had any of the problems you're told you will have if you don't compost the "right" way. It smells? Not really. I haven't put any animal bones or meat in it, but this pile doesn't really smell different from anything else in Florida - which is to say it smells like rotting vegetation. Raccoons and cats digging in it? Yay, they're turning the soil for me. Otherwise I don't care. The more I think about it, the simpler composting seems, but we've allowed all these rules and procedures to take over a very basic natural process. Maybe people prefer to pretty it up instead of allowing it to remind them that hey, one of these days this is going to happen to you, too.

For whatever reason, my neighbors were setting off fireworks last night. Someone please tell me what's to celebrate on July 18. Also fireworks are awful for more reasons than just that I woke up thinking someone was shooting guns at the house.

I went down an interesting rabbit hole the other day as I searched for examples of Moira's Web Jewels - remember her and her amazing sets of nav buttons, bars, and backgrounds? Some of them are still out there on other sites, usually archived, but I found a more or less live Angelfire page using a full set of her stuff. And it was a Pern/Dragonriders fan page, so also a rarity in the Anne McCaffery apparently hadn't sued them. I never did find the set I was looking for - I remembered that she rendered a metallic gold surface in a really unique and beautiful way and I wanted to steal the color palette. But digging around and seeing screenshots of old GeoCities pages, or having a page FULL of animated gifs come up was very Web 2000 and a lot of fun. 

I've been fighting some sort of illness off and on since the weekend. Today was particularly bad, but I'm finally starting to feel somewhat normal. Tomorrow I have to head up to central Georgia to pick Fox up at the Jacksonville Airport. He's been in Tokyo for the last two weeks! His flight should get in around five or six tomorrow evening, but there's weather moving in on JFK, where his flight from Japan will land and he'll pick up his domestic for home. He went out when all that bad weather had everyone backed up with cancellations and late flights, and it took him over two days to actually get where he was going.

Nothing major happened here while he was gone, but I wasn't expecting it to. I'm not a party animal or anything so I mostly hung around the house, got a lot of reading done, played with the cats. I bought a treadmill and set it up in the master bedroom, and it's been great for me. No getting up insanely early to beat the sun, no bugs, no dogs, air conditioning, and without needing to listen for cars I can catch up on podcasts. I'm trying to settle on a running routine and I think I'm just going to go ahead and start my marathon training, but duplicate weeks and switch things around.

My stomach is all fucked up. I get hungry and think everything's better but then after I eat I feel queasy again. So for now, tea is my friend. And that's a shame because I was going to roast a chicken breast with some asparagus in a packet, a recipe I found on Buzzfeed. See, they're occasionally useful. If not tonight it can be lunch tomorrow before I head out.

When I feel better and have more brainpower, I mean to upgrade to a paid account and start restocking user pics, and set up my raven mood theme. The skulls will do for now, though, they're pretty cute.

And I have tomatoes sprouting now. The other seed tray gave me almost nothing, but I'm tempted to try again. Maybe get some flowers going, and couple more squashes, and another round of microgreens. If it weren't for the cats I'd be growing microgreens inside where I could clip them easily.