The Raven's Roost

1. I've read a few excerpts from a book I'm probably going to wind up buying, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage. As you may well know, 28 men wound up stranded in Antarctica for something like 20 months until they were finally rescued. Among the many awful things they endured was using packed snow as toilet paper. Another was wind madness. See, winds in Antarctica can reach 100+ mph and be absolutely unrelenting.

I have never endured anything like a fraction of that but wind madness is entirely real. Back in my LiveJournal days, I wrote a post complaining about winds that were battering Louisiana - not a hurricane, just this constant high wind one summer. It finally got so that I didn't want to go outside for any reason because this devilish wind was ready to smack you around, whistle in your ears, blow dust into your eyes, it was awful. A friend who lived in Los Angeles commented that the Santa Annas there sometimes got so bad that the crime rate would shoot up because people just totally lost their shit with the wind.

2.

Huzzah, notebooks! Leuchtturm1917 released a set of new colors just last week - fox red, light grey, mint green, and forest green. I was down to my last two blanks - the horror! So I ordered all four of the new colors. I don't often like every new color they come out with, but this set just looks so good together!

3. Went out for a short run today and it went well. I had a few minor pains warming up, but I felt good. Got home and did some yoga to stretch out - I also need to get back to doing a strength routine. I didn't do badly in the strength department on this last run. Yeah, my shoulders got tired, but my back and core muscles seemed more than up to the task. I need to work on ankle strength and stability, and probably more upper body strength.

4.

First things first! Brownie batter hummus. My local Publix had Delighted By, which is the brand I buy, another brand that began with an L but that offered strawberry and mango, and Boar's Head in just chocolate mint. Anyway, DB is the stuff you may wish to look for ---> https://delightedbyhummus.com/

I wasn't imagining things, they do offer a snickerdoodle hummus, Publix just didn't have it this time. The pumpkin pie flavor lists "pumpkin" as the first ingredient, so pumpkin spice everything fans may want to check that out. I didn't prep any oatmeal but I'm planning to do my "short" four-mile run today as fasted cardio so I might have a smoothie bowl later.

Second things second. I'm usually late to everything cool in technology so I literally just an hour ago learned about making digital notebooks. I found some extensions and goodies that let me make mine in Google Drive so my project for the weekend is to work on that.

I was just thinking early this morning, oh hey this is useful, I guess I'll print it out later. Ugh, I've got dozens of things I need to print and I don't want to. Toner's expensive, the print will fade. I like buying binders and office stuff - I'm a fan of pens and paper. But I don't want to get swamped in a sea of printouts. My first husband printed out every news article he read, and our apartment was awash in stacks of fucking printed-out stories that made it very difficult to clean or make things feel organized and tidy, so I'm often reluctant now to do the same thing. I stopped printing recipes and started using an old Android tablet in the kitchen to pull up pages on, but then what happens when the site goes away? Or the article is pulled?

As a bonus, I don't have to worry about taking it with me, since I can get to my Drive on any of my devices. And while I do still love traditional media and normally take any excuse to buy a dead-tree notebook, I also love minimizing and simplifying. When technology works it's awesome. And this works. Unlike Fallout 76.

Being a food nerd one of the notebooks I'm making is for cooking. I'm making folders and subfolders for different types of foods - not so much "breakfast" and "dinner," as cookies, main courses, vegan dishes, Japanese, etc. And I'm cross-copying things so "how to make onigiri" appears in snacks, Japanese, and vegan. w00t

The interactive notebooks teachers use look pretty interesting, so if you're going to school or have kids who are that would probably be useful.

Someone please come over and refill my coffee cup. There's a cat sleeping on my lap and I don't want to disturb her.