The Raven's Roost

Yesterday, my virtual half marathon went pretty well. I knew dehydration was going to be an issue, so I drove into town and stashed a water bottle under some bushes right at about the turnaround point, and that helped immensely. I still got dehydrated and crashed out, but this time at mile 11, rather than mile 7. So I didn't quite finish in the time I'd hoped for, but I was not honestly expecting to. 2:17:43 is pretty good, though.

Fox talked me into getting a hydration vest similar to his. Well, exactly like his, except smaller, for me. So that will allow me to haul along two 20 ounce bottles of water or electrolyte drink, and it has pockets for your phone, gels, and all kinds of other shit. They're UltrAspire vests, and designed more for trail/ultra runners, but they came highly recommended on r/running for people who need to carry water. In my case it was definitely dehydration rather than glycogen depletion - I've been running fasted and working on my fat adaptation all spring and summer. Yesterday, what I was feeling was increased heart rate, no saliva, and brain fog. My legs and everything felt fine. I just needed salts. I bought some packets of "Liquid IV" powder to mix up, and a couple of Gatorade Zeros, since I'm not sure what I'll like and what will work best for me. I'm trying to avoid too much sugar, though I think a little won't hurt.

I get to try it out this coming Sunday, since I have a two-hour run scheduled. I'll probably continue driving to the state park and leaving the truck there, then running up the sidewalk towards town. The military reservation is great, but while we're still in the rainy season, the first half of the trail is a total slog through a bunch of sandy mud. Plus, doing some of my running on pavement gets me ready to race on pavement.

I received my Pilot Metropolitan pen and I love it. The balance is nice and it should write very smoothly once I change the ink cartridge. I forgot that you shouldn't bother using the ink that the pen comes with, because it's often old and gunky. I've spent most of 2021 being very careful about my spending and saving, so of course I've blown it out this past week. I bought a couple of Leuchttrum 1917 journals, one in metallic copper that will be my daily commonplace book, and another in "sagebrush," which will be my new reading journal. The notebook I've been keeping my reading journal in is some unknown quantity from Target that I bought back in maybe 2002. It's okay, but as I think I mentioned before, I'm ready to start having nice notebooks and good writing supplies. It will take a while to copy all the entries, but it will be worth it to have a reading journal I wouldn't mind other people seeing. And then to top it off, I found a website out of Brooklyn that has the LAMY Safari pen I've been after, and they were running a sale, so I just ordered that pen, plus a box of ink.

I think I'm done for now, but I just wanted to have both a fine nib and medium nib pen, and I figured with the new notebooks, I should be content for a while. Unless Leuchttrum comes out with some limited edition color I simply must have, I can probably wait around and just order a couple of notebooks from them every three or four months. I got into a bad habit when Kitty was alive of buying any and every notebook that caught my eye. She was pretty indiscriminate about them - which is perfectly fine, everyone has their preferences. But I've found that if I'm writing in something with shitty paper and a terrible binding, it doesn't matter how pretty the cover is, I hate it.

I've got about seven more weeks until the Wine & Dine half marathon, so here's hoping that I can actually hit my goal there. That's over a month of additional training, plus working out my hydration and nutrition strategy.

Yesterday's errands went well. Sometimes running errands makes me extremely peopled out and cranky but I was all right. My book store visit was also excellent - a lot of good finds and I still have fifty-five bucks in store credit. Someone had dumped the first seven volumes of Lone Wolf and Cub in withdrawn library editions so I snapped those up. They have sticky label residue on the covers but they're in pretty good shape for public library manga. This has been on my to-read list for a long time, and I'm a fan of historical manga. In other bookish news, I completed my reading challenge for the year, completing my fiftieth book last night.

Other finds from Chamblin Book Mine are:
Glittering Images and Glamorous Powers by Susan Howatch, the first two volumes of her Starbridge series
Little Saint by Hannah Green
Buddha by Karen Armstrong
Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines or Seven Books of Wisdom of the Great Path According to the Late Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup's English Rendering - edited by WY Evans-Wentz
They had a copy of The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, but I didn't buy it because I'm an idiot, and clearly I need to go back for that one.

Then at Jax Oriental Market, I found this. It was an impulse buy from a display that also featured the same cakes with a small pig on top, and I recognized it as something both Japanese and New Year related.



I found that it's a mochi cake that's meant to be displayed until either the 7th or 11th of January, at which point you break it up with your fingers or a hammer (never use a knife) and eat it by using the unflavored mochi in a soup or as crackers, or honestly however you wish to prepare it. It says "keep refrigerated" but I think that's an American thing. It's actually sealed up in plastic, and it's literally just rice flour and citric acid. They also had green tea noodles, which I had not seen there before. I know those are typically more of a spring dish, but given the sheer simplicity of a lot of the green tea noodle recipes I've seen, it's worth my while to practice a couple of times to make sure I have the balance of flavors right before "officially" serving up a spring noodle salad.

Today's plan includes a five-mile easy run, making almond butter protein bars, not freezing my ass off, and taking care of a slew of little chores I put off over the last couple of days. However, I feel sort of like a slug, and I just want to sit near the fire, drink coffee, and read.