The Raven's Roost

It's been a busy time for us recently, so I haven't been checking in here as much. Nothing bad is happening, just busy, yanno?

I made a trip down to Palm Coast to consult with a gastro about my liver enzymes, and he thinks my GP is overdoing it by asking for a liver biopsy. So this is good news for me, because I didn't want to get a liver biopsy, either. New doc recommended stopping vitamin D supplements, and said I may have a genetic predisposition to fatty liver. I must have looked at him weirdly because he explained that my dietary and exercise habits are likely to be holding worse problems at bay, since fatty liver often occurs with other lifestyle diseases as "metabolic syndrome," none of which I have. I did explain the reason I am still on blood pressure meds is that my body seems to have become dependent on them and I get massive rebound hypertension when I try to quit. Anyway, he's ordered a set of blood tests specifically looking at liver stuff, along with an imaging procedure to look for damaged tissue. I hate this.

Fox's physical therapy has finally started, and she wants him to do strengthening exercises. LOL I've been telling him that, too, but I'm also not going to rub it in. I am going to encourage him to keep up on it, and will let him know when I'm doing my lifting workouts so that hopefully it prompts him to do the stuff she's prescribed. I also need to take some video of his running for her so she can look more at his running gait. I think she did some gait analysis already but not a really deep dive or anything.

Today we're going to try to get more yard work done. I need to mow and trim again, and Fox is going to put the brush hog on the tractor and cut our walking trails in the Wayback again. I also have more garden plants to set out, though the colder weather at night right now is making me wonder if I'm too much ahead of myself, but I think they'll be okay. The potatoes are thriving for now, and I looked up when to start mounding dirt around them. Garlic is going to take a longer time. Some tomatoes are good to be planted, some aren't really sprouting, and I bought a bell pepper plant. I'm also going to get my soil tested soon, maybe run the samples over to UF and schedule that metabolic test while I'm there.

I never had a ton of social media accounts in the first place, but I'm considering deleting Facebook. I already tried deleting Instagram, which for some reason won't happen until the end of next month. I guess they need to send a tech into the server to hand-delete the data, and he's got to ride over to the office on a pack mule leaving out of Wichita with the next wagon train. Anyway that's obviously no big loss, and FB won't be either. My initial reason for having it was keeping up with some family members, but for the most part they have stopped posting, and they rarely, if ever, interacted with me when they were on. I don't know why I even bothered in the first place, they don't care, I don't either. The only social I'm thinking of keeping is Reddit and I'm honestly not sure why.

Once it gets into the 50s here I'm going to head out and run, then try to get my yard work done by around lunchtime. I don't want to be out there all day and burn myself out, so I plan to split things up between today and tomorrow.

 Can "Indie" Social Media Save Us? an interesting article by Cal Newport - soft paywall

I think there's a lot to be said in favor of recent ideas like the much-touted one of "break up Facebook," but to me the better question is "do we even need social media at all?" And I think the answer is "Nope." Jaron Lanier is correct in his assertion that social media is basically ruining everything - civilization, discourse, free time, and our brains. And the remedy for that may not be better social media platforms, but personal-level decisions to abandon it altogether. I don't know where this would leave things like Dreamwidth - though to be honest I see a difference between blogging platforms and social media ones.