The Raven's Roost

Yeah, Gordon Lightfoot's death has had this particular song stuck in my head the last few days. A mesmerizing song about sailors drowning in the freezing dark waters of the Great Lakes. Although honestly, I think that not many people would even be aware of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald if that song hadn't come out.

Anyway, we're down to two days until we leave, so today's chores include a quick trip into town to buy camping food, and getting with my neighbor to give her the house key so she can feed the cats while we're away. Needing to get cat sitting or boarding led me down a somewhat uncomfortable pathway of thought about the age of my two fuzz monsters and my own goals.

See, I am really drawn to doing adventure shit. I like walking and running long distances. I want to thru-hike the Florida Trail one day. I want to try multi-day endurance races, and on some of those I'll likely need Fox to crew me. So ... maybe when they die ... I shouldn't get new cats.

Which seems unthinkable. I love having cats around. But I'm also torn, because it's unfair to them to leave them alone at a kennel or something for weeks at a time while I go do these long hikes or runs and stuff. I don't know, maybe I'm drastically overthinking things, here. Fox couldn't exactly thru-hike the WHOLE Florida Trail because he'd never be able to get that much time off work. At best he could section hike. On the other hand, I could do the whole thing on my own, especially if he was here at the house to send supply shipments, keep an eye on my GPS location, and provide moral support like "Don't get eaten by a bear". Though it is a consideration, because adopting a kitten or two locks me into another 15 years or so of caring for another creature or creatures.

Of course there's nothing to stop me doing my thru-hike, and then picking up a shelter cat when I get home. Or, you know, finding a cat while I'm out. "Fox, I found a kitty!"
"That's kind of a big kitten."
"Look, it's so fuzzy, it's got spots!"
"I think that's a panther cub..."
"So we'll need a bigger litter box."

This was more on my mind this morning after reading an article on the UTMB, and then watching Crowley limping a little because he's getting some arthritis in his front passenger-side leg. Poor old man, his muzzle is getting more white hairs on it, too.

I need to do a base run today, which I want to do while it's still nice and cool, then clean up and head to Middleburg.

I'm normally in bed reading by now but I'm up waiting for Fox. He had to go out and work on something with the internet - not sure what went wrong, but he took his laptop, and bunch of other equipment and his "wifi on a stick." I said I'd wait up for him so here I am. Our net here was up and down for a while but that part seems pretty stable now.

Camp Blanding is still shelling us. Not as badly as at some points during the day, but they're still at it. They let loose some kind of barrage earlier that knocked stuff off the walls and terrified the cats. But it's a small price to pay for their buffer area. Keeping the development out here to a minimum is what keeps the quality of life high - in my opinion. I have known some people who moved out here and then left within a year because they hated being so far from "civilization." Anyway, they haven't shelled overnight in a long time, but I do hope they quit when it gets full dark.

I usually get up early but I have to be up earlier than normal for an 8:30 doctor appointment in Orange Park. I did say I preferred a morning time slot, LOL. I have errands and things to do but I just don't much like going out any more. I'd rather not be around people. I think I've gone into full Hermit Mode - people in Monk Mode got nothin'.

With the face coming up in September I've started thinking about how I can boost my chances of PRing. The high-fat diet is helping to take care of one of my major problems, which was needing frequent walk breaks. Not that there's any shame in needing to walk, but even at a slower pace, eliminating walk breaks has slashed my overall times. My other issues were going to be related to running on the treadmill all summer and I thought of a way to get around those.

Run outside.

Yeah, it's summer in Florida. It's hot and muggy outside. It sucks. But it takes 10 to 14 days to acclimate to heat. So that's one problem down. Another was that I don't have a good sense of what my pace really is on a treadmill. 11:30 outside feels like a fun, easy jog, while 11:30 on the treadmill feels like I'm dying. I need to be able to realistically gauge my pace and learn how to adjust, and I simply can't seem to do that indoors. Of course, the 'mill is still there for me on stormy, flooded-out, or otherwise impossible to run outside days. Tomorrow, for example, it will be way too hot when I get home. I'm aiming to get out and have my runs finished by eight or nine in the morning, and I certainly don't want to be out there at noon.

I've also found an interesting keto-friendly energy bar that may fulfill my fueling needs - which are going to be minimal on a half marathon, but it'll be nice to have something to snack on around mile 10 when I know I'm going to start dragging. They sell Keto Bricks in 1000 calorie bars, but you can melt them down and make smaller bites, which is what I mean to do. Pop the smaller ones in the deep freeze overnight and they should be okay in my belt pack. We'll see. The chocolate peanut butter cup bar I bought actually tastes like cacao butter - surprise, it's made with cacao butter but it's good to taste it. I've been trying to make a more stable "fat bomb" snack for a while now, and everything I make tastes really good, but is sloppy and not stable at room temps. At 1k calories each they're more than I need for normal runs, but would be ideal for stuff I hope to do in the future when we start having ultras again.

Hey, it's been quiet for about ten minutes. I wonder if Camp Blanding put their toys away for the night! XD

Since "The Ecstasy of St. Beryl" is beginning to remind me of a medieval altar piece, I'm looking to expand the canvas, widen the background painting, and add an ornate frame. I've found several Gothic and Victorian Gothic revival frames to reference, and they're intricate enough that I could work small animals and insects into the design just to reinforce Beryl's association with non-human living things.

That piece is getting close enough to the end that I think I'll focus on it for a while. I still have a character sheet for Lora that needs to be finished, but I have enough references for the other characters that I can get rolling on that comic.

It's a gray, gloomy day here. I love gloomy days. It's a good day to get to work.

What Walden can tell us about social distancing and focusing on life’s essentials. A long-ish read and one you need not have read Walden to appreciate.

I read this book in high school, where it was required reading in honors English. It had such an incredible impact on me that I read it twice - as soon as I finished I just started again. I wrote my end of term paper on it. I have always had a copy around. Re-reading it now is like revisiting a familiar stream of conversation with an old friend. It may be a bit awkward at first but you quickly pick up about where you left off. And it was always at the back of my mind going through life. I graduated college, got jobs, got married the first time, and did other things we're all expected to do.

But I'd find myself sitting around in the evening, after my first husband had spent hours grousing about how my merit increase in pay "wasn't enough," and how they expected too much of me, I should be a manager, and other complaints that always seemed to boil down to wanting me to make a five-figure income while staying at home to see to his needs. I finally started thinking, I could be living in a cabin in the woods somewhere. I hate this. This isn't even remotely close to the kind of life I imagined for myself. Not that the details matter but I managed to shift into exactly that kind of life, a move for which I'm grateful every day. "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined." is not a direct quote from Thoreau but a summation of a passage in Walden and accurate or not, it served me well as a touchstone.

I guess it comes as no surprise that the other major author whose advice I took very directly to heart is Thomas Merton.

Maybe it's because I've had plenty of time to acclimate to a very rural and quiet life, and maybe it's also because, left on my own, I develop rather monk-ish habits. (I made a pun, hrrrhrrhrhrrr) I'm finding the mandated staying at home, the "social distancing," and the slower, quieter direction life is taking even for someone who previously already lived a fairly slow and quiet life are not hard to adapt to. I understand others may have been used to a more active life, or have a naturally greater need for stimulation and I'm not insensitive to their plight.

My only anxiety at the moment is that I will need to do some grocery shopping next week. I made a good plan and stocked us up well without falling into hoarding behavior - I planned for a certain span of time, decided what we needed for that time, and bought only that. The only thing I'm beginning to feel the lack of is fresh produce. So I'll be venturing forth to restock that. I have seed trays that are doing decently, all those broccoli and arugula plants, and another garden bed that should be ready for planting in another week or so. Rather than waiting on compost to decay, I helped things along by dumping compost starter right into the ground, along with organic blood meal, bone meal, and the rest of a bottle of fish emulsion. It doesn't smell awesome, but there's the root end of a napa cabbage I disposed of last week that already has enough leaves growing back to make a meal of.

I also don't want to sound like I'm flexing on people here. I don't mean to sound as if I'm lording it over anyone else. I understand that I'm in a very privileged position. A pandemic isn't fun and people are suffering. But I feel a little hopeful that there will be lessons learned in all this. Or ... people will be people and learn nothing. We'll find out.

Hey y'all! I was right, I was not even remotely close to awake last night at midnight. It's very cold here today (yay!) and I've got a lot of my regular household things done. We're waiting on it to warm up a little and for the dew to burn off so we can work on the deck. The cats are all freezing completely to death and will *literally die* if they can't sit on me. Silly kitties. ^.^

So, who's doing goal setting today? ME. Me me me me. Alas I don't have easily available posts about previous years, since I don't think I ever wrote much publicly about them. When I look back over the past few years I see a lot of positive changes I've been able to make, so I feel optimistic about making some new ones.

I have a set of smaller goals I've already started working on - instituting a no buy/low buy year, getting more comics done, and in general being more creatively productive, which goes hand in hand with one of my bigger goals, to spend less time online. I waste a lot of time on shit like Reddit, which while fun and occasionally informative, it's just social media for people who hate social media. I'm not planning on closing my account, but I am going to put a site blocker on it that will allow me an hour maximum each day. And the way my mind works, I'll tend to not want to "run out" my time in case I want it later. So I'm more likely to use that time reading, drawing, playing with the cats, picking my nose, or doing yoga.

The yoga goal is an interesting one, as it's very open ended. I've been a self-taught yogi from the beginning in 2000 when I first picked up a couple of how-to books and started doing yoga in my apartment after work. I've never gone to a class and never felt like I needed a teacher. This is anathema to some folks, but I'm content with being self-guided and working on my own, so I'm going to continue in my own way. I do wish to reach out to other yogis, especially the more like-minded sort. After some searching and reading, I decided my "deep dive" into yoga need not include teacher training - yoga teacher training is mainly there to teach you how to teach other people to do yoga. So its goals aren't the same as my own. I would also like to try a retreat at some point, especially since there's a retreat center near me in the Ocala area. I think it's in the national forest/WMA.

No buy/low buy is pretty easy to define - stop buying dumb shit. Did I buy dumb shit today? No? Good, I met my goal.

Last year, my personal "color of the year" was a bamboo green, or a yellowish spring green. This year I'm going with teal blue because I wanted something a little darker, but still cheerful. A good teal makes me think of vacations, relaxing times, and clear mental space, so that's the vibe I'm looking for. Sorry but I couldn't figure out how to actually embed the color chip this time.

And finally, this is the guide I have found useful for habit-building. Heck the whole site is useful, but be forewarned that they're pushing their one-on-one coaching pretty hard. If that's something that works for you, then I'd look into it, but as I was saying above, I'm usually pretty good with self-directed and self-paced things. I understand some folks like having the extra accountability built in, though.

Now, let's go forth and do awesome stuff!

So I've gotten most of my Christmas shopping out of the way, and I can see some incoming things on my USPS page. I haven't decorated or anything but I'm considering putting up popcorn and cranberry strings, peanut butter and seed sticks, and other stuff like that out for the wildlife. But then it might be a toss-up as to whether the fresh cranberries go on a string for the birds or go into my face. Or into a batch of white chocolate almond bark, THEN into my face.

As I mentioned previously, I deleted my old Facebook account, then opened a new, very limited one for access to a fitness group I'd joined. I also use it mainly to keep in touch with my mom and sister since they have that and Instagram and that's pretty much it. Mom has the flu, which at her age ain't good. I also saw that someone I'm connected with on there is feeling a bit bitter that I've ghosted them. So why they're still connected to me on FB I don't know but anyway. This person texted me in early 2018 and I didn't hear the notification. I didn't SEE the text until a few weeks later. Not wanting to admit I never check my messages I hoped she'd text again and I could blow off or explain my previous derping out. She didn't. It's been over a year and a half and I never could work up the fortitude to contact her, and now it seems too late, so that's that.

I'm sometimes amazed that I have as many friends as I do, given who I am, as a person.

But anyway, it also reminded me to delete my LinkedIn account. I'm not sure why I even had one, but it's gone now.

This week's project is disposing of essential oils. Kitty left a bunch of perfume oils and such that I never got rid of, and now I'm looking into how to get rid of them properly. I'm not looking forward to having to decant every single little-bitty fucking glass bottle but the oils are a hazardous material, and the glass can be recycled. I doubt it'll take more than an hour from start to finish, it's just dragging everything outside to work on it. I may even wait until Friday, so as soon as I'm done, I can take the oil to the dump, along with some other piddly hazmat items we tend to save up until we need to go. Right now I have a camp stove sized propane bottle and a couple of lithium-ion batteries, but I think there are some old tires in the garage that can go, too.

 I'm taking Sheba to the vet this morning for her yearly shots. After this, I think she won't need to go back for three years for boosters. We got the carrier out a couple of days ago and just put it in the kitchen like it's no big deal, and we can get her to go into it with treats. This is no guarantee she won't turn into Buzzsaw Cat when it's time to crate her up to go, but it might work! Sheba can be very dissuasive when she wants to, and the normal logic of "two adult humans vs. seven pound cat" falls apart when you're trying to handle something that's like a ball of angry razor blades.

So, Suze Orman. Yeah. I won't bother linking the tweet or anything but she, in her infinite wisdom, has said that the problem is that people spend too much money on coffee. And if you'd just put all that in an IRA (I assume she means a Roth IRA) in forty years you'd have a million dollars! Again, instead of looking at the corporate and governmental entities that got us into this position, let's blame individuals. Could people be spending less and behaving more frugally with their money? Yes, but that isn't the point. The point is that shaming someone for wanting the bright spot of joy in their otherwise depressing grind of a day slogging away at dead end jobs on a doomed planet is a shitty, stupid thing to do, and it's missing the target entirely.

I put a cat towel in the carrier ahead of time, since Sheba was sleeping in another room. And now Nana is in the crate napping on the towel. I wonder what the vet would say if I showed up with two cats. "Nana doesn't have an appointment, she just wanted to come along for the ride." 

Don't get too comfortable in that box, Nana - you're next. I have a plan to get the rest of the cats in, up to date on their shots and such, by the end of the year. Feisal will be easy to take. Crowley maybe not so much, but he at least likes to ride in the car. 

It was 29 when I got up this morning, and when I went to read the rain gauge, the top was frosted to the collection tube! Not that a frost or two, or even three, is unusual for this area, I've just never had to crack ice off the rain gauge before. The birdbath had a crust of ice over the top, and the ramp up to the deck was slick and you needed to penguin-walk to avoid slipping. It's a much more comfy 60 now, in the house anyway.

The train of thought that yesterday departed from the Social Media Is Wreaking Havoc Station has pulled in at Attention Is Currency.

That idea is not even remotely new or original, but I am making it a watchword (watch ... phrase? can it be a watchword if it has more than one word?) for the coming months. Sometimes things I know in my brain take a while to actually turn into a realization. I need time to ponder things, so another aspect of social media like FB that bothers me is the sheer speed at which you're expected to process things. I sometimes spend days, or a week or more, turning over one notion only to find that everyone else seems to have moved on. In some ways I'm not very smart - the sheer glacial pace of my cognitive processes was always a ding against me as a kid, but sometimes it's best to be the worst horse. So anyway, enough about my brain meat.

Where you put your attention says worlds about you. And there is so much, so very very much competing for that attention every moment of the day that some people wind up in the unfortunate position of trying to pay attention to everything at once. My thesis advisor had one of those fragmented postmodern consciousnesses. I don't - I'm a mono-tasker, and someone who easily becomes overstimulated, overwhelmed, and peopled out. So when I'm at home I can be selective about where my attention goes - for example right now I am writing, listening to music, and petting a cat when I pause to gather my thoughts.

In previous ages it would have been like this quite a bit. And please don't mistake this as nostalgia or anything - I do not want to see a return to the 40s or 50s, or whatever decade it is we're idealizing right now. But this morning I was deleting and archiving a lot of the email I got overnight. Gmail now has a handy "unsubscribe" feature, though sometimes I think trying to unsubscribe from mailing lists just gets you on more mailing lists, so if I unsubscribed once but now get different emails from the same company I just report spam and block.

Obviously since it's the holiday season a lot of those emails are trying to sell me something - some tangible object to give someone else, because capitalism. This is the time of year when I really see who all has my email address and I take advantage of it to try to get off as many lists as I can. But that left me wondering today, what are the lists I remain on selling me? And not just in the form of "buy this thing it's a perfect Xmas gift," but on a more subtle level. We "pay attention," so what am I buying with my attention? Sometimes I let lists slide if they don't send me things very often, but still, what are they peddling?

Being able to curate and control one's digital life is in many ways a great luxury. So my personal project over the next couple of days is looking more closely at what online entities are nickel-and-diming my attention. Yeah it takes less than a second to swipe away an unwanted email solicitation, but that's still time and cognition. So I bought some compression socks, or a cat drinking fountain, or a book, and I'm supposed to get email for the rest of my life? Mmmm, no.

And this isn't even beginning to get into the area of current events and attention. I think a lot of us are well aware of the fuckery that goes on with people trying to direct our attention to this or that, and away from this other thing.

I haven't reached any good conclusions here, but I need to get an eight-mile run today, and I want to do it while it's reasonably warm.

I have fallen behind on Black Butler. Ordinarily I'm the kind of reader who likes omnibus editions of comics or manga. Give me a free evening, a glass of wine, and a nice, thick book. But I picked up Black Butler almost at random after browsing the shelves at Barnes & Noble, back when I decided manga was worth my while and I was going to read some, but had no clue where to start or what was good. I still consider myself a real n00b, but partly that's because when I just say, "I like manga," I don't want people to think I've been reading for thirty years and know all the authors, artists, and have super-refined tastes and a huge collection. When I say it, I mean I'm still somewhat starry-eyed in front of the shelves, and each series potentially holds my new favorite story.

Lo these many years past, when I was newly married and still lived in Louisiana, I actually managed to see the animated movie version of Ghost in the Shell. I haven't yet seen the live-action version. But I expressed an interest in it to Fox (I've since divorced that first guy, mainly for being an emotionally abusive jackass, which Fox is not) who picked up a copy of the manga in Tokyo.

He sent me a picture and I looked it up to discover he'd gotten a bilingual edition that reviewers on Amazon noted was "uncensored." Hmm, naughty bits? Yep, naughty bits. America is so weird about that. It's like we use porn to sell every conceivable kind of food or product, but if you just make porn for the sheer hell of making porn then you're obviously immoral.

Anyway.

I finally got to sit down and start reading this thing and I'm really taken with it. The art's terrific. If I weren't already working on learning Icelandic I would probably be pushed to take up learning kanji and spoken Japanese. One language at a time, though. But I've taken a break because I know we'll likely eat dinner soon, and I want to just have some uninterrupted time with this story. It's been so long since I saw the movie that I only remember the bones of the plot. The same friend who had a copy also showed me that Studio Ghibli film about the tanuki, which I still love watching from time to time. She also was a big fan of Bondage Fairies ... 

As a side note, I have a generally positive attitude towards sexually explicit material. I say "generally," because I don't believe everything sexually explicit is something to feel positive about, but that's again, for another post.

So I was just sitting here writing and I noticed that, unless she's on one I don't have yet, Grell isn't on the covers of any of the Black Butlers. I do have a Funko POP vinyl of her, but I also try not to own a lot of doodads that I have to dust and clean around. So I have that one, and TV series Hannibal. So yes, my tastes run dark. ;) I told my mom once I blamed it on her because I recall as a small child being read to sleep ... with Edgar A. Poe stories. I think I came by it honestly.

There are two volumes of the bilingual edition on Amazon - same as the one I'm reading. I don't know what other editions were like since this is my first time with it, but I'm really impressed and enjoying the hell out myself. Hopefully I don't stay up too late!