Tuesday: I walked past one of our cats this afternoon, as she sat upon a box in Thing 1’s room. She was upright, rocking back slowly, eyes fixed on me, and it reminded me of the nighttime portion of the 2019 SRT Run/Hike. I still owe you a trip report, but for now, settle for an excerpt:

I couldn’t believe I was here again: checkpoint 6 in the gloaming. I had pushed hard all day to get past the Cliffs of Insanity, the trail along the edge of Bonticou Crag, while there was still light. I had arrived at the checkpoint around 6:45, a full 30 minutes earlier than the previous year, but it made no difference. As I hit the Crag Trail, I was once again forced to turn on my headlamp. This year, it was a combination of the approaching dusk and a persistent mist that had been following me for the past hour and a half. Moreover, this time there would be no Dawns, no Aimee, and no Don calling out to confirm that we were still on course. Just me, the woods, the hunter, and that half-seen beast.

I’ll finish writing it eventually. That’s part of the reason for this blog migration. I feel far more comfortable writing Markdown in a vim window than I do writing in Word or a browser.

I walked outside after finishing up my work for the day, intent on checking out the weather after today’s tropical storm, Isaias. As I stood outside, the trees across the street began to sway alarmingly in the wind, and I heard a loud crack come from somewhere. I looked for several minutes, but couldn’t find the broken branch. Once again, I find myself missing the indoor track at the gym that I swore I was done with.

I wondered briefly if the Adirondacks would be affected by today’s storm, as they had been during Hurricane Irene.

In other news, last week I switched the rendering engine on the blog from Goldmark to Blackfriday. Initially, I did this because I was thinking about tracking habits here using task lists. I eventually decided against that, but the change in engine brought another unexpected surprise. The Goldmark engine renders a space after each link, which is quite annoying if you tend to include punctuation around links, like I do. The Blackfriday engine does not.

As far as tracking habits goes, I’m trying out Habitica, which turns daily monotony into an RPG.

Also, while migrating some of my old Wordpress posts, I came across a short piece about the mess that I had written in 2017. It’s still 100% relevant.

Sunday: Wow.

Today started off decently enough. I had planned out a hike. I was going to check out an area of the Adirondacks that I’ve had my eye on for years, now. I’ve got a sweet, roughly 50k loop mapped out there, and I wanted to get some idea of what terrain I’d be dealing with. Maps can only tell you so much. My training plan called for 30-45 minutes of hiking, and I had planned on an out and back on one of the trails.

Also, I migrated the repo for this blog to github, so I could edit it from elsewhere, and so I could start to approach the point where I can run git push and have the changes appear in production.

Finally, I had marked my detox and detox-php software packages as abandoned; they are, for the most part, obsolete under modern OSs. I have had no desire to work on them for years now, and I worry that they would be perceived in the modern eye as being antagonistic toward people who don’t speak English, or who aren’t American, and that is decidedly not what they were created for. They were created to deal with the very real problem of certain characters being difficult to work with under older version of Linux and other Unix variants. As I stated, this is no longer the case in modern OSs.

Then, as I was starting to get ready to go hike, my body decided to throw yet another curve ball at me. In hindsight, it’s perfectly clear what had been going on, but I never would have predicted the outcome. The short version is IBS sucks.

Until next time, be excellent to each other…