crows are calling.

still down with a fever, oura insists that I continue to rest. it's comforting to have a little fitness tracker buddy.

therapy tomorrow which is good because it spurned me to send an email to my doctor rejecting his prescription for progesterone, he thinks it may or may not be too strong of a dose but he wanted to try it and see before attempting the smaller dose because that requires compounding at another pharmacy which is more expensive and time consuming and complicated.

i don't care how much harder it is, i don't want to risk taking too high of a dose of any hormone. so I told him that, after refusing to fill the medication for three weeks. sigh.

i may take a little break from our visits. it feels a bit like beating my head against a wall.

but he's the only doctor i know who will prescribe me hormones and part of me does want access to estrogen when the time comes that i feel i need it.

i dunno.

anyway.

trying to make the most of being sick. i slept most of the day, yesterday. it was lovely. i walked during crow-hour in the courtyard, a slow, leisurely walk in circles while the crows gathered in the tall old trees we have here, chatting on with each other about their day. i took a bunch of photos of the fall foliage in the fading light. it was such a beautiful day, the prettiest october day ever, and i was sad to have slept through most of it, knowing the rain would be back today and probably here to stay for a long while. but the evening walk helped soften the blow a little bit.

i'll share photos soon.

they are so uplifting, listening to them and watching them fly. if there is reincarnation and if i have to come back to earth in some animal form, i'd like to come back as a crow.

(more likely i think i need a break from dense 3rd dimensional existence, though - or if i have to be a material thing, maybe i could go to a different world - i had a very strong intuition as a child that i was the opposite of an "old soul," that this was definitely my first time here and my first time in a dense material body and it was not suited to my personality at all whatsoever. i dearly missed being a being of energy who could travel at the speed of thought, and there is a part of me that still misses it, even though i know this is basically nonsense, heh.)

after my crow walk, when the light had fallen and all the lamposts had lit themselves, i came in and made popcorn in my new-to-me halloween ceramic halloween bowl. it made me so happy. josh requested popcorn too so he got his own bowl.

settled in for some halloween movies, but ended up starting with the last episode of Loki season 1, and watched the first episode of season 2. i felt it would make the the happiest of all my options. hiddles is just so fun. i love that the loki character is becoming so emotionally complex. we've never really seen him invested in someone else's well-being (granted, Sylvie is, in a way, himself, haha. so it lets him still be fully self-interested which is kinda great.)

i tried to find Halloween (Michael Myers) proper, but none of my streaming platforms had it (granted i only have Hulu, Netflex, and Disney).

So I opted for the new Haunted Mansion on Disney.

It was so charming!

I really love ghosts.

And Owen Wilson, who I had just gotten a nice dose of on Loki, too.

It was a bit campy and silly in places, definitely some throw away elements, not at all sophisticated, but in general very fun and touching in places.

I don't believe in ghosts but there's still part of me that hopes I get to be one for a time. haha. it seems really fun. I still talk to Lunar's ghost in the kitchen and courtyard pretty much daily. ghosts are sweet, even if they don't exist.

eventually i wound down and went to bed around 1am.

I thought I'd slept better but I still had fever dreams (dreamt a lot about animals) and my resting heart rate dropped to 50, which is still 10bpm higher than normal for me, my hrv is in the 20s now which is 10 points higher but nowhere near my normal range, and my fever temp stayed the same, alas.

I got up a little after 8am and decided to try to start a new habit of sweeping the apartment first thing monday morning, before coffee.

this was much more difficult than i was expecting. perhaps because i'm not feeling well.

BUT. I did it, and I'm glad.

Did 3 loads of laundry, washed all the dishes, made coffee, started a Huberman podcast episode.

Then I got on a baking tear and couldn't stop. it was just too much fun. it started with cooking a turkey burger for Josh for his lunch, and then i remembered the glorious bunch of locally grown basil that i couldn't resist from Groundworks Organics, last batch of pesto for the season yaaaaay, so I whipped that up in the food processor while the turkey burgers were cooking. but then, after filling jars with pesto (one in fridge, one in freezer) and cleaning the food processor and cleaning up everything else, i grabbed the pie pumpkin i got a few days ago and started rinsing it and it just felt so good in my hands, I was so excited to roast it and turn it into pie, that my body flooded with happy chemicals and i got entirely wrapped up in the process. I halved the pumpkin, scooped out the seeds, and placed it in the oven to roast in my large 13" glass baking dish. then I spread the seeds out on parchment paper on a cookie sheet and seasoned them with olive oil and rosemary sea salt and slipped them in the oven to roast with the pumpkin. they were done in ten minutes and josh and i have already devoured most of them. so delicious. and nutritious.

then i washed all the plums from Food Not Bombs and whipped up a double batch of gluten-free crust, encrusted two pie pans, and sliced the plums and placed them in the smaller one while filling the larger with pumpkin filling from the roasted pumpkin. I added a dash of salt, pumpkin spice, honey, two eggs, heavy cream, and a little bit of butter to the pumpkin filling. to the plums I just sprinkled a tiny bit of corn starch underneath them and cinnamon and a tiny bit of butter on top, nothing else.

both of those went in to roast and then i chopped up my purple potatoes and prepped those to roast once the pie and tart were done.

THEN I decided to grab the fennel from Food Not Bombs along with a sweet onion and a green cabbage and chopped all of that up to roast after the potatoes were finished.

by the time everything was baked and roasted, it was well after 3pm and I was soooooooooooo happy. everything tasted wonderful.

now we have veggies and pie and tart and seeds and potatoes yum yum yum. we both ate a little of everything and there is still so much more to enjoy.

so grateful.

i had to keep washing dishes and changing out loads of laundry while all this was happening, a second cup of coffee was brewed in there somewhere around 1pm, i listened to an old Halloween mix I'd made some years ago on youtube, it was so much fun.

I'm quite tired now though, and my body hurts a little. not nearly as bad as before though. definitely on the mend, it's just slow going. slight tummy discomfort still, but I'm eating anyway. mostly comfort foods but that's okay. the tart is especially satisfying, something about the natural sweetness of the baked fruit without any added sugar that my body is craving. i love how the dark blackish-blue skin and yellow flesh of the italian plums melt together while cooking and dyes everything a deep fuchsia.

put together one order and took it to the post office but i always forget that Indigenous People's Day is a bank holiday and government offices are closed. So I scheduled a pick-up with my mail carrier for tomorrow instead, we'll see if that actually works. there are no more blue boxes that allow package drop off, not even at the post office proper, due to constant crime and vandalism of the boxes and mail. sigh.

still need to put away laundry and i could definitely use a shower. excited to rest the rest of the night. maybe find more halloween movies.

I have lots of website work to do but I've noticed that my brain is not functioning correctly and I'm making some unusual mistakes in regular tasks, so I'll wait to do more highly visible professional work until tomorrow and hopefully I'll be feeling a little better by then. hopefully i won't forget my therapy appt in the morning, meep.

Really hoping that I'm all better before Shadowplay this week and VNV Nation on Friday, we shall see. Not much I can do but take care of myself and hope.

Should probably hydrate more.

ooooo pretty sunset! I'm going for another (slow, gentle) walk in the courtyard. I hear the crows calling.

I love october so much.

noodles are the best comfort food whilst sick.

walk was nice. sunset was soft, grey clouds lined with pale yellow. the crows had many stories to tell about their adventures today. the whooshing of their wings when they finally rush off together is envigorating.

tired tired. i forgot that i was hoping to get the rest of the halloween decor up tonight. maybe at least some of it, we'll see.

first, need to re-heat some noodz. (organic locally made ramen to be precise.)

foods and foliage

here's some of the foodz i made today (not pictured are the fresh pesto from scratch and turkey burgers):





And the foliage and such from last night's dusk walk in the courtyard:



















I have so many photos from Dog and Saddle mountains and mushroom hunting and coastal visits in September that I never posted anywhere that are a lot more impressive than these - this is stuff I see every day, this time of year, right out my window. But for some reason, maybe just because of my illness right now, I just wanted to share these gentle moments.