Liralen's Adventures Through Life

I need to do a quick write up of BigBadCon before it escapes me. I've been so busy since I got back that I haven't really had the time to sit down and write down anything, though I intend to write up two of the games I played, maybe three, but definitely two. But I want to capture the days before they get too far away from me, and it's already been a week. Carl and I had fun by planning a lot of this months and months in advance. It's just one of those things that we've been doing, since I go to visit him at least once a year, on the most part, and we have a habit of putting together a wiki page and putting down everything that we're doing to do, everyone we're doing to see, and everywhere we're going to eat. Especially the eating. In fact, one of the things we figured out, early, was that we were going to go to Pican instead of going to Berkeley and eating at Chez Panisse. Thing is that Carl has a gang in Oakland who make a tradition of going to Pica

On my birthday, my third painting show was hung. *laughs* It's just a small space, at my church, but it's a very nice presentation space, and 10% of the proceeds go to the church. We're heavily involved in the recovery efforts for the city, and were actually awarded a $10,000 grant for the relief work we're doing, so that we have plenty of materials and tools with which to do it. I love that the mother of one of our congregants got to learn how to use a pneumatic air gun to help. Maybe I should say that anything that's earned from this show goes to that fund? Anyway... it's always a little crazy getting everything framed, under glass, and matted properly, though I didn't even bother matting the Western style watercolors, since the edges of the paper were beautifully deckled, I just floated them over a background page. And they look so different when they're in their framed best! It always kind of amazes me how they look when they're like this.

Our very last day in China was in Shanghai. The hotel was in this middling area where it was within very close driving distance to the shopping districts, but there wasn't all that much that was withing walking distance. I got up pretty late, had a leisurely breakfast, and Dad and John had something of a plan to go see some lake or another and or just walk through town. We got everything packed, but kept the luggage for once, since we were going to have to bring it with us when we met up with Jevons afternoon. I wasn't sure how far I'd be able to go, but decided that I wanted to try it instead of just sitting in the hotel room on our last day. It was a little bittersweet in ways, as we'd done so much in so little time, and had explored so many things; but I was also completely worn out between the illness, doing all the travel, and simply having to deal with all the strange things here. Still, the morning was clear compared to the previous days, and we only had to g

Suzhou is just West of and a little north of Shanghai, and it's on the Grand Canal, an enormous canal that was built all the way from Beijing, and was used by an emperor or another to do the Grand Inspection, a euphemism for Tax Collection. It's beautiful, though thinking about the fact that it was all dug by hand with what was essentially slave labor, it isn't that surprising that it was one of the reasons why that particular Dynasty didn't last more than a few years. The city is also the site for one of the largest and oldest private gardens now owned by the Government. The Humble Administrator's Garden is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and was originally built in the Shaoxing period (1131-1162) of the Southern Song Dynasty, but in 1513 CE Wang Xiancheng, who was an Imperial Envoy and a poet of the Ming Dynasty, took it over and created a garden when he was retired by the Emperor from Imperial life. In Chinese, the name of the garden was The Stupid Administrator&