Liralen's Adventures Through Life

I hope everyone who got to celebrate it had a wonderful Memorial Day. We had a pretty busy day. The three of us started at Leenie's Cafe, a restaurant that does New Orleans Specialties, including a "chocolate beignet" that was a beignet with melted bittersweet chocolate squirted on top. I haven't asked them if they're displaced from New Orleans, and I probably should. After that the three of us scattered: I helped with a garden consultation, John went off to work on a house (sealing tile and caulking the edges), and Jet went to a friend's house to play all day. The consultation was with a long time friend who's also a cancer survivor, and we had a lot of fun just wandering through her yard and talking about what she could or should do with various patches of it. We had their little dog with us, and he just wanted affection whenever we stopped to talk. It was a beautiful morning, sunny, warm, and dry. I went home, watered my tomato plants. I should ...

I think one of the reasons I didn't write here so often for quite some time is that a lot of my life has turned into involving other people's stories, not just my own. 911 is all about incidents I can't really talk about. Church often involves things that I can't talk about because they concern other people's privacy. And all the flood work has to do with putting back together people's lives, and talking a lot about their stories seems to make me feel odd, as it's really theirs to tell, not really mine. So I haven't been writing that much about the flood victims and the lives we're putting back together, but I may be shortchanging them and myself in that estimate. Today we threaded blanket insulation behind the 2x4's of the framing in the basement. It had all been taken out by two volunteer crews that did a great job of gutting out all the drywall, insulation, and carpeting in the basement, which sustained four feet of water down there. That ...

During the flood, a woman had the first floor of her house completely wiped out and along with it was a piano that she'd had for most of her life. Her brother is a concert pianist, she is not, but she took great comfort in the music. She's a single mom, and was living in a friend's house while we were rebuilding hers. She worked on her house pretty much every time I was there, and near the beginning John realized that she really missed her piano. So we lent her mine. Decades ago I'd been researching digital pianos and their cost, and one weekend I'd ducked into Costco to get something, and they were having a flash sale on digital pianos for about two-thirds their usual price. I walked out of the store with a piano on a cart. I'd played piano as a child, ten years of it, won second in a California-wide state competition, and as soon as I was out of my parents' house I dropped it. I wanted to play again, but even after I bought it back then, I just never r...