Liralen's Adventures Through Life

All right. I finally got my Razar Blackwidow Tournament Edition Stealth keyboard, and I'm happy with it and with the low weight needed to activate the keys. It makes my tendonitus just that much less aggravating. And it's as silent as I'd hoped that it would be. I'm also grateful to finally have function keys again, and some of the navigation and short cut keys that the Happy Hacker does not have. Which isn't to say that I don't love the Happy Hacker for its capabilities when I'm writing code, but it is not the easiest thing to use when a lot of the game keys are function keys. And on the HH they take two key hits instead of one, so it's Not Good for reflex work. Yes, I know that I could reprogram it, but this just seemed a whole lot easier, and there was no way on earth I'd give up mechanical switches. The Razar ones are quite nice to the touch, too. I know... updating more than once in a week... it's insane...

It's taken a while, mostly from circumstances beyond my control, which is all right. I only have seven more weeks of being moderator, and I am actually counting the weeks. It's not a pretty reality, but it's what I've got. Thanksgiving went well. Our trip down to San Diego started in a horizontal snow storm on the way to DIA, 90 degree weather in La Jolla, lots of wonderful food adventures, and then a cooler end to the week there and a trip home to a winter wonderland of snow.

There were actually two parts to this last adventure, too. One was actually from the sign up phase, the other was the game itself....

So John and I now have a tradition, where I take a week off for the Big Bad gaming convention and then he takes a week off to go to Seattle and be with his mom for a week. Poor Jet has to do the school thing, but since there was talk at BigBadCon of allowing 13+ to play and run in a kiddie pool, he's said that he'd like to come for the weekend and not skip any school to do it, but still come and play. That would be fantastic. As it is, though, we each get our week to do what it is that we really want to do, and it turns out very well for both of us. Jet seems to get into the spirit of the whole thing, too, and is extra helpful for both of us while the other is gone. This is really long, and on livejournal, it allows you to open and collapse sections as you please .

Halloween was fun. For the first time, I actually went out with the parents and the kids to go trick-or-treating. I'd always chosen to stay at home, and this time I decided to just leave the bowl of candy on the front doorstep with a sign, and I went with John and Jet through the neighborhood. It was fun. Especially more fun since John was back home from Seattle. We traded off weeks, and I'll write more about the gaming and convention and setup for it in another entry; but the week while John was away made me, as always, really appreciate everything single parents have to go through so much more. Especially when things break down... One thing that happened was that I completely misplaced my fitbit, which seems a small thing except that I've been living with a pedometer for longer than Jet's been alive, so it's really hard on me and my habits. And when I mean completely, I actually mean that I lost it three times in a row while John was away, and the last time wa...

It seems that I am a band mom. *laughs* And not just a band mom, but a marching band mom, which seems a different breed of sorts. And it seems that John and I have done our usual thing, which is just dive in and do stuff. Jet has had marching band competitions both last weekend and this weekend. Luckily, or unluckily, depending on how you look at it, last year, his high school's marching band placed dead last in the standings, so there really was only room for improvement. And they have improved. The band director is really fun, and really wants his kids to have fun and grow with the experience, so it's been good watching the kids figure out what it is that they can do. Mr. Legg was really great about setting up the program with the base music, moves and teaching the kids how to march through the end of the summer and into the beginning of the school year. The color guard pretty much came up with their own moves throughout the piece, and figured out how much they really wan...

I had a Day, yesterday, which I was glad I finished. I work up with more tooth pain in the relatively new crown, and I was really unhappy about it. It's been happening for the last three weeks, so I finally broke down and called the dentist and got an emergency appointment at 2pm. It was amazing how much relief I simply got from having made the call, at least I'd know what was going on... So I went off to my 8:15 chiropractor's appointment with Brian, and he was careful not to jar my jaw, which was very nice of him. He commented that I finally had a curve to the top of my spine again. When I first started seeing him at the beginning of the year, the stress from the stuff happening at the church had all gone to my shoulders and neck. The muscles and tendons had been under so much tension there for so long, that they'd frozen into place and were pulling my head and shoulders forward into the classical old lady hunch. This was inline with the fact that I was pretty ...

Lots of changes... VBS was good, the small break was great, the last of the summer was full, and then yesterday Jet got his braces off for the last time (he'd had two sets of them, poor kid) and today he went to high school. Yeah. Yeah. I still remember when he went off to Kindergarten, as John says. *laughs* He's got the same smile, and a lot of the same personality, really. The backpack fits better, now. He didn't look back either time. Jet made his own lunch, scheduled himself, including getting to bed early so that he could handle the 6:00 awakening time to get in his bike to get to school by 7:30. He was all ready to make his own breakfast, but I think John helped out this morning. I got up just to see him off. I'm not a morning person, and Jet really didn't expect it of me, but... there's old expectations on my part about what I 'should' be doing. *laughs* Not that he has them. But we wished him well, and he took off on his bike and h...

And the Slate article is now live . It amuses me that on Facebook, my friends had it all over my timeline even before I had gotten the note from my editor that it was up. I loved little film montage they got for it, too. It's cool, too, to get to meet some of the people that read it, too.

I just sent off the first big edits for an article for Slate , solicited by the editor from "the Liralen who inspired Jordan." It's interesting realizing that that was more than thirty years ago, and how much I've changed since and how much I've done and gone through. And also how much the same I am as that ambitious girl who wanted to be an electrical engineer... And how much the world has changed since, too. It was also kind of cool, after all the writing I've done, that getting an article down to 1200 words was entirely doable, and dealing with Ms Bosch's edits makes me appreciate editors all the more. I've been spending the last two or three weeks working on our church's Fellowship Hall remodel, doing the things I do. The whole congregation helped with the demolition and it was fast, dirty, but safe work. I've managed to avoid most of the insulation, but did drywall, thousands of drywall screws, including ceiling screws, and then do...

So I did do the challenge! And I finished it, too.... So starting with day 1 at the very top... the first day was while I was still in NYC, the second was done on the airplane and the picture taken when I got home. The whole challenge was to do something related to Asian-style painting every day of the month, and to take the picture of what I liked most about the work of the day and to post it on Facebook. The posts had to be done every day, but if you skipped a day, you could make it up just the next day, so they had some leeway, which I didn't take. *laughs* There was something about the discipline of doing it every single day and having it be something publicly shown that made a difference because I painted every single day... It was interesting to see and feel the progression as I went along. About half of these would never have seen the light of day if I were to only post or show the paintings that I actually show, but it was interesting doing it with a bunch...

It started out rainy, with the fog still visible from the night before, though, in a way, since we were up past midnight the day really 'began' while we were still coming home from Phantom ... The top tower of the Empire State Building gets lit different colors depending on the day. It was Caribbean Week, so they lit it purple, blue, green, orange, red, and magenta. *laughs* I couldn't have told you which color was what. The rain and the mists were still around the next morning. Luckily, nothing had gone off during the night, and we were all kind of bleary at breakfast, which was at 7 am. I don't know how Dick does it, running at that pace all the time, but we were all pretty dead tired, and I knew that I was sad and glad knowing it was our last day. Glad to get home to my own bed and familiar routine, but sad, as it is an amazing city. I deliberately didn't bother with trying to post anything that morning, because we all had to pack our stuff. We were taking ...