Liralen's Adventures Through Life

Good wishes to all who are reading this for your Winter holiday, whatever it is. I'm sitting here by my Christmas tree with the presents under it and the stockings up and the cookie and milk that Jet set up on the hearth, out of the way of the actual fireplace so that Santa won't trip over it. It's good to see family traditions being upheld. The several inches of powdery perfect Colorado snow outside doesn't hurt the ambiance either. I have a mug of hot chocolate and a nearly empty fridge as John and I are prepping for an adventure. We'll be driving a whole van of instruments for the Silver Creek High School Marching Band to Florida for them to use at the Outback Bowl's half time show. Luckily, another set of parents are going to be driving the van back, so we don't have to make the 2000 mile trip twice in a week... I am grateful. Jet is now sixteen and will pretty much be taking care of himself until the night before his band heads for the airpor

My trips for BigBadCon are always filled with feasts: feasts of the body, mind, and creative spirit. The Chef Chu's feast was one of those, with friends that I haven't seen for a long time, with food that I cannot get in the Boulder County area. The dishes were of Peking duck, sea bass steamed with ginger and scallions, dry cooked string beans, pea sprouts with garlic, and tangerine beef along with the favorites of snow white chicken, pot stickers, and cream cheese crab wontons fried deep and crisp. But best of all it was with people I haven't seen for a year, and have talked to just about a often, people I used to game with all the time and whom really feed my creative juices: Trip, Earl, Cat, Carl, Chrisber, Christy, and their Teo. It was fun to tell them stories of Jet, who is now taller than I am and driving. *laughs* They'd last seen him when he was tiny, still holdable in arms, stealing glasses, and crawling about playing with tableclothes that hung over the

And going to BigBadCon at the end of this week. I'm a little sad that I had to miss the last of Isabel's visit to our home to get here, but I think I really needed some time away to evaluate and think about things. My art show had gone quite well, at Mimi's studio. There are photos of my show space on Flickr, and John and I helped Mimi and Paul clean out a beautiful little breezeway that had amazing light for the display space. It was small, and the paintings were pretty crowded in there, but people got to see them, which was the whole point of it all. There was even a very nice little table/desk where I could put all my painting materials so that I could demonstrate how it worked or allow others to try out the ink, brushes, and paper. I had an outlet so I could bring a water boiler and make herbal teas and it was amazingly nice because the weather during the show was really rainy for Colorado, days of rain, which is really unusual. But it meant that a lot of people

I feel a little like I'm slipping sideways instead of moving forward or back. I'm still gaming, but in different venues than just TF2. I'm now playing Terraria, Civ V, CS:GO, Overwatch, Payday 2, and, most of all, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, mostly because I get to play with Jet, and he and his friends really like playing with me, no matter how good or bad I might be. I'm helpful, I cheer them on, and I usually do something smart in a game where there are so very many ways to die by being stupid. Still, I've decided that I'm out of competitive, and that's been a good decision all around. I am painting, spinning, and even dyeing again. There have been some fun things in the past few months, and the bees are still doing quite well. There are mites, but I think I'll just treat them this fall and it might help with next year. I've been getting through a huge volunteer work load for the Longmont Studio Tour, and a lot of it has been for the m

Today was one of those days.... I was added back onto the roster of my old 6's team, I got my bee allergy shot, I helped plan a siege defense, I got to play Rainbow Siege Six for the first time with my son and his friend, I had a last minute dental appointment with my periodontist that was nearly foiled by my GPS, and I might have a mild eye infection as well. But I got Dairy Queen and good gaming. I think I'm a little tired.

I had a salad today. There are some things that I miss when I'm on the road, and in particular, oddly enough, is the food that I can get at home. A salad with half a slice of crumbled bacon, half a perfectly hard boiled egg with a moist yolk, bits of Stilton, apple, candied pecans, creamy blue cheese dressing, and a whole bowlful of young spring greens that were on sale at the local super market for only 2.79, less than a quarter of what such a salad would cost at any of the restaurants. Or a soft boiled egg with a few droplets of soy sauce on the yolk with a slice of toast, buttered and slathered with quince jelly from the quince tree in our neighbor's backyard... It's good to be home.

There was very intermittent internet in Winnemucca, NV. So I'm catching up today. It's funny sitting nearly halfway across the country, still thinking about the water from Crater Lake...

It was the graduation party today. We arrived in the morning, had some pancakes, and went for a walk with Isabel before getting ready for the party.

Today was a really simple day. We got up as we were able, had breakfast in the cottage. The lady renting us the airbnb room had stocked the fridge with eggs from the chickens who woke Jet up last night, fresh whole wheat bread from the local bakery, butter, raspberry jam from the garden, milk and half and half. We'd brought our own milk, too. She had also stocked fresh coffee. The kitchen came with frying pans and the like, so we fried eggs, toasted bread, and ate. Then we were off to Paul, Jan, and Marina's.

From Alturas we went north and west and wandered about until we got to Lava Beds National Monument, another of our National Parks stops. There we did some extensive exploring of the lava tubes underground, and then headed to Ashland. There we found our cottage for the next few days, and met up with family and friends for dinner and some time together before heading back to our little home away from home, and there to bed.

We ate breakfast in our room. John was the early riser, and walked a few feet to the gas station/grocery shop and bought us a half a gallon of milk. So we had cereal, yogurt, fruit, and some of my granola with dried blueberries as well. It was a great breakfast. Jet started up the boiler for his morning tea while John and I walked two blocks up the road to The Roost to get some coffee. The coffee we found was far better than what we'd gotten the previous morning, and actually better than I've had from various coffee shops.

It's about 1500 miles from Longmont to Ashland, so most of today was just spent getting as far as we could. We started in Vernal, UT, and headed west across Utah on 40. 191 went south through a canyon, and then 6 got us to I-15, which took us South and got off on 6 further south to Delta. There we picked up US 50, the loneliest highway in the US, and that took us to Eureka, Nevada.

We took off at 8:30 am, after finishing the very last of our packing and the last dregs of the refrigerator. That's always one of those traditions of travel that I've both loathed and taken an odd sort of delight in. The usage of the leftovers in creative ways has always been kind of fun, but the last few meals are always something of a hodgepodge of odd bits and ends. And given that all the Memorial Day weekend and graduation party goodies were being advertised everywhere, it was insult on top of injury. It was good to finally get out and going.

It's raining tonight. The soft hiss of water on the pavement, the spatter on the windows, and the coolness through the house. The sky was a riot of fluffy clouds, shadows, and curtains of water being blown in from over the mountains. There's been a good amount of rain for the last week, and it's been a blessing, since the winter was really dry; but with the rain came a late snow that was surprising after Mother's Day. My tomato plants survived all of that, thankfully, and are doing really well, in part due to John making some heroic fixes to a cheap greenhouse that buckled under the snow. Poor thing. He had to reinforce nearly the whole structure to keep it up.

One of the interesting things was that when I first started down the competitive path, I lost about 15 pounds of weight from my high of about 172 lbs, during the worst of the stressful days of moderating. Then, over the course of the six months of competitive, I got down to about 150 lbs. I'm not a small woman to begin with, I'm 5'9", and I did and still do construction, so 150 was kind of frightening. The only time I'd ever hit that weight since my late 20's was also during my moderatorship, when I'd gone four months on extreme stress and got to the point where I came down with vertigo before I could actually stop and rest for a week. I regained my weight fairly quickly with actual sleep and food. I did that again.

Yes, it has occurred to me that the whole year's worth of pursuing gaming was actually my running away from something else. Immersing myself within game worlds, with people I could probably never see face-to-face, whom I didn't even know the real names of, was incredibly like the early Usenet in some ways. Handles like MonkeyMasterB8, Synchronous Heartbeat, ExtraOrdinary, Randomizer, ToastGhoast, and my favorite EvilDeath1234 were all a part of it. Most people felt it mildly rude to be looking for real names, though, eventually, with all the time in conversation, we would start to talk about our real lives. Pursuing, if not perfection, at least excellence, with those whose sole purpose was to get better at the game, was intoxicating, and playing with people who did little but play video games for all their time off filtered for those for whom this was their life for now. And it turns out a lot of us really are walking away from life for a while, for various reasons. I h

It's been odd, this last week. Since about Monday, after I'd finished turning everything over to the team, I've been getting back to my life. And it's been a mixed bag...

[putting this back up as it's.... real... ] Four of the guys who were regulars, either as substitutes or as main players, have said that they won't go forward with the team. Merek, the one with the most experience in competitive, who had gotten into ESEA open teams that were quite good, said explicitly that he wasn't going to play with the team if I wasn't playing anymore. He said that he'd had so much experience in competitive that it wasn't about winning anymore, it was about the people he was playing with. And if they weren't fun to play with, then it wasn't worth doing. And if I wasn't going to be playing with him, then he didn't want to play anymore. When I told Joanne that they'd had to have an ex-plat medic to replace me, she interrupted and said, "They can't replace  you . No one can replace you." She was right. And I have to hear them both...

I started in October, at the very last minute putting an ad up on the UGC LFP forums for the NA Iron teams. There were, as I understood it, five divisions, the lowest being Iron, then Steel, Silver, Gold, and Platinum. And the teams that placed in the top so many spots of each division could move up. I honestly didn't think I could even get into Iron... I only had 700 hours in the game, and barely 60 of them were as a Medic. I'd mostly played Pyro, Engie, Heavy, and Medic was my fourth-most played class. But Medic was the one class I thought I might be able to play in the 6's meta, which really only allowed for medics, soldiers, scouts, and demomen.

We've arrived in LA. It is the latter half of Jet's Spring Break, and we're here to remember, and to visit a few people, including a niece who is in school here and a friend I've never seen in the flesh before, but whom I talked with a great deal over a good many things. We'll see how it goes. In the mean time, my body is amazed at what it's like to not play TF2 for an entire day. We've been to Trader Joe's and to the Mecca that is Original Tommy's, and eating my single cheese, extra chili, hold everything but the slab of fresh, local tomato, please. It was amazing. My stomach is still uneasy about what I did, but... a price well worth paying. *laughs* We got out to the Santa Monica pier at night, walked it and ate a churro. Got to see the fishing was good on the end of the pier, and got some good steps in today. It's a break from the gaming... We made it into the top 16, didn't make the top 8, however, who were in the play offs.

I have rarely, in my life, been so without a long-term plan for where I was going or what it was that I was going to do. With work, there had always been a plan; with the books, there was the finishing of them; with the painting, there were the shows; and with the church, there was a clear agenda of what had to be done. But, ever since May, I've been going forward into this gaming world like a blind man moving without even a cane to figure out where the next step even was. I'd just feel my way forward with each day; and things happened to me, sometimes without my really consciously choosing what it was I was going to do, who it was that I was going to seek out, or even a very clear idea as to what it was I was even attempting to accomplish. I would blindly ask and then I would receive the unexpected. Like going to TPF and asking to learn how to play with other people and being gifted with people well beyond what I thought was my ability to play against. Going into competitive

Lots of things have been happening, some of them looked bad when they happened, but some of it has turned out all right. Our 20-year-old Passat died a complete death, I've had periodontal problems, and my old overuse problems with my hands and arms have come back with the competitive video gaming. None of those things were particularly surprises, per se, but they haven't been that much fun.

... I did nothing but exist. It was 9 F (-13 C) outside, and I stood there, watching through the open garage door all the tiny flakes dance down out of a white sky onto a landscape blanketed in light and limned in sepia and shadow. Every breath bit cold at the linings of my nose and the back of my throat. I stole the moment because I was helpless. There was nothing I could do, so I did nothing but exist. I had an 11 am appointment that I was going to miss. I'd left my keys in John's car, and he'd found them there, and was running them back to me in order to rescue me, taking time from his meetings and calls and arrangements, making me a priority ahead of the rest of his plans. I was grateful. I'd called the chiropractor to tell them I was late, and they would tell my massage therapist. We would just have to wait and see how things played out. So I just breathed and saw and felt. And it was good. John was happy about being able to help me, and I was grate