Liralen's Adventures Through Life

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