Liralen's Adventures Through Life

Since October, I've been filling my time with a lot of new things. One of those things that I've realized, as an introvert, is that I still need community.  No matter how tired or frustrated people sometimes make me, I still need the contact, still need to toss ideas around with people, and still delight in meeting new people and getting to know them. So I'm back in a position with our church, and it's as the head of the Pastoral Relations Committee, the people of the congregation who are supposed to help tend to the covenantal relationship between the pastors and the congregation.  It's an interesting job, and I held it for a while when I was moderator-elect, before I became moderator.  I'm oddly comfortable with it, too, as my main function really is to listen.  Listen to the pastors, listen to members of the congregation, and listen to how things are going between them. I've also been joining a few of the small groups, people that are gathering toge...

So every year, I make the pilgrimage to the Bay Area to visit Carl, do a round of visits with old friends from Caltech, the old usenet, and from Carl's games from the 1990's. We catch up, eat great food, and then we end the week at BigBadCon, which is now in Walnut Creek at the Walnut Creek Marriott.  It's been there a few years, now, and we've started to really get to know the venue and all the things that are offered around the hotel, which is nice. Part of the reason why this is pretty much the only convention I go to anymore is because we always start with a round of visiting people or catching up with them during a dinner or something. Half the fun is that a lot of the things we do have become something of a Tradition. I flew out on the 8th of October, and met up for Peking Duck and all the good things at Chef Chu's with the old Mountain View crew, who mostly don't live there anymore, and only make it to this part of the area once a year.  It was a sm...

I'm going to take a page out of Jet's book of plays and just go through time as I'm able.  I came home from the last trip with a cold, a severe lack of sleep, a rather messed up upper body, and a number of issues with the way my vision was working. I also had a teeth cleaning yesterday, which I'm happy to report found nothing that needed to be worked on this time.  That a first for a while, and I'm really grateful, but I've been mostly recovering instead of being able to write and juggle pictures. After the West Coast trip, John and I had a good few days at home that included going to the amazing wedding of Andrew, the son of Bob, a co-worker of ours who had been with us in Redmond and had done the move to Boulder in 2000. Actually, Bob hadn't done the move then, he'd waited for his daughter to finish high school and then came with Andrew and his wife Mei. Andrew was a part of Jet's growing up, and we've been close friends with them for a very ...

A few days before we had to leave Seattle to get home in time for appointments and a showing of My Hero Academia: Two Heroes,  John and I sat down to figure out which way we wanted to go home.  There was the quick way, which was via I-80 through the mountains, but it was fast, freeway, and kind of boring without too much to stop and do along the way. The other way was up north, through Vancouver into Banff National Park and then down south through the way we'd gone a few years ago when Jet was off on his European trip. The third way (and probably not the last) was through Yellowstone National Park, just taking I-90 east and then heading south into the park. We looked up the weather along the latter two routes, as we decided we didn't want to just go the same old way down, and it turned out that Banff was expecting rain and fairly cold weather the whole time, and Yellowstone looked like it was going to be both warmer and clearer, though there were still some chances of rain...

"I thought we were in Seattle.  What is that huge bright thing up in the sky?" It's been cool here, but sunny.  Ordinarily, it is sunny here through September and into October, the long Indian summer is almost always a part of Seattle weather, but it's fun to talk about, especially since all the weather reports had been predicting rain for most of the days we were to be here.  60's as a high and clouds all the way down the ten day forecast.  But it's been remarkably clear and sunny here while we've been here, and I've been enjoying it a great deal. I really enjoyed sitting on Isabel's back porch.  I read, I sketched the geraniums, and I waited for these guys to come to the hummingbird feeder.  There were hummingbirds who had staked out the feeder and it was always something of a thrill to hear the thrumming of their wings. Our time with Isabel is something I think I'll just hold private.  It was good and helped me heal from some things I...

Finally got my little camera hooked up to the connection as well as my phone. The phone is easy... but sometimes I just snap random things with the little camera that comes out so much cooler than I thought. Some of my utterly favorite things from the Paramount Studio Tour were things I hadn't expected. The first was finding that Lucille Ball had been the first true believer in the Star Trek franchise, and the photo in the front forum of the tour area. It was also the first time I realized just how much of a power Lucille Ball had been not only in her own studio, the Desilu production company, but later on also in the whole of the Paramount powerhouse of TV and movie making.   The sign shop was amazing, mostly because the guy that was in charge of it all had started with pinstriping cars, and had done such a good job on one of the cars that someone had offered him a one-time job at Disney to do that kind of detailing for the rides there.  From there he'd gone o...