Liralen's Adventures Through Life

One of those odd things, that I've been wanting to write about for some time, has been about gender boundaries. About the spaces where I've been walking that seem exclusive to one gender or the other. And I'm talking about a 100 to 1 ratio, on the most part. In fanfiction nearly everyone involved was female, or they were males who were transgender, they'd been born female and were moving toward what they felt was their true nature. The odd thing there, for me, was that they were firmly embedded in an all-female community and had few if no inclinations to move away from it. They might have to deal with everyday life as a male, but their online social life was nearly completely with women. Gamers are nearly all male. I know of three or four women who play, but they're few and far between, and I know more transgender females than I do ones that were born female. And, just like the transgenders in fanfiction, they're happier staying in the community that they ...

I spent nearly fourteen hours on ramen broth, yesterday. *laughs* I should have taken a picture or three, but it's a slow process. Momofuku Noodle Bar has a cookbook out that details it's exacting process for making ramen broth, and I follow all the bits but the bacon and I use bonito shavings instead of bacon. I also probably skim a little more fat off the broth than they do, but it's all to the good, and I don't put any salt in it so that when we eat it with our noodles, we add it then. I have a smoked salt that we love in it, along with the usual mirin, soy, and, when I have an extra chicken carcass leftover from making fried chicken or whatever, we do get tare of a sort. I needed the long slow process to get through more profile, and through a bunch of Rainbow 6 videos teaching me about how to learn maps and how to flank and how to play a more vertical game on the various maps. That's one of those things about Rainbow is that a lot of the floor can not ...

I'm on a search committee for our church and I basically can't talk about much about who we're talking with or some of what we're doing, but the basic idea is to find a pastor for our church and to present our church to pastors so that they can figure out if they'd like to serve us. And we can't talk about them, at all, because they might be working or doing things with their church and no one knows, yet, that they're looking, as that's just how it's done. But while going through all the profile, someone was incredulous about the number of introverts there were as candidates, and I thought about it a lot. You want an introvert because of the nature of confidentiality, you want someone who will think about every word they say and cannot slip about things that they shouldn't be talking about. Besides, introverts listen very very well; but the other searchers were right about the fact that pastors do have to deal with people, and lots of people ...

My characters are talking to me again. It's... kind of cool and kind of troublesome and kind of making me wonder what it is about just putting words to screen that wakes them up again. Though, to be honest, it was really the asthma that woke Ukitake up, and he was gently encouraging me to breathe slow and deep, to keep control of my breathing rather than letting the coughing take over while I was in my bed in the middle of the night and I really needed more sleep. It worked. Life and characters and creation is an odd mix. The one that has been waking up the most used to be my original twist on Kisuke (yes, equally intelligent and amoral, but lazy enough to stay on the right side of the law). A character that I signed over all rights to someone else; but... I still have an even older name, Argent, who has been in my head for a very long time. He's woken up and is watching me with sleepy gray eyes. He's been enjoying the Rainbow Six Siege games immensely. Just yesterda...

I did a bunch of things today, most of them away from the computer, but a few of them with the new screen that I’d gotten for Christmas, with a 32-inch diagonal. I watched Moana on it, and really enjoyed it. I don’t get to see Disney movies when they first come out the way I did when my son was a lot younger, but this one was well worth watching. They did a good job respecting the Polynesian cultures being portrayed, including hiring a native for the lead role. That was nice, but it really was the story that did it for me. No romance at all involved, which was cool to see, but just friendship and working together at things, which was all good. I cried through a lot of it. That’s okay. It’s good to have good stories. When it was done, I worked on a calligraphy lesson for people that wanted an hour and a half class in the afternoon. I then ran out to get some supplies, return some library books and the movie. Yes, our local library has a bunch of the newest DVD’s available f...

  I got a look at the smoldering mess that was under the lava cap sitting on my emotions when, of all things, my husband asked me if I shouldn’t be using the old rice in the refrigerator rather than cooking some more for the eel and rice dinner my son and I were having.  John was having to eat grits and eggs because he’d had periodontal work done earlier in the day, so he wasn’t even eating with us. I said, “No. There isn’t enough. Jet and I were just talking it through.” And he came back with a, “I didn’t hear your conversation.” And Jet chimed in with, “We talked about it in the car, Mom...” And I said, “No. We were talking about it as we came into the kitchen.”  And I got a whole lot angrier for what seemed no reason. It took some talking and working things out before I could get at what was really going on with it all. I am sick of the fact that the women who have been sexually harassed basically being told that it’s  their fault  that it’s still...

Today's good stuff included a house newly clean (with all three of us working at it to finish in a couple of hours), a good set of matches in R6 this morning with SyncHeart, DarkToaster, and my son, a lesson on the layers of writing in the New Testament including metaphor as more than historic fact, and a walk where I didn't cough continuously for longer than I had breath.  With the latter I got to talk with John in good ways about some of the loss elements of my life. Part of it is facing the fact that the child who I birthed and have shared my life with for nearly two decades is growing up and being a wonderfully capable adult and is going off on adventures a year earlier than I expected. He's thinking of doing something overseas next year for half the year, which is wonderful for him and says a lot about how he's grown.  I appreciate the good parts of that immensely.  It's a true mother's goal, I think, to have a child who is entirely capable on his o...

As can be surmised, I came back from the Florida trip in bad physical shape.  The funny thing was I am hurting where I wasn't hurting before the trip and things that had been hurting before the trip had stopped until I came back. Days of doing nothing but being in a car, watching kids, or walking my feet off used very different muscles and emotions and tendons than did sitting at my desk in my office for much of the time. And I had time to not only think, but talk with my husband about a few things that have been recurring thoughts. The foremost was that after spending most of my life using my blogs and journals to process my emotions, I've walked almost completely away from them for more than three years.  Some of the reasons were good ones, having to do with the change in how the Internet now works compared to what it used to be, where anyone could find out anything that I said about them if they took a moment to look.  I had a relative of mine tell me that they'd read ...

John and I drove a UHaul van filled with instruments and uniforms from Longmont, CO to Tampa Bay, FL starting the day after Christmas and ending up in Florida on the 28th, in the afternoon. The temps started at 5° F and didn't get above 12° F until the last day. I'd picked up a cold from Jet at the very start, and we pushed the run, knowing we had a time limit, so it was just three days of eat the hotel breakfast, eat lunch from our cooler, stop and stretch for dinner, and then hit bed at around 11 pm at a hotel we'd booked when we'd figured out our route, which was straight east on I-70 until St. Louis, keep going east on I-40, head south east through Tennessee into Georgia, and then go down to Florida. The last day of the road trip was a bit of a blur for me, because I was so sick. But I'll admit that I did a lot better than Jet had when he had the cold, he had two entire days of being completely out of it and sleeping all day. That might have been as much due ...