Liralen's Adventures Through Life

I have seen a lot about bone broth the last several years?  I think?  I can't remember exactly when I didn't see it in the grocery story and didn't know that baby Yoda drank bone broth in the Mandalorian (which, by the way, I haven't actually seen, yet, and am not sure if I'm going to). I know I was mildly intrigued, but not enough to pay That Much for a box of "bone broth" and not quite enough to go and get bones from the butcher to make it. However... Sky Pilot Farms is our supplier of eggs from their chickens on their farm who all live in Longmont as well. I love getting things that are made Right Here, when I can. I was getting a dozen eggs from them at the Farmers' Market every single time I remembered. When COVID hit and we ran out of eggs one week, I went to their farm stand and bought them there in the early summer/late spring, until the week when they sent stuff via email that they weren't going to be doing ad hoc things out of the stand a...

 ... are very much less well defined than others. With the combination of being thoroughly retired and COVID, most of the days don't have a lot of structure and sometimes I accidentally add to that by just not being terribly well organized or having much of a plan or priority for anything. Mostly because I don't have to?  But it helps having outside input now and again, or external deadlines that reflect on what I need to get done. One of the recent deadlines was an October art show with my church, and instead of showing the paintings within the building of the church, all the artists were asked to either provide a video or send pictures of their art and some preferred music to Karina Doyle, who did the video for the Puerto Rico mission trip. She does good work. I, however, decided I wanted to do my own, and I'd even contacted Cynthia Lin of U3. They'd just put out an album called "In Waves". I'd been following her ukulele lessons on YouTube, and loved her...

Near the beginning of the pandemic, CP Gray came out with a video " Spaceship You ", which I have thought about a lot since I saw it. It's one of the reasons why John and I go out and walk every single day, there aren't that many useful handles on mood outside of physical activity and that's the one physical activity that we can do a lot of out here. Luckily, this part of Longmont is relatively sparsely populated, and the people we normally see on our walk are either neighbors or the people living in the condos and Wee Cottages across the street. Everything East of us is wide open (though perhaps soon to be filled in a bit with a Costco and businesses, which still shouldn't produce more people wandering about the trails and sidewalks around us. But one of the things that John's exceptionally good at has been updating or reconstructing our living areas to better fit our needs. I sometimes have ideas of what I want, but he's been amazing at implementing ...

One of those things that struck me today, while John and I were walking, was that the flags were at half mast. It was for Pearl Harbor, but it struck me again that there really hasn't been a period of mourning for the quarter million people who have died of COVID in the US, yet. Due, in large part, to Trump wanting to deny that any of this has happened, I think, but it's been a thing that's bothered me badly. Back in 2013, when the flood happened here, it physically affected a relatively small portion of the city, but everyone in Longmont went into a sort of mourning over the losses. Not just the temporary losses of the usage of parts of the city, including a very large section of green space, or that so many people had damage to their houses, or even the homes completely lost. Luckily, no lives were lost in Longmont, though other communities were not quite as lucky.  Grief takes effort and energy. For someone close, it's a lot of energy and time. But the overwhelming n...

So since about March, we've been watching church from home, at first via Zoom and now through YouTube.  Of course, John, being John, helped lead the charge to get the service online and streamlining the process so that instead of having four or even five people sometimes to get it to stream properly, we're now down to two volunteers and one of our staff doing the work to get all the sound, cameras, and video prompting to work. One of the pieces is this beast of a machine, with a Ryzen 7, water cooling, and a very nice video GPU. It was fun pointing John at all the resources that I had used and helped Jet use to build our machines, and have him go ham. It was far less expensive, and while COVID had made some hardware harder to get, it was also possible to look at alternatives with PCPartsPicker  and find the best prices that search engines could find. The best thing was making sure that it's upgradable, that the power supply, casing, and motherboard would make it easy to put...

I've been making masks. A whole lot of masks. At the beginning of the pandemic, I was actually buying a shirt from High Seas Trading Company and John gets so many shirts from them, that the owner asked me if I'd be willing to volunteer for their Mask Relief efforts to get LA front line health care workers some masks when all the PPE had dried up for everyone. So I said that I'd be happy to do two 25 mask kits. A few of my friends did them as well, and they were very fiddly, specific masks, that had four pleats, a pocket opening that was centered in the back of the mask, and a nose wire. I think I was doing them in my sleep, with all the pleats. But I learned how to pleat with a pair of tweezers to hold the pleat in place, and after breaking three needles, finally figured out how to get through all that cloth.  After that nearly all the other designs were simple. These were defined by health care workers and retail dress makers, and I have noticed, since, that nearly everyon...

Today I'm thankful for something that didn't happen. And since it's not mine to tell, I'll just leave it there. The intensity of the gratitude is as big as it's vagueness. *laughs* Instead, I will talk a bit about my three favorite adventures in Puerto Rico, two of them happened at the very end, the other was basically when everything at the camp started to flood due to the deluge of rains that were coming down. *laughs* Here is the video that Karina made of the whole trip: That rain at the beginning? I recorded that just to remember the thunder of the rain pouring down. That was when the whole camp was just running with water, and it was streaming through the grounds, knee high and even hip high in some low areas around the buildings. The meeting hall below our dorm was flooded, and the other group that came and stayed in the other half of the dorm, had to mop out their kitchen.  Colorado is a very arid place, and I haven't been in rain like that for a very lon...

Pokémon Go has been a useful obsession. It's helped me get out of the house and walk when I really didn't want to, and kept me out when I probably should have come back. Especially during these COVID times, I need to get out and walk to stay sane. So I go out. Today it was 31F when I went out, so I was in extra layers. It was good and I caught so many that I decided to go ahead and try for the 200 in one day task for level 41. Yeah, I'm one of those players. I have over 11 million XP at this point, and while I had the 6 million needed for level 41, I still had to do the special tasks. One was already done. One was the 200 in a day. One is 30 raids won, which at a raid pass a day is 30 days, but I keep getting more remote passes than I should. *laughs* My hands got pretty cold. And most of my stops are a fifteen minute walk from home, other than the gym that I can access from inside my hous e. Yes. I am the envy of some players. *laughs* But it's just one gym and while i...

To touch on Puerto Rico... mostly because I made a couple of friendships there that I hadn't expected and one got strengthened in a way I also hadn't expected. This year, UCC Longmont decided to try and do two weeks of reconstruction in Puerto Rico, as compared to the one week last year. Many more people wanted to go, the accommodations could only take so many, and so we spread everyone out into two teams with some folks that wanted to be there for both weeks. We did fundraising dinners, had potluck dinners to learn Spanish and cook food from Puerto Rico, and raised nearly 10,000 dollars to be used on the materials we needed to fix things there. There was a core group of seven folks who were staying for both weeks: John and I, Jeff and Lysa, Fran, Carole and Linda. There were about ten for each of the weeks in addition to the core seven, and both groups had vastly different personalities, but both were fun.  Linda and I got to know each other back before I was even moderator, a...