Liralen's Adventures Through Life

I burned Hell Money for Morgan when he died during COVID in an ICU for an infection. He was younger than I, and he was a kind man whom I had shared sushi with in a restaurant near BigBadCon when all the other folks went for BBQ with deep fried things. We had enjoyed the lighter fare and the smaller amount of company and we'd talked without the whole crowd of folks he'd always happily entertained, and it was good. I mourned him at a distance, for reasons you all well know. I still miss Isabel. That's to be expected for a while to come, and I find that I miss George more, too, with that. She kept his memory bright, and that kept them clear for me, too. Now I need to do the work for both. My stacks of hell money have been depleted significantly this last year, and it's a reminder for me that it's okay for me to feel sad when I'm still mourning. The incense and the smoke comfort even as they sting, and I remember all my dead. Even the ones I didn't know. The Bou...

I started reading James Clear's Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven way to Build Good Ones and Break Bad ones, and it started with a really interesting premise... I do recommend the book, as it's got a lot of specific details on how to improve life with a lot of small, doable changes in the systems one has for doing things. But the starting premise that really struck me was that habits often change because ones self-definition changes.  I really loved that. I had to drastically cut my sugar intake when I became pre-diabetic. And I realize now that "I AM pre-diabetic" became something of my mantra while I did all the small things I needed to cut nearly all the added sugar from my diet at that time. I lost 20 pounds, lowered my blood sugar, and even had half a dozen side effects that all improved my health; but none of those were what precipitated the change and none of those were my stated goal of the time. I just realized that I had become pre-diabetic and that my old s...