Liralen's Adventures Through Life

When my son decided to go to Mines, he met a bunch of like minded young people his age, and when he first came home there was this time when he admitted that he and his cohort had decided that they were the ones who were going to have to save the world from Climate Change because all those who had gone before didn't seem to be up to the job. He and his friends were facing that reality with determination. A few months ago, he showed me this video: Kurzgesagt's " We WILL Fix Climate Change! " I watched it and cried, and he told me later that when he watched it, he cried too because the main gist of the video is that humanity, in concert, has brought ourselves back from the brink of self-destruction. The weight of the impending disaster was immense, and to know that we weren't all going to just die of Climate Change was huge. There's a lot more work still to be done, don't get me wrong, but all the Apocalyptic tones of authors screaming for attention and the ...

Strawberry Hill makes povitica for the Kansas City Ukranian and Croatian and Eastern European people in the Midwest. They do an amazing job of it and were highly recommended by John's father's cousins. So we bought an apple cinnamon one and an English walnut one to see what they were really like. We ate the apple cinnamon one, first, and that's what I started my experiments to reproduce. I started with Joy Food Sunshine's Homemade Povitica Bread Recipe , but it was far too light and airy and bread-like for me. It's a very nice loaf of sweet bread with a very light swirl of nuts for flavor and scent. It's a nice thing, but entirely unlike the Strawberry Hill loaf, which was super dense and the swirl of flavors dominated the almost chewy wrapper around the filling. It also had very little cinnamon, something I really missed as the Strawberry Hill apple povitica had a wealth of cinnamon richness. Also in talking to the Arkansas cousins, living in the American Sout...

I've been branching out a bit with my sourdough.  One particular branch had to do with my sore tooth. I couldn't quite handle the usual crust when I was recovering from my crown replacement. In part because I was still using a good deal of rice flour to keep the dough from sticking to the cloth I was using in the loaf pan for the overnight chill/ferment cycle. Rice flour makes for a much harder crust than I like, though it also allows for really pretty patterns because it comes out white.  The loaf to the left is one that had a LOT of rice flour being used to keep the cloth mostly non-stick, and I did it only once because the texture was so hard for me to chew. I read that one could use a 50:50 mix of rice flour and regular flour and that would mitigate the texture problem, but I ended up using the mix for just rubbing directly on the cloth AND using Farmer John's very coarsely ground whole wheat flour directly on the dough to keep it from sticking to the counter and that w...

There are two different everyday dumplings that we always used to make at home. One is the potsticker (gwo tiea) and the other is the boiled dumpling (jow tzs) (literally foot). They have a variety of innards and different wrapper dough to deal with their cooking environments. Dough Ingrediants Potsticker Dough 400 grams all purpose flour 210 grams boiling water 2 grams salt Boiled Dumpling Dough  400 grams all purpose flour 210 grams cold water 2 grams salt Dough Preparation - Is the same for both Put the flour and salt in a medium bowl, and, using a fork or chopsticks, gradually add the water. Pour out the pieces of dough and extra flour onto a clean counter and knead together. Place in a covered bowl and let rest for 20 minutes. Then take it out and knead it again until it's smooth and pliable, about 3-5 minutes, and then put in the covered bowl again to rest at least 20 minutes, but it can hold for a few hours. Filling 1 pound meat/protein. Usually ground pork, but ground turke...

I'm dreaming again. One of the side effects of the asthma drug I was taking was "vivid dreams". A lot of the wildest dreams I used to write about were when I was on the stuff. When I stopped taking it, I stopped dreaming. And with the sleep problems, I guess I wasn't getting much REM sleep. But... now that I seem to have worked out a new sleep regimen I'm regularly getting six to eight hours of sleep a night and, miracle of miracles, I'm dreaming again. Jet recommended the anime Demon Slayer  to me, so I've been watching it and it's been feeding my dreams interesting materials. Before that, it was mostly Hades and even Deep Rock Galactic. But between Demon Slayer 's art and motion (and the water animation is amazing) I'm now getting some distinct images at night and situations and sequencing in bright color and sound again.  And with the sleep, I seem to have also managed to make good progress with the healing of that tooth. It makes me aware w...

A year or so before the pandemic, I bought a pair of very bright, wide-toed running shoes that I used mostly for walking. During the pandemic, I walked a LOT of miles in them, given that I was walking about 10,000 steps a day. This was in order to deal with my cervical issues. When it first started, I couldn't really do anything without pain other than walk. And I kept up the habit and John joined me during COVID.  These are those old shoes. I wore through them. Actually ripped the sides of them during a hike on slick rock with water running over the rock, and trying to stabilize myself caused me to rip out both outsides. The soles had already started to wear smooth, so they were really slick on wet surfaces.  I even wore through the insoles, and only realized it after I wore these through the downpour in New Orleans. I'd had to take the insoles out to let them dry, and realized that I'd actually gone right through them. They were made by Altra , which is actually made near...

We got to see Turning Red  with Jet tonight!  It was a lot of fun. As Jet put it, part of it was not a part of my experience, but it was very entertaining. The whole puberty with other girls and being so... it just wasn't a part of my growing up; but it was fun to see anyway. The part of it that was very much a part of my growing up was both... painful and connecting. The whole experience of growing up in a Chinese household as a female to a mother who was Chinese was too close to home. For those who want to avoid spoilers, you should stop here.  Just go see it if you haven't, yet. You'll understand more of me, than I might. It was the line, "I will never be good enough for her."  I never felt like I was. Even with perfect SAT scores, getting into Caltech, being one of two women in a class of 200 MSEE's, making enough money in one year to pay off two cars and most of a house, none of it was good enough. There was always MORE I should be doing better. When I re...

Last night, when I went to lie down in bed, I felt briefly dizzy, but dismissed it as a by-product of my mild eye infection, that I'm ignoring until it's a week old. As it's likely viral and no doctor has anything they can do about it or any urgency about dealing with it unless it's more than a week old. I've now had enough of them to know that that is what happens if I bring it into a doctor. So I ignored it. I usually get up twice a night just to use the bathroom, wash my hands, and have a drink of water. I felt oddly dizzy during all that, and when I tried to lie down, the whole bed started feeling like it was spinning. Vertigo. Not fun. Not at all conducive to sleeping. Luckily, or unluckily, my sister has been plagued with vertigo of some sort or another for a good decade, so John and I knew that there was some maneuver to deal with crystals dislodging in the ear, and he looked it up. It's the Epley Maneuver . It's patently well-documented. And John rea...

The A/V job was well worth doing. The memorial was very heartfelt and John did the work while I helped him with cameras and the sound. There was a huge gathering, too, of family, friends, and the community around the family. The support was palpable. It was good to do.  And, for the first time in two years, John and I went to a neighborhood party in the afternoon/evening. They were a vegetarian/vegan household, but we knew they ate eggs. So I made a pecan pie. Of course, it started with the pecans. When we were going through Texas, John and I stopped at two different pecan "stores". One was far more interested in selling any tourist anything they might happen to want from Texas. The second, just off the side of the highway in Chillicothe, TX, was actually trying to sell pecans. There were signs all through town saying, "We buy pecans." So I guess there are a lot of pecan trees in the area, but these were from the Valley Pecan orchard, or so they say and all the nuts...

I have gotten out of the habit of writing every night. I do other things. I play games, I watch Disney+ or YouTube. I paint. I draw. I shower. I do my night ritual so that I can get to sleep, when sleep wasn't a thing I was getting for many a night, the ritual has become important. I'm grateful I had a really good night's sleep last night.  I was filling in all the new patient paperwork for my upcoming annual exam and trying to find a new doctor and a number of the questions had to do with sleep. I may still ask for a sleep study. We'll see if there are other issues with my sleep that I don't know about, or that John doesn't wake up enough to know. But I realized that after an entire month when I couldn't sleep worth a darn, it's amazing  to know that I'm going to just sleep when I get to bed. I had a good day.  I got to get a massage. I got to play with Jet and Erin at Deep Rock Galactic before dinner. We've been playing once or twice a week for...

I've now been doing transcripts at Longmont's 911 for 9 years. It's changed a lot from burning CD's for all the attorneys to a completely digital process, and going from tracking all the phone and radio traffic for an incident to nothing but the initial phone call. It's also gone from doing maybe half a dozen to doing sometimes upwards of fifty a week. I was very glad that there were only twenty something this week, so I wasn't much more than an hour. Having a lot of practice helps.  It was odd, though, going to the bulk store for dried soy beans and the library and not really needing a mask. A few people were still going about with them, but with the positivity numbers so low and the county and state mandates gone, I think most folks were feeling that it was okay to be without. And I realized, especially during the latter part of the road trip, that I rarely actually get within six feet of anyone for any amount of time, much less ten minutes on most errands. So...

We got home in less than two days, and last night, when I went to bed, I knew I was going to be in trouble. For the last several months, I've been waking up at night, when I was here in Colorado, with a panic response. I felt like I couldn't get enough air. I would take a lung capacity test, and it would come out normal; but I felt, emotionally, like I couldn't breathe . It was awful. My allergy doctor, Dr. Li of Flat Iron Allergy, has been urging me to take my Advair twice a day when it used to be that one inhalation a day was enough for me. So, reluctantly, I decided to take his advice. I probably should have done it sooner, as that very night, I stopped having the panic attacks. He's also the doctor who told me to get off Montelukast, which used to be an asthma drug that Dr. Murthy put me on, but the side effects of Montelukast were anxiety, vivid bad dreams, and some patients became suicidal. There were also side effects of ADHD, sleeplessness, and loss of mental cl...

The night before we left, on the TV was the guy in charge of the throws for the St. Patrick's Day parade. He proudly showed off the 1200 pounds green cabbage heads, and I couldn't get out of my head my incredulity at the idea of catching a head of cabbage when I was expecting beads or a doubloon. And as we pulled away from the Garden District, we saw several people in chairs along the parade route and a bunch of chairs were setup too. It was right outside the door of where we'd stayed. If we knew, we might have stayed another night, but it was also good to get out before the crowds. There were cranes and herons out in the wetlands around the city. The white chop on the brown water, and the beauty of the white birds in the brown trees with the green starting to blush on the ground and on the ends of the branches.  We headed out, across Louisiana to Texas. The one stop we took was at a crackling stand. It was pretty obvious that everything that was in the stand was fried in t...