Liralen's Adventures Through Life

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

I'd missed my lesson by Mayee Futterman last week, while we were at Vera's house.  I thought about missing it again this week, but decided not to, so I did get up a little earlier than usual and John and I got on the trolley to go into town.  The electric trolleys run about every fifteen minutes or so, and there's an RTA app that not only shows you where you are, but where all the trolleys are along their lines and exactly where they are at all times. You can see when it's approaching your stop and when it's just left as well.  It went all the way to Canal Street, which is the main street downtown, and there's a Cafe Beignet just a couple of blocks down Canal. After the plantation, my right hip, knee, and calf weren't particularly happy with me, so I just went slow and it was okay. The line coming out of the Cafe Beignet was so long, that I could be as slow as I wanted. It gave us plenty of time to look around. A few of the things I saw were these bags of c

I actually slept for most of the day, yesterday, while John drove all over. I was pretty wiped from the dread of the dentist, and had a hard night of it last night, too. It didn't really help that a crew came to pour concrete for the driveway of the building and John set off the smoke alarm in the apartment when he made his breakfast.  My breakfast was a few block's walk away to the Gracious Bakery, where John had a breakfast bun and I had something called a Hazelnut Crimuffin, which was a croissant dough cut into bite-sized bites glued together with hazelnuts and cinnamon bun filling. It was quite good, crisp on top and layered and rich underneath. With a simple latte, it satisfied my need for something new. My word muscles have been feeling stupid stiff. It's been a really long time since I've really written much, and I feel awkward and gauche just listing the things that have been happening on this trip. It really probably isn't that terrible, but it feels so dif

There was mixed news at the dentist. The bite is just fine, it's that this is at least the third time this particular molar has been drilled into and there is some chance that the nerves and veins, the pulp in the tooth, is just going to die. There is some chance it will just heal on its own, but the experienced dentist here said that he thought it less likely than it failing eventually. The good news was that the X-Ray showed no deterioration along those lines, yet, and I've done this before, where the dentist was sure it was going to die, but it came back with time and being careful to not mess with it too much. It was oddly good to know that there really wasn't anything I could do for it other than wait. And it was really good to get confirmation that my dentist at home is entirely competent and that I can trust him with whatever does happen next. We headed out because it was supposed to be raining all day, and the turquoise house in the photograph was across the street

John was up and about early, and I got up a little later, but with plenty of time to make a fried egg and some toast. It was very nice for a simple breakfast, since we had plans for most of the day. It was supposed to be rainy and cool, and it was definitely cool enough for me to wear my leggings instead of shorts. We then took the trolley over to The National WWII Museum . It's an enormous museum, with a huge theater in the center that has a good hour's movie with Tom Hanks in it that goes over the whole history of the war. There's an entire wing for just everything up to the US entry due to Pearl Harbor, an entire floor of one building for the European Theater, and another for the Japanese and Asian Theater.  The movie was pretty solid, and used things like being able to shake the seats, bringing in an entire bomber fuselage, and other fun things like smoke and bits of snow to evoke the feeling of the moment.  There were thousands of exhibits, it seems, each battle in the