Liralen's Adventures Through Life

It's very odd to look at a written piece now and know that it really is a pretty good first draft, but that it really truly needs a second draft rewrite. The skin's too thick there, there's too much Shiny there, the guts are hanging out here, the bone structure could be balanced there.... It's odder yet, now, being able to look at a painting and go... that's a good first try, now, let's get on with the REAL painting... Reminds me of the times I've been knitting a sweater or a shawl and I suddenly just start ripping the whole thing out and John's watching me, shocked. "It's just not right..." Or when I was writing code for some of Jet's turtles on Minecraft, and I shocked him by deleting a few dozen lines and replacing them with three. "Oh, that's awesome," he said, looking at it. What's stranger yet is that, for me at least, it's all becoming the same sort of thing. Make it better, make it stronger, more e...

It was a mildly crazy day today, because I had six reports to do for the 911 folks in the morning, that took nearly all of my four hours, and then I spent four hours in a watercolor class this evening with  Ugljesa Janjic , a local watercolor painter. The 911 stuff had moved from Friday to today because we spent yesterday on a small trek to the Stupa out in the Red Feather Lake area, and that had turned out beautifully. I have some wonderful things that I want to paint out of that hike, too, but it and a trip to Copoco's Honey in Fort Collins for some emergency mite control effects. So it's been a full couple of days. And Ugljesa was amazing and even though I was the only person signed up for his class, he held it anyway, and he not only held it, but he let me use his palette and board to get a really good feel for how he works and what he does. He works on FULL SHEETS (30x22 inches) of watercolor paper, 140 lb, and just pure white, with a good tooth if he can find i...

Guilin was the smallest of the cities we were visiting, with "only" 700,000 people, and according to Lily and Jevons, it's pretty much a village out in the middle of no where, in comparison. It's quite close to Vietnam, and the sultry weather matches. The city has very distinct limits on the buildings, making sure that there were no high rises to cut off the views of the mountains. And there were mountains everywhere ... all of limestone and all carved into karst formations that are covered with trees and tropical growth. They are quite reminiscent of Vietnam's landscape. Our hotel was right by the Li River, in the heart of their shopping district. It had rained the day before, so profusely that the temperatures had dropped to something in the high 70's and low 80's when, usually, by the end of May, their temperatures are in the 90's. Sadly, the change in location didn't help my asthma, which really started to act up. Luckily, though, the overca...

We went to a reception for the wedding of one of John's high school friends, and it was pleasant. Second marriages for them both, so they asked that no one give them gifts, just be present, and it was nice. Since it was in the south end of Denver, we, of course, hit Ikea, just to look, and came out with a small armful of things. Went to H Mart and came out with a whole cart of food, including Jet's favorite meal when John's busy for an evening, grilled eel. They always remind me of Jin, in  Samurai Champloo trying to kill eels in the woman's cart.  We came home tired, had a quick dinner of BBQ chicken, wok-seared green beans, and chibata from the Farmer's Market with a quick dip of extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar and a few fresh tomatoes from the garden. So good, so quick. And then we went swimming in the neighborhood pool, and it started raining as we walked, and droplets pocked the surface as we swam, quickening until the sky lit with lightning and the...

The end of the Seattle trip has been kind of crazy. It started easy with Isabel for our last day, but things didn't turn out quite as planned with the Eurovan, and circumstances snowballed into one utterly insane day that could only have happened under the full moon.

We spent two shellfish and family packed days in Bellingham, WA, where we went to a hang gliding take-off point, a beach through the woods, and all around town (especially Mallard's Ice Cream). We stayed late on Friday to have dinner with Yuri and Emily, and then went to Redmond with John's mother, Isabel. From here we took Saturday to visit with the Gaynors, Sunday to visit Eastgate Congregational UCC and William and Jo in Ballard and meet with a bunch of Synarians at the Pellerin's for dinner. On Monday we took Isabel to the Great Wheel on the waterfront and Pike's Place Market, and then today we spent getting all kinds of stuff from Frye's, Ballard Bees (two medium supers!), and Trader Joe's. It's been kind of busy. It's also been kind of amazing realizing that I've been friends with Jim for more than 26 years, William for more than 16 years, and I'm not even going to be able to count years with all the people from Synario. Best of al...

We spent a really great day on the eighth at the Lewis and Clark Caverns and the camping site that was just at the foot of the mountain that held the caverns. On the ninth, however, due to a series of unfortunate events, we ended up spending most of the day in Butte, Montana, waiting in car repair shops and getting ferried by various people as the Eurovan got carried by flatbed truck to said repair shops. What exacerbated the experience was the fact that Butte was having a festival and a rental car couldn't be had for love or money, and the guys at Car Tunes, where the Eurovan is now being repaired, did just about everything they could. We ended up staying the night in a Comfort Inn, taking advantage of the "stranded motorist rate", which I didn't know even existed until now, and being wished well by nearly everyone we met. That was pretty cool. So now we're another 700 miles to the West and a bit north, in a rental car from Enterprise. We went to Bellingham ...