Liralen's Adventures Through Life

John and I have this habit, on vacations, of just going to an area and then discerning what's interesting in this new place and going to explore that with intensity. We've done this repeatedly: flying into Hawaii, knowing we had a free resort setup but little else, flying into Mexico with just our suitcases and asking the taxi guy where a cheap and good hotel was, and flying into London and lugging our luggage to a garret room with shared bathroom for a night before deciding to drive over 1000 miles all over the tiny island. China was an exception for us, and I think I now realize that I might have resented that in some small part, but also was grateful for it, though I spoke as much Spanish as I do Mandarin and we got by fine in Mexico. Still, China's government makes it a bit more difficult to go anywhere without requisitioned permissions. So, we started wandering the way we usually do...

It was interesting, this time around, that "going on vacation" actually meant a great deal more than usual. Ever since the flood, John's been working a pretty steady work week, sometimes even including Saturdays when local churches offered work parties for jobs that were available. So these last two weeks were really "time off" when it hasn't been that way for a long time. As a quick starter: these enormous Filley-Rostykus reunions started way way back, and had their roots in the times when Isabel and George would take their four boys across country in a station wagon to go back to Isabel's mother's home. Walt, John, and Isabel were all sibling and they would gather whenever the Rostykus clan made its way to the East Coast. One of the earlier ones I knew was when Isabel's mother turned 100, and as much of the clan as possible would gather. This particular reunion started about a year ago, and had its seeds within the reunion that myJohn organiz...

I went by myself, for the first time in a long time, to a movie theater to see Edge of Tomorrow . John's mother is in town, as she's going to be traveling with us to North Carolina on Saturday, and Jet and John were working at a flood house. I'd read the original book All You Need is Kill , translated from the Japanese, and I was so haunted by the book that I actually got rid of it once. I've since bought it again, reread it, and needed to see the movie. So I went. Alone. Probably for the first time in a few decades. *laughs* But I really needed to see it, and I liked the adaptation, and it is, indeed, an adaptation. It was fascinating to see how the changes really made it an American movie instead of the genre Japanese SF book with its intricate and haunting plot. I recommend it as a fun action movie, especially for those of us who are story choice-based video game addicts, and there were a few visceral hits for me as a twitch video game addict. I'd recommend the...

Had a really straightforward day today. I mostly dug weeds out of the raised beds in the garden, shopped at the local farmer's market, planted my last four tomato plants, and went swimming with the boys. The spice of the day was making clay pot rice for lunch for Jet and I, it was simple enough now that I have an actual clay pot to cook it in and the rice on the bottom was good and crunchy. I have to say I loved that it was raining while we swam.

I hope everyone who got to celebrate it had a wonderful Memorial Day. We had a pretty busy day. The three of us started at Leenie's Cafe, a restaurant that does New Orleans Specialties, including a "chocolate beignet" that was a beignet with melted bittersweet chocolate squirted on top. I haven't asked them if they're displaced from New Orleans, and I probably should. After that the three of us scattered: I helped with a garden consultation, John went off to work on a house (sealing tile and caulking the edges), and Jet went to a friend's house to play all day. The consultation was with a long time friend who's also a cancer survivor, and we had a lot of fun just wandering through her yard and talking about what she could or should do with various patches of it. We had their little dog with us, and he just wanted affection whenever we stopped to talk. It was a beautiful morning, sunny, warm, and dry. I went home, watered my tomato plants. I should ...

I think one of the reasons I didn't write here so often for quite some time is that a lot of my life has turned into involving other people's stories, not just my own. 911 is all about incidents I can't really talk about. Church often involves things that I can't talk about because they concern other people's privacy. And all the flood work has to do with putting back together people's lives, and talking a lot about their stories seems to make me feel odd, as it's really theirs to tell, not really mine. So I haven't been writing that much about the flood victims and the lives we're putting back together, but I may be shortchanging them and myself in that estimate. Today we threaded blanket insulation behind the 2x4's of the framing in the basement. It had all been taken out by two volunteer crews that did a great job of gutting out all the drywall, insulation, and carpeting in the basement, which sustained four feet of water down there. That ...

During the flood, a woman had the first floor of her house completely wiped out and along with it was a piano that she'd had for most of her life. Her brother is a concert pianist, she is not, but she took great comfort in the music. She's a single mom, and was living in a friend's house while we were rebuilding hers. She worked on her house pretty much every time I was there, and near the beginning John realized that she really missed her piano. So we lent her mine. Decades ago I'd been researching digital pianos and their cost, and one weekend I'd ducked into Costco to get something, and they were having a flash sale on digital pianos for about two-thirds their usual price. I walked out of the store with a piano on a cart. I'd played piano as a child, ten years of it, won second in a California-wide state competition, and as soon as I was out of my parents' house I dropped it. I wanted to play again, but even after I bought it back then, I just never r...