Liralen's Adventures Through Life

Our walk was along the Sandstone Reach, which follows the St Vrain Creek as it meets up eventually with Boulder Creek and other Front Range waterways. It is open land, with plenty of wetlands and the birds and wildlife that goes with it.  There was one bald eagle right on the waterway who flapped painfully up until it caught a current and then it circled higher and higher until we couldn't see it when it presented sideways to us and could only catch the black flash of its wings when it was headed away from us. It was amazing to watch it just ride the wind up without a single flap after the initial flurry. It's about a two mile walk from the parking lot we've found to Sandstone Ranch proper, and another two back, all as flat as creek side paths can be, and Longmont City has paved it all with cement so it's smooth, easy walking and we can make distance at a good pace for aerobic work. There were a lot of people on the path, today, and nearly everyone wore masks when we pa...

Or Many Things... One of the things was getting around to cutting Jet's hair and having it turn out pretty good. Good enough he actually thanked me for the cut, after, which I was very very pleased by, and gives me some hope for when I have to get my hair cut to just get the heaviness out. Another was signing up to make 50 face masks for MaskRelief.com , which is shipping packs of materials for masks to sewers, who send them back so that they can be donated to medical facilities around the country. I'm doing about five a day, and finished the first 25 already; but another friend who was in desperate need for something to do has "borrowed" the second pack of 25 until her shipment comes. The other thing that I did turned out to be bigger than I'd imagined and is tied very tightly with something I've been working on for the last year. Since the beginning of last year, I've been involved with the Longmont Community Justice Partnership , which is a r...

We had a little time with Jet between the Hawaii trip and the end of the Christmas break, which was nice and we had one adventure during that time that was pretty amazing. I'd bought tickets in October for the Monet exhibit at the Denver Art Museum, titled The Truth of Nature. The full photo album can be found if you follow this link. I've always loved Monet, but never really understood why he was an Impressionist when so much of what he painted is so easily recognized for what it is; but then I didn't understand why that title had been made in the first place. The exhibit features more of his paintings than have ever been gathered in one place and it was beautifully organized by all the places he loved. It also included an excellent explanation of Impressionism, what was, at that time, thought of as characterized by hasty, unfinished work that didn't have the level of detail or meticulous finish that "real" paintings had in that day. I was mildly aston...

Uhm.  Yeah. I fall prey to the impulse to mostly write then things are good, not when things are bad, or when things I decided don’t quite turn out the way I’d wanted them to. But that’s also a part of life and not blogging about the bad stuff means that I’m only bragging about the good.  Bleh. So. The dental thing I thought I’d taken care of?  Not so much.  The dentist didn’t actually figure out the adjustment of the bite until the third subsequent visit, and by then all the nerves were so inflamed he had me do a week-long prednisone series to calm things down.  And that didn’t just calm down the inflammation it also has depressed me significantly as well as delayed my final test on my blood sugar numbers for another three months. But I am maintaining my lower weight pretty well, with the help of my boys.  That’s been a good note. But speaking of delays... the new house has been delayed significantly by a new city inspector who decided that t...

Since October, I've been filling my time with a lot of new things. One of those things that I've realized, as an introvert, is that I still need community.  No matter how tired or frustrated people sometimes make me, I still need the contact, still need to toss ideas around with people, and still delight in meeting new people and getting to know them. So I'm back in a position with our church, and it's as the head of the Pastoral Relations Committee, the people of the congregation who are supposed to help tend to the covenantal relationship between the pastors and the congregation.  It's an interesting job, and I held it for a while when I was moderator-elect, before I became moderator.  I'm oddly comfortable with it, too, as my main function really is to listen.  Listen to the pastors, listen to members of the congregation, and listen to how things are going between them. I've also been joining a few of the small groups, people that are gathering toge...

It's taken a while, mostly from circumstances beyond my control, which is all right. I only have seven more weeks of being moderator, and I am actually counting the weeks. It's not a pretty reality, but it's what I've got. Thanksgiving went well. Our trip down to San Diego started in a horizontal snow storm on the way to DIA, 90 degree weather in La Jolla, lots of wonderful food adventures, and then a cooler end to the week there and a trip home to a winter wonderland of snow.

The heavy rains yesterday did send some of our friends back into evacuation mode, but we're fine. Whew... and now begins the cleanup... That's John in the shorts, Hawaiian shirt, glasses and mustache. We're starting to dig friends and neighbors and anyone else out that needs help. John's actually coordinating a huge number of people through our church to just get bodies where they can be used, and the outpouring of support has been amazing. The Longmont Foundation has been a long-time organization that takes all kinds of charitable contributions from industry, the community itself, and personal contributions and uses them for the good of the City of Longmont. They've organized a fund that will use 100% of its proceeds for the relief for flood victims, and I've had a long enough personal history with the organization to know that they'll deliver exactly as promised. If you're looking to help us, this is the best way to do it.

... to be in a Nationally acknowledged disaster area. It's not a good sign when local coverage of what's happening around town is going on all day. And we have been watching it as it unfolds all up and down the Front Range. My family and I are basically on a peninsula, cut off to the North, South, and West by destroyed or underwater roads. For a little while we were cut off to the East as well, when I-25 and highway 85 were closed, it was impossible to get to or leave Longmont for a little while yesterday. The St. Vrain River cuts us off to the North from the rest of Longmont, to the south Boulder "Creek" cut off a lot of Boulder from the rest of Denver to the south. Jet's school was closed Thursday for a Flood Day, and then we found out, on Friday that they were going to remain closed through next Wednesday, the 18th. So we just stayed at home, put away jugs of water, watched TV, ate our plentiful supplies, listened to helicopters going into and out of Longm...