Liralen's Adventures Through Life

 ... are very much less well defined than others. With the combination of being thoroughly retired and COVID, most of the days don't have a lot of structure and sometimes I accidentally add to that by just not being terribly well organized or having much of a plan or priority for anything. Mostly because I don't have to?  But it helps having outside input now and again, or external deadlines that reflect on what I need to get done. One of the recent deadlines was an October art show with my church, and instead of showing the paintings within the building of the church, all the artists were asked to either provide a video or send pictures of their art and some preferred music to Karina Doyle, who did the video for the Puerto Rico mission trip. She does good work. I, however, decided I wanted to do my own, and I'd even contacted Cynthia Lin of U3. They'd just put out an album called "In Waves". I'd been following her ukulele lessons on YouTube, and loved her...

Honestly, it wasn't 'cause the bees found them under the elastic of my beekeeper's outfit.  *laughs* Though, perhaps, it helped. I'm finally kind of settling into the fact that Jet is out of the house, and that doesn't mean that I'm not his Mom, still.  My fitbit still says, "Hi Jetsmom!!" every time I look at it...  But I am finding that I'm settling into this new way of living. Just in time for me to uproot everything and go to LA with Tonya and Lisa and putz about there before heading up on a train to San Francisco, where John will meet Tonya and I and we'll all drive north together, wander about the redwoods, and then head further north to drop Tonya off at her friend's and the two of us will go visit Isabel in Redmond. Which should be good, too. One thing I'll note is that I've really recovered all my functionality from March, and my massage therapists are working on the last out-standing knots in my left shoulder.  I...

I spent nearly fourteen hours on ramen broth, yesterday. *laughs* I should have taken a picture or three, but it's a slow process. Momofuku Noodle Bar has a cookbook out that details it's exacting process for making ramen broth, and I follow all the bits but the bacon and I use bonito shavings instead of bacon. I also probably skim a little more fat off the broth than they do, but it's all to the good, and I don't put any salt in it so that when we eat it with our noodles, we add it then. I have a smoked salt that we love in it, along with the usual mirin, soy, and, when I have an extra chicken carcass leftover from making fried chicken or whatever, we do get tare of a sort. I needed the long slow process to get through more profile, and through a bunch of Rainbow 6 videos teaching me about how to learn maps and how to flank and how to play a more vertical game on the various maps. That's one of those things about Rainbow is that a lot of the floor can not ...

Today was one of those days.... I was added back onto the roster of my old 6's team, I got my bee allergy shot, I helped plan a siege defense, I got to play Rainbow Siege Six for the first time with my son and his friend, I had a last minute dental appointment with my periodontist that was nearly foiled by my GPS, and I might have a mild eye infection as well. But I got Dairy Queen and good gaming. I think I'm a little tired.

[putting this back up as it's.... real... ] Four of the guys who were regulars, either as substitutes or as main players, have said that they won't go forward with the team. Merek, the one with the most experience in competitive, who had gotten into ESEA open teams that were quite good, said explicitly that he wasn't going to play with the team if I wasn't playing anymore. He said that he'd had so much experience in competitive that it wasn't about winning anymore, it was about the people he was playing with. And if they weren't fun to play with, then it wasn't worth doing. And if I wasn't going to be playing with him, then he didn't want to play anymore. When I told Joanne that they'd had to have an ex-plat medic to replace me, she interrupted and said, "They can't replace  you . No one can replace you." She was right. And I have to hear them both...

I started in October, at the very last minute putting an ad up on the UGC LFP forums for the NA Iron teams. There were, as I understood it, five divisions, the lowest being Iron, then Steel, Silver, Gold, and Platinum. And the teams that placed in the top so many spots of each division could move up. I honestly didn't think I could even get into Iron... I only had 700 hours in the game, and barely 60 of them were as a Medic. I'd mostly played Pyro, Engie, Heavy, and Medic was my fourth-most played class. But Medic was the one class I thought I might be able to play in the 6's meta, which really only allowed for medics, soldiers, scouts, and demomen.

We've arrived in LA. It is the latter half of Jet's Spring Break, and we're here to remember, and to visit a few people, including a niece who is in school here and a friend I've never seen in the flesh before, but whom I talked with a great deal over a good many things. We'll see how it goes. In the mean time, my body is amazed at what it's like to not play TF2 for an entire day. We've been to Trader Joe's and to the Mecca that is Original Tommy's, and eating my single cheese, extra chili, hold everything but the slab of fresh, local tomato, please. It was amazing. My stomach is still uneasy about what I did, but... a price well worth paying. *laughs* We got out to the Santa Monica pier at night, walked it and ate a churro. Got to see the fishing was good on the end of the pier, and got some good steps in today. It's a break from the gaming... We made it into the top 16, didn't make the top 8, however, who were in the play offs. ...

I have rarely, in my life, been so without a long-term plan for where I was going or what it was that I was going to do. With work, there had always been a plan; with the books, there was the finishing of them; with the painting, there were the shows; and with the church, there was a clear agenda of what had to be done. But, ever since May, I've been going forward into this gaming world like a blind man moving without even a cane to figure out where the next step even was. I'd just feel my way forward with each day; and things happened to me, sometimes without my really consciously choosing what it was I was going to do, who it was that I was going to seek out, or even a very clear idea as to what it was I was even attempting to accomplish. I would blindly ask and then I would receive the unexpected. Like going to TPF and asking to learn how to play with other people and being gifted with people well beyond what I thought was my ability to play against. Going into competitive...

Lots of things have been happening, some of them looked bad when they happened, but some of it has turned out all right. Our 20-year-old Passat died a complete death, I've had periodontal problems, and my old overuse problems with my hands and arms have come back with the competitive video gaming. None of those things were particularly surprises, per se, but they haven't been that much fun.

... I did nothing but exist. It was 9 F (-13 C) outside, and I stood there, watching through the open garage door all the tiny flakes dance down out of a white sky onto a landscape blanketed in light and limned in sepia and shadow. Every breath bit cold at the linings of my nose and the back of my throat. I stole the moment because I was helpless. There was nothing I could do, so I did nothing but exist. I had an 11 am appointment that I was going to miss. I'd left my keys in John's car, and he'd found them there, and was running them back to me in order to rescue me, taking time from his meetings and calls and arrangements, making me a priority ahead of the rest of his plans. I was grateful. I'd called the chiropractor to tell them I was late, and they would tell my massage therapist. We would just have to wait and see how things played out. So I just breathed and saw and felt. And it was good. John was happy about being able to help me, and I was grate...

A UGC Steel team, even. And people seem to be trusting me with it. So. Since about April, I got involved in the TF2 (Team Fortess 2) gaming community. It started with joining the failing Team Play First Community, and getting pulled into the staffing because someone found out that I could play with computers and get them to do what I wanted them to do.

We've been in San Diego for our annual visit for Thanksgiving. It's been a little crazy thinking it's been a whole 'nother year. I've also been very absent from these pages. I think it was mostly because of the habit of keeping private the happenings at UCC Longmont, and it went even further now that I am friends with dozens of very Internet-active men in their teens and twenties. They're all great people, but are very private about their private names, they keep very strictly to their gaming labels, and they've seen what fame can do both bad and good. So they're careful about not giving out private information, and I respect that. Plus, nearly all of them are in the tldr camp, it seems. So I just don't. Or haven't. *laughs* Don't like being boring, in some ways, but it does seem like I've left the places I used to frequent all the time.

So for the last couple of weeks, we've been prepping Jet for his Colorado Music Ambassador's to Europe trip. He's going with Voyager's, a group that solely sets up high school bands, orchestras, and choirs for trips to Europe. Yesterday, we managed to get Jet checked in and off through security with 500 other kids. It was pretty crazy, and took four hours to get through the whole thing.... ... and then we packed the Eurovan, got our stuff together, and this morning we headed dead North along I-25. We've just driven from 9am until about 9pm with stops for lunch and dinner, and a few bathroom breaks and gas stops, and we're now in Harlowton, MT at the Country Inn Motel, which is superbly clean and comfortable for only $55 a night for the two of us.

Just been on a kind of recovery schedule... taking it easy, mostly, but trying to get some physical work in to let me sleep at night. Yesterday I spent hours on the rose garden, wedding, watering, and dead-heading in full sun, and it was wonderful. We've had a month of rainier and wetter weather than we're used to, which is nothing compared to what we used to get in Seattle, but here it was pretty unusual, so it's been nice that this week we're back to high-80's during the day and 50's at night, so that it's comfortable to sleep. Today I got to write with Amber a little later than usual. I had a good long walk through the whole neighborhood, too, along with a much needed two hour nap. I'm just wiped and not exactly sure why, but I'm sleeping when my body seems to really need the sleep. So that's all to the good. I also had about fifteen minutes of TF2 gameplay with Jet. We usually play around 7pm mountain time through to about 8, just when ...

I had a crown that had a hole in it and I was NOT looking forward to replacing it. At all. But I went into the dentist this morning and they took off the old crown. There was a small cavity underneath it, which they quickly removed. They built it all up again, and then took an impression of both the inside and the outside, and then made me a temporary crown and put it on. It hurt doing it, for all the doctor did a great job of applying the novocaine, to the point where I couldn't feel my tongue or that side of my mouth; but now it hurts a lot less than I thought it would. They adjusted everything beautifully, and for all that they tore up my gums pretty good getting it in and clearing out all the old stuff, the tooth itself doesn't hurt as much as it used to or nearly as much as it did when the old, badly made crown was put in place. I suspect that the cavity was starting to affect it a little, and having it covered up well, now, makes it happier. There were a lot of small ...

Yesterday I had our monthly Cabinet meeting, and it always takes a lot out of me, but we got through everything on the agenda and got out of the meeting with three minutes to spare. I really am aware of how much people sacrifice to get to these meetings, so I try to make the best use of their time. But it left me pretty flat this morning, but I was up at 6:50 to meet up with Amber, a friend of mine, whom I word war with at 7 am every Thursday morning. She's a lawyer so has to get to work by 9 on that day at least, so we just get the words in before she leaves for work. Right at 9 am, Gina showed up with 10 pounds of white grapes from the vines in her backyard and all the ingredients for jelly. We did two entire batches of grape jelly, five pounds of grapes per, with one package of pectin and a lot of time and a very nice food mill. PickYourOwn.org has a very nice recipe that details the whole process , and the Sure-Jel people have a very solid recipe for the jelly. So solid I...

I actually ran a tabletop RPG game for Jet and Teddy last week and it's turning into something we can probably do on-going. I ran it with Dungeon World, and found it far easier than I thought it would be. And I've been playing and watching a lot more TF2 in the last week than I thought I'd be watching, and it's turning into a lot more fun than I thought it would be, too. The Dungeon World adventure was really good. Dungeon World really sets things up so that the GM really has to listen to the players throughout and figure out which way to go and explore the game and figure out how it's going to go, together. I set up a pretty simple three-stage adventure, and both Teddy and Jet gave me bits in the first two fights that I was able to use in the third face-to-face with the big Baddy. The interesting thing was that my grasp of the numbers at an intuitive level (I hadn't really sat down to work through all the exact numbers for how strong the last villain was wi...