Liralen's Adventures Through Life

Today did not start auspiciously. My guts were entirely unhappy with me and the whole situation. After breakfast, we went for a little walk, that was actually quite good.  It included going out onto a stone pier that was a great exercise in balance that echoed a lot of the strength work I've been doing for the last four years. So it felt really good. The only problem was that when we got back to the room, my gut was very insistent about any kind of movement being a mistake. Kaopectate, an over the counter medication that uses Bismuth to "regulate your digestive system" was something that I had when I was a kid. It comes in vanilla flavored, now, and John got me some from Longs Drug, and I dosed myself as soon as he got it, drank some water and hoped that... well "maybe it will work out." We dropped by Konohiki Seafoods, and bought their very simple bento boxes.  Mine had two inari along with a pickle maki and two pieces of fried ginger chicken. John's was pr...

Thursday, the 7th was a plan to get to see the Kilauea Lighthouse and wildlife sanctuary and to go and walk the Limahuli Botanical Gardens. Both required reservations and some exact timing with those reservations. The Kilauea reservations were done on the half hour, and you were expected to take no more than forty five minutes on the site, and that was stated on the ticket and website. The gardens suggested that one plan for at least an hour and a half on the grounds, and Google maps said that getting there could take everywhere from an hour and a half to forty minutes, depending on the construction that was along the way.  So our plans got a bit more extensive to make sure everything worked. Our Lighthouse reservation was for 10:30 and our Garden reservation was for 2:00 to give us plenty of time to have lunch and get where we needed to go. We also made a lot of possible plans for how to fill that time if the travel conditions were good, given what we'd seen on the scouting trip, ...

Monday was supposed to be less than half a day of work, with everyone cleaning up the very last details on all the projects on the site. I wandered about helping various people with the ends of all their projects. One was fixing the fact that one of the beams had been set a fraction of an inch too low compared to all the joists, so we had to nail a little bit of wood to the bottom of every joist. Someone had ripped a 2 by into equally thick shims, and there was a team of two trying to put them up on everything. Jenny had a methodology that included presetting all the nails, so I did that while she and Sue's husband, Jim, nailed them over their heads. It's not a comfortable job to do, as you have to swing a hammer up. You can't really use the weight of the head with gravity to really nail, and beginner hammer users always have a tendency to do little hits without being able to really get it in well because they lack the confidence to hit it harder. So I had a little trick, o...

I'm dreaming again. One of the side effects of the asthma drug I was taking was "vivid dreams". A lot of the wildest dreams I used to write about were when I was on the stuff. When I stopped taking it, I stopped dreaming. And with the sleep problems, I guess I wasn't getting much REM sleep. But... now that I seem to have worked out a new sleep regimen I'm regularly getting six to eight hours of sleep a night and, miracle of miracles, I'm dreaming again. Jet recommended the anime Demon Slayer  to me, so I've been watching it and it's been feeding my dreams interesting materials. Before that, it was mostly Hades and even Deep Rock Galactic. But between Demon Slayer 's art and motion (and the water animation is amazing) I'm now getting some distinct images at night and situations and sequencing in bright color and sound again.  And with the sleep, I seem to have also managed to make good progress with the healing of that tooth. It makes me aware w...

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'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...

One of those things that struck me today, while John and I were walking, was that the flags were at half mast. It was for Pearl Harbor, but it struck me again that there really hasn't been a period of mourning for the quarter million people who have died of COVID in the US, yet. Due, in large part, to Trump wanting to deny that any of this has happened, I think, but it's been a thing that's bothered me badly. Back in 2013, when the flood happened here, it physically affected a relatively small portion of the city, but everyone in Longmont went into a sort of mourning over the losses. Not just the temporary losses of the usage of parts of the city, including a very large section of green space, or that so many people had damage to their houses, or even the homes completely lost. Luckily, no lives were lost in Longmont, though other communities were not quite as lucky.  Grief takes effort and energy. For someone close, it's a lot of energy and time. But the overwhelming n...

I've been making masks. A whole lot of masks. At the beginning of the pandemic, I was actually buying a shirt from High Seas Trading Company and John gets so many shirts from them, that the owner asked me if I'd be willing to volunteer for their Mask Relief efforts to get LA front line health care workers some masks when all the PPE had dried up for everyone. So I said that I'd be happy to do two 25 mask kits. A few of my friends did them as well, and they were very fiddly, specific masks, that had four pleats, a pocket opening that was centered in the back of the mask, and a nose wire. I think I was doing them in my sleep, with all the pleats. But I learned how to pleat with a pair of tweezers to hold the pleat in place, and after breaking three needles, finally figured out how to get through all that cloth.  After that nearly all the other designs were simple. These were defined by health care workers and retail dress makers, and I have noticed, since, that nearly everyon...