Liralen's Adventures Through Life

First, Bali Hai. It was a picture I couldn't find yesterday.  Friday was mostly a recovery day. After breakfast we went on a walk. Then we headed back to the complex, and I went and worked out in the gym. I have hip and lower back things now that really respond well to me doing strengthening work. John went and got us more poke for lunch and we spent lunch on a Zoom meeting with Jet. He was on campus and talked with us via his phone until he ran out of charge and ran off to his board game evening get together.  We went on another walk and scouted out bakeries, coffee shops, and found another place that actually sold Kaua'i grown, medium roast coffee. The darker the roast for coffee, the more the roast profile takes over the taste of the whole cup. If you want to enjoy the varietal, then you really want at worst a medium roast that doesn't go too far into the second crack. Yes. We roast our own coffee for Reasons, which include knowing what varietal I have and where I want t...

 We started the morning with a Quest. It was to get to the Dignity of Earth and Sky, a statue that John had found when he and I were looking with Linda K. into the tradition of Star Quilts in the Lakota tribes. The hotel didn't really have breakfast so we made do with a banana we'd bought the day before and the toasted oats I'd brought for myself.  She is in Chamberlain, South Dakota, right in a rest area! I was so surprised by that, but she was also a lot larger than it looked from the photos in Google maps. Most of them didn't have a person in there as someone to compare against, but the photos made her look like she was about the size of a real person instead of being nearly seven times as tall. There are LED lights built into her star quilt, into the blue panes of the star, and there was a lot of care taken to have her represent her people as three different Lakota women were used as the models for her. The rest stop had a little museum, and along with that was a sm...

I'd missed my lesson by Mayee Futterman last week, while we were at Vera's house.  I thought about missing it again this week, but decided not to, so I did get up a little earlier than usual and John and I got on the trolley to go into town.  The electric trolleys run about every fifteen minutes or so, and there's an RTA app that not only shows you where you are, but where all the trolleys are along their lines and exactly where they are at all times. You can see when it's approaching your stop and when it's just left as well.  It went all the way to Canal Street, which is the main street downtown, and there's a Cafe Beignet just a couple of blocks down Canal. After the plantation, my right hip, knee, and calf weren't particularly happy with me, so I just went slow and it was okay. The line coming out of the Cafe Beignet was so long, that I could be as slow as I wanted. It gave us plenty of time to look around. A few of the things I saw were these bags of c...

Lately, I've been feeling like I've been run over by a truck, but got away with it. Bruised, battered, aching all over, but I'm alive, and I'm whole and I can keep going. It's not physically difficult for me to live and do the things that life needs of me, but so difficult mentally and emotionally. The Capitol Riot occurred on January 6th. That reminded me, in a huge, emotional way, of the fact that my family was wiped out by the Cultural Revolution. Armed insurgents destroyed local governments and moved, eventually, on the capitol of China and destroyed the old way of life. On the way there, they killed, detained, or executed most of the countries intellectuals and artists, including half of my mother's family, and all of my father's who didn't move to Taiwan. I had a very emotional few days, and wrote a big thing on Facebook about that and had hundreds of people respond, forward, and eventually one took exception to my equating Trump and his Proud Boys...

 ... 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...

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...

Sometimes I think he's at school... or at work... or off to band practice... or at a game.  And it feels all right that he's gone, and then I remember, and it still feels all right. He's happy, he's safe, he's with a family he finds fantastic in a situation and culture he's learning about at a massive rate, and it was like he was just in the room with us, showing us around his new house and showing us the compact city just outside his window in a video call with us.  And then he's gone again when the call is done, but we know he's doing well and learning hand over fist and loving the situation he's landed in and it's all good. And, just like when he's away at school, at work, or even when he went off to Europe, Chicago, or other places on his down, I get back to doing all the things that I want to do with my life.  There will be more of that.  He will be back in four months, but then he'll be off to college and the rest of his life, s...

I did a bunch of things today, most of them away from the computer, but a few of them with the new screen that I’d gotten for Christmas, with a 32-inch diagonal. I watched Moana on it, and really enjoyed it. I don’t get to see Disney movies when they first come out the way I did when my son was a lot younger, but this one was well worth watching. They did a good job respecting the Polynesian cultures being portrayed, including hiring a native for the lead role. That was nice, but it really was the story that did it for me. No romance at all involved, which was cool to see, but just friendship and working together at things, which was all good. I cried through a lot of it. That’s okay. It’s good to have good stories. When it was done, I worked on a calligraphy lesson for people that wanted an hour and a half class in the afternoon. I then ran out to get some supplies, return some library books and the movie. Yes, our local library has a bunch of the newest DVD’s available f...

And going to BigBadCon at the end of this week. I'm a little sad that I had to miss the last of Isabel's visit to our home to get here, but I think I really needed some time away to evaluate and think about things. My art show had gone quite well, at Mimi's studio. There are photos of my show space on Flickr, and John and I helped Mimi and Paul clean out a beautiful little breezeway that had amazing light for the display space. It was small, and the paintings were pretty crowded in there, but people got to see them, which was the whole point of it all. There was even a very nice little table/desk where I could put all my painting materials so that I could demonstrate how it worked or allow others to try out the ink, brushes, and paper. I had an outlet so I could bring a water boiler and make herbal teas and it was amazingly nice because the weather during the show was really rainy for Colorado, days of rain, which is really unusual. But it meant that a lot of people...

It's about 1500 miles from Longmont to Ashland, so most of today was just spent getting as far as we could. We started in Vernal, UT, and headed west across Utah on 40. 191 went south through a canyon, and then 6 got us to I-15, which took us South and got off on 6 further south to Delta. There we picked up US 50, the loneliest highway in the US, and that took us to Eureka, Nevada.

One of the interesting things was that when I first started down the competitive path, I lost about 15 pounds of weight from my high of about 172 lbs, during the worst of the stressful days of moderating. Then, over the course of the six months of competitive, I got down to about 150 lbs. I'm not a small woman to begin with, I'm 5'9", and I did and still do construction, so 150 was kind of frightening. The only time I'd ever hit that weight since my late 20's was also during my moderatorship, when I'd gone four months on extreme stress and got to the point where I came down with vertigo before I could actually stop and rest for a week. I regained my weight fairly quickly with actual sleep and food. I did that again.

I had a Day, yesterday, which I was glad I finished. I work up with more tooth pain in the relatively new crown, and I was really unhappy about it. It's been happening for the last three weeks, so I finally broke down and called the dentist and got an emergency appointment at 2pm. It was amazing how much relief I simply got from having made the call, at least I'd know what was going on... So I went off to my 8:15 chiropractor's appointment with Brian, and he was careful not to jar my jaw, which was very nice of him. He commented that I finally had a curve to the top of my spine again. When I first started seeing him at the beginning of the year, the stress from the stuff happening at the church had all gone to my shoulders and neck. The muscles and tendons had been under so much tension there for so long, that they'd frozen into place and were pulling my head and shoulders forward into the classical old lady hunch. This was inline with the fact that I was pretty ...