Liralen's Adventures Through Life

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, ...

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...

John's brother, Walt, and his wife, Cathie, stayed with us for the weekend, and we were really busy Friday night running around Longmont and finding all the breweries and ending up at the Pumphouse for dinner.  It was fun, and they invited some friends from Fort Collins, who had fun talking with us. Saturday was the farmer's market, introducing them to Farmer John's peaches and whole wheat flour, and finding some breakfast at the Izzo's bakery.  Then we went into Denver and the Taste of Denver to see our neighbor, Greg, play in Paradise Theater , a Styx tribute band as part of the nostalgia trip for the whole fair.  There were hundreds of booths there, food and vendors of all kinds.  One guy was selling bamboo bedding, and it was fun asking him more questions... Most people selling things only know enough to sell them, no more, and for someone like me, who really has to know a thing, it gets interesting talking to someone who only knows enough to sell that thing,...

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...

That's the easiest show and tell of the turn around. That and that my sleep went from averaging 6 hours a night to averaging a bit under 8. Well... and I can type more than a sentence and not be in pain, I can lift my sheets with the back of my left hand without a flash of agony, I can drive for more than a minute without having to curl my left arm against my chest to keep it from hurting to much, I can do more than two prayer shawl labels before having to take a break and stretch my neck and back and shoulder... I'm actually back to functional levels in nearly almost every way. I can swim, I can sleep at night, I was able to help in the long road trip to San Diego and up to Oregon and back home in rotation with the boys by the end of the trip. It's been a week by week sort of progress.  I'm now playing games again, judiciously, with the highest priority being playing with Jet before he leaves for Japan on the 20th of August. Yes.  Next week. And it's been...

I think the most frustrating thing about trying to heal from overuse problems is that the list of things that I can't do basically makes up most of the "therapy". Given that most of my life has to do with what I can do, not with what I can't, it puts the focus on the wrong thing for me. And sometimes things affect the central condition that had nothing to do with video games. So, I have a better understanding of what exactly is happening, but that doesn't make it any better. I seem to have a combination of tendinitis issues in the left wrist and hand (and forearm and elbow and shoulder (top, back, and front)) along with a cervical curvature problem in my neck that is pinching the nerve bundle that goes to my entire left arm. When the narrowing in my neck gets bad, my entire left arm hurts. This also means, however, that when I ice my neck most of the pain in my left arm goes away. Except, of course, the pain that is actually due to the tendinitis. All of this ...

From Alturas we went north and west and wandered about until we got to Lava Beds National Monument, another of our National Parks stops. There we did some extensive exploring of the lava tubes underground, and then headed to Ashland. There we found our cottage for the next few days, and met up with family and friends for dinner and some time together before heading back to our little home away from home, and there to bed.

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.

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've had a really bad cold for the last two weeks, upper respiratory that went into the lungs and aggravated my asthma all to heck and back again. So I missed doing the digital transcripts for the 911 dispatch center last week, and also had to skip on my bee venom shots because they don't like me doing them when I need my immune system to fight something off. For that matter, I probably shouldn't like dampening my immune system when I am fighting stuff off. Anyway. I missed 911 last week, and went in this week. They had an anniversary card for me! And it included a $25 gift certificate to Chili's! That was really sweet of them, and it indicates that they like what I'm doing, I think. Volunteers at church and at the OUR center don't really get things. So we have dinner some night, and I'm grateful. It was also kind of cool today in that the machine was down, there was just one report in the queue I could do anything about, and someone had accidentally put...

We spent two shellfish and family packed days in Bellingham, WA, where we went to a hang gliding take-off point, a beach through the woods, and all around town (especially Mallard's Ice Cream). We stayed late on Friday to have dinner with Yuri and Emily, and then went to Redmond with John's mother, Isabel. From here we took Saturday to visit with the Gaynors, Sunday to visit Eastgate Congregational UCC and William and Jo in Ballard and meet with a bunch of Synarians at the Pellerin's for dinner. On Monday we took Isabel to the Great Wheel on the waterfront and Pike's Place Market, and then today we spent getting all kinds of stuff from Frye's, Ballard Bees (two medium supers!), and Trader Joe's. It's been kind of busy. It's also been kind of amazing realizing that I've been friends with Jim for more than 26 years, William for more than 16 years, and I'm not even going to be able to count years with all the people from Synario. Best of al...

Several years ago I took the Boulder County Beekeepers' Association class for how to keep bees. It was in the Boulder County Farming co-op and it was in the dead of winter. They told us all about the thousand ways bee colonies can be killed and how to do your best to slow down the death... So I didn't really seriously think about it for quite some time. Last year, one of the big Denver pollination and honey outfits died, and they were selling their equipment for cheap, and I got six boxes, a feeder, a queen excluder, and a telescoping top for $100... Yes, the class told me everything about why getting used equipment was a bad idea, but... it was so inexpensive, and I just wanted to try.  Succeeding wasn't so much the point, as just actually having the courage to try.

It's weird having both Blogger and G+ and wondering how that works. *laughs* Anyway.... here's a link to the G+ album of the little trek John and I took to get my three pounds of bees and their queen. It was more fun than I thought it would be, especially with hundreds of bees just hanging out with the keepers in the garage. It was a very fine example of how to act around these ladies, and how gentle the bees really are when they're not in their hive, yet. All of these commercial bees were bred for gentleness, so I'm actually very happy to have experienced exactly how not-dangerous these girls are.