Liralen's Adventures Through Life

I have gotten out of the habit of writing every night. I do other things. I play games, I watch Disney+ or YouTube. I paint. I draw. I shower. I do my night ritual so that I can get to sleep, when sleep wasn't a thing I was getting for many a night, the ritual has become important. I'm grateful I had a really good night's sleep last night.  I was filling in all the new patient paperwork for my upcoming annual exam and trying to find a new doctor and a number of the questions had to do with sleep. I may still ask for a sleep study. We'll see if there are other issues with my sleep that I don't know about, or that John doesn't wake up enough to know. But I realized that after an entire month when I couldn't sleep worth a darn, it's amazing  to know that I'm going to just sleep when I get to bed. I had a good day.  I got to get a massage. I got to play with Jet and Erin at Deep Rock Galactic before dinner. We've been playing once or twice a week for...

I started reading James Clear's Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven way to Build Good Ones and Break Bad ones, and it started with a really interesting premise... I do recommend the book, as it's got a lot of specific details on how to improve life with a lot of small, doable changes in the systems one has for doing things. But the starting premise that really struck me was that habits often change because ones self-definition changes.  I really loved that. I had to drastically cut my sugar intake when I became pre-diabetic. And I realize now that "I AM pre-diabetic" became something of my mantra while I did all the small things I needed to cut nearly all the added sugar from my diet at that time. I lost 20 pounds, lowered my blood sugar, and even had half a dozen side effects that all improved my health; but none of those were what precipitated the change and none of those were my stated goal of the time. I just realized that I had become pre-diabetic and that my old s...

I put off a lot of things until after Jet left.  There was a two-fold madness to this plan. The first was to pay as much attention to Jet while I had him as I could, and then, when he was gone, to be too busy dealing with all the things I'd put off to miss him too much. It worked pretty well. Monday was pretty much a blur, and I got to do a lot of emotional processing while I was too tired to be defensive about it.  I also got in a full session at 911, with over 35 reports, which is an extraordinarily large number, and the management and Joe, my favorite IT guy for all of dispatch, was profusely thankful for my work.  I even went and got boba tea after, which was something I'd done all summer, getting Jet his while I got me mine, and it was good to just think of him. Tuesday I went into constructive mode, and was super busy. The biggest thing was that John and I started going through all our shelves and pulling out books that we'd never read again.  We pulled o...

I’m adrift, still. Still haven’t found a direction and a reason or a passion or a thing that I have to go out and do. And I’ve been wandering for a while, and I realized, today, that it was all right. A friend of mine, someone whom I’ve admired and interacted with with great enjoyment had a son who suicided in the last month, leaving behind a baby son, a wife, his friends, his parents, and all who knew him in sorrow. He did it violently, too, and it’s scarred a great number of people who loved him very much. And I realized that as much as I’m without direction, rudderless, I also don’t have a huge hole in the bottom of my boat, either. I have a sail and the sun and plenty of provisions and water and a crew who is waiting in the wings, understanding in some way that I really just need some doldrums for a while, a rest that will actually heal the deep tiredness from the last few voyages that were fraught with dangers, storms, lost souls, ...

It's been odd, this last week. Since about Monday, after I'd finished turning everything over to the team, I've been getting back to my life. And it's been a mixed bag...

Back in the 80's, when I was fresh out of college, I read Emerald Eyes by Daniel Keys Moran. At Caltech, the student bookstore always stocked the latest in science fiction as a matter of course and steered my pleasure reading in that vein.

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 dentist had noticed that I had some significant bone loss around a few teeth, so he scheduled me for an extra-long session with the hygenist. I was not looking forward to that, either... but went in today to get it done. Lucky for me, the bone loss is mostly from my habit of grinding my teeth. Even with a toothguard, the loss has been pretty significant, but it's not periodontal disease, thank goodness. I don't have the inflammation, nor do I have significant plaque buildup, and my gums are healthy as can be. The hygienist was amazingly thorough, delved into places that she was even surprised she was able to get to, and ended up finishing half an hour early. She also cut the bill to just two-thirds the original quote, simply because I didn't need anything more than what she'd done. She also gave me the usual goodie bag of brush, floss, flossers (for my bridge), and toothpaste. Plus, she gave me the added assurance that my bridge was on solid, and no worries there....

I went by myself, for the first time in a long time, to a movie theater to see Edge of Tomorrow . John's mother is in town, as she's going to be traveling with us to North Carolina on Saturday, and Jet and John were working at a flood house. I'd read the original book All You Need is Kill , translated from the Japanese, and I was so haunted by the book that I actually got rid of it once. I've since bought it again, reread it, and needed to see the movie. So I went. Alone. Probably for the first time in a few decades. *laughs* But I really needed to see it, and I liked the adaptation, and it is, indeed, an adaptation. It was fascinating to see how the changes really made it an American movie instead of the genre Japanese SF book with its intricate and haunting plot. I recommend it as a fun action movie, especially for those of us who are story choice-based video game addicts, and there were a few visceral hits for me as a twitch video game addict. I'd recommend the...