Liralen's Adventures Through Life

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...

The hardest thing about posting intermittently, compared to when I was doing it every day, is that there are so many things I want to talk about, but jumbling them all together feels like a mashup that has no real point. The things that are on my mind at the moment include: The road trip to the Canadian Rockies that we did, which is more of a picture album kind of thing, where I get to talk a bit about the rewards of each day. Our in-between time for the two houses, and the unexpected gifts that have come with that time. My summer with Jet before he goes off to college, which might fit a little with the first point. Various culinary adventures we've had in Karen's kitchen, which can also be a pictures and linear telling kind of thing. The odd revelation that if I take Christian Teachings from the angle of it being about community, NOT about individual behavior (under the creepy stalker eye of a god that immediately punishes or rewards said behavior) all kinds of things...

I keep trying to write up the Puerto Rico trip and I keep tripping over the feeling that doing it linearly doesn't do it justice.  At all.  But it's what I'm so used to writing, so I keep trying and then deleting it again. It actually started when Jet was six, and John went off to Biloxi with people from our United Church of Christ church (UCC Longmont) to help with reconstruction after Hurricane Katrina and I joined him in following years.  But that was a long long time ago, and you all already know about our crazy left-wing denomination that does what that radical Jesus of Nazareth said despite Roman rule. Those crazy things about taking care of the poor and the hungry, about defending the powerless, and loving other people like oneself; and what Micah said, before Jesus, about doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God. But that's thousands of years ago. Maybe it really started when Carol said, "What are we going to do about Puerto Rico?...

And now I am unofficially done with being moderator. I actually wrote my position out of the official governance, and when the present moderators got it put into effect, I was finally out of the job. So, some of it was that the Moderator Past (yes, I used to do a lot of Christmas Spirits jokes about the Moderator Elect, Moderator, and Moderator Past) was officially a part of the Cabinet for the years following their time in office. And in rewriting the governance, I wrote that position out.

I'm not sure how I forgot about this in that last entry... but I finally finished my Tuscan Sunflower Shawl. Took about four months, and I ripped it out twice to get it to go right. It's a knitpick.com pattern, and I used the Comfy cotton yarn for it. I love the texture. It was pretty much what I wanted it to be, but a little too small for me. Luckily, it's going to be a present for someone who is smaller than I am, and she loves sunflowers. I managed to finish it, wash it, and as you can see, pin it out to dry using my lace wires. There were a few painful points to the pattern itself. One was that the increases weren't regular, they weren't done the same way with each repeat of the pattern, and going with what had gone on before was why I'd had to rip it back once. The other really painful bit was that each and every petal at the edge had to be done with a different piece of yarn. You had to cut the yarn at the end of each petal, which meant that I had to w...

Finally got past a bit of a barrier about my dental stuff. I'd had a bad experience with a dentist in the spring, and finally got around to finding a new one, and doing all the things that I needed to do to get all my records to a new place that someone I really do trust a great deal recommended. I'd been thinking, nearly all summer about the fact that I should get it done, but it took me months before I actually did it. And the hardest part was just picking up the phone to call the old office to tell them that I wanted them to transfer the records. Especially since their main office manager is a mom that we know well from carpools and the bus stop as she's in the neighborhood. I had all these fears in my head, but when I made the request she was perfectly professional and perfectly helpful, and it was such a relief.

I haven't been, actually, though I've been trying. Just wasn't trying very hard when I had Ready Player One on my Kindle last night, and I was down to the last few chapters and had to Finish it, so I was up until 2 am reading. It was good, not great. Simple YA with straightforward villains. Little depth, but it didn't need it, and it'll probably make a visually vivid, action-packed movie. Fun, especially with all the 80's pop culture references, great gaming references, and some lovely Nerd references, particularly the one about the protagonist's love interest being like Jordan from Real Genius . That made me laugh a lot. Thing is that it magic-wanded some very real and nasty technical problems that were mere extensions of problems that we already know about today, was a post-fossil fuels world that used unsustainable energy sources on an every day basis, and made a few social problems of today something that was still huge in twenty years. There... actua...

It's very odd to look at a written piece now and know that it really is a pretty good first draft, but that it really truly needs a second draft rewrite. The skin's too thick there, there's too much Shiny there, the guts are hanging out here, the bone structure could be balanced there.... It's odder yet, now, being able to look at a painting and go... that's a good first try, now, let's get on with the REAL painting... Reminds me of the times I've been knitting a sweater or a shawl and I suddenly just start ripping the whole thing out and John's watching me, shocked. "It's just not right..." Or when I was writing code for some of Jet's turtles on Minecraft, and I shocked him by deleting a few dozen lines and replacing them with three. "Oh, that's awesome," he said, looking at it. What's stranger yet is that, for me at least, it's all becoming the same sort of thing. Make it better, make it stronger, more e...