Liralen's Adventures Through Life

A year or so before the pandemic, I bought a pair of very bright, wide-toed running shoes that I used mostly for walking. During the pandemic, I walked a LOT of miles in them, given that I was walking about 10,000 steps a day. This was in order to deal with my cervical issues. When it first started, I couldn't really do anything without pain other than walk. And I kept up the habit and John joined me during COVID.  These are those old shoes. I wore through them. Actually ripped the sides of them during a hike on slick rock with water running over the rock, and trying to stabilize myself caused me to rip out both outsides. The soles had already started to wear smooth, so they were really slick on wet surfaces.  I even wore through the insoles, and only realized it after I wore these through the downpour in New Orleans. I'd had to take the insoles out to let them dry, and realized that I'd actually gone right through them. They were made by Altra , which is actually made near...

I've been binge watching The King's Avatar on Netflix. It's based on Chinese graphic novels which, in turn, I believe, were based on serial novels, and it's been fascinating seeing so much of what it was like to be on a competitive team. And old friend of mine recommended it and I've been really grateful for the distraction. It's been a balm after the happenings in DC.  John and I were delivering Jet back to Mines when all of that happened, and I didn't let it affect me much, as we had plans. We went to Vihn Xuong Bakery to get bahn mi. They had amazing sandwiches, with their own fresh baked rolls, delicious pickles and veg, and Jet and I got the combination, which included their BBQ pork, their ham, and, of all things, headcheese as well as their house made pate and the usual Magi sauce and other condiments.  Momofuku published a cookbook, a while back, that I've been using to make ramen with. The noodle recipe isn't that useful for a home cook, bu...

 ... 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...

So since about March, we've been watching church from home, at first via Zoom and now through YouTube.  Of course, John, being John, helped lead the charge to get the service online and streamlining the process so that instead of having four or even five people sometimes to get it to stream properly, we're now down to two volunteers and one of our staff doing the work to get all the sound, cameras, and video prompting to work. One of the pieces is this beast of a machine, with a Ryzen 7, water cooling, and a very nice video GPU. It was fun pointing John at all the resources that I had used and helped Jet use to build our machines, and have him go ham. It was far less expensive, and while COVID had made some hardware harder to get, it was also possible to look at alternatives with PCPartsPicker  and find the best prices that search engines could find. The best thing was making sure that it's upgradable, that the power supply, casing, and motherboard would make it easy to put...

Pokémon Go has been a useful obsession. It's helped me get out of the house and walk when I really didn't want to, and kept me out when I probably should have come back. Especially during these COVID times, I need to get out and walk to stay sane. So I go out. Today it was 31F when I went out, so I was in extra layers. It was good and I caught so many that I decided to go ahead and try for the 200 in one day task for level 41. Yeah, I'm one of those players. I have over 11 million XP at this point, and while I had the 6 million needed for level 41, I still had to do the special tasks. One was already done. One was the 200 in a day. One is 30 raids won, which at a raid pass a day is 30 days, but I keep getting more remote passes than I should. *laughs* My hands got pretty cold. And most of my stops are a fifteen minute walk from home, other than the gym that I can access from inside my hous e. Yes. I am the envy of some players. *laughs* But it's just one gym and while i...

Our walk was along the Sandstone Reach, which follows the St Vrain Creek as it meets up eventually with Boulder Creek and other Front Range waterways. It is open land, with plenty of wetlands and the birds and wildlife that goes with it.  There was one bald eagle right on the waterway who flapped painfully up until it caught a current and then it circled higher and higher until we couldn't see it when it presented sideways to us and could only catch the black flash of its wings when it was headed away from us. It was amazing to watch it just ride the wind up without a single flap after the initial flurry. It's about a two mile walk from the parking lot we've found to Sandstone Ranch proper, and another two back, all as flat as creek side paths can be, and Longmont City has paved it all with cement so it's smooth, easy walking and we can make distance at a good pace for aerobic work. There were a lot of people on the path, today, and nearly everyone wore masks when we pa...

So every year, I make the pilgrimage to the Bay Area to visit Carl, do a round of visits with old friends from Caltech, the old usenet, and from Carl's games from the 1990's. We catch up, eat great food, and then we end the week at BigBadCon, which is now in Walnut Creek at the Walnut Creek Marriott.  It's been there a few years, now, and we've started to really get to know the venue and all the things that are offered around the hotel, which is nice. Part of the reason why this is pretty much the only convention I go to anymore is because we always start with a round of visiting people or catching up with them during a dinner or something. Half the fun is that a lot of the things we do have become something of a Tradition. I flew out on the 8th of October, and met up for Peking Duck and all the good things at Chef Chu's with the old Mountain View crew, who mostly don't live there anymore, and only make it to this part of the area once a year.  It was a sm...

Honestly, it wasn't 'cause the bees found them under the elastic of my beekeeper's outfit.  *laughs* Though, perhaps, it helped. I'm finally kind of settling into the fact that Jet is out of the house, and that doesn't mean that I'm not his Mom, still.  My fitbit still says, "Hi Jetsmom!!" every time I look at it...  But I am finding that I'm settling into this new way of living. Just in time for me to uproot everything and go to LA with Tonya and Lisa and putz about there before heading up on a train to San Francisco, where John will meet Tonya and I and we'll all drive north together, wander about the redwoods, and then head further north to drop Tonya off at her friend's and the two of us will go visit Isabel in Redmond. Which should be good, too. One thing I'll note is that I've really recovered all my functionality from March, and my massage therapists are working on the last out-standing knots in my left shoulder.  I...

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...

The hard part about resurrection is having to die first. I seem to be in the that Easter frame of mind, and my body has taken matters into its own hands. Around March 10 my left arm felt like it was on fire from my fingertips all the way to my neck, and I stopped playing all my video games. The week before I had been playing frequently, on the order of 6 to 8 hours for many of the days. There were just so many people I wanted to play with, so I was playing with the European guys in the morning, some of the night shift guys in the afternoon before they went to work, and then with Jet and his friends in the evening. Sometimes, if I was feeling restless, I would hang out with the late-night crew as well. I would take stretch breaks between matches with people, and I usually took the weekends off, other than when Jet wanted to play. Yes, that is a lot more hours than I have played for quite some time. But on the most part, I thought I felt good. I was icing and staying on top of the te...

One of those myths of competitive gaming is that you have to be "good enough" to play competitively. Sure... it's scary and it feels crazy to try out for a team if you think you're terrible at the game, and it's important to try out for a position that you really enjoy playing; but the secret is that you don't have to be that good. What you have to be is willing to get better. That's not a small thing. You have to be willing to dedicate the time and effort, be willing to destroy your self-perception about how "good" you are at the game, and be willing to do whatever it takes to learn how to be better at the game with your team. And no matter how good you get, you have to be willing to try and do your best to get even better. Especially at the top tiers. You have to be willing to destroy what you thought you knew, get creative, and get even better. And you will get better. Playing against others who are dedicated to being good gets you ...