Liralen's Adventures Through Life

It's funny how something as simple as a toothbrush working again as it should could be a sign of hope. Small things working as they ought to. The signs we choose to make into Signs for our lives.  We have a very old Sonicare toothbrush handle, with just one button, and there are no online manual for it that we can find, and one day, during the pandemic, it just decided to stop signaling every quarter of it's full 2 minute working time. I had been used to swapping halves of my mouth on those signals and I felt oddly lost without it, the two times a day I was brushing my teeth. When the cleaners came, I'd been bundling away all the stuff what was on the counter of our bathroom, and I threw it into a very narrow space between somethings John had put under the sink and my WaterPik. It might have gotten its button mashed into doing what it was supposed to again, or something, but whatever it was, it made me feel like there might be good things possible again. Yes, I still do my ...

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...

It's raining tonight. The soft hiss of water on the pavement, the spatter on the windows, and the coolness through the house. The sky was a riot of fluffy clouds, shadows, and curtains of water being blown in from over the mountains. There's been a good amount of rain for the last week, and it's been a blessing, since the winter was really dry; but with the rain came a late snow that was surprising after Mother's Day. My tomato plants survived all of that, thankfully, and are doing really well, in part due to John making some heroic fixes to a cheap greenhouse that buckled under the snow. Poor thing. He had to reinforce nearly the whole structure to keep it up.

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...

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 ...

It was raining, the slow, fine ever present rain that goes with a sky occluded by white. The overcast and drizzle were familiar to me, as comfortable and present as my own breath. I was carefully watching the shadow of the edge of a running blade, using the shadow's intersect with its caster as my way of knowing when I'd hit my mark. I was cutting tile. Huge tiles so heavy it was work to carry two of them anywhere, and I was happily using a power tile cutter, that ran water over the blade to keep it cool enough as it ate its steady way through. John wanted a number of special cuts as the shower he was tiling wasn't the most even thing in the world. It had been finished by hand, and it showed: one wall wasn't exactly square with the other, the curbs weren't vertical, and one wall wasn't quite plumb. So John was fitting in each piece as we got to it, and marking them for me to cut. The tile cutter is loud, so I wear hearing protection when I use it. I get star...

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 ...

A friend of mine had a ton of crabapples on her crabapple tree. They were the larger variety, thank goodness, but she and her husband had bagged them up in bags that had nearly seven pounds of the little suckers in 'em. They brought them to church to give away to anyone that would take them. Several people took home bags, including me, since one of my younger friends at church said that crabapple jelly was the best thing ever, and my friend, Mimi, had actually served me some of her crabapple jelly on goat cheese on crackers and it was very tasty indeed. The thing is that every single crabapple had to be cleaned, and the blossom and the stem cut off. I also threw out every one that had a worm in it, and every single one that wasn't quite good anymore. There weren't that many of them, but all of them had to be cut into in order to figure out if they were any good or not. That is probably what took the longest time. The next thing I had to do was just cook 'em in...

Had a really straightforward day today. I mostly dug weeds out of the raised beds in the garden, shopped at the local farmer's market, planted my last four tomato plants, and went swimming with the boys. The spice of the day was making clay pot rice for lunch for Jet and I, it was simple enough now that I have an actual clay pot to cook it in and the rice on the bottom was good and crunchy. I have to say I loved that it was raining while we swam.

I hope everyone who got to celebrate it had a wonderful Memorial Day. We had a pretty busy day. The three of us started at Leenie's Cafe, a restaurant that does New Orleans Specialties, including a "chocolate beignet" that was a beignet with melted bittersweet chocolate squirted on top. I haven't asked them if they're displaced from New Orleans, and I probably should. After that the three of us scattered: I helped with a garden consultation, John went off to work on a house (sealing tile and caulking the edges), and Jet went to a friend's house to play all day. The consultation was with a long time friend who's also a cancer survivor, and we had a lot of fun just wandering through her yard and talking about what she could or should do with various patches of it. We had their little dog with us, and he just wanted affection whenever we stopped to talk. It was a beautiful morning, sunny, warm, and dry. I went home, watered my tomato plants. I should ...