Liralen's Adventures Through Life

Tuesday was absolutely insane. We had two appointments for the radiation oncologist and then the lung cancer specialist.  And while we were talking with the lung cancer specialist, he heard that John and I were here from Colorado and were going to fly back, again, for the brain cancer specialist next week. He said, "I think I can find an opening for you with him. Let me go talk to him."  He talked with the brain cancer specialist, and lo and behold, we got the 1pm appointment we couldn't get through the regular channels, and while we decided to have lunch in the cafe in the cancer center, Kathy and John got texts about the new appointment.  This whole trip has been blessed with so many bits of luck. John and I got two of the last four seats on the non-stop that was most convenient for our flight in. This Friday's flight was half the price of all the other flights around this crazy travel holiday. Our room at our hotel was the very last room left at this Homewood Suite...

Monday was supposed to be less than half a day of work, with everyone cleaning up the very last details on all the projects on the site. I wandered about helping various people with the ends of all their projects. One was fixing the fact that one of the beams had been set a fraction of an inch too low compared to all the joists, so we had to nail a little bit of wood to the bottom of every joist. Someone had ripped a 2 by into equally thick shims, and there was a team of two trying to put them up on everything. Jenny had a methodology that included presetting all the nails, so I did that while she and Sue's husband, Jim, nailed them over their heads. It's not a comfortable job to do, as you have to swing a hammer up. You can't really use the weight of the head with gravity to really nail, and beginner hammer users always have a tendency to do little hits without being able to really get it in well because they lack the confidence to hit it harder. So I had a little trick, o...

Jet came home from Nashville on Saturday morning. He left for his flight at 5am, and we picked him up at DIA at 8am, and so started a very dense five days.  On Saturday was the graduation of a dear friend of both Jet and myself. Jet met them during high school, I've really gotten to know them better in the last year, as they and I made more of an effort to see each other and really talk and listen to each other, as we're both involved in the restorative justice practices of the Longmont Community Justice Partnership. So it's a natural mix of people who like asking each other open questions and really listening to each other.  They're finishing at PhD, with some really rough spots with an advisor that has not been the most available for them. It gives me a lot of gratitude for Jet's advisor, who is nearly always available to him as he navigates his early years through his program in Bio-Medical Engineering.  Having several young researchers in my gaming group has ex...

When my son decided to go to Mines, he met a bunch of like minded young people his age, and when he first came home there was this time when he admitted that he and his cohort had decided that they were the ones who were going to have to save the world from Climate Change because all those who had gone before didn't seem to be up to the job. He and his friends were facing that reality with determination. A few months ago, he showed me this video: Kurzgesagt's " We WILL Fix Climate Change! " I watched it and cried, and he told me later that when he watched it, he cried too because the main gist of the video is that humanity, in concert, has brought ourselves back from the brink of self-destruction. The weight of the impending disaster was immense, and to know that we weren't all going to just die of Climate Change was huge. There's a lot more work still to be done, don't get me wrong, but all the Apocalyptic tones of authors screaming for attention and the ...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

Today I'm thankful for something that didn't happen. And since it's not mine to tell, I'll just leave it there. The intensity of the gratitude is as big as it's vagueness. *laughs* Instead, I will talk a bit about my three favorite adventures in Puerto Rico, two of them happened at the very end, the other was basically when everything at the camp started to flood due to the deluge of rains that were coming down. *laughs* Here is the video that Karina made of the whole trip: That rain at the beginning? I recorded that just to remember the thunder of the rain pouring down. That was when the whole camp was just running with water, and it was streaming through the grounds, knee high and even hip high in some low areas around the buildings. The meeting hall below our dorm was flooded, and the other group that came and stayed in the other half of the dorm, had to mop out their kitchen.  Colorado is a very arid place, and I haven't been in rain like that for a very lon...

To touch on Puerto Rico... mostly because I made a couple of friendships there that I hadn't expected and one got strengthened in a way I also hadn't expected. This year, UCC Longmont decided to try and do two weeks of reconstruction in Puerto Rico, as compared to the one week last year. Many more people wanted to go, the accommodations could only take so many, and so we spread everyone out into two teams with some folks that wanted to be there for both weeks. We did fundraising dinners, had potluck dinners to learn Spanish and cook food from Puerto Rico, and raised nearly 10,000 dollars to be used on the materials we needed to fix things there. There was a core group of seven folks who were staying for both weeks: John and I, Jeff and Lysa, Fran, Carole and Linda. There were about ten for each of the weeks in addition to the core seven, and both groups had vastly different personalities, but both were fun.  Linda and I got to know each other back before I was even moderator, a...