Liralen's Adventures Through Life

I haven't been sleeping all that well since Tuesday. The election results affected me badly. Jet had a great description, "It's grief adjacent." It is grief about my expectations about the world, this nation, and people in general. Though, if you asked me on any particular day, I don't actually believe in the "general" concept of people at all. I also know that a lot of my back brain has been processing, taking things in, and it then runs through a lot of them at night, even on nights after really physical days like the bike ride. So lack of sleep, an aching body, and something was really affecting my digestive system. These are all things you probably don't get in travel blogs. The downtime realities of travel. It's just the beautiful surfaces. I am guilty of some of that on Facebook, as one only has so much time, so much bandwidth, and can only display so many pictures, so why not the ones that we want to remember?  Why not brighten someone els...

Today started as something of a random walk, mostly because of the rain showers that were ribboning their way across the island. We never really knew when it would happen, but there would be a sudden downpour and then it would eventually stop. So we started out by going to look at waterfalls. Okay, yes, that's not a waterfall, but the first one was pretty far from the area that was set aside for viewing it, and it wasn't that great, and well... Magenta Bougainvillea! Yes, that was kind of the flavor of the day, honestly. We went and saw an old valley for the river there, that had, long long ago been a set of terraced taro beds, which Japanese farmers turned into terraced rice beds, and then modern day farming came in and turned it into beef cattle fields, and today you can see the pastures with cows grazing, but the grass shows the lines of the old terraced beds. That was pretty cool.  Beautiful scenery and a car to run to when it started pouring.  And I'll admit this was v...

  As we leave home, I have this habit of saying good-bye to the mountains that we see every day. It's a good ritual, reminding me that I will be back, that it's never forever, and that I do love where I live. That said, nearly the moment we actually left the house, I fell asleep. John was driving, of course, and as those of you who know me well from this blog, I had a ton of things leading up to the moment of leaving, including, of course, all the preparation, the packing, and all the things that we had to finish before we could leave. I have also been wrestling with nearly six months of having my hands and forearms hurt at night, whether I played games or not. Even when we were out on trips for a week or more, my hands and arms continued to ache at night. And some part of me took that as a sign that I was going to have to cut back yet again on the things that I did and I'd had enough of that. I was down to just about two hours a day of play, and having to watch computer us...

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...

I'm dreaming again. One of the side effects of the asthma drug I was taking was "vivid dreams". A lot of the wildest dreams I used to write about were when I was on the stuff. When I stopped taking it, I stopped dreaming. And with the sleep problems, I guess I wasn't getting much REM sleep. But... now that I seem to have worked out a new sleep regimen I'm regularly getting six to eight hours of sleep a night and, miracle of miracles, I'm dreaming again. Jet recommended the anime Demon Slayer  to me, so I've been watching it and it's been feeding my dreams interesting materials. Before that, it was mostly Hades and even Deep Rock Galactic. But between Demon Slayer 's art and motion (and the water animation is amazing) I'm now getting some distinct images at night and situations and sequencing in bright color and sound again.  And with the sleep, I seem to have also managed to make good progress with the healing of that tooth. It makes me aware w...

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...

Last night, when I went to lie down in bed, I felt briefly dizzy, but dismissed it as a by-product of my mild eye infection, that I'm ignoring until it's a week old. As it's likely viral and no doctor has anything they can do about it or any urgency about dealing with it unless it's more than a week old. I've now had enough of them to know that that is what happens if I bring it into a doctor. So I ignored it. I usually get up twice a night just to use the bathroom, wash my hands, and have a drink of water. I felt oddly dizzy during all that, and when I tried to lie down, the whole bed started feeling like it was spinning. Vertigo. Not fun. Not at all conducive to sleeping. Luckily, or unluckily, my sister has been plagued with vertigo of some sort or another for a good decade, so John and I knew that there was some maneuver to deal with crystals dislodging in the ear, and he looked it up. It's the Epley Maneuver . It's patently well-documented. And John rea...

We got home in less than two days, and last night, when I went to bed, I knew I was going to be in trouble. For the last several months, I've been waking up at night, when I was here in Colorado, with a panic response. I felt like I couldn't get enough air. I would take a lung capacity test, and it would come out normal; but I felt, emotionally, like I couldn't breathe . It was awful. My allergy doctor, Dr. Li of Flat Iron Allergy, has been urging me to take my Advair twice a day when it used to be that one inhalation a day was enough for me. So, reluctantly, I decided to take his advice. I probably should have done it sooner, as that very night, I stopped having the panic attacks. He's also the doctor who told me to get off Montelukast, which used to be an asthma drug that Dr. Murthy put me on, but the side effects of Montelukast were anxiety, vivid bad dreams, and some patients became suicidal. There were also side effects of ADHD, sleeplessness, and loss of mental cl...

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...