Liralen's Adventures Through Life

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...

 ... 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...

Uhm.  Yeah. I fall prey to the impulse to mostly write then things are good, not when things are bad, or when things I decided don’t quite turn out the way I’d wanted them to. But that’s also a part of life and not blogging about the bad stuff means that I’m only bragging about the good.  Bleh. So. The dental thing I thought I’d taken care of?  Not so much.  The dentist didn’t actually figure out the adjustment of the bite until the third subsequent visit, and by then all the nerves were so inflamed he had me do a week-long prednisone series to calm things down.  And that didn’t just calm down the inflammation it also has depressed me significantly as well as delayed my final test on my blood sugar numbers for another three months. But I am maintaining my lower weight pretty well, with the help of my boys.  That’s been a good note. But speaking of delays... the new house has been delayed significantly by a new city inspector who decided that t...

Since October, I've been filling my time with a lot of new things. One of those things that I've realized, as an introvert, is that I still need community.  No matter how tired or frustrated people sometimes make me, I still need the contact, still need to toss ideas around with people, and still delight in meeting new people and getting to know them. So I'm back in a position with our church, and it's as the head of the Pastoral Relations Committee, the people of the congregation who are supposed to help tend to the covenantal relationship between the pastors and the congregation.  It's an interesting job, and I held it for a while when I was moderator-elect, before I became moderator.  I'm oddly comfortable with it, too, as my main function really is to listen.  Listen to the pastors, listen to members of the congregation, and listen to how things are going between them. I've also been joining a few of the small groups, people that are gathering toge...

I've had a really bad cold for the last two weeks, upper respiratory that went into the lungs and aggravated my asthma all to heck and back again. So I missed doing the digital transcripts for the 911 dispatch center last week, and also had to skip on my bee venom shots because they don't like me doing them when I need my immune system to fight something off. For that matter, I probably shouldn't like dampening my immune system when I am fighting stuff off. Anyway. I missed 911 last week, and went in this week. They had an anniversary card for me! And it included a $25 gift certificate to Chili's! That was really sweet of them, and it indicates that they like what I'm doing, I think. Volunteers at church and at the OUR center don't really get things. So we have dinner some night, and I'm grateful. It was also kind of cool today in that the machine was down, there was just one report in the queue I could do anything about, and someone had accidentally put...

The high-desert moan of the wind has been omnipresent for the last week. The warm winds melted away the eight to ten inches of snow piled everywhere, other than in the most persistent shadows, still mounded with dirty ice. So the world, in the low slant of morning sun, was all the dusty taupe of Front Range winter. The trees were black lace against the grass and cold pale sky, and flocks of geese rose in deep V's heading, inevitably north. Their compasses already pointing toward a spring that still feels so far away. I was driving into the dispatch center. On the way I saw men in black suits, black cowboy hats, solid black boots, and long black dusters paler on the legs with the blowing dust and dirt. They were directing traffic for a funeral, and their worn, rugged faces were solemn, all stern comfort for those that turned into the parking lot of the funeral home. It was a gray as the landscape, a simple one-story building surrounded by blacktop and the brown gray dirt. I'...

Our very last day in China was in Shanghai. The hotel was in this middling area where it was within very close driving distance to the shopping districts, but there wasn't all that much that was withing walking distance. I got up pretty late, had a leisurely breakfast, and Dad and John had something of a plan to go see some lake or another and or just walk through town. We got everything packed, but kept the luggage for once, since we were going to have to bring it with us when we met up with Jevons afternoon. I wasn't sure how far I'd be able to go, but decided that I wanted to try it instead of just sitting in the hotel room on our last day. It was a little bittersweet in ways, as we'd done so much in so little time, and had explored so many things; but I was also completely worn out between the illness, doing all the travel, and simply having to deal with all the strange things here. Still, the morning was clear compared to the previous days, and we only had to g...

Back in high school, a pure white boxed set of paper bound books came out with two-color covers and a lid on the box. I bought them because I'd just moved to a new city for my senior year in high school and the misfit boys that I'd ended up being friends with after school were playing D&D. But my friend Alfred had mixed his own version of it, set in feudal Japan, with samurai swords, daimyo, and oni instead of the more standard fare and monsters in the book.

I'd forgotten that going home is always a blend of getting back to where and whom I came from along with both the comfort and discomfort of being here. That it's that uncomfortable feeling of 'oh, that's where that phrasing came from' or 'that's why I have that attitude' all blended with the comfort of the familiar, the known, and all the memories that go with them.