Liralen's Adventures Through Life

I feel a little like I'm slipping sideways instead of moving forward or back. I'm still gaming, but in different venues than just TF2. I'm now playing Terraria, Civ V, CS:GO, Overwatch, Payday 2, and, most of all, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, mostly because I get to play with Jet, and he and his friends really like playing with me, no matter how good or bad I might be. I'm helpful, I cheer them on, and I usually do something smart in a game where there are so very many ways to die by being stupid. Still, I've decided that I'm out of competitive, and that's been a good decision all around. I am painting, spinning, and even dyeing again. There have been some fun things in the past few months, and the bees are still doing quite well. There are mites, but I think I'll just treat them this fall and it might help with next year. I've been getting through a huge volunteer work load for the Longmont Studio Tour, and a lot of it has been for the m...

We ate breakfast in our room. John was the early riser, and walked a few feet to the gas station/grocery shop and bought us a half a gallon of milk. So we had cereal, yogurt, fruit, and some of my granola with dried blueberries as well. It was a great breakfast. Jet started up the boiler for his morning tea while John and I walked two blocks up the road to The Roost to get some coffee. The coffee we found was far better than what we'd gotten the previous morning, and actually better than I've had from various coffee shops.

And now I am unofficially done with being moderator. I actually wrote my position out of the official governance, and when the present moderators got it put into effect, I was finally out of the job. So, some of it was that the Moderator Past (yes, I used to do a lot of Christmas Spirits jokes about the Moderator Elect, Moderator, and Moderator Past) was officially a part of the Cabinet for the years following their time in office. And in rewriting the governance, I wrote that position out.

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...

I'm not sure how I forgot about this in that last entry... but I finally finished my Tuscan Sunflower Shawl. Took about four months, and I ripped it out twice to get it to go right. It's a knitpick.com pattern, and I used the Comfy cotton yarn for it. I love the texture. It was pretty much what I wanted it to be, but a little too small for me. Luckily, it's going to be a present for someone who is smaller than I am, and she loves sunflowers. I managed to finish it, wash it, and as you can see, pin it out to dry using my lace wires. There were a few painful points to the pattern itself. One was that the increases weren't regular, they weren't done the same way with each repeat of the pattern, and going with what had gone on before was why I'd had to rip it back once. The other really painful bit was that each and every petal at the edge had to be done with a different piece of yarn. You had to cut the yarn at the end of each petal, which meant that I had to w...