Liralen's Adventures Through Life

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...

John and I drove a UHaul van filled with instruments and uniforms from Longmont, CO to Tampa Bay, FL starting the day after Christmas and ending up in Florida on the 28th, in the afternoon. The temps started at 5° F and didn't get above 12° F until the last day. I'd picked up a cold from Jet at the very start, and we pushed the run, knowing we had a time limit, so it was just three days of eat the hotel breakfast, eat lunch from our cooler, stop and stretch for dinner, and then hit bed at around 11 pm at a hotel we'd booked when we'd figured out our route, which was straight east on I-70 until St. Louis, keep going east on I-40, head south east through Tennessee into Georgia, and then go down to Florida. The last day of the road trip was a bit of a blur for me, because I was so sick. But I'll admit that I did a lot better than Jet had when he had the cold, he had two entire days of being completely out of it and sleeping all day. That might have been as much due ...

I had a salad today. There are some things that I miss when I'm on the road, and in particular, oddly enough, is the food that I can get at home. A salad with half a slice of crumbled bacon, half a perfectly hard boiled egg with a moist yolk, bits of Stilton, apple, candied pecans, creamy blue cheese dressing, and a whole bowlful of young spring greens that were on sale at the local super market for only 2.79, less than a quarter of what such a salad would cost at any of the restaurants. Or a soft boiled egg with a few droplets of soy sauce on the yolk with a slice of toast, buttered and slathered with quince jelly from the quince tree in our neighbor's backyard... It's good to be home.

It seems that I am a band mom. *laughs* And not just a band mom, but a marching band mom, which seems a different breed of sorts. And it seems that John and I have done our usual thing, which is just dive in and do stuff. Jet has had marching band competitions both last weekend and this weekend. Luckily, or unluckily, depending on how you look at it, last year, his high school's marching band placed dead last in the standings, so there really was only room for improvement. And they have improved. The band director is really fun, and really wants his kids to have fun and grow with the experience, so it's been good watching the kids figure out what it is that they can do. Mr. Legg was really great about setting up the program with the base music, moves and teaching the kids how to march through the end of the summer and into the beginning of the school year. The color guard pretty much came up with their own moves throughout the piece, and figured out how much they really wan...

Sadly, that night, the fire alarm went off. Three times. The first time was a good hour long build up of the alarm getting louder and louder and... finally we actually got up and went out into the hallways, and there were firemen in gear, going to find something. There were also people in their pajamas going back to their rooms, as they'd found out, already, that there was no fire. Some of them had been standing outside for most of that time, in the rain. Then it went off again. This time it was relatively short, and everyone got to find out that it was being caused by a wiring short that was happening because of the rain getting in through one of the fire alarm throw switches on the outside of the building. Nearly everyone had assumed that it was one of the kids, because we were also sharing the entire floor with a summer camp as well as our own. When it went off again at 4am, I just put my pillow over my head, rolled over and went back to sleep. I was so tired, it was easy. ...