Liralen's Adventures Through Life

First, Bali Hai. It was a picture I couldn't find yesterday.  Friday was mostly a recovery day. After breakfast we went on a walk. Then we headed back to the complex, and I went and worked out in the gym. I have hip and lower back things now that really respond well to me doing strengthening work. John went and got us more poke for lunch and we spent lunch on a Zoom meeting with Jet. He was on campus and talked with us via his phone until he ran out of charge and ran off to his board game evening get together.  We went on another walk and scouted out bakeries, coffee shops, and found another place that actually sold Kaua'i grown, medium roast coffee. The darker the roast for coffee, the more the roast profile takes over the taste of the whole cup. If you want to enjoy the varietal, then you really want at worst a medium roast that doesn't go too far into the second crack. Yes. We roast our own coffee for Reasons, which include knowing what varietal I have and where I want t...

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...

 ... 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...

A few days before we had to leave Seattle to get home in time for appointments and a showing of My Hero Academia: Two Heroes,  John and I sat down to figure out which way we wanted to go home.  There was the quick way, which was via I-80 through the mountains, but it was fast, freeway, and kind of boring without too much to stop and do along the way. The other way was up north, through Vancouver into Banff National Park and then down south through the way we'd gone a few years ago when Jet was off on his European trip. The third way (and probably not the last) was through Yellowstone National Park, just taking I-90 east and then heading south into the park. We looked up the weather along the latter two routes, as we decided we didn't want to just go the same old way down, and it turned out that Banff was expecting rain and fairly cold weather the whole time, and Yellowstone looked like it was going to be both warmer and clearer, though there were still some chances of rain...

John's brother, Walt, and his wife, Cathie, stayed with us for the weekend, and we were really busy Friday night running around Longmont and finding all the breweries and ending up at the Pumphouse for dinner.  It was fun, and they invited some friends from Fort Collins, who had fun talking with us. Saturday was the farmer's market, introducing them to Farmer John's peaches and whole wheat flour, and finding some breakfast at the Izzo's bakery.  Then we went into Denver and the Taste of Denver to see our neighbor, Greg, play in Paradise Theater , a Styx tribute band as part of the nostalgia trip for the whole fair.  There were hundreds of booths there, food and vendors of all kinds.  One guy was selling bamboo bedding, and it was fun asking him more questions... Most people selling things only know enough to sell them, no more, and for someone like me, who really has to know a thing, it gets interesting talking to someone who only knows enough to sell that thing,...

I think the most frustrating thing about trying to heal from overuse problems is that the list of things that I can't do basically makes up most of the "therapy". Given that most of my life has to do with what I can do, not with what I can't, it puts the focus on the wrong thing for me. And sometimes things affect the central condition that had nothing to do with video games. So, I have a better understanding of what exactly is happening, but that doesn't make it any better. I seem to have a combination of tendinitis issues in the left wrist and hand (and forearm and elbow and shoulder (top, back, and front)) along with a cervical curvature problem in my neck that is pinching the nerve bundle that goes to my entire left arm. When the narrowing in my neck gets bad, my entire left arm hurts. This also means, however, that when I ice my neck most of the pain in my left arm goes away. Except, of course, the pain that is actually due to the tendinitis. All of this ...

I’m adrift, still. Still haven’t found a direction and a reason or a passion or a thing that I have to go out and do. And I’ve been wandering for a while, and I realized, today, that it was all right. A friend of mine, someone whom I’ve admired and interacted with with great enjoyment had a son who suicided in the last month, leaving behind a baby son, a wife, his friends, his parents, and all who knew him in sorrow. He did it violently, too, and it’s scarred a great number of people who loved him very much. And I realized that as much as I’m without direction, rudderless, I also don’t have a huge hole in the bottom of my boat, either. I have a sail and the sun and plenty of provisions and water and a crew who is waiting in the wings, understanding in some way that I really just need some doldrums for a while, a rest that will actually heal the deep tiredness from the last few voyages that were fraught with dangers, storms, lost souls, ...

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...

Today was one of those days.... I was added back onto the roster of my old 6's team, I got my bee allergy shot, I helped plan a siege defense, I got to play Rainbow Siege Six for the first time with my son and his friend, I had a last minute dental appointment with my periodontist that was nearly foiled by my GPS, and I might have a mild eye infection as well. But I got Dairy Queen and good gaming. I think I'm a little tired.

It's been odd, this last week. Since about Monday, after I'd finished turning everything over to the team, I've been getting back to my life. And it's been a mixed bag...

I got my breathing capacity test today at the allergy clinic. I knew that I needed a checkup with my doctor to continue getting a couple of my prescriptions refilled; so I called this morning and the receptionist said that Dr. Murthy had an opening at 10:30, so I just up and went. And I now have 75% lung capacity, when four years ago I had only 67%. This is good news. I've been running around a lot, I guess. *laughs*

So I did do the challenge! And I finished it, too.... So starting with day 1 at the very top... the first day was while I was still in NYC, the second was done on the airplane and the picture taken when I got home. The whole challenge was to do something related to Asian-style painting every day of the month, and to take the picture of what I liked most about the work of the day and to post it on Facebook. The posts had to be done every day, but if you skipped a day, you could make it up just the next day, so they had some leeway, which I didn't take. *laughs* There was something about the discipline of doing it every single day and having it be something publicly shown that made a difference because I painted every single day... It was interesting to see and feel the progression as I went along. About half of these would never have seen the light of day if I were to only post or show the paintings that I actually show, but it was interesting doing it with a bunch...