Liralen's Adventures Through Life

It's funny how something as simple as a toothbrush working again as it should could be a sign of hope. Small things working as they ought to. The signs we choose to make into Signs for our lives.  We have a very old Sonicare toothbrush handle, with just one button, and there are no online manual for it that we can find, and one day, during the pandemic, it just decided to stop signaling every quarter of it's full 2 minute working time. I had been used to swapping halves of my mouth on those signals and I felt oddly lost without it, the two times a day I was brushing my teeth. When the cleaners came, I'd been bundling away all the stuff what was on the counter of our bathroom, and I threw it into a very narrow space between somethings John had put under the sink and my WaterPik. It might have gotten its button mashed into doing what it was supposed to again, or something, but whatever it was, it made me feel like there might be good things possible again. Yes, I still do my ...

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...

Or Many Things... One of the things was getting around to cutting Jet's hair and having it turn out pretty good. Good enough he actually thanked me for the cut, after, which I was very very pleased by, and gives me some hope for when I have to get my hair cut to just get the heaviness out. Another was signing up to make 50 face masks for MaskRelief.com , which is shipping packs of materials for masks to sewers, who send them back so that they can be donated to medical facilities around the country. I'm doing about five a day, and finished the first 25 already; but another friend who was in desperate need for something to do has "borrowed" the second pack of 25 until her shipment comes. The other thing that I did turned out to be bigger than I'd imagined and is tied very tightly with something I've been working on for the last year. Since the beginning of last year, I've been involved with the Longmont Community Justice Partnership , which is a r...

I keep trying to write up the Puerto Rico trip and I keep tripping over the feeling that doing it linearly doesn't do it justice.  At all.  But it's what I'm so used to writing, so I keep trying and then deleting it again. It actually started when Jet was six, and John went off to Biloxi with people from our United Church of Christ church (UCC Longmont) to help with reconstruction after Hurricane Katrina and I joined him in following years.  But that was a long long time ago, and you all already know about our crazy left-wing denomination that does what that radical Jesus of Nazareth said despite Roman rule. Those crazy things about taking care of the poor and the hungry, about defending the powerless, and loving other people like oneself; and what Micah said, before Jesus, about doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God. But that's thousands of years ago. Maybe it really started when Carol said, "What are we going to do about Puerto Rico?...

I put off a lot of things until after Jet left.  There was a two-fold madness to this plan. The first was to pay as much attention to Jet while I had him as I could, and then, when he was gone, to be too busy dealing with all the things I'd put off to miss him too much. It worked pretty well. Monday was pretty much a blur, and I got to do a lot of emotional processing while I was too tired to be defensive about it.  I also got in a full session at 911, with over 35 reports, which is an extraordinarily large number, and the management and Joe, my favorite IT guy for all of dispatch, was profusely thankful for my work.  I even went and got boba tea after, which was something I'd done all summer, getting Jet his while I got me mine, and it was good to just think of him. Tuesday I went into constructive mode, and was super busy. The biggest thing was that John and I started going through all our shelves and pulling out books that we'd never read again.  We pulled o...

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.