Liralen's Adventures Through Life

I'm getting asked a lot these days about how my mother is doing. It's never easy to answer, because she's dying. She's pretty comfortable for all that, all of her needs are being taken care of. She has hospice checking on her every time she needs anything. She's being made as comfortable as possible with modern medicine and care.  Most people end up saying, "That's so hard."  And the only thing I can really do is nod. There's something in my head that always says, "It's not hard the way you think it's hard." It doesn't detract from the fact that everything is pretty difficult right now. I've always hated my emotions. They're always pretty difficult for me to access, except when I have the opportunity to process them with someone else, extroverted emotional expression seems to be one of the few ways I can deal with them. Grief always eats all my energy.  When I first came home from San Diego after the Thanksgiving perio...

We started the day talking through what it was we wanted to do on our last day here. It was good to talk it all through and to figure out what it was we really wanted to get, do, or experience on our last full day here. We're going to have to leave first thing in the morning to catch our plane to Las Vegas, which should let us get on a plane to Denver. Hopefully there won't be another foot of snow delaying everything there... We had our breakfast out on our patio, the last of all the things we had bought to have for breakfasts.  Then, as usual, a hen came up to check us out while we were eating. We shooed her off, but a little later, another came to look through the glass at us while we were getting ready to go. All week, one of the hens has been coming up to the glass, watched us, and lain down on the welcome mat to watch us as she napped.  It's fascinating that the chickens like watching us as much as all the tourists love watching them. But I really wanted a picture of o...

I haven't been sleeping all that well since Tuesday. The election results affected me badly. Jet had a great description, "It's grief adjacent." It is grief about my expectations about the world, this nation, and people in general. Though, if you asked me on any particular day, I don't actually believe in the "general" concept of people at all. I also know that a lot of my back brain has been processing, taking things in, and it then runs through a lot of them at night, even on nights after really physical days like the bike ride. So lack of sleep, an aching body, and something was really affecting my digestive system. These are all things you probably don't get in travel blogs. The downtime realities of travel. It's just the beautiful surfaces. I am guilty of some of that on Facebook, as one only has so much time, so much bandwidth, and can only display so many pictures, so why not the ones that we want to remember?  Why not brighten someone els...

When my son decided to go to Mines, he met a bunch of like minded young people his age, and when he first came home there was this time when he admitted that he and his cohort had decided that they were the ones who were going to have to save the world from Climate Change because all those who had gone before didn't seem to be up to the job. He and his friends were facing that reality with determination. A few months ago, he showed me this video: Kurzgesagt's " We WILL Fix Climate Change! " I watched it and cried, and he told me later that when he watched it, he cried too because the main gist of the video is that humanity, in concert, has brought ourselves back from the brink of self-destruction. The weight of the impending disaster was immense, and to know that we weren't all going to just die of Climate Change was huge. There's a lot more work still to be done, don't get me wrong, but all the Apocalyptic tones of authors screaming for attention and the ...

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 ...

I burned Hell Money for Morgan when he died during COVID in an ICU for an infection. He was younger than I, and he was a kind man whom I had shared sushi with in a restaurant near BigBadCon when all the other folks went for BBQ with deep fried things. We had enjoyed the lighter fare and the smaller amount of company and we'd talked without the whole crowd of folks he'd always happily entertained, and it was good. I mourned him at a distance, for reasons you all well know. I still miss Isabel. That's to be expected for a while to come, and I find that I miss George more, too, with that. She kept his memory bright, and that kept them clear for me, too. Now I need to do the work for both. My stacks of hell money have been depleted significantly this last year, and it's a reminder for me that it's okay for me to feel sad when I'm still mourning. The incense and the smoke comfort even as they sting, and I remember all my dead. Even the ones I didn't know. The Bou...

I started reading James Clear's Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven way to Build Good Ones and Break Bad ones, and it started with a really interesting premise... I do recommend the book, as it's got a lot of specific details on how to improve life with a lot of small, doable changes in the systems one has for doing things. But the starting premise that really struck me was that habits often change because ones self-definition changes.  I really loved that. I had to drastically cut my sugar intake when I became pre-diabetic. And I realize now that "I AM pre-diabetic" became something of my mantra while I did all the small things I needed to cut nearly all the added sugar from my diet at that time. I lost 20 pounds, lowered my blood sugar, and even had half a dozen side effects that all improved my health; but none of those were what precipitated the change and none of those were my stated goal of the time. I just realized that I had become pre-diabetic and that my old s...

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...

I've been binge watching The King's Avatar on Netflix. It's based on Chinese graphic novels which, in turn, I believe, were based on serial novels, and it's been fascinating seeing so much of what it was like to be on a competitive team. And old friend of mine recommended it and I've been really grateful for the distraction. It's been a balm after the happenings in DC.  John and I were delivering Jet back to Mines when all of that happened, and I didn't let it affect me much, as we had plans. We went to Vihn Xuong Bakery to get bahn mi. They had amazing sandwiches, with their own fresh baked rolls, delicious pickles and veg, and Jet and I got the combination, which included their BBQ pork, their ham, and, of all things, headcheese as well as their house made pate and the usual Magi sauce and other condiments.  Momofuku published a cookbook, a while back, that I've been using to make ramen with. The noodle recipe isn't that useful for a home cook, bu...

One of those things that struck me today, while John and I were walking, was that the flags were at half mast. It was for Pearl Harbor, but it struck me again that there really hasn't been a period of mourning for the quarter million people who have died of COVID in the US, yet. Due, in large part, to Trump wanting to deny that any of this has happened, I think, but it's been a thing that's bothered me badly. Back in 2013, when the flood happened here, it physically affected a relatively small portion of the city, but everyone in Longmont went into a sort of mourning over the losses. Not just the temporary losses of the usage of parts of the city, including a very large section of green space, or that so many people had damage to their houses, or even the homes completely lost. Luckily, no lives were lost in Longmont, though other communities were not quite as lucky.  Grief takes effort and energy. For someone close, it's a lot of energy and time. But the overwhelming n...

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...