Liralen's Adventures Through Life

A year or so before the pandemic, I bought a pair of very bright, wide-toed running shoes that I used mostly for walking. During the pandemic, I walked a LOT of miles in them, given that I was walking about 10,000 steps a day. This was in order to deal with my cervical issues. When it first started, I couldn't really do anything without pain other than walk. And I kept up the habit and John joined me during COVID.  These are those old shoes. I wore through them. Actually ripped the sides of them during a hike on slick rock with water running over the rock, and trying to stabilize myself caused me to rip out both outsides. The soles had already started to wear smooth, so they were really slick on wet surfaces.  I even wore through the insoles, and only realized it after I wore these through the downpour in New Orleans. I'd had to take the insoles out to let them dry, and realized that I'd actually gone right through them. They were made by Altra , which is actually made near...

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...

Today I'm thankful for something that didn't happen. And since it's not mine to tell, I'll just leave it there. The intensity of the gratitude is as big as it's vagueness. *laughs* Instead, I will talk a bit about my three favorite adventures in Puerto Rico, two of them happened at the very end, the other was basically when everything at the camp started to flood due to the deluge of rains that were coming down. *laughs* Here is the video that Karina made of the whole trip: That rain at the beginning? I recorded that just to remember the thunder of the rain pouring down. That was when the whole camp was just running with water, and it was streaming through the grounds, knee high and even hip high in some low areas around the buildings. The meeting hall below our dorm was flooded, and the other group that came and stayed in the other half of the dorm, had to mop out their kitchen.  Colorado is a very arid place, and I haven't been in rain like that for a very lon...

Our walk was along the Sandstone Reach, which follows the St Vrain Creek as it meets up eventually with Boulder Creek and other Front Range waterways. It is open land, with plenty of wetlands and the birds and wildlife that goes with it.  There was one bald eagle right on the waterway who flapped painfully up until it caught a current and then it circled higher and higher until we couldn't see it when it presented sideways to us and could only catch the black flash of its wings when it was headed away from us. It was amazing to watch it just ride the wind up without a single flap after the initial flurry. It's about a two mile walk from the parking lot we've found to Sandstone Ranch proper, and another two back, all as flat as creek side paths can be, and Longmont City has paved it all with cement so it's smooth, easy walking and we can make distance at a good pace for aerobic work. There were a lot of people on the path, today, and nearly everyone wore masks when we pa...

Uhm.  Yeah. I fall prey to the impulse to mostly write then things are good, not when things are bad, or when things I decided don’t quite turn out the way I’d wanted them to. But that’s also a part of life and not blogging about the bad stuff means that I’m only bragging about the good.  Bleh. So. The dental thing I thought I’d taken care of?  Not so much.  The dentist didn’t actually figure out the adjustment of the bite until the third subsequent visit, and by then all the nerves were so inflamed he had me do a week-long prednisone series to calm things down.  And that didn’t just calm down the inflammation it also has depressed me significantly as well as delayed my final test on my blood sugar numbers for another three months. But I am maintaining my lower weight pretty well, with the help of my boys.  That’s been a good note. But speaking of delays... the new house has been delayed significantly by a new city inspector who decided that t...

There are pros and cons to living in a home that is staged for an open house and for showing.  The pros include it being very very easy to pick up everything that's out and getting it out of ones way, there are actually very few things out. The cons are pretty much all the things on the other edge to that particular blade. We are selling the house here, the one we've lived in since Jet was three, and which is the one he remembers the most. Our realtor is the same one who introduced us to Colorado when Xilinx hired her, and Colleen Vandendriessche of PRO in Boulder is very high energy and has a very clear idea of how things should go. For a while, she was thinking we'd do better renting the old house instead of selling it, and if our financial situation was like nearly anyone else's, she'd be right, but we aren't.  And she was very gracious about asking her tax guy and accepting his answer that it might not be the right thing for us. It's good. It's b...

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...

Honestly, it wasn't 'cause the bees found them under the elastic of my beekeeper's outfit.  *laughs* Though, perhaps, it helped. I'm finally kind of settling into the fact that Jet is out of the house, and that doesn't mean that I'm not his Mom, still.  My fitbit still says, "Hi Jetsmom!!" every time I look at it...  But I am finding that I'm settling into this new way of living. Just in time for me to uproot everything and go to LA with Tonya and Lisa and putz about there before heading up on a train to San Francisco, where John will meet Tonya and I and we'll all drive north together, wander about the redwoods, and then head further north to drop Tonya off at her friend's and the two of us will go visit Isabel in Redmond. Which should be good, too. One thing I'll note is that I've really recovered all my functionality from March, and my massage therapists are working on the last out-standing knots in my left shoulder.  I...