Liralen's Adventures Through Life

I've been binging on anime lately, mostly because I'm in the midst of my fifth cold of this winter season. I ended up getting a premium account on Crunchyroll. I've been watching Yowamushi Pedal , first and second series, all of Brave 10 , both series of Sword Arts Online , Jet and I are still going with Fairy Tail , and now I'm watching Log Horizon . Jet and I have a few months to catch up on One Piece , still, and are about two-thirds through Naruto Shippenden , which is pretty amazing to me. I finished the Naruto manga and loved it thoroughly. Yowamushi Pedal is a fun series about a high school boys' bicycling team. It follows one Onoda Sakamichi, a boy who loves anime and has glasses and feels like a complete nerd, but who is a naturally awesome bicyclist. He takes to it like a duck to water, but needs a lot of training for how to do it well, to strengthen up, and to figure out the overall strategies of the races. It's all very much a team effort, and I...

Sometimes, I think that scientists, early on and at a very early age, get an tremendous education through classic Halloween horror stories on the pitfalls and error of disregarding the opinions or feelings or thoughts of the rest of the human race, especially if they're particularly brilliant. That just because you might think they're stupid or slow or whatever doesn't mean that what they think or feel doesn't matter or that they can't hurt you badly if you treat them badly. Everything from Frankenstein to Dracula to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea all tell the same sort of story. Don't put yourself above or beyond humanity, or the mobs with the pitchforks and torches will be coming for you. Not that we all *get* that lesson, but still... I got it pretty early, and I think my time at Caltech made me VERY aware that I'm not really that smart, and certainly not smart enough to act like some idiots with very high IQs. So I en...

This year, as with every year, Carl and I started planning for the run up to BigBadCon and the convention itself months in advance. It's good to build upon the delicious bones of adventures past to create precise structures for the future with just enough room and juice in it to allow for the wonderful surprises of what's to come. We actually created a wiki for everything, including what we were doing each day, and details of the games and everything. And during BigBadCon's signups, I didn't get into several games I'd wanted to get into, including one of Carl's, and I was pretty disappointed at first, but then I realized that 1) I'd gotten into a lot of stuff I really truly wanted to get into and 2) I had room for something to surprise me in really good ways. There were other surprises, to start, that weren't all so good. One of which was having my temporary crown pop out the weekend before I left, so Monday morning found me in the dentist...

The dentist had noticed that I had some significant bone loss around a few teeth, so he scheduled me for an extra-long session with the hygenist. I was not looking forward to that, either... but went in today to get it done. Lucky for me, the bone loss is mostly from my habit of grinding my teeth. Even with a toothguard, the loss has been pretty significant, but it's not periodontal disease, thank goodness. I don't have the inflammation, nor do I have significant plaque buildup, and my gums are healthy as can be. The hygienist was amazingly thorough, delved into places that she was even surprised she was able to get to, and ended up finishing half an hour early. She also cut the bill to just two-thirds the original quote, simply because I didn't need anything more than what she'd done. She also gave me the usual goodie bag of brush, floss, flossers (for my bridge), and toothpaste. Plus, she gave me the added assurance that my bridge was on solid, and no worries there....

I'm not sure how I forgot about this in that last entry... but I finally finished my Tuscan Sunflower Shawl. Took about four months, and I ripped it out twice to get it to go right. It's a knitpick.com pattern, and I used the Comfy cotton yarn for it. I love the texture. It was pretty much what I wanted it to be, but a little too small for me. Luckily, it's going to be a present for someone who is smaller than I am, and she loves sunflowers. I managed to finish it, wash it, and as you can see, pin it out to dry using my lace wires. There were a few painful points to the pattern itself. One was that the increases weren't regular, they weren't done the same way with each repeat of the pattern, and going with what had gone on before was why I'd had to rip it back once. The other really painful bit was that each and every petal at the edge had to be done with a different piece of yarn. You had to cut the yarn at the end of each petal, which meant that I had to w...

Just been on a kind of recovery schedule... taking it easy, mostly, but trying to get some physical work in to let me sleep at night. Yesterday I spent hours on the rose garden, wedding, watering, and dead-heading in full sun, and it was wonderful. We've had a month of rainier and wetter weather than we're used to, which is nothing compared to what we used to get in Seattle, but here it was pretty unusual, so it's been nice that this week we're back to high-80's during the day and 50's at night, so that it's comfortable to sleep. Today I got to write with Amber a little later than usual. I had a good long walk through the whole neighborhood, too, along with a much needed two hour nap. I'm just wiped and not exactly sure why, but I'm sleeping when my body seems to really need the sleep. So that's all to the good. I also had about fifteen minutes of TF2 gameplay with Jet. We usually play around 7pm mountain time through to about 8, just when ...

I had a crown that had a hole in it and I was NOT looking forward to replacing it. At all. But I went into the dentist this morning and they took off the old crown. There was a small cavity underneath it, which they quickly removed. They built it all up again, and then took an impression of both the inside and the outside, and then made me a temporary crown and put it on. It hurt doing it, for all the doctor did a great job of applying the novocaine, to the point where I couldn't feel my tongue or that side of my mouth; but now it hurts a lot less than I thought it would. They adjusted everything beautifully, and for all that they tore up my gums pretty good getting it in and clearing out all the old stuff, the tooth itself doesn't hurt as much as it used to or nearly as much as it did when the old, badly made crown was put in place. I suspect that the cavity was starting to affect it a little, and having it covered up well, now, makes it happier. There were a lot of small ...