Liralen's Adventures Through Life

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...

Huh. When I left it at that cliffhanger, I didn’t think that would come back to bite me and give me two other medical things to “deal with” in the interim. So. I’d best write before anything ELSE happens on top of all the house stuff. Best of good news with the house things: we closed on the old house!  The new owners met with us for the signing with their adorable baby boy and it was a blast. The new house is going well, and John’s checking every day, there’s a photo album of the daily progress here. The original medical thing was that my doctor’s office called me after my blood test and told me that I had the very first signs of pre-diabetes, and they just said that I should watch my carbs and get a bit more aerobic exercise and get another test in six months.  I immediately cut out the donuts and milk tea mornings on Mondays and also nearly all the candy, cookies, and treats I snuck when I was bored. Most of all, it meant that I couldn’t finish off the dregs of hon...

The last two weeks have been a little crazy. We've been working all along to get everything ready for showing the house. There were three stages: the first when Colleen showed up and gave us a quick run through of everything she thought we should do, things that we could kind of take or leave. They were as big as getting everything that was natural wood painted either white or gray and moving my entire library out of my office to things as small as the orientation of my second monitor. We got a lot of those things done. Including the miraculous cleansing of the carpets and tile.  The tile was so white, Jet came in saying, "For a while, I thought you'd spilled flour all over the kitchen floor!"  We didn't have all the woodwork painted, because not only were all the kitchen cabinets natural wood colored, but all the window casings, all the railings, all the doorframes, all the edging at the bottom of all the walls, the fireplaces were encased in natural wood for...

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...

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?...

The Puerto Rico Mission Trip in a Nutshell. *laughs*  Or, really, a YouTube Video that Karina, one of the people who went, made from all the photographs everyone took.  It's lovely, and the lyrics go so well with the pictures.  I love that she put John in every time they sang "sweat", his sticking his landing, and Kaleia being the little girl who can do anything. I'll do more details soon, I promise. But I loved turning my face up to the rain when it was just pouring while we were replacing the plumbing at the camp.

Since October, I've been filling my time with a lot of new things. One of those things that I've realized, as an introvert, is that I still need community.  No matter how tired or frustrated people sometimes make me, I still need the contact, still need to toss ideas around with people, and still delight in meeting new people and getting to know them. So I'm back in a position with our church, and it's as the head of the Pastoral Relations Committee, the people of the congregation who are supposed to help tend to the covenantal relationship between the pastors and the congregation.  It's an interesting job, and I held it for a while when I was moderator-elect, before I became moderator.  I'm oddly comfortable with it, too, as my main function really is to listen.  Listen to the pastors, listen to members of the congregation, and listen to how things are going between them. I've also been joining a few of the small groups, people that are gathering toge...