liralen: (crane)
Welcome to my journal. I'm putting this at the top so folks can find things easily. There are so many years' worth of stuff on this journal that it's not that easy to find things. I started out just journaling, but then got into writing fiction as well.

First, trip journals. They're all family friendly. You can also just click the travel tag as well to see everything related to it.

Just to keep this short... )

Closure

Mar. 11th, 2025 02:46 pm
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I think the hardest thing about this whole thing was that Mom couldn't really talk or process any of it with us. She couldn't voice her thoughts and couldn't do anything for Dad or us about the end of our relationship with her. By the time we found out the tumor had already taken her ability to word. Oddly, luckily, I've had to make closure for myself quite a few times in my past often without input from the other person that was involved. 

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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.

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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...

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Today did not start auspiciously. My guts were entirely unhappy with me and the whole situation. After breakfast, we went for a little walk, that was actually quite good. 


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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.

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Today started as something of a random walk, mostly because of the rain showers that were ribboning their way across the island. We never really knew when it would happen, but there would be a sudden downpour and then it would eventually stop. So we started out by going to look at waterfalls.

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We started the day by going out for breakfast. John had been making our breakfast most mornings, and he'd discovered a little cafe that was only open for breakfast and lunch in the second story of one of the buildings in our little town, and they had some intriguing specials. 

So we woke up and walked over to the Olympic Cafe.

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Recovery

Nov. 9th, 2024 09:54 pm
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First, Bali Hai. It was a picture I couldn't find yesterday. 

Friday was mostly a recovery day. After breakfast we went on a walk. Then we headed back to the complex, and I went and worked out in the gym. I have hip and lower back things now that really respond well to me doing strengthening work. John went and got us more poke for lunch and we spent lunch on a Zoom meeting with Jet. He was on campus and talked with us via his phone until he ran out of charge and ran off to his board game evening get together. 

We went on another walk and scouted out bakeries, coffee shops, and found another place that actually sold Kaua'i grown, medium roast coffee. The darker the roast for coffee, the more the roast profile takes over the taste of the whole cup. If you want to enjoy the varietal, then you really want at worst a medium roast that doesn't go too far into the second crack. Yes. We roast our own coffee for Reasons, which include knowing what varietal I have and where I want the roast profile for the coffee involved and if I really want to taste the varietal. Hawaiian coffees, like Blue Mountain coffees are notorious for the fact that they don't actually have a lot of varietal character. They're MILD. People loved them for the fact that they have no taste. It's so funny in some ways. 

Dragonfruit is also bemusingly mild. Creamy, the tiny seeds don't intrude, and this startling red beauty was no exception. We cut this in half for breakfast and were amazed by the color, which is actually why dragonfruit commands the prices that it does, honestly, it's beautiful. 

But it didn't actually taste of much. It was entirely unassuming. Juicy, tender, not very sweet or... well... fruity. It was almost like the perfect texture for fruit but the flavor of very gently sweetened Jello. 

I would not go so far as to say that Kaua'i grown coffee tasted like Jello, though. It's still coffee. And the medium roast makes for a very gentle, unassuming cup that does a good job of waking one up in the morning. Its price is worth paying for supporting the local roasters and growers. All the walking out meant that we could have a treat because we'd have to walk all the way back, so we headed back to Wailua Shave Ice.

This time we got Da Mango. It was lovely. Mango syrup, a mango cream, mango chunks all over the top, and lovely little mochi bits all around the edge. They added chew. It was so good, and even better when we shared it. 

While we ate, an old man sat down next to us and asked us how we liked the shave ice, and he said that it was pretty much the price of a meal for him. He said he was a local, and started off with an apology for the bad weather. We said we didn't mind it too much, and he said that most of the tourists said that, but given that he lived on the beach he really didn't care much for it. For all that, he was pleasant enough company while we finished our snack. 

I went and did my painting class in the room.  It was nice having had enough experience to have packed everything I needed, but I thought the "gold" paper was the one that was colored pale gold with flecks of gold, when actually it was the one that was butternut colored, which wasn't the "butternut" paper. Lol. 

I ended up enjoying the paper I'd packed enough that I didn't regret it. John wandered in and out, doing the laundry and exploring as was his wont. I usually stayed mute on the Zoom call for the class, so he wasn't disrupting anything. The class was supposed to go until 7 pm, but it ended early, so we headed off to dinner at Napali Brewing. We had a wedge salad, mixed regular potato and sweet potato fries, Huli Huli chicken which was a butter and oyster sauce sauced chicken thigh, and roasted brussels sprouts. 

The salad, fries, and sprouts were all amazing, the chicken was so so. 

After dinner we headed back to the room and out to the resort's hot tub. It was a nice meeting place for other residents, and we all talked while we soaked. Then back to the room to shower and write. I was finally able to catch up for the last two days. That felt pretty good, especially considering that I used a twenty minute timer and stretched when it went off. 

And given that Thursday night had been really painful, Friday night ended up being much much better. 


liralen: Finch Painting (Default)

Thursday, the 7th was a plan to get to see the Kilauea Lighthouse and wildlife sanctuary and to go and walk the Limahuli Botanical Gardens. Both required reservations and some exact timing with those reservations. The Kilauea reservations were done on the half hour, and you were expected to take no more than forty five minutes on the site, and that was stated on the ticket and website. The gardens suggested that one plan for at least an hour and a half on the grounds, and Google maps said that getting there could take everywhere from an hour and a half to forty minutes, depending on the construction that was along the way. 

So our plans got a bit more extensive to make sure everything worked.Read more... )

Walking Day

Nov. 8th, 2024 10:10 pm
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 On Wednesday we walked.

Right after breakfast, we put on our walking shoes and headed north on the trail. There's a trail right behind the complex we're living in, and it goes fourish miles in either direction, along the coastline, so it accesses a lot of different beaches. I didn't want to go for more than half an hour, as we'd have to make our way back. John had a meeting around lunch time, so we weren't going to go too far this morning anyway. 

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I was just going to keep going, but we got really knocked off our emotional feet on November 5th, and not for just the reasons a lot of folks did. We actually didn't pay any attention to the Election Day news until late in the evening, and in Hawaii, late is really late for the rest of the country. 7pm in Hawaii is already tomorrow in New York. 

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Planning...

So today was the day we decided to scout the whole of the North Shore, just heading north from our base and going as far as it was possible to go. Kaua'i is like most of the islands here, i.e. an island with a road around it, and a few roads that go up to the top of the mountain in the middle of the island. The road around this particular island, though, isn't a closed ring. The shaping and wear on the mountains to the north cut deep valleys between ridges, and the roads get less and less possible to make the more they try to cross the deep cut valleys from the wear of the water that falls constantly on the top of the mountain.  Both Kaua'i and Hawai'i are shaped that way. Not so much Maui or some of the other islands. 

But that means that there is an End of the Road going either way along the ring around Kaua'i. And to day we went North. 

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The last time we came to Kaua'i was in 1993, right after hurricane Iniki. It was pretty sparse back then, as the whole island was rebuilding, we stayed at one of the few hotels that was still whole, and we ate at one of the very very few "fish" restaurants and the waiter there thought we were remarkable as we were dressed like a native, but no native would be eating fish at a restaurant. Everyone had plenty of fish off their boat or their uncle or cousin's boat. They wouldn't be paying money for fish.

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Monday was supposed to be less than half a day of work, with everyone cleaning up the very last details on all the projects on the site. I wandered about helping various people with the ends of all their projects. One was fixing the fact that one of the beams had been set a fraction of an inch too low compared to all the joists, so we had to nail a little bit of wood to the bottom of every joist. Someone had ripped a 2 by into equally thick shims, and there was a team of two trying to put them up on everything. Jenny had a methodology that included presetting all the nails, so I did that while she and Sue's husband, Jim, nailed them over their heads.

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Once the roof on the fourth house was up, there were a lot of things that started going into motion. Getting the windows and doors into the house, finishing the front porch, and planning all the framing for the loft and walls in the fourth house.

The other houses still needed work. Following the plumbing and having to move various walls, the floors had to be pulled up while they were doing the work and they all had to be re-lain, sometimes recut to follow the new contours of the rooms or enclosures. Both House Number 1 and 2 had had the flooring done in the spring for the whole loft and the bathroom, and a chunk of that flooring had been pulled up. There were a number of "final" coats of paint to be put up, more battens that could be secured where we had siding, seams to be caulked, and lots of screw holes to be filled.

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Sorry...

Sep. 21st, 2024 09:47 pm
liralen: Finch Painting (Default)

I decided to enjoy a sunset and a campfire tonight, so I'll probably write about today tomorrow....


liralen: Finch Painting (Default)

 A little background about the whole of the National YMCA Alumni Service Project. So it turns out that all the camp directors, managers, organizers, and even the cooks that work for the various YMCA camps all over the United States all get amazing pensions. They also organized as alumni, and the alumni organization wasn't all that active and was starting to die off.

Some of the folks in charge of the organization decided to try and do a national service project, and a bunch of folk got really excited about it. They solicited ideas from various Y's all over the country and ended up accepting the proposal by the YMCA of the Seven Council Fires in Dupree. It is the only Y on a Native American reservation, and the idea was to build four houses for single mothers that were looking to get out of generational poverty and multi-generational homes that had problems supporting them appropriately.

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I spent most of the morning caulking.

I'm not entirely sure how to convey the depth of history that goes underneath that statement. Let's start with the fact that in a great many volunteer construction projects, that caulking is usually given to the girl with the least experience who just says okay when someone, usually male, asks her to please do the caulking. It's oddly considered by many volunteers as "make work". It's something that's not nearly as fun or fulfilling as using power tools, putting up a wall, building actual framing for rooms, or nearly anything. It's the low man on the totem pole work.  And not a lot of people jump up to do it.

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The interesting problem of blogging about construction work is that I rarely have the time to take pictures of what I'm doing. So it's rarely a complete look at what I actually got up to. In this case, however, John was kind enough to take a break and actually shoot some photos. I also shot some photos yesterday of the site just as it looked when we got there, so that I'd have something to compare against at the end to really figure out how much progress we'd made. 
 
 A single day.
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 We started the morning with a Quest.

It was to get to the Dignity of Earth and Sky, a statue that John had found when he and I were looking with Linda K. into the tradition of Star Quilts in the Lakota tribes. The hotel didn't really have breakfast so we made do with a banana we'd bought the day before and the toasted oats I'd brought for myself. 

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