Daily Adventures

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 passed each other. I'm not sure how much that's needed in open air with a path that's a bit more than six feet wide; but it was oddly reassuring to have everyone conscious of each other.

The view going back to the car from the ranch was spectacular on a constant basis. We'd stop here and there to take pictures. The sun is far enough south to not interfere with any of the photos of Long's Peak and all the ones around it. 

I particularly love this one with the long shadow of the trees from the low southern winter light. I may have to make a very large watercolor painting from it using the techniques a Boulder painter taught me in one of his classes where I was the only one who showed up.

The afternoon and evening were pretty quiet after that, and dinner was simple, just leftovers: turkey, potatoes from the GB Fish and Chips we'd gone to on the way to delivering Jet back to Mines, gravy from the turkey, and roasted asparagus. And after dinner I did my usual gaming, playing a bit of TF2 with FiTH on their server, doing a bit of Immortal Redneck before playing some Risk of Rain 2. Syncheart joined me about then, and we played a chapter of Lego Batman 3 for the lols, but decided that it was much more fun doing Risk of Rain 2 together.

He helped me get the achievement of opening the timed chest on Rally Point Delta. The chest locks itself after 10 minutes, so it was fairly quick to fail and try again when we went to the wrong level. The second time we got lucky and hit the right level and Sync helped get me there with three minutes to spare!  That was really great. And then we went and did the final Boss now that the game has an actual ending instead of just looping as many times as possible through all the environments. 

That was very satisfying. 

I also managed to put up a Happy Birthday post for John on Facebook, and was reminded by another poster of our Puerto Rico trip in January. It seems like a world ago instead of just earlier this year. I want to make a go of writing about that trip, with the perspective of being here and now rather than then. There is much I'm grateful for about that trip and I want to capture some of it, even half a year away.

Hope all of you had a great Thanksgiving! We had a wonderful time with Jet, even for just the few days we had him, and I'm super grateful for the ease of COVID testing at Mines and here for us.

I was feeling so sad yesterday and I didn't really figure out why until the evening and seeing all the memorials and pictures people were posting about remembering on all the social media things.

Gradually coming to the realization that emotions don't always have to reasons, and it's just something that happens.  Feelings just come and go, and they aren't any particular kind of truth and they don't define me.  I feel sad, it's not that I am sad, which is a newish distinction for me to make and was made all the more obvious by the language used to deride each other in first person shooters.

It's interesting realizing that I learn more from the contrast.

John's now off on the road, having to leave early in order to actually meet up with us in California. With the extra day he'll have plenty of time to stop and hike and enjoy himself along the way, while we're touring a studio he'll probably be hiking in Reno. *laughs*  Jet, John and I are on a Whatsapp Chat and with all three of us separated it'll be interesting to see what pops up from all three perspectives.  It's an interesting way to stay current with each other.
( Read more... )

That's the easiest show and tell of the turn around.

That and that my sleep went from averaging 6 hours a night to averaging a bit under 8.

Well... and I can type more than a sentence and not be in pain, I can lift my sheets with the back of my left hand without a flash of agony, I can drive for more than a minute without having to curl my left arm against my chest to keep it from hurting to much, I can do more than two prayer shawl labels before having to take a break and stretch my neck and back and shoulder...

( Read more... )

One of those myths of competitive gaming is that you have to be "good enough" to play competitively.

Sure... it's scary and it feels crazy to try out for a team if you think you're terrible at the game, and it's important to try out for a position that you really enjoy playing; but the secret is that you don't have to be that good. What you have to be is willing to get better.

( Read more... )

One of those odd things, that I've been wanting to write about for some time, has been about gender boundaries. About the spaces where I've been walking that seem exclusive to one gender or the other. And I'm talking about a 100 to 1 ratio, on the most part.
( Read more... )

My characters are talking to me again. It's... kind of cool and kind of troublesome and kind of making me wonder what it is about just putting words to screen that wakes them up again.

Though, to be honest, it was really the asthma that woke Ukitake up, and he was gently encouraging me to breathe slow and deep, to keep control of my breathing rather than letting the coughing take over while I was in my bed in the middle of the night and I really needed more sleep. It worked.

Life and characters and creation is an odd mix.

( Read more... )

As can be surmised, I came back from the Florida trip in bad physical shape. I am hurting where I wasn't hurting before the trip and things that had been hurting before the trip had stopped until I came back. Days of doing nothing but being in a car, watching kids, or walking my feet off used very different muscles and emotions and tendons than did sitting at my desk in my office for much of the time.

And I had time to not only think, but talk with my husband about a few things that have been recurring thoughts.

The foremost was that after spending most of my life using my blogs and journals to process my emotions, I've walked almost completely away from them for more than three years.  Some of the reasons were good ones, having to do with the change in how the Internet now works compared to what it used to be, where anyone could find out anything that I said about them if they took a moment to look.  I had a relative of mine tell me that they'd read every account I had made that mentioned someone dear to them, and they were upset that my view hadn't coincided with theirs.

I said, very gently, that I couldn't have known what their viewpoint was, my sources of information were so limited.  I admitted, quite readily, that I didn't have the whole story, that I didn't know the whole truth and that I was probably wrong in what I'd said. 

They'd come ready for a fight, but when I said, that they were so surprised, it took all the fight out of them.  I didn't want similar things happening with all the church members, with my online gamer guys, or with the writing things that happened before that.  But I have been finding lately that I truly miss having the history there to refer to when I wish to. It's odd having decades before that, everything from what I ate to what I did to how I felt and what I thought I'd learned.  So many cycles repeated.

So I figured I needed to get back into writing again, whether or not anyone was going to read or follow didn't matter as much as what it does for me. So I signed up for Catie Murphy's 100 words for 100 days and so I'm going to write at least 100 words a day for a while.  The secondary part of all this is that the trip reports, with their photos and how they've evolved haven't really filled much of my emotional gap... most of them are just written according to the photographs I happened to snap and have veered away from the feelings and thoughts I've had about the experience, until, of course, I run out of photos... 

Another thing I've realized is that I am still depressed. It's not surprising in a lot of ways, but I haven't been willing to face it, admit it, or discuss it.  And I seem to be determined to keep myself depressed, worn down, and hurt. Just the other day I saw this video by CP Grey on the seven ways to Maximize Depression, and I'm seem to be doing a good number of them all at once. Some of it under the guise of the video gaming, but some of it just hasn't been making much sense to me.  The sleeping pattern part of it is the most obvious one, I've been constantly exhausted.

The Florida trip pushed it way past anything I've hit for a long time. Even when I was doing construction, a full week of heavy lifting and power tools, I didn't feel this bad; but I'd also been working out back then and doing physical work on a consistent basis. For the last two years, now, I've mostly been in my office. 

I have walked away from competitive gaming, but I haven't walked away from the people I met on that road, and most of them are true gamers, who spend hours honing skills at their screens. I am playing a lot of Rainbow Six Siege, still, and I'm actually getting competent at the game, learning the maps, situations, and what to look for. I'm making predictive C4 kills, mean headshots, finding cover instinctively instead of just standing in the open, doing good predictive thinking, flanking well with map knowledge, and coordinating with my team: except when I'm tired.

It's an odd way to gauge my condition, go into a game and see how quickly I'm killed or how well I can kill other people; but it's an accurate barometer. The problem is that the entire environment, other than the friends that I play with, deeply feed the depressive aspect of "surround yourself with negative people."  Instinctively, I've been only playing with people who can be positive with each other, who can dismiss and forgive the mistakes, and cheer when there are successes; but competitive is competitive and the comparisons are inherently about who is better and who is worse.

I am taking small steps out of the depressive stuff, I think, and doing it in a way where I don't have to abandon my friends.  I am really concentrating on my sleep patterns. I am designing my days so that I have time away from screens, and I'm moving.  As Tim Minchin says in his graduate address, "Run, my intellectual beauties, run."  There is a lot more in his speech that matches the positive side of CP Grey's lovely sarcastic approach to the same subject, and the similes and metaphors and sheer beauty of language Minchin employs is worth experiencing.

One of the great big deep holes of depression has to do with the entire state of the United States right now, with Trump as president, and the whole insanity that's going along with it, especially with regards to the objectification of women and racial bigotry. It doesn't help that gaming is very much prejudiced against women and as a "girl" gamer, I've been treated very badly by a few really awful men. There's underlying assumptions, as much on my side as theirs, and it's been weird and hard to try and untangle what is me and what is them. It's like walking back into engineering as a female, and trying to make my place when even I didn't necessarily believe I should have one. It's a big, deep hole that goes well back into my girlhood, and I haven't even begun to dig there, yet.

I'm afraid to.

But I've pretty much put myself in the middle of that quagmire, and it's starting to look like I'm going to have to start digging to really get out. Especially since it's deeply tied in with the whole aspect of same sex fanfiction that I used to write all the time, and the fact that I stayed totally away from non-con, not because anyone told me, but because I just had to for my own self-respect.  No one gets "used". Period.  So I am holding some boundaries well, if unconsciously.

Another huge slice of the depressive pie has to do with losing people or losing aspects of people. Seeing people lose capabilities over time, sometimes losing what they felt were essential parts of themselves with strokes or meningitis, or in the case of Alzheimer victims losing their memories and everything but their basic values. I'm at the age where I've lost quite a number of people already, and now I know a 32-year-old with brain cancer, 27-year-old with degenerative spinal injuries, an artist with loss of color vision, etc. etc. etc.  and now they seem so awfully young. Half my age, and dying already.  Life isn't fair. It never has been, but it just seems more so to me now.

So.  I think I have to focus on positive things, good things, things I can do and change and fix in my own corner of the world that may or may not touch on others.  I read Jo Walton's My Real Children over Thanksgiving break and it resonated, her micro efforts making huge changes in how the world walked. We'll see what comes of that.

Anyway... I'd rather leave on a positive note. *laughs*  One game that John, Jet, and I are playing as a family is Overcooked, a cooperative cooking game which we all play together in front of the TV, and it's reduced us to laughing so hard we can't breathe. The small Christmas miracle that occurred in conjunction with that was that I asked for one XBox controller on Amazon and I received three, one for each of us, which makes the game a lot easier to play. I hope to recount more specifics with regards to that in future bits.

I feel a little like I'm slipping sideways instead of moving forward or back. I'm still gaming, but in different venues than just TF2. I'm now playing Terraria, Civ V, CS:GO, Overwatch, Payday 2, and, most of all, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, mostly because I get to play with Jet, and he and his friends really like playing with me, no matter how good or bad I might be. I'm helpful, I cheer them on, and I usually do something smart in a game where there are so very many ways to die by being stupid.

Still, I've decided that I'm out of competitive, and that's been a good decision all around.

I am painting, spinning, and even dyeing again. There have been some fun things in the past few months, and the bees are still doing quite well. There are mites, but I think I'll just treat them this fall and it might help with next year. I've been getting through a huge volunteer work load for the Longmont Studio Tour, and a lot of it has been for the marketing side of things, rather than just the art. But I've been painting again, backing things, and trying to figure out matting and framing as well. And, of course, John and I just had our 30th Anniversary and it was a good, quiet one, with the annual Boulder County Fair ferris wheel.

( Some of the pretties... )