12.42am Saturday: Liz Argall, "Mike Hammer", Lee Moyer, Toulouse Petit

It's past mindlight (accidentally typed apposite expression!). Brain curling at the edges. Such an array of surprises and delights as we go. Still things to record from these days and one more day before we go to Portland on Sunday. And I've heard Liz going upstairs to bed just now after another evening maintaining her discipline of providing cartoons on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. For a widening audience, including in healing professions and communities, but for no income thus far, a condition of her visa status as Liz and Mike await the outcome of Green Card applications.

Liz is still the extraordinary combiner of values and imagination as she showed in The Prophet's Sister when she was 19 in 1999, before she learned so much depth of human experience with her mother Margaret's illness and unkind death in the two following years. We have not seen each other from 2011 to this year. It is good to be together and admire what Liz does, having taken herself to a bigger world and a wider audience for her creative work.

When I speak of my admiration for this daughter Liz instantly speaks of how wonderfully she is supported by Mike, who himself, away from his demanding day job and under the name of Mike Hammer (pseudonym, as customary in Roller Derby) has risen swiftly to the third** of five ranks among certified referees in world Roller Derby, having initially been taken up by Portland's Rose City derby team in 2009 to advise on skating skills. Liz and Mike make a great team!

** Level 3 (silver) Able to exceptionally perform referee duties for WFTDA sanctioned interleague play.

This is Liz-perspective as now articulated by the Things Without:

... and this is Liz in The Prophet's Sister, 1999:

What of innocence lost?
It cannot be lost, it cannot be destroyed. These are traps of the mind that the unwary fall into, we forget how to maintain our state of innocence and finding that it has faded to a slip of nothing assume it has been destroyed forever. Innocence cannot be destroyed—it can be injured, forgotten, suppressed and hindered in every way possible, but the potential for innocence will always remain. It is like a seed that waits inside every person, waiting for the nurturing that will allow itself to grow once more and express its glorious, bounteous, giving self. 

We travel Sunday with Liz, southwards roadtrip. Mike joins us for the Memorial Day weekend in San Francisco a week from now. We have been generously offered the house of Liz's friend Lee Moyer and his partner Venetia in Portland for Sunday night. Venetia and Lee will be away on vacation, but we were able to dine with them on Wednesday evening at Toulouse Petit in St Anne. How interesting now to have a so-far-away favourite eating place, from 2011 and again now.

The menu reads:
"previously accepted limitations no longer apply"

I don't remember Liz accepting limitations!