Liralen's Adventures Through Life

I just sent off the first big edits for an article for Slate , solicited by the editor from "the Liralen who inspired Jordan." It's interesting realizing that that was more than thirty years ago, and how much I've changed since and how much I've done and gone through. And also how much the same I am as that ambitious girl who wanted to be an electrical engineer... And how much the world has changed since, too. It was also kind of cool, after all the writing I've done, that getting an article down to 1200 words was entirely doable, and dealing with Ms Bosch's edits makes me appreciate editors all the more. I've been spending the last two or three weeks working on our church's Fellowship Hall remodel, doing the things I do. The whole congregation helped with the demolition and it was fast, dirty, but safe work. I've managed to avoid most of the insulation, but did drywall, thousands of drywall screws, including ceiling screws, and then do

So I did do the challenge! And I finished it, too.... So starting with day 1 at the very top... the first day was while I was still in NYC, the second was done on the airplane and the picture taken when I got home. The whole challenge was to do something related to Asian-style painting every day of the month, and to take the picture of what I liked most about the work of the day and to post it on Facebook. The posts had to be done every day, but if you skipped a day, you could make it up just the next day, so they had some leeway, which I didn't take. *laughs* There was something about the discipline of doing it every single day and having it be something publicly shown that made a difference because I painted every single day... It was interesting to see and feel the progression as I went along. About half of these would never have seen the light of day if I were to only post or show the paintings that I actually show, but it was interesting doing it with a bunch

It started out rainy, with the fog still visible from the night before, though, in a way, since we were up past midnight the day really 'began' while we were still coming home from Phantom ... The top tower of the Empire State Building gets lit different colors depending on the day. It was Caribbean Week, so they lit it purple, blue, green, orange, red, and magenta. *laughs* I couldn't have told you which color was what. The rain and the mists were still around the next morning. Luckily, nothing had gone off during the night, and we were all kind of bleary at breakfast, which was at 7 am. I don't know how Dick does it, running at that pace all the time, but we were all pretty dead tired, and I knew that I was sad and glad knowing it was our last day. Glad to get home to my own bed and familiar routine, but sad, as it is an amazing city. I deliberately didn't bother with trying to post anything that morning, because we all had to pack our stuff. We were taking