Liralen's Adventures Through Life

It seems that I am a band mom. *laughs* And not just a band mom, but a marching band mom, which seems a different breed of sorts. And it seems that John and I have done our usual thing, which is just dive in and do stuff. Jet has had marching band competitions both last weekend and this weekend. Luckily, or unluckily, depending on how you look at it, last year, his high school's marching band placed dead last in the standings, so there really was only room for improvement. And they have improved. The band director is really fun, and really wants his kids to have fun and grow with the experience, so it's been good watching the kids figure out what it is that they can do. Mr. Legg was really great about setting up the program with the base music, moves and teaching the kids how to march through the end of the summer and into the beginning of the school year. The color guard pretty much came up with their own moves throughout the piece, and figured out how much they really wan...

I had a Day, yesterday, which I was glad I finished. I work up with more tooth pain in the relatively new crown, and I was really unhappy about it. It's been happening for the last three weeks, so I finally broke down and called the dentist and got an emergency appointment at 2pm. It was amazing how much relief I simply got from having made the call, at least I'd know what was going on... So I went off to my 8:15 chiropractor's appointment with Brian, and he was careful not to jar my jaw, which was very nice of him. He commented that I finally had a curve to the top of my spine again. When I first started seeing him at the beginning of the year, the stress from the stuff happening at the church had all gone to my shoulders and neck. The muscles and tendons had been under so much tension there for so long, that they'd frozen into place and were pulling my head and shoulders forward into the classical old lady hunch. This was inline with the fact that I was pretty ...

Lots of changes... VBS was good, the small break was great, the last of the summer was full, and then yesterday Jet got his braces off for the last time (he'd had two sets of them, poor kid) and today he went to high school. Yeah. Yeah. I still remember when he went off to Kindergarten, as John says. *laughs* He's got the same smile, and a lot of the same personality, really. The backpack fits better, now. He didn't look back either time. Jet made his own lunch, scheduled himself, including getting to bed early so that he could handle the 6:00 awakening time to get in his bike to get to school by 7:30. He was all ready to make his own breakfast, but I think John helped out this morning. I got up just to see him off. I'm not a morning person, and Jet really didn't expect it of me, but... there's old expectations on my part about what I 'should' be doing. *laughs* Not that he has them. But we wished him well, and he took off on his bike and h...

And the Slate article is now live . It amuses me that on Facebook, my friends had it all over my timeline even before I had gotten the note from my editor that it was up. I loved little film montage they got for it, too. It's cool, too, to get to meet some of the people that read it, too.

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 ...