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The rest of the New York pictures are here.

I want to be continuing to work down my bloggables list with another post I’ve been intending to write forever.

Instead I am having another sinus infection today, which has wiped me out. The antibiotics should be kicking in soon. I’m grateful for my doctor and my medical insurance.

So I’ll just share the good news that my mammoth revision actually worked. I have a long list of tiny things to fix now, but nothing major.

Sighed a big sigh of relief over that one. I really feel like I’m growing and stretching and getting better at this whole writing thing. That gives me hope that maybe this year will be different from last year. Which is exactly what I need.

Lots of things are different, now. Lots of things are aligning in my favor. I’m in a good place.

As for the other side of the business, Drew is swamped, which is both good and bad. We needed the money, but Drew probably did not need to be working the 55 hour weeks he’s been working. (These are not over. Next week will have some late nights as well so he can meet turn around deadlines.)

He’s holding up excellently, though. He’s staying happy, in his Drew-like way. And the commissions just keep coming. We’ve discovered that tax return season is one of our busy seasons–along with tournament season in the summer. The busier we get, the more I realize we’re actually doing this thing and succeeding.

I’m doing fine with it, too, given that he’s still available to talk to me while he works. I wouldn’t handle it very well if the long work week meant he was gone all the time. Especially since I’ve spent a good portion of the last week useless.

And on top of it all, we’re gearing up for the release of our next miniature. It’ll be finished within the week. I have a bunch of work to do before we can send it off to be cast…work that is about to leap off Drew’s table and onto mine. The antibiotics should have rescued me by then, though. Thank goodness for that.

That’s what’s going on here.

I posted most of my NYC pictures over at  , but there will be a few stragglers here.

Let’s talk about New York.

My sister is living there right now, going to school for musical theater. She’ll be back in LA next year, and then probably back to New York again.

My parents flew us all out to see her for Thanksgiving, since my mom was the only one of us who had ever been to the city.

I love big cities. I love them so much I’d live in one in a heartbeat. My first choices would be Paris and NYC, though San Francisco would also be acceptable. (No thank you to LA or Los Vegas. And SLC does not count.) Given that I’ll probably never actually move to a big city (them being so expensive, us being able to work from anywhere, and our community here being so great it’s impossible to leave) I really love to visit.

New York City is my kind of city. Places have a feel to them. I grew up near San Francisco, and I love the feel of that city. Paris feels old, with generations of architecture layered over each other like a post modern text. (Credit for that analogy goes to my parisian travelling companion Emily, but it’s never left me.) LA and Vegas feel more fake, more planned, more recent.

New York feels old and alive. Drew and I did a lot of my favorite kind of touring–just walking around the streets looking at stuff.

And taking pictures, if course. Because that’s what we do. (I’ve given up on not looking like tourists–but I comfort myself that we look like tourists in our own town, too. Maybe we just need better cameras to be taken seriously.)

Cut for friends pages. Lots of pictures within.

Drew’s aunt Lee Ann is kind enough to buy us season tickets to her choral performances with the Salt Lake Choral Artists. We always love these concerts–the conductor Brady Allred picks fascinating and disparate music. We’ve seen them do everything from traditional American folk music to an oratio about a native american soldier coming home from Iraq.

Last weekend’s performance was arrangements of music by the Beatles.

Instead of organs or orchestras, a Beatles cover band accompanied them, playing interim numbers between the choral pieces.

The members of the choir danced a bit during the band numbers. The band was a good cover band–the kind that makes the music their own. They did some of the more interesting Beatles’ music–like Back in the USSR–not just the early pop stuff.

The conductor and assistant conductor ran the chamber choir and the concert choir through rival arrangements of Blackbird…simultaneously.

A children’s chorus sang When I’m Sixty-four.

The self proclaimed “token Brit” in the choir gave amusing anecdotes about how the Beatles influenced his own life, though he also proclaimed himself to be a “square” and a “techie.”

The chamber choir performed an arrangement of “Can’t Buy Me Love” so traditionally that it might have been written by Bach. We laughed through the whole thing. I think Lennon rolled over in his grave.

An a capella group responded with a much more lively rendition.

An audience full of sixty-year olds swayed their arms in the air during Hey Jude.

The scripted and controlled form of the choral concert gave way to the off-the-cuff form of the rock concert.

All the choirs came together at the end to sing “All You Need is Love.”

The music was entertaining and powerful and moving and hypnotic–all the things Beatles music ought to be.

So. Much. Fun.

The good news is that I have officially unburied myself. All the tasks I ignored while I was finishing my revision are now done. I have a few overdue christmas presents to sew (whoops) and a few books written by friends to read, but I’ve now staunched the bleeding of the task list sufficiently that I can do it. In fact, these are the only tasks on my larger Things To Do lists…at all. (This is because I stopped adding things a while ago when I realized I had Too Much To Do.) And that feels good.

The bad news is that I’ve apparently worked myself into a waking coma. I can’t do anything today but lie in a lump. The daily to do stuff is languishing. (Fortunately it’s stuff like Dishes and Laundry and Water the Plants. Somehow, we’ll all survive.)

I watched a movie. I’ve done a lot of boring web surfing. I can tell I’m in a coma because it didn’t even bother me that I was so bored. I just kept clicking. I don’t want to move again. Really ever.

I should have seen the coma coming. I’ve written five paragraphs in two days, because pulling words out of my brain was like pulling taffy. My writing is the canary. It always goes first.

Fortunately this weekend has precious little productivity required. Hopefully the coma will be over by Monday.