There are only four days left to donate to Tu Publishing, so if anyone meant to do so, the time is now. The donations have spiked in the last two days (probably due in part to the lj auction ending) but Tu still has 4,000 dollars to go before it meets its goal.
Blog
Retrospective
I graduated high school in 2000, so this year marks the end of the first decade of my adult life.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the things I accomplished in those ten years. I made a lot of mistakes, but overall, I’m pretty happy with the way things turned out. Things that filled those ten years:
Wrote seven books
Earned two degrees
Became mentally and emotionally healthy
Made a lifetime’s worth of amazing friends
Married my best friend
Of course, I fell seven times doing most of those things. (#3 especially was the cause of much falling.) But I stood up that eighth time, and that’s what counts, I think. It was all a tremendous amount of work, but worth every bit of it. Each of these things has been quite a blessing, and a miracle.
What’s interesting is that everything on that list is something that I knew I wanted by the end of that first year on my own. Which makes me think about the things I want for the next ten years of my life. The list goes something like this:
Several published novels doing well enough
Kids
A house
A 12-year-successful happy marriage
A 12-year-successful profitable business
That seems like a lot. If I got all of that in the next ten years, I don’t know what I’d work for in the 20’s.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try.
Christmas
Yesterday we decorated for Christmas and made pretzels and watched Nightmare Before Christmas. We center our family traditions around decorating, because we’re always off with other family on the 24th and 25th, so we don’t get a chance otherwise.
This morning I woke up and the house smelled like Christmas candles. I turned on the lights that run around our window, over the bookshelves, and around the tree. The tree sparkled. Goreshade, my betta, swirled in his bowl surrounded by fake holly and fake snow.
And I felt warm. I’m glad we have holidays at the beginning of winter. It gives me something to be happy about.
(Post about New York is coming, if it doesn’t take the rest of my natural life to upload the photos. Which it might.)
These are the last few in a series experiment with ISO, saturation, and contrast. They end up a bit fuzzy looking, but were the only way I could take photos in dim exhibits.
