Today I did something good for my mental health and -- gasp! -- scooted out of work at 5. It was such a gorgeous day, I couldn't help myself.
Rolled home on the R train and then did a couple of errands. Picked up my latest Japanese art buy at the post office. It's a lovely, understated painting of a boat docked under a weeping willow. I'm trying to assemble a modest collection of scrolls to rotate according to the season and so my collection just grew by one more scroll. It'll be a while before I have anything approaching a standing collection but I've got a couple of pieces I really like and that's good enough for me.
So after picking up this scroll I ambled over to a new local coffee shop I'd heard positively mentioned on astorians.com. Nice place! Organic fair trade coffee, really friendly owners and a mellow, welcoming environment. I sat there and shot the breeze for an hour and a half, just chatting with people from my neighborhood. Now that we have an alternative to Starbucks in my part of Astoria I'll go there instead.
Been doing a lot of calligraphy research online lately. Getting promoted again spurred me to dive even further into my studies. Right now I'm reading up on rinsho (臨書 ), a thin bladelike script similar to kaisho that you find in very old texts. Not many web pages mentioning it in English but oh, there's a treasure trove out there if you google it in Japanese. So exciting to find other people writing and thinking about it as well!
On the inexhaustible topic of calligraphy, since I ended up writing so much about it here I decided to spin that whole section off into its own blog, Shining Flower. Feel free to have a look.
Other than that, work continues to be busy but exciting. Still prepping for the trip to Ghana and I find it hard to believe that a month from now I will actually be there with some of my all-time favorite people. What a trip that's going to be. I guess it makes all the shots I'm getting worth it. Last Friday I had to get shots for Hepatitis A and B. The shots themselves were no big deal but I developed a low grade fever a couple of hours later as my body reacted to the vaccine. I'd had all sorts of ideas about what to do with my Friday night but I ended up passing out early to let my immune system take over and do its job. Now I'm back to normal but more shots are on the way so my shoulder's just going to be sore for the forseeable future as far as I can tell.
That's about the news. On to another day.
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