Penultimate Day!

I have got to finish my mondo-dala by the time I hit the sack tonight, even though it isn't due in class until Thursday at 6. I simply have too many things to do next week to have time for painting, and then we're leaving for VA by 6 am Friday, in order to get there to watch the visiting Tibetan monks creating a sand mandala (yippee!).

I've been painting steadily every day; the greatest obstacle I have faced has been my indecision over colors and design past the green rings.
As you can see, I did figure out what to do - Z suggested that pink would go well with the green "leaf" color, & she was right! I decided on the water and then sand colors to go with the pearls, which have been part of the design for a while now (many thanks to C & Z as consultants on how to paint pearls!). And then I dithered forever, while doing other things, over the penultimate ring.

Now I know, so after a trip to AC Moore to get more white paint (man, do I ever go through a lot of that!), I am about ready to set up to finish. I hope I can get done before midnight.

I've also been reading like crazy to read all the Elle books by Sept. 4, and have only two left. I got through Meredith Hall's Without A Map pretty quickly, and I have to say it was a big relief to finish it. She is for the most part a good writer, but her choppy, inconsistent style is very frustrating and at times confusing; one moment she is living in Boston with her boyfriend, the next she's walking alone down a dusty road in Nebraska with no explanation of how or why she got there, and then on the next page she's back with her boyfriend again and they've bought a fishing boat and there is a sketchy explanation of how that came about.

Guiltily, I also have to admit that it was a relief to stop reading about such a very sad life intertwined with so many other sad lives. After a while, it just became an overload and I couldn't take in any more. Which was too bad, because there were some very nice bits of writing in this book.

~Namaste