wherein Liz draws pictures in crayon, attends an interesting concert, & gripes about crossposting

It is time once again for me to inflict a random picture I drew in RE upon the internet!

Today’s lesson wasn’t a lesson. Instead, after the chalice lighting and opening ritual (and a couple songs from the RE musician, who was with our class this week), the kids got half an hour for snacks and free play. In practice, this meant four seven-year-old boys who all wanted to make paper airplanes and fly them around the room. Managing that does not take one’s full attention, so my co-teacher and I did some arts & crafts of our own while keeping things to a dull roar.

I started by making a paper cutout snowflake, but I left that at the smoke shop for Melodrama (one of my coworkers) to add to our winter window displays. This was my second art attempt: a crayon picture of a sunset over open water. Because why not. *grin*

(The scanning process altered the colors a bit — the picture is more orange and less red in real life — but the non-altered scan is incredibly washed out, so eh, whatever.)

[link to original post, for when Tumblr inevitably breaks the embedded image]

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After church, I ate lunch at Hal's Deli (fish sandwich, mmmm), dropped by the smoke shop for fifteen minutes until the library opened, and then lounged in a library armchair and finished reading American Canopy, because it was overdue by about a week and I wanted to finish it before turning it in. Then I went to the second of my five Finger Lakes Chamber Ensemble concerts.

This one was the first of a two-concert series presenting all of Beethoven's piano-and-cello works, which in practical terms means five sonatas and three sets of variations. This concert was three sonatas and one variation set, which means the March 16th concert will be two sonatas and two variation sets. The pieces come from all periods of Beethoven's career, and the cellist (Stefan Reuss) talked a little bit about each piece before he and the pianist (Michael Salmirs) played them, which I thought was very nice and also educational.

The church was only about half-full, as compared to the January chamber concert -- this is a more specialized area of interest, I assume, not to mention it was a frigid day and the roads got pretty icy overnight as Saturday's giant slush puddles froze -- but the music was lovely and dramatic (well, Beethoven, what else were you expecting?) and I enjoyed it very much.

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Now I am drinking cheap Merlot and preparing to post the entirety of "An Ounce of Prevention" to AO3. I did all the formatting last night, so all that's left is the summary, the tags, and twenty-four chapters worth of copypasting. Bleh. (I don't usually like to import from ff.net, because stripping crap out of the files would be just as much tedious work, and in this case I also wanted to correct one honorific usage while I had the chance.)

Okay, I will go get started on that.

[Fic] "An Ounce of Prevention" index page - Naruto/Harry Potter

An Ounce of Prevention: 20,000 words, Aug. 2006-July 2008. During the timeskip, Sakura finds a very interesting diary among Tsunade's books and papers. Trouble ensues. Contains mind games, violence, discussion of death and dirty tricks, and discussion of the ethics of war and assassination. [Crossover: Naruto/Harry Potter]

"An Ounce of Prevention" is the direct result of a crack pairings meme from 2005, though Sakura and Tom do NOT have a romantic relationship. I began writing this as a silly one-shot for askerian's birthday, but the plot bunny nagged at me until I expanded the story. It ended up being about loyalty, responsibility, and Sakura's lingering issues over Sasuke's departure from Konoha; Tom is mostly a catalyst.

I set myself the challenge of writing a crossover that didn't disrupt canon in either series -- in other words, to write a story that could be a lost chapter of both the Harry Potter books and the Naruto manga -- and I think I succeeded. *is proud*

( An Ounce of Prevention - Table of Contents )

For the record, I am perfectly well aware that these chapters are ridiculously tiny, and hardly deserve the name "chapter" at all. This is an unfortunate side-effect of the way I wrote the story. You see, "An Ounce of Prevention" was meant to be a one-shot. Its continuation was completely unexpected, and ran headlong into my semi-compulsive need to keep all chapters of any given story at roughly similar lengths, give or take about 15%-20% of that story's average chapter length. The average length for "An Ounce of Prevention," discounting the two epilogues (because epilogues totally don't count) is 875 words, which means all chapters should stay between 700 and 1,050 words... and with the glaring exception of chapter 1 (the original one-shot, clocking in at a tidy 600 words), they do.

...

I try to start with longer first chapters these days. *wry*