Anita Miller wanted to be able to look at daughter Lori's pictures whenever she wanted, without having to root through photo albums.

So what she did was hang the pictures in the hall. Down one hallway, turn right, and down another.

Anita walks you through the hall, pointing at the pictures. There Lori is riding a horse. There Lori is roller skating. There Lori is water skiing, snow skiing. There she is parasailing. Oh, and there she is rock climbing.

"The Hall of Fame," Lori says a friend calls it.

Says Anita: "She's done it all."

Lori Miller is 23. But there's something else you should know about Lori Miller. She's battled cancer three times, and she's blind. Has been since she was 2 years old.

"I take life on as a challenge," she says. "Anything on the edge."

"Don't tell her she can't do anything," Anita says.

Lori gets a bang out of flight attendants. They watch her get up, walk down the aisle and go to the bathroom. This never ceases to amaze them.

"I can't tell you how many times they drive me nuts," she says. "They make a huge deal out of it. It's a simple task in life."

Retinoblastoma (malignant tumors of the retinas) claimed Lori's eyesight at 2. Where her eyes were, she now has two artificial prostheses. One day after the surgery, Lori hopped on a tricycle and rode down the hospital hallway - without hitting the wall.

Anything she remembers seeing is from a 2-year-old's perspective.

"Somebody says the color teal, and I say, 'What?' she says. "I try to visualize or think about things in my head."

Ten years later a different cancer attacked her jaw muscle. Her top teeth no longer have roots because of the radiation. She missed 105 days of the seventh grade. She still made the honor roll.

This February Lori discovered she had breast cancer. So rare was this type of cancer doctors couldn't treat it by either radiation or chemotherapy. The doctors removed all the tissue in the mastectomy and now they wait and watch, hoping the cancer doesn't spread elsewhere.

For now the breast cancer has taken away Lori's ability to do upper body activities, like lifting weights or playing goalball. Goalball is a game played by the visually impaired that involves throwing a big ball with bells in it. She could have been on the U.S. women's goalball team that traveled to England for the European National Championships, but she scratched that.

"I'm not quite ready physically," she says. "Getting hit in the chest with a ball coming at you 30 miles an hour, I don't want to do that right now."

The girl who likes to live life on the edge couldn't stew around doing nothing. She searched for her next challenge. Her legs worked just fine, so she took up biking.

She rides tandem bikes, which have one other person directing the bike. Lori sits in the back. Yes, the driver guides and shifts the bike. But Lori helps pedal, and she has to know when to do things like lean or stand.

She calls cycling her "Road To Recovery."

"E-mail was a lifesaver for the first week, but I was getting tired of doing that," she says. "I'm used to going nonstop and having something to work toward. Getting on that bike was the first thing I could do. I got hooked on cycling."

She competed in her first race at the end of June in Dallas. She and her partner took third in one race and fifth in another.

"The heat index was 111 degrees," she says. "We were on the track in the middle of the afternoon, giving it all we had, going in circles on this banked track. You have to go a minimum of 15 miles an hour unless you want to fall off."

Now she's racing in Tallahassee. She and her partner took third in Wednesday's time trials. Next she will travel to Colorado Springs for the world competition hosted by the International Paralympics Committee Sept. 12-22.

Longtime family friend Alan Alderfer drives the bike for Lori when she trains in Warsaw. He raced bikes competitively for a six-year stretch. They try to ride a couple of hours each day.

What Alderfer has discovered about Lori is her hearing ability.

"She'll tell me there's a mailbox here or a tree here or a new house here," he says. "It freaks me out."

Says Lori: "Sound waves bounce off things. When we're on the road, I can tell when we pass objects."

When she eats out, she can tell when a friend is looking at a bill. She says that's usually when the person looks down and mutters.

Lori Miller has always seen herself as one of the guys, or in this case, one of the girls. She's never asked for special treatment, never turned blindness into a crutch. Ask Anita what one word best describes Lori, she says, "independent."

To break any uneasiness in social situations, Lori says corny things like, "Get out of my way, you're blocking my view of the TV set." Anita says Lori's goal in life is to educate society, to strip the barriers that blindness sometimes builds.

"I realize if I want to break into a social thing, it's gotta be my initiative," she says. "I have to do it myself. I've found that if people see I can do the same things they do, they're less hesitant to ask me to hang out.

"You have to be strong. If I don't feel welcome or comfortable, I'm not gonna let that stop me."

She went to Warsaw Community Schools, attended classes like everyone else.

There was the time as a teen-ager she rode a 10-speed bike from her home in Melody Acres, across Old Road 30 and into the Boggs Addition. So proud was Lori, as soon as she arrived at her friend's house, she picked up the phone to brag to her mom.

Anita had a few choice words, like "Don't ride that bike anymore."

Lori obeyed. She left her 10-speed there and rode her friend's brother's bike home.

Challenges, Lori said. She needs them. She thrives on them.

Even now, she finds only two major hang-ups with being blind. She can't hop in a car and leave when she wants to, and she misses making eye contact with friends.

When she went to school at Notre Dame, one of the first things she did was get herself lost to see whether she could find her way home.

If she has a four-hour layover at the Dallas airport, instead of sitting in a chair like a piece of luggage, she walks, trying to find a cup of coffee.

"I've always been a good cane traveler," she says. "If you're determined enough to find something, you will."

She takes her guide dog, CeCe, when she is at a familiar place. If there is a crowd or traffic, she leaves CeCe behind because it's more of a hassle.

Lori finished at Notre Dame in four years. Now she's at Western Michigan, working on her Masters in blind rehabilitation teaching. She studies by listening to tapes, reading braille and working on computers.

Life isn't all games. Lori's been up to the Northwest Territories in Canada to work with an Indian tribe where 23 percent of its population has retinitis pigmentosa. The peripheral vision deteriorates until they no longer can see.

She also helped start a Disabled Students Office at Notre Dame and started a website on the Internet for people who have retinoblastoma.

She went to Washington, D.C., two years ago to stress to congressmen that visually impaired people can and do contribute to society.

"I just want to be me," Lori says. "Go about my business, do what everybody else does. With my nature of perfectionism, I take things to a higher level. A lot of it is I know a lot of people doubt since I'm blind. I know everybody's watching.

"My whole reason behind doing a lot of stuff is hopefully it will make a difference for the next person. Whether it be just somebody not being afraid of walking up to a blind person to say hi. That made a huge difference alone."

There was roller skating. Then skiing. Then parasailing. Now it's cycling.

Lori's already planning her next adventure.

"I was talking to some people about sky diving this past weekend," she says. "Scuba diving is the other thing."

Like Anita says: Don't tell Lori she can't do anything. [[In-content Ad]]