tortoisegirl | Entries tagged with life

The main character of the book I'm reading now is a baker who keeps mentioning her cinnamon rolls, and after 200 page of this I succumbed to the power of suggestion and made cinnamon rolls. I messed up a little with the yeast so they didn't rise as much as I'd hoped. They're closer to bite-sized than the big puffy rolls I was going for. But they taste good.

And they were well-timed treats, because we've had miserable weather the past few days. Yesterday was a constant switch between rain and snow that turned into a mess of slush, then overnight we got about a foot of heavy, wet snow. Thank goodness it's my day off work (because the school didn't close, even today), but there's still shoveling to do at home. There were several backups on our narrow little street when cars got stuck on the ice. Snow is pretty and all, and exciting, but I've hit that point where dealing with winter weather is dragging me down.

I'm still working on campus, and being there not as a student is a little strange. Thinking about stuff like finding classrooms and buying textbooks makes me happy not to be doing that anymore :) I've started the venture of shopping for appropriate job interview clothes, which as been less fun. I even need to get new stuff like a new purse and shoes (my current purse is so battered it's not doing me any favors, and I'm realizing I don't have any black heels).

Ah well. For now I'll go eat my cinnamon rolls and keep my toes warm.

Day before Thanksgiving yay~ I ended up taking the whole day off and baked much bread and half a pie that will be finished tomorrow. I made a little pilgrim hat for the cat but he's being a party pooper and refusing to wear it.

Yesterday I had the fun experience of tripping falling on campus, and since I was wearing a skirt my knee got all scraped up, then bleeding profusely about two minutes later as I was walking to the subway to go home D: I didn't notice it and a woman had to stop me to tell me there was blood running down my leg. Had to duck in a building (with some "omg are you okay" comments from the security guards) and hang out in the bathroom for 15 minutes waiting for the bleeding to stop. And the blood had started pooling in my shoe, yuck. GOOD TIMES.

ANYWAY, back to this thing:

30 Day Meme
Day 29 → Hopes, dreams and plans for the next 365 days

Oh boy. Well, on an immediately scale I plan/hope to finish everything I need to for my classes which would fulfill the requirements for my degree and then I would graduate in December. And then I'll have a degree! And since grad school won't be happening anytime soon, I'll be done with college! So the rest of my plans and hopes are pretty much to get a job and figure out how to do this whole post-grad adult life thing. Yikes. I'll be able to keep my current student job for another semester after I graduate, so that's good. I've already applied for one job. It would give some aim to my life for the next year or so my big hope is to get that, but the chances of me getting this job are so slim that asfjsdflj, I don't even want to talk about it. I'd love to move, both into my own place and maybe away from this area. There's other generic stuff that I always talk about wanting to get done. Write more, go to the gym more, be less reclusive. Um. I don't know. Resolve that whole "aimless life" thing, in general. Yeah.

Short entry to check in, because I haven't in a while.

I took a final exam on Tuesday (given early so we could use the rest of the semester for our papers) and thank god, it's done, it's over. Might have been the worst essay ever but I don't care because whatever, I'm done with that. Papers are looming now and I'm in the early research stage, and the "dear god I hope these articles inspire something for me to write about" stage. This and next week a bunch of my classes have been canceled which means some nice breaks and chances to go home early. I'm already planning out stuff to cook for Thanksgiving. Next Wednesday I have the option to not go into work and with my class canceled that day I could have the whole day off to cook, but I might take the shift for the money and the chance to get school stuff done there. Not sure yet. A day off is tempting.

I will go back to the 30 Day Meme soon, and I hope to do a zombie-filled post about The Walking Dead and the Left 4 Dead games. It's just that those are taking more effort than I'm willing to put into LJ posts at the moment. Though maybe I'll do the next meme prompt later today.

That's about it for now. Here, have a dog:

Current Music: The Blarney Lads - I'll Tell Me Ma | Powered by Last.fm

I'll get back to the 30 day meme soon, but the next few prompts are long and complicated and I'm not up to it right now.

I went to a presentation on careers in the publishing industry yesterday and I think...I think I need to get a Facebook. They kept mentioning promoting via social networks it might actually hurt me to say I don't know how FB works. The office I work for now has one but my coworker handles it. Whenever I have to log on to upload something or friend someone (like, twice so far) it takes me forever to navigate and get it done. I don't want to deal with people finding me though...maybe a fake name just to get used to it? I don't know, would it look better to an employer to not have a FB at all, or to have one they can find that's free of all the crap that gets people fired? I really don't want to deal with pretending to be interested in people I kinda remember from high school.

But other than that revelation the presentation was very useful, and hey, maybe that line about "something in publishing" I've been feeding to people who ask about my job plans could actually happen. I need to work on my resume. And read up on the book industry.

Still need to find something to wear to my dad's wedding reception tomorrow. I have my standard dress that I've worn to a few dressy things already, but it shows off the tattoo on my back. And my grandparents don't know that I have any tattoos. They wouldn't throw a fit or anything, but it's not a conversation I'm sure I want to have. Maybe I can find a shawl to keep around my shoulders since it'll be cold anyway. My sister's going to be late to the reception b/c of a band competition that day and for some reason I'm stressing over it. I'm kinda scared she'll use it as an excuse to skip it all together, and I don't wanna think about what that'll do to my dad. I also hope I can find my camera before tomorrow- it's been missing for about a month.

I so wish I could do NaNoWriMo this year. I've gotten a laptop since I last tried which I think would help my word count (made it to about 25k words last time). Too much school work though. Maybe I'll try to write my papers in the style of NaNo; write 3000 words of nonsense to fill the pages, edit it later.

30 Day Meme
Day 26 → Your week, in great detail

Well, last week. Technically I started this entry Sunday night and have been taking forever finishing it.

( My life is boring enough that I forget large chunks of it. )

See, something interrupts my frequent LJ posting and suddenly I'm completely out of the habit. Anyway.

30 Day Meme
Day 22 → A website

Orisinal, a site full of adorable little flash games. Kinda my go-to for de-stressing (when I don't want a shooting-things kind of game). I've spent cumulative hours playing the one with the bunny and the bells.

Life in school has slowed down to a normal pace, which still means lots of reading but at least I'm not tied to a computer typing up papers. Still house-sitting for my dad, which continues to be nice and quiet. There are so many stray cats in this neighborhood. One of them let me pet them this morning, though they usually scatter when I walk by. Still haven't stopped by the cafe down the street, but I hope to do that after work today. Not much going on this weekend, for the next two weekends I have plans, delicious plans! I need to find time to go to Linvilla Orchards and buy up all the apple-related things I can manage.

Yesterday there was a big family thing down in Maryland and I went with my dad and his fiance (both sisters skipped out, grrr). I only knew about five people there even though we're all apparently related, so that was a little awkward. I won a Skip-It from this little contest we did. Ah, family.

The location was very cool though; a park (national park, maybe) right on the Chesapeake Bay, and our picnic area was right by a fishing pier. My dad's cousin was crabbing and fishing all day and ended up bringing home about three dozen crabs. There was a turtle pond too with a snapping turtle that loved the vanilla wafers we fed him. And! The park has a rehabilitation center for birds that are injured, and some of them can't be re-released into the wild. There's a really cool habitat for a handful of raptors right in the middle of the woods. No attendants, just a series of wood-and-wire enclosures.

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( Owls. Everyone is fond of owls. )
After we left the family picnic Marie-Claire had a hankering for some crabs so we explored the area a bit looking out for a restaurant. Which was mostly...driving past cornfields. For like an hour. We did find a restaurant overlooking a marina and Dad and Marie-Claire had their crabs. I've never been to a crab place before so I was kinda 0_0 when they dumped a pile of cooked crabs right on the table. They creeped me out. And I don't eat seafood so I was there with my salad and french fries. Idk, I think seafood will eternally weird me out.

And then this silliness happened after dinner, because we're all dorks sometimes.
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My last entry wasn't a very informative update, so let's try again.

There hasn't been much of anything going on this summer, which has been my biggest downer lately. I haven't actually gone anywhere because of scheduling and time and money and blarg, life, and all the potential fun stuff has been pushed back until around the start of school when I'll be thinking about other things. The planned trip the shore a few weeks ago didn't happen because of the godawful heat, and it's been damn difficult to get people together for other things. I've completely and utterly failed at using free time for things like reading and writing, though that's my own fault.

I did get to see Inception, which was awesome, and hang out with friends and cute little baby. I've been using my Art Museum membership (saw the Renoir exhibit!) but I'm such a philistine that there's only so many times I can go there and stay interested. Damn all the museums here for costing so much money >:|

So the lack of updates was just because of a lack of things happening, that's all. I think I'm too boring for Livejournal.