hey i am older today than i was yesterday

And the day before! I am now officially 26, and I feel much older. Suddenly I have an opinion about whether or not people should be on my lawn.

Here is a cheese plate! Nathan made it at about 1am on the morning of my birthday, because I was bummed that no one wanted to go out to the bar for birthday drinks. He also poured some 2 buck chuck for me and our house guests. It was awesome, as was the rest of my birthday.

monday again!

Wow, I can't believe it's been a whole week!

I am terribly busy and will be until March 15 at 3pm, but I felt that I needed to take time out from my busy, important schedule to tell you that I got my first paper back today, my first paper of grad school, and there are comments and suggestions a plenty, but I got an A-! I've been feeling overwhelmed by this whole grad school thing, so it is nice to know that I actually know what I'm doing. Basically.

Also, I know you don't care, and I would totally be bored and/or nauseated by this if I were you, but I went home this past weekend, and I got to spend oodles of time with Nathan, and it was our six-month anniversary (six monthiversary?), and we went out to dinner, and I will stop myself before I get too gross and sentimental, but I had a really good weekend.

time flies

...when you're wasting your life.

It was raining when I woke up this morning, which derailed my only plan for the day, i.e. do laundry as soon as I woke up. It eventually stopped raining, sort of, so I walked to the laundromat (Soapie's, awesome name, almost as good as Miss Bubble's on Amsterdam back in Harlem) and did a load of laundry. I mostly washed my t-shirts and the one pair of pants I wear all the time now (um, I should really go shopping). I did my laundry in pink tights and a black skirt and my job-interview sweater, because I dress nicer and nicer as it gets closer and closer to laundry day. Because I am a scrub.

Oh, someone is cranky! I just cannot believe that it's 8 o'clock at night and the only things I've accomplished today are doing a load of laundry and reading about 40 pages of words about history. Also, I watched some News Radio and made stir-fry. And... that is it. UGH. I need to go write a novel or clean my room or something.

pins and needles

I can't seem to get into a regular pattern with this blogging thing. Minimal posts for a month or two, then multiple posts per day for a week or so, then nothing. I'm trying to get organized and start adding an item a week to my Etsy shop, so maybe I will also try to update this more regularly.

I'm not big on taking things seriously, or at least admitting that I take things seriously, but I do want to start putting more energy into selling things that I make. I applied for a sales tax number and everything. I have to send in a form for my sales through December 31, or possibly January 1st? Not that it matters; I have no sales to report. I did make two sales on Etsy, of these strange face beads that I bought at Bobby Bead, but neither of them were shipped to Wisconsin, so I do not need to pay sales tax on the grand total of $9 that I made last year.

Probably I'm being a little hard on myself. I've only been doing this since mid-October, and I was working two jobs for the first few months and then distracted by the holidays and my grandma's... passing. Wow, that is not an easy thing to write. So, I've been distracted, but I am now both effectively unemployed and temporarily financially solvent thanks to my student loan, so I have a real opportunity to take some time to build up a business. I don't know that it'll ever pay my rent, but if it could possibly pay for me to buy more beads and fabric, that would be pretty sweet.

I labeled this post "important decisions," along with a bunch of other ridiculous labels, because I think I am still going through the long process of admitting to myself that I need to really try to make this crafting thing work. I had a pretty severe panic attack yesterday; possibly the worst one yet. I'm not even really sure what it was about. Everything is going pretty well in my life. Being back in school is amazing, I love Milwaukee, my friends and family are great, my boyfriend makes me so happy, and I'm not broke. I guess that's probably what the problem is though. Things haven't gone this well for me at any point in recent memory; I don't know how to handle not being depressed. (And also I probably have not completely dealt with my grandma and how much I miss her, but this is already personal enough.)

I'm not quite sure how to end this. I'm not quite sure what my point is. I know I started this post to talk about how I got a lot done today and walked around and enjoyed the temporary warm weather. That is obviously not what I actually wrote about. I think for now I'll just leave this be. I'll add some more photos soon; that's more fun than this personal stuff, I think.

math is hard

If I do a practice test based on one mathematical concept and get 12/15 right, but that one concept will only be tested in 2-3 of the 28 (28?) math questions on the GRE, and I'm 75% likely to answer a word problem correctly but 30% likely to answer a quantitative comparison question correctly and -100000% likely to answer a data interpretation question correctly, what is the probability that I'm going to write something whiny about studying for the GREs instead of something obvious about how scary it is that more than thirty college students were murdered yesterday? Or something probably selfish about how I had this moment of panic when I realized it was in Virginia, but my cousin is okay and so are all her friends, so somehow that makes it easier for me to deal with? Or something about how lame it is that I only heard about the shooting today, because apparently I live under a rock?