quick updates about what's been going on in my life slash proof that i am alive and have not given up blogging:

• we have been living in the new house for a week, now. we still have no couches which means our living room cannot be set up which means there are still boxes of stuff that cannot find homes which means we are still technically not moved in which kinda sucks. 
• we do have internet and tv now, though. so yay for that, although i really haven't used either very much.
• aside from not having couches or a living room (or a dining room. we are basically living on the floor) half of my books cannot find shelf space. i need more shelves, but it's not a high priority at the minute so my library is also filled with boxes of stuff that still need homes. 
• i am doing nano, slowly but surely. very, very slowly. i have only been able to write three days so far which sucks. i have just over 4500 words. i will put up the word tracker on my blog eventually in case you care. i will make it to fifty thousand by the end of the month.
• i have a blog post that i am halfway through and another one that is just barely started that i will finish and post as soon as i'm less behind in my nanonovel. they are both a lot sappier than usual. i think my pregnancy hormones are getting to me. 
• due to panicking, some poor planning, and stupid apartment policies, we still have our apartment for a bit and i have been making sure that the almost four years of living there (more like three and a half for me, my husband lived there alone for a bit) is wiped clean. this involves a lot of cleaning, obviously, and carrying last minute things down three flights of stairs. in really small batches. because i am pregnant and not supposed to be carrying heavy things. i have spent more time at the apartment this past week than i have at the house.
• apparently it's deer mating season (or so i am told) and the other day a stag came running across the street and sort of almost got hit by us, and my first thought was, "god, james, look both ways" and i think i have a problem. 
• i am itching to have some down time to start crocheting/knitting. i will crochet so many baby blankets. and sweaters (i found a fast and easy and still adorable sweater pattern that i will make a hundred of.)

sometimes in life you drop little innocent hints about yourself and your location across multiple social media platforms that in and of themselves are neither too revealing nor harmful, but if you put them all together then they maybe just might be if you squint and tilt your head slightly to the left. other times in life you spend years taking classes in cyber security and grow into a very paranoid person that is hesitant to even look at a computer without first putting a paper bag over your head. and then there are the times where the first and second overlap just so and you end up leaving the country for three weeks but scheduling blog posts so that no one will know on the off chance that you have a crazy stalker waiting to break into your apartment the second they learn that it's empty. (granted, i mentioned on here that i would be leaving the country ahead of time so really, the whole effort was moot but whatever.)

anyway, i'm back! (i was gone as of july tenth, just in case you were wondering.) and i am exhausted. it feels like i spent a ridiculously large portion of those three weeks on airplanes and in airports. (i will probably calculate the exact percentage of my vacation that i spent in the air because i am a nerd, but it will have to wait until tomorrow because of that whole exhausted thing.) another large portion of that time was spent without the time/internet access to blog. (which i had planned for, hence the scheduled posts, but i was still supposed to write something last week.) i'm sure there are stories from my vacation that will seem blog-worthy in the morning, but at the moment, the only thought in my head is how delicious chinese food would taste right now. 

also, i definitely remember spending a lot of time before i left cleaning my apartment, but when i walked in today (after a taxi ride that i could not keep my eyes open in after the airlines didn't send one of our bags after we had to suffer through an annoyingly not-direct flight because we made reservations really late this year) and thinking, ugh the apartment looks so effing cluttered. because it is, of course. because there is really no other way for it be. i mean, there are only so many places that you can keep things in a one bedroom apartment. add to that the fact that i have an unhealthy addiction to yarn, regularly make and bring home pottery pieces throughout the year, have more books than i have room for, and a very bad habit of keeping everything "for memories" and, well... i'm sure you get the picture. i am able to block it out for most of the year, but the second i go to saudi arabia, where my room (in both families' houses) is sparse and neat and empty slash big enough so that even some things thrown on the floor doesn't make it look too messy, that ability disappears and i come back and just see small and cluttered and junk. but at the end of the day, it is my small and cluttered apartment and i love it. which is why i am the worst at house hunting fyi. 

if you're not here when i break in, i'm gonna go to your closet just so i can smell your skin

i spent most of my life without watching a single reality tv dating show. no bachelor. no bachelorette. no roses or rings or tears. i never even wanted to watch them. not in a i'm-better-than-that way, but in a never-grabbed-my-interest way. i would sometimes hear a recap on the radio the morning after it aired, and i would think... nothing. so i was surprised when commercials for i wanna marry harry aired on fox a few months ago and i thought, yes. i would like to watch that. (for those of you that don't know, twelve american girls went to england where they were competing - for lack of a better word - for a guy they all thought was prince harry but was really just a guy that looked a lot like prince harry. then at the very end he revealed his true identity to the girl he chose in hopes that she would still choose him back. spoiler: she did. and they won a quarter of a million dollars for not being shallow losers.) when the first episode aired i watched it on demand, as i do, and i thought, this is a show that i cannot watch an episode at a time. (i find that reality tv needs to be marathoned for maximum enjoyment.) so i waited. (and forgot about it.) the other day i went to fox on demand and found that all of the episodes were up. (i thought that they had all aired, but really the show was cancelled due to absolutely no one watching it and they just threw the episodes up because there was no point holding on to them.) the point of this story is, after watching eight episodes of a reality tv dating show, i have learned that people can be psychotic. one contestant (what the heck am i supposed to call them?) was straight up terrifyingly crazy and jealous and i was half expecting her to shank the other girls in their sleep the entire time. she was like text book crazy jealous girlfriend. it was both entertaining and horrifying. but mostly horrifying.

you would think that watching eight straight hours of reality tv would mean that i am not being productive, but you would be wrong. (yay insomnia caused by my body being stupid and not knowing how to deal with completely normal hormone fluctuations. still. nothing makes me not wanna get pregnant more than thinking about how my body is obnoxious with every day hormones and how it will go completely haywire with pregnancy hormones. was that tmi?) i have been doing some serious cleaning and reorganizing of my apartment. it looks roomier already. (i also finished crocheting forty plus turtles for my sister's scarf. i hate turtles.) 

*(One Of Those) Crazy Girls - Paramore

what's been going on around here

yesterday i was supposed to catch up on my nano word count, and while i obviously didn't catch up, i am closer to catching up than i was on friday. if i write a few big word days this week (and i'm not even talking super big, just two or three thousand words) then i should be juuust fine. (although i still find myself taking too long to start my actual story and writing around all of the exciting parts, and i never respect my favorite authors as much as when i realize that my story really sucks and i have no idea how to fix it. i can have a good premise but then i realize that my plot is sucky and how does that even happen? every. single. time. you'd think i write a good one as a fluke or something at least.)

and just in case any of you care, the lump on my ankle from the lyme disease is finally going down. like, it's now probably more than fifty percent smaller than what it was a couple of weeks ago, and yes, okay, i'll admit it: i guess my doctor was right. my shoulder pain (which didn't go away with the antibiotics so i was wrong about that, too) is pretty much gone as well. so now i'm going to connect those two in my brain. by the end of this month, i won't only have a fifty thousand word novel sitting in cloud space, but i will also be lyme free and pain free you will (fingers crossed) never have to listen to me talk about it again.

and i finally have a clean apartment. (except for the bedroom, but if you close the door then you can't even tell it's a colossal mess.) i had to clean it for wednesday when my sister, husband, friend and i all went to watch ender's game and then came back to my place for dinner. (i'm going to start off by saying that no, i did not boycott the movie like so many others, and i thought that, as book to movie adaptations go, it was pretty good. neither my sister nor my husband had read the book, and they never felt lost at all. which is growing increasingly rare i have noticed. (yes, it felt a little rushed. yes, the book was better. but that will always be the case.) i also loved both the character and actor of bean. he was the most adorable comic relief i have ever seen.) but the fact that it is still just as clean half a week later is pretty amazing for me. my tolerance for mess is ridiculously high so this almost never happens.

oh, and my professor gave me a ninety-nine on a paper and then spoke to me after about how "your paper really deserved a hundred, but i don't give hundreds. congratulations." and don't you hate that? if my paper deserves a hundred then give me a hundred. i had a teacher in elementary school that was the same way. she used to say, "if i gave you a twenty out of twenty then what would i give a published writer?" and just, what? you should not be grading my work as a fifth grader on how it compares to a published writer's work. you should be checking that i met all of the requirements, and if i did, then give me the twenty. sometimes, i really don't understand teachers.

edited to add: i also got rid of our fruit fly problem! go me!

/end updates.

*What's Been Going On - Amos Lee

this place is always such a mess

so yesterday was kind of a "hang on a minute, i think i'm being productive! oh wait... no, never mind. false alarm. actually, i am! i am being productive! at least a little bit. yay me!" kind of a day. if i am the only one that gets these kinds of days then please just play along and act like i am not a total weirdo. (sidenote: i have recently found myself saying a bunch of things that i never used to say [like weirdo and wonky] and i do not know where these words came from but they are now a huge part of my vocabulary.) as i mentioned before, grandmothers and sisters and nephews and basically everything else took precedence over cleaning my apartment and after a month of that, it is a huge mess. like, really, really bad. bad enough that if you were downstairs and really needed to use the bathroom so you called me to ask if you could use mine, i would pretend i wasn't home and watch from the window as you wet yourself. and because i suddenly find myself without the constant time spent at home (i miss it!) i have developed a method of slowly getting the house clean. i will basically do mini chores whenever i am home and have a few spare minutes. these include washing a few dishes, folding half a load of laundry, organizing one corner of the tower... small stuff. at this rate, i will have a clean apartment by the end of the semester. *sigh*

(reason number 4367864 to have kids: at least you have a good reason to have a messy apartment.)

so yesterday i had agreed to help one of my students with a homework assignment during our meeting. when the computer lab did not have the software that we needed, i felt super cool and helpful for like half a second because i had my laptop with everything already installed from when i took the class. unfortunately, i hadn't used my vmware for a while, and so i didn't know that it had expired. obviously my feeling of helpfulness was short-lived. i spent a while trying to get this alternative software to work (it didn't) while downloading a new version of vmware. when everything was finally set up, he started working on his assignment only to find that it was not working. i could not for the life of me figure out why. when he finally had to leave (after an hour and a half of me feeling stupid and wasting both of our time) i decided to take one last shot at making it work. and of course it did. perfectly. because that's just how things go for me. i texted him saying that it was working, but he had plans to meet up with a friend so that was the end of it.

during my office hours (or the hour and some that i had left after suffering with faulty software) i decided to catch up on all of the blogs that i am behind on due to everything i listed above that has affected my cleaning. i had hopes to fly through them all quickly, but goodness i missed a lot. when i am on here everyday it feels like no one ever updates. but you would be surprised by how many updates there are on every blog in a month. i got through a couple of blogs, but still have three posts from one blog and a few on another that i have to go through. (i don't like feeling like i missed something so no i cannot just start reading from where they are now thank you very much.)

anyway, i am taking a break to blog and do nothing right now and then it is back to mini chores, choosing a paper topic, trying to do the reading for today's class (i am not too hopeful about that) and then heading off to school for two meetings and class. ugh. i really want to have a netflix marathon.

*One Headlight - The Wallflowers

my words like silent raindrops fell and echoed in the wells of silence

on saturday, my older sister and her family made their way back to the desert. yesterday, i brought my younger sister her guinea pigs. today, i woke up to a completely silent house. i thought i heard the guinea pigs squeaking until i reminded myself that they weren't there and just lay in bed, listening to the silence. it's just me and darcy again, but this time there's a loneliness hanging over us that wasn't here in the beginning of the summer. (darcy misses his animal friends and the human attention he was getting.) the apartment is still a total mess, but there are empty spots where the cages used to be. there's an empty corner in the tower where all of their things were kept. i know that if i pick up the toys this time, i won't find them thrown around my apartment an hour later. and instead of the relief that i thought at times i would feel, there is only sadness. i miss the commotion of the summer.

and while i could go into an endless ramble of everything i miss, i won't. instead, i'll say that mondays used to be my do nothing days, but suddenly i find them jam packed with things: an online class, office hours, student meetings. and add to that the fact that i forgot my phone at my parents' house last night and now have to drive all the way back there to get it. and also get groceries. and i just want to sit in my room and be sad. but there is no time for that.

i will have to find time this week to do a major apartment cleaning (which is harder than it sounds because i do not have a single free day and this cleaning will take all day) and, being an avid hater of the process of cleaning (though i love a clean house), that should be fun. and then i will fall into a rest-of-the-semester routine, and the summer will fade into memory faster than i would have thought possible. (i am hoping that the routine includes both book editing and blanket knitting, but i am feeling too blah at the moment to really force them into it.)

*The Sound of Silence - Simon and Garfunkel

i aint got nothing to say

it's crazy how fast i can go from clean apartment to tornado just blew here and left a neck-braking mess in its wake. sometimes i wish i was the kind of person that liked to clean. the kind that would pick up the mess on the floor instead of just picking a complicated path through it on the way to the kitchen for another cup of fruit punch. but mostly i'm just happy that i'm the kind of person that has a fairly high tolerance for mess. it makes it so much easier to be lazy.

i don't think my mind has realized that i am back home. i sit on the couch everyday compiling lists of things that i need to do, and only realizing that i could and should just do them right now when it's too late. i'm living in a moment of suspension. where i can spend a morning making chocolate covered cake balls and reading poetry and then laugh carelessly when someone brings up school and professors and exams. i'm starting three hundred different stories, poems, ideas and stopping them mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-care. i'm opening novels just to stare at the letters on the page, letting my mind wander somewhere up on the ceiling - in the corner that holds sunlight even after darkness has claimed the rest of the room.

i know i should buckle down and finish something more than a chocolate bar, but i think i'll continue to float here, making friends with dust motes, until life and the real world decide to bring me down.

*Dancing in the Dark - Bruce Springsteen

what have you been doing lately?

i'm knitting a scarf. in the middle of august. it was all very sudden and now i have half of it done. see, i've had this yarn for two years now that i bought to knit into a scarf. one of my knitting needles has been missing forever though (ever since it impaled my sister when she stepped on it. it went right up through her foot. it was gross.) and i just always assumed it would show up without me having to look for it. it didn't. the other day i was in michael's and knitting needles were on sale for ninety nine cents so i got a pair, came home, and started to knit. i finished one thing of yarn (i can't remember what they're called) in two and a half days and am now starting on the second.

in other news, saturday morning we had an impromptu trip into dc and went to the spy museum and madame tassauds, or however you spell that. it was super fun. did you know that julia childs worked for a spy network? and that poe was a spy? and the dude that wrote robinson crusoe? and george washington, who couldn't tell a lie, apparently had no problem with spies. it was all very interesting and we saw super cool things like the hidden cameras and bugs that you would think were only for movies but apparently were used in real life, too. oh, and at the beginning you choose a secret identity and are quizzed on it as you go through the museum and i, being awesome, made it through my mission without blowing my cover. the person being quizzed next to me was caught and sent to jail.

on another note, yesterday i cleaned the kitchen which is really not that big (especially compared to the kitchen i just left) and it took me forever. over two hours. it was ridiculous. i think because it was the first time i really cleaned it (yeah, i've been lazy since we got back. sue me.) so i was scrubbing down everything. hopefully next time it won't take as long. anyway, i finish cleaning it and a couple of hours later we're grilling hamburgers and frying chips and making chocolate cupcakes and just generally making a mess. guess what didn't look all clean and pretty anymore? it never fails that the day i clean a kitchen everyone decides to have the messiest thing they can think of for dinner.

*What Have You Been Doing Lately? - Relient K

lying to yourself doesn't make it easier

recently, a bunch of people have been telling me that blogging regularly is hard. in light of that, and seeing how i blog semi-regularly, or regularlry enough, this means i obviously was given some special gift at birth that makes me amazingly awesome. and being the generous person that i am, i have decided to share this gift with you. here are all my secrets on how to blog regularly. you see, the problem most of you are probably facing is that you're confusing blogging well with just, well, blogging. you don't have to have some really cool thing to say in each blog post, or really anything to say at all. you don't have to have the perfect words. all you have to do is sit at the keyboard and let your brain throw up onto the screen. in a good way. take whatever mindless thought is collecting dust in the corner of your mind or whatever pointless thing you did or did not do that day, and dedicate an entire post to it. give it its undeserving fifteen minutes of fame. i mean, obviously don't just laundry list the whole thing up, but give it life.

i find it funny that i started this post two days ago. i honestly can't remember what other mindless drivel i was going to add to my list of "secrets," so i'm just going to leave it at that. at least for now.

moving on. the past couple of days have been entirely devoted to my cousin, his wife, and his two kids who were all stopping by our area on their way to florida where the wife is going to study. five minutes away from disney world and orlando studios. meaning harry potter world. the unfairness of this is killing me. anyway, back to the past couple of days. they were all about them. when they were at our house, my day was filled with playing with the kids, talking to the wife, helping the cousin get paperwork in order. when they were off at offices getting scholarship stuff taken care of, i was just sitting around waiting for them to come back. and now they're gone. and there's an empty suitcase waiting to be packed and a house that looks like ground zero of an earthquake that was hit by a tornado and then used as a playpen for thing one and thing two that should probably be cleaned. and there are no more distractions to keep me away from either.

i really don't feel like packing. i really, really don't feel like cleaning. and i hate the fact that ignoring them won't make them do themselves. and i hate that pretending they're not here won't make them go away. and yet, i'll just sit on the computer and not look past the fifteen inch screen and pretend that the room is cleaned and my stuff packed.

this post is in desperate need of direction.

*3 Little Words - Frankmusik

i want you to keep everything

it's amazing what you find when you clean your room. really clean it, not just doing the top three-quarters of the mess. it's what slips into that last quarter among the piles of batteries that may or may not be dead and old pens that are missing their caps that can really surprise you. uncovering all the hidden reminders of days so long past that the memories are fading can really put into light just how much you've changed over the years. i've been living in this room for almost a decade, give or take a year or two, so there are many years worth of stuff piled up in here. i'm a pretty sentimental person, and end up keeping a lot of junk most people would throw away. i am also a major pack rat (a characteristic i like to pretend i don't have) which means even more stuff. going through it all was just... weird.

for example, in a pile of old papers from high school (including every math test from tenth grade forward. even i had to raise an eyebrow at that one) i found this math packet that was half solved by me and half solved by this kid i used to have the biggest crush on for years. he had filled it out one day on the bus in a confusing, rather pointless story that i'm not gonna write out here. but anyway, i haven't seen this kid since our graduation in 'oh six (actually, i think i might have seen him on campus a couple of weeks ago but i'm not sure) or really talked to him aside from a couple of facebook messages a year or so back. i kept a packet just because it had his writing on it, i could pick him out of a crowd from a mile away, and now he's just not in my life at all. and i don't even notice his absence. like a lot of people i used to know. a lot of high school memories were surfacing today. 

i also realized that i suck at sending cards. i have an entire pile of thank you and get well cards, signed with little notes in addressed envelopes, that i just never got around to sending. talk about a waste of money. i can't even remember when some of them are from but judging from my handwriting they are nowhere near recent.

oh, and looking at how my handwriting has changed on all the papers was interesting. the fact that i had handwritten essays in junior year surprised me too. so did finding a paper that didn't make me want to scratch my eyes out by rereading it. that rarely happens. (there's this essay i wrote junior year of high school on gone with the wind that i was obsessed with. i thought it was the greatest thing ever written. i can't even look at it now without wanting to take a red pen to it.)

there were magazines i had saved because of some actor/actress/singer on the cover that i couldn't care any less about now.

there were things i had lost years ago like my mini stapler from my freshman year at college and the silly putty i bought for my brothers when they were four and five. they are now nine and ten. i found my high school diploma and tons of old hallmark cards, some not even for me. 

and i kept every. single. thing any kid ever drew me. i have tons of stuff from my brothers from over the years, but also drawings and notes from the kids i used to substitute for and girls on my bus. it's crazy. 

there were lists of songs i had wanted to download, half of them i never got around to, and statements from my old bank that doesn't even exist anymore. 

there's just so much stuff and it's taking forever to get through it all because i have to stop and read everything. 

*I Want You to Keep Everything - These United States