Plan

Okay okay okay. Let's work this out.

What I need is a BA/BS. If I get that then I can have some more what am I doing with my life crises and have some options. At the same time, I'll get my elementary education endorsement. Okay okay okay. This will take me more than one and a half years.

At the end of this year I'll have 144 credits. As of now I have 47 upper division credits. I need 48 upper division credits for a BS.

What I really need is to know my credit breakdown from the past. I know I have the science stuff down (at least, I'd better by now) but who knows about the rest.

I need 225 credits for a BA/BS. That's 81 more credits between this June and whenever I graduate. I'll get 48 of those from normal classes next year, so that is 33 extras. I plan to take summer classes, so that's 16 credits. So I'll have to get 17 more credits. Or wait, I think I got some credits for sheep club last year. Did I? Man. This is why I need to get that credit breakdown. Well, if I did, maybe that brings me down to the less obnoxious need for under 16 credits which can be done in one quarter, either in the fall or over the summer. Okay. Not bad.

I can also totally fill my elementary education endorsement with all that.

And then....I don't know.

TOP PRIORITY WHEN I GET BACK:
meet with career counselor.

Glitter Lake

We went to Gr's cabin for the second time and it was great.

Ba and Gr and Je and Bej and I all went. We hiked in the woods and saw some fantastic trees. We didn't find bigfoot, but we knew they were out there. Mostly we wished we were bigfoot because then we could keep warm in our hair and walk over tough terrain. It would be so nice to be perfectly suited to a habitat.

We got to the lake and it glittered in the rain. Ba and Gr went on their own adventure and Bej and Je and I hung out. Bej fell in the lake, but that wasn't the important part.

Maybe I can explain better what happened in pictures. Maybe not.

Reunited, yeah yeah

What a lovely reunion that was at S's new beautiful apartment with her new together life. Good times all around, yes yes. Good music. Good dancing. Good crab rangoon. Good family fun.

I have a midlife crisis and a cabin in the woods to go back to. I have thanksgiving with the family, which I missed last year and it's nice to be home.

I have new medications to take. I have an exam to write and a research project to somehow get through.

I took a tai chi class the other day. I was forced into it, but it wasn't bad.

I think my blog posts have gotten more and more insane recently. But I have to get this stuff down for posterity's sake. What did I do this thanksgiving break? Well, we visited Granny and had a reunion and went to thanksgiving and brought Bej home.

Bigfoot is real.

There's a bright golden cow on the meadow

GUESS WHAT EVERYONE!

NO CLASS TODAY!

We had a serious windstorm last night. It kind of hypnotized me for a bit. I sat up in bed to hear it better and it was so loud and wind through the treesy and great. Our power went out from like eight last night till some time in the middle of the night so Bej and I had a paper cutting (in the style of Nikki McClure) by candlelight party. We made a very nice bigfoot scene.

Our kitty cat is playing with a little bit of wire.

Now, since class is cancelled and all, Mi and I are going to go to the big bead store and get all of the beading stuff we could ever need. And then I will have my supplies for Jo's craft party on Thursday. Oh oh oh and then we will go sleep over at Je's house. Oh oh things are good around here.

A teacher

I don't think I want to be a scientist anymore.

I like science but I don't want to be a scientist.

I think I want to be a teacher! Fourth grade.

La la la la sauerkraut

Making my own sauerkraut. How Olympia of me.

Here is a beaver lodge I found in the woods. Also that is a poisonous newt (Taricha granulosa) in Gr's hand.



We had a pumpkin carving party last night.




BOO!bs

The busiest bees

Busy busy busy busy busy. I think this is the busiest I've ever been. Class, work, cleaning, cooking, grocery shopping, research project, it looks like less when I write it down but I swear it takes up all of my time.

Well not all of my time. Because somehow amid all of that I am hanging out with people almost every single day, lots of people coming and going and lots of things happening. It's funny, it's like the exact opposite of "you'll live with your boyfriend and then never see anyone anymore!" Bej and I hardly have any time just us, and when it is just us we are sleeping or doing our homework or making dinner or buying the groceries or something. We might even have to start scheduling time to hang out just the two of us, because it seems like if it isn't scheduled it may never happen. I mean, I'm not saying I don't want friends over all the time, because I totally do. Maybe just like also a little Bej and me time thrown in there. I think it's funny how not holed up together just the two of us we are. Wah wah wah, I have too many friends and we have too much fun all the time, wah wah wah.

Luckily I'm really into being productive. And I get a lot done. And I'm into my class again and I want to do really really well on everything. I had a big thank goodness I go to this college and not any other one moment the other day in lecture. I'd been freaking out about what to do with my life because I was like AHHH I like science the best but what it is to be a scientist these days seems so wrong, and THEN my teacher gave a lecture about how screwed up it is and it was reassuring. I mean, not that reassuring because there are a lot of problems, but maybe I could talk to him about them and get an idea of what I actually want to do. Oh god, what am I going to do with my life.

I think the issue is that normally my weekends are my time to breathe, but this weekend I have staff training all day Saturday and Sunday and so I won't be able to breathe until next Friday, and then the Monday after that I have to go on another field trip, and I won't really be able to breathe then. I don't like going away from home. I need some breathing time.

I'm a little overwhelmed. But when I'm overwhelmed being productive makes me feel better. Maybe I will get a bunch of homework done right now and feel better.

Deer Tracks

Scenes from our apartment:


















I went away on a field trip from Monday-Friday of last week. It wasn't that great. I mean, it was okay, I talked to a bunch of people, but I really just wanted to be home. I really miss my home when I'm away from it. But the landscape was cool.


And the teachers brought their kids who were four and six and the coolest kids and they made me want kids so bad. Kids kids kids.


But then I got to go home. And it is good because home is the best.

And if you didn't notice we have a kitty kitty cat. And she is a really cool cat. She likes to hang out on the dresser.

This year

Oh wow.

I'm so happy with everything in my life right now. It's weird. It's like there is nothing remotely wrong with what is happening. It's great but it's also like, what? How is stuff so good right now? At least I still have lyme disease and some headaches to keep it from being frighteningly perfect. Actually just kidding, I'd rather that went away. But like, besides that. I am a very very lucky girl.

EVERYTHING RIGHT IN MY LIFE:

My class seems great, I'm making friends in it already, I'm going to learn some cool stuff, maybe it will lead to a career. Or at least a cool internship.

I actually love my job, which is weird after working at a place I hated. But weird in a good way. Hanging out with good babies doing good things all day, pretty sweet. It pays a lot less, but oh well.

I have a beautiful apartment with a wonderful person. I'll take pictures soon and show you all.

My friends are great. And all the impact I have from them is positive. And they're great and over every day and there is never a dull moment. Like, one or two dull moments maybe over the course of a week. But they still aren't bad.

And the exciting thing is I am still meeting people! I'm meeting so many new people all the time and hanging out with them. College, right?

ALSO check out this sugar/xylitol/agave/ANY SWEETENER free ice cream I made! OH MAN. IT WAS SO GOOD. I ALMOST DIED. It was SWEET and CREAMY and COLD and DELICIOUS and EVERYTHING ICE CREAM SHOULD BE.




I'm happy again! Actually truly happy! And it is fantastic. You can tell I'm happy because I'm blogging again. And also because I said so.

Is this the calm before the storm or the beginning of the rest of my life? I'm going to think the better one at least until I am proven wrong.

INTERNET IN MY APARTMENT

YEAH YEAH YEAH

Settling In

Oh man. Moving into an apartment is a heck of a lot of work. Especially when you don't have a car. Jes and Mi have been super generous with letting me use their cars but still. If I had one of my own I could just zoom zoom get the groceries and zoom zoom get the compost bucket and zoom zoom zoom get the doormats. I have a long list on my fridge of things I need to do, and while I've gotten a whole lot done there are always more. A lot of them are tricky too, like get a dining room table and chairs for free please. I've spent a lot of money buying stuff for this house but we've also gotten a TON of stuff for free. Still need more though. Pretty much everything is unpacked except for our clothes, since we don't have a dresser. So they are all exploded all over the bedroom. I'm ready to be able to put them away.

My life is pretty great right now. Everything it should be, nothing it shouldn't. Which is so nice, especially since I don't take it for granted anymore. I've been hanging out with some combination Jes and Mi and Je and Ba and A (and of course Bej, I would not even put that in because it seems too obvious to need saying but this way he won't feel left out) every day, doing all sorts of things like making soup and necklaces and Indian food and sushi and listening to Jes and Bej write their songs. I'm making friends in my class already. On Tuesday we went to the zoo and I saw a POLAR BEAR FIGHT right up close RIGHT THERE and it was SO COOOL. I also saw otters snuggling and baby tigers. So like, heck yes. And after tomorrow I should have a computer of my own that works (my computer attended a party a few weeks ago and had a bit too rough of a night) and internet in my home AT THE SAME TIME, which is something I haven't had in one month. A whole month. Can you imagine.

Maybe I will get to cross more things off my list this weekend. That would be pretty sweet.

Friends in My Class

Oooooooh I want to make friends in my class I want to I want to I want tooooooo.

I'm going on an overnight field trip with my class Monday-Friday of week two of classes. Oh oh oh oh I hope I make friends I hope I make some friends.

Home again home again

I'm so happy I'm here.

I'm living in A's attic. It will be Ke's room when she shows up but I'm in it until I can move into my apartment. A's house is beaaaaaaautiful. Seriously, so beautiful. It's in the perfect location and it is blue and has a lovely finished basement (which is covered with vomit right now, no big deal) and a fireplace with a fake fire and a fish pond and pear tree and the swing set of my youth. We made pear crisp the other night with Ba's pear swirler-corer-pealer and A's pears. GLUTEN FREE DAIRY FREE SUGAR FREE pear crisp. If agave nectar doesn't count as sugar. It kind of does. But oh well.

I've seen more seals up close in the past few days than I think I've seen ever. There are all these harbor seals in the harbor eating the salmon. The Stream Team has a see the salmon station set up and they give you polarized glasses so you can look into the water and see tons and tons of salmon swimming around. I want to see a seal catch a salmon. I've seen a seal surface with a salmon in its mouth and eat it, but I want the catch.

La's sister Br is visiting and she is super cool. We're best friends. I don't want her to go back to Ireland in a few days.

La's house is ridiculous. The front door is always open and there is junk everywhere inside and out. It's hard to tell who exactly lives there with all the people going in and out and everything is constantly a mess. There is an organ in the front yard and a washing machine in the back yard. I guess what happens is some of the people dumpster dive stuff and try to sell it on ebay, but it is all sitting out in the yard in the rain so I don't know how valuable it could possibly be. But there is a firepit that we have fires in and always tons of vegetables that La brings home from the farm.

Ba is setting up her dorm room to be the best dorm room ever in the freshman dorms. I'll have to take some pictures of it because it is really impressive. She was put in there without a kitchen or living room or anything because she is an RA but she is certainly making the most of what she's got. And then some.

I told Mi that I would water her plants while she is in Chicago but then her car broke under Je's watch so I don't know how I will get there. I'll have to make a long trek.

I'm excited to move into my apartment. It seems a little wrong that A won't be there because A and Bej and I have been having the best of times living together. But I'm super excited to unpack and decorate. I have two framed dinosaur posters, one identical to the one in C's kitchen and one in a similar theme. It's going to be good.

Wow

People are amazing me with their generosity. All these people are offering all these things and doing so much. I'm wowed. It's a mixed feeling of feeling like such a burden and feeling so grateful for the help and feeling so amazed that people are willing to help Bej and I like this. I'm a little overwhelmed with emotion.

The King and the Queen and the Doctor Too

Gosh. I guess summer is coming to an end. Well like, kind of. School doesn't start for another month and I'm going back home to the grand old Oly, so I guess the last chapter of my summer is starting. Everyone else going back to school (or off to exotic locations) makes it seem like it's over. I actually didn't realize that my summer isn't over until just now. Umm. Yeah. School doesn't start till September 27.

So in eleven or twelve days (somebody please explain to me how to properly count down days, for some reason the concept has always been a difficult one for me) I'll be back, probably homeless and in a corner somewhere but back nevertheless. I'm ready to go now, but these eleven or twelve days will probably go fast.

I'm happy I came back, though, because this has been a summer of getting better. The whole fiiinally getting treated for lyme disease thing probably did a lot to help that. The thing about lyme disease is it seems any symptom can be caused by lyme. Like changes in mood, depression, anxiety, crying easily, all that stuff. And as my headaches are going away that stuff seems to be too. I guess there is no way to know what part of my sadness was lyme and what was from my situation. Probably it was from both. But maybe that time in the spring when I was thinking that I was a useless bad person and that living my life was doing more harm than good and getting all empty and crying about it had something to do with lyme disease causing depression. And maybe when the treatment is over I won't feel like that again, because it really isn't like me.

Remember how I said my headaches are going away? Pretty big news. Things were getting a little ridiculous. It's a lot easier to go about your day when there isn't headache headache all the time headache. So that's a good thing about the summer. Another good thing is that this summer I was able to relate with my family on a friend sort of level. Which was pretty cool. I can really really see how we're all growing up. It seems like I'm growing faster than ever right now. I mean, it's not like the difference between two and three, but I wasn't aware of it back then. But I'm imagining being this baby and thinking WHAT. I'M GETTING SO MUCH BIGGER AND MORE CAPABLE. PRETTY COOL. I wonder how long all this growing and maturing and changing keeps up.

I had a radical thought this summer. But before I tell you about it I'll tell you about this one time when Rosie came up to me with a notebook this summer and asked me for my "radical ideas" about life, and so I told her about letting go of caring about image and what other people think and buying stuff and worry and jealousy and all sorts of stuff like that, and she copied down all my words like I was this great old sage or something. But anyway, my radical thought was that maybe I really am special. It feels like something that I shouldn't admit, because it seems that when people think they're special they're mistaken and everyone else is like they think they're all that but really we all know they're just regular. And the real special people are supposed to be totally unaware of it. But maybe I'm not regular. People tell me how special I am all the time and I always kind of dismiss it, like it's the whole "special snowflake" thing that isn't true. Maybe everyone is special and it isn't fair to put down specialness. And if you're wondering what I mean by special, I mean especially good. When I was little it meant always well behaved and knows too much about birds. But now maybe I'm a really good person. Even if I'm not yet, that's my goal. But if I'm not special people should stop telling me I am because I just might believe it.

Also, while I'm still very much a beginner, I can already play more on the banjo than I ever thought I was capable of. This is of course because I had very low expectations.

Well then.

I've sucked at blogging this year. I was just looking at the number of blog posts per month thingy on the side there and realized 2010 has gone by with hardly any posts. I guess that isn't a big deal, but while I guess you folks do read this it really is for myself. I like having records of what I am doing and what I thought, because I know that before I know it before I have time to think years will have gone by and I will need a little something to kick my memory.

Most of my past blog entries (and I have a lot, considering I've been blogging on and off for eight years now) I avoid rather than read, since like, embarrassing. I don't really want to remember that stuff anyway. But I do. And I will.

I think what happened is I don't like blogging when I'm unhappy and there was too much unhappy this past year. I kind of chronicled that. Enough, I guess. Enough as I could with my policy of blogging as if everyone I know can see it since you never know when a blog may slip into the public eye and goodness knows I'm not about to put anything on the internet that I wouldn't want any people seeing.

But I've kind of pulled myself together. For a while I stopped believing in myself, trusting my decisions, and believing that people like me. I lost my trust in that I know what is right, that I can plan, that I know how to do things, that I'm talented.

For a while, I thought that I shouldn't speak up and offer my suggestions about how to do things. I didn't want to cause a stir. I didn't believe that I could be right.

Father had told me years before about how most people have a voice in their head that feeds them a stream of negative. You're doing that wrong. You're in the wrong place. They don't like you. And so on. When he told me that before, I couldn't relate. I didn't have one of those voices. And then this year I developed one, and it stayed with me until I remembered what Father said. And I remembered how he told me that the important thing about that voice is it does not speak the truth. It's crazy. Lots of people believe everything it says, because there it is talking. But it is very untrustworthy.

Maybe it is coming home. Maybe it is being out of that apartment. Maybe it just took me this long to pull together. Maybe the losing and finding myself thing was a helpful part of the growing up process. I think I'm definitely wiser having been through it.

I am excited

for the rest of my life!

WAH WAH WAH

WAH WAH WAH I MISS MY BOYFRIEND WAH WAH WAH

Things

Things are good now. They're good. Looking back on the year it doesn't seem so bad. Probably because things are good again, so I can now see all the good that was clouded up by the bad.

April 14

I do have friends here. I do. I think. Or maybe I'm making friends. No, I have friends. I do. I do have friends. All I did all day was hang out with my friends, all different friends. I have friends here.

I think.

And if I don't I'm on my way to having friends. But I think I do. Maybe I'm not sure. No, I totally do. I have friends here. I have friends here.

Winter Quarter

Spring quarter is better but I still feel a little lost and confused like I have no friends here, though I suppose I do. No, I do. I do have friends here. I totally do. I think I'm just still caught in residual pain and confusion. I feel like I'm floating around and that I don't belong anywhere and that I'm not attached to anything. I still don't understand why or how this happened to me. I guess I never will. I guess all I need to do now is let it go, but I feel to wrapped up in it all to let it go. Maybe I just need time.

It's weird how much being hurt has clouded my ability to see the fun in what I'm doing. Everything should be better right now. It should be pretty good. I have friends. We do fun things together. When Father was visiting he was talking to me about how nice it is that I'm in college with good friends who are good to me and who like me and who I like. And I was thinking, am I?

But I am! I guess. I suppose. Am I?

I guess I'm still not sure. How did things go so bad this year?

It isn't all bad, though. A lot of it is good. A lot of good, like dinner parties and roller skating and power tools and baby plants and chocolate fights and snuggling.

Maybe I just need time.

Gelato gelato gelato gelato

Oh goodness.

This is the best vacation ever. After all those awful months (well, they weren't entirely awful. but like, they were kind of awful) at school this is the most welcome dose of wonderful. I've only been here for a few days and we've already done so much and there are so many more adventures planned. Every day is full of adventures. I'm not stressed. I'm not upset. I'm happy. Really, actually happy, the kind of happy that I haven't felt for a while. I'm hoping it will stay when I go back to school. I think spring quarter will be better and maybe I can keep up this mood. But like, man. This is like a five star luxury vacation. Today we woke up early and went to the zoo. There was a baby gorilla and an owl kangaroo. There were also some cuddly penguins hanging out together in the same little penguin cave. After the zoo we took a nap and then went to Half Moon Bay where we found all the best stores. One sold baby bunnies and baby chicks and turkeys. I wanted all of them. There was also a really cool antique store and a knitting store with a stuffed knit stegosaurus. We went to the beach and saw the water and lay in the sand and buried our feet. After the beach we got dinner at one of Bej's families favorite restaurants. We got salad and baked goat cheese and enchiladas and the BEST gelato for dessert. I can't even tell you how good this gelato was. I was twitching as I ate it. It was that good.

Oh man oh man oh man and that was just today.

Yesterday we visited Grandfather and Be and that was cool because Grandfather is the coolest. We walked to the top of a hill and there was water on three sides of us and an eagle was flying low and circling around us. We actually don't know what kind of bird it was. But it was definitely eagle-like.

OH MAN OH MAN

I'M HAVING THE BEST TIME GUYS! THE BEST TIME!

Tonight

Mi and I are doing homework. Mel and Ur are doing a puzzle. La is coloring. Everybody is eating strawberries. This is the life.

Okay

There was a week of sun and it was great. I went to the beach every day with different combinations of people. I painted in the forest by myself. Everyone wore dresses and lay around in groups on the field. And it's FEBRUARY. Dresses! Without coats! In the sunshine!

Things are better. I haven't cried in a while. I made chocolates last night with Ba. I have seeds in little pots on my desk. Maybe they will grow.

Down on the farm

You can click on them for bigger sheep.