Learning Experience

The past few hours has been a learning experience all in it's own. Tonight I finally broke down and decided to look up jobs. I decided to start small, and knowing I want away from my small town I decided to look in Chillicothe, the only other territory I am more familiar with besides Muskingum County. I discovered that there are indeed many jobs focusing in the medical field, management jobs and LOTS of opportunities at food industries. I had to crack a smile at some of the listings I found. At least I know I can find a job somewhere out there. Will it pay for student loans, an apartment, a car payment, car insurance, food and other expenses? Not even close, but if I ever do get bored I am sure I can find a small part-time job two or three days a week. I also decided to finally sit down and type out a draft to a resume. I was not looking forward to this. My GPA isn't near where I would like it to be at, and due to this I have become slightly depressed at the thought of not being able to find a job. I have my fingers crossed that my work experience will benefact me down the road. I do pride myself in trying new things and doing the best I can at what I do. Also, with my job inquiring, I discovered that thanks to my work experience with handling money and a cash drawer, I am qualified to work at a bank! I have often thought about applying at a bank to have some more work experience, plus one to where you have to dress more professionally than the other places of employment I have worked at. Out of the three, two required a strict uniform, and my very first job I could go to work in sweat pants and a hoodie because it was behind the scenes work. I enjoy dressing up and looking presentable to the public. Not only would I have to look presentable, but this type of job would also give me a good excuse to go spend some money on clothes! So far my resume is a draft, and my friend Jodie, who has worked mulitple different jobs in different areas of skills (examples: She is a qualified teacher, yet she has worked in Retail, in Hotels and as Management), is taking a glance at it to see how good of a job I did. It has been about six years since I last had to make a resume. Tomorrow I plan on finding my resume I made in high school and editing my current one I just put over an hour's worth of time into. I am also going to be looking for other job opportunities. I plan on compositing a list of places I can/would like to apply to and also what zip code I would like to apply to. Right now I have some decision making to do. Apply anywhere, apply where I am most comfortable, apply in familiar territory, or apply at home (applying at home is my very last and least thought about option). I cannot wait until this whole job search is over with. I seriously cannot wait to go apartment searching! A dream would be to have an apartment with a friend, but depending on where I go that may or may not be an option. I am not the greatest person when it comes to decision making, I always try to make the other people around me happy, but I have put my fist down and have decided Murphy is not being left at my parents' house for more than a month after I find that job that will help me better myself and my future. He has been part of my life for too long, and will continue to be in my life (and the place I call home) until his dying day. There is no if, ands or buts about that. No one will change my mind when it comes to him! I will find an apartment that allows me to have him. I will not settle for a place that will not allow me to have him. I have learned something else today...I do a lot of venting while blogging...But I love it!

Exhausted

The past month or so I have noticed anxiety building up, and I have noticed changes in my body that have no happened in over a year to seven years. When I would feel nervous I would start to break out in red blotches on my shoulders and chest, and sometimes on my back. Recently, I started feeling anxious and uncomfortable, and those red spots returned, only this time they were super red and it was one big blotch all over my chest. I felt dizzy again, paniced, and drained. This happened more than once. One day last week Nichole and I decided to meet at Taco Bell for dinner, and I noticed I was shaking for no reason what so ever. When we ordered I felt displaced, and within a few moments of sitting down I felt a wave of absolute dread and panic hit me. This was what drew the line. I went to the doctor and had a new prescription wrote for anxiety medication.

I had been doing well without it. Over 6 months without it, feeling great, and then suddenly all the anxieties of life just come crashing down. Between work and school, money issues and having to even do my own laundry and clean my room and my car it all has just bottled up and seems to have exploded into pure dread. The doctor said I should have stayed on my medication when my mother was diagnosed with cancer. To be honest, I felt better off of it until the hot flashes, red blotches, the dizziness and the sudden feeling of absolute dread (which leads to feeling like you are going to die) exploded on me. I have been taking the medicine for over a week now, and, yes, I am feeling better, but what started when I was first on the medication (Lexipro) is constantly being exhausted and tired.

I noticed it this morning. I slept through my alarm, once again missing my 9 am class. In fact, I slept until 11:30, had to get dressed and drive over to the school for my noon class. Surprisingly I was only two minutes behind, and the professor was still taking attendence. What luck.

I slept over 10 hours straight last night, and you would figure that after 10 hours of sleep and only being awake for 12 hours and hardly doing anything for the day I could keep going. Once 11 pm hit I have been exhausted. I forced myself to do two hours of reading research for my Seminar a little while ago.

It is nice that I am not having the out of control dread feeling and I am not dizzy, but this whole tired issue is really making me angry. Last time I went through this, it took three months for me to adjust. I do not know how many times I missed my 11 am class when I first started on this medication over a year and a half ago. Until that point in my college career I rarely missed any class. I had the occasional migrain I would get, but I usually went to school. Take some pain medication and go. I cannot wait until this exhaustion feeling goes away. Even after working for 2 hours this afternoon on research for my seminar paper, and reading the pieces I printed off to help me write my Seminar I feel like I have not accomplished a single thing.

Not this weekend but the following weekend I am planning on taking another trip to Chillicothe and spending my Saturday working on my Seminar project up there. God Bless Jay for allowing me to come up and make his home my own quiet study place while he is at work. He has encouraged me to keep going with my Seminar and has helped me see more light at the end of the tunnel to this semester. It is hard to believe but in 6 weeks I will have a Bachelor's Degree in English. What am I going to do with it? God only knows. Hopefully, I will find a great job here soon so I can move on with my life. I am excited and nervous. I cannot wait to have a place of my own to call home for Murphy and I. I cannot wait to experience the thrill and anxiety of moving all my belongings to another place and actually have friends over for an evening of games and/or movies and have a few drinks over conversations, or have Jay come visit me at my own place for a weekend. When I am at his house I miss Murphy all the time. I would love to have Murphy and Jay near me together.

Jay came down yesterday for a day, and I finally got to try Tuna Steak with Dill Sauce at The Forym. I must say, I think Jay has me hooked. I have never had warm tuna, and the Dill Sauce made it even better. I think I kind of understand why relish goes well with tuna now. Now that I have an idea on how Jay likes his Tuna Steaks and the type of sauce he likes I think I will attempt it. Should be a fun experience.

Before we went to The Forum for dinner, I picked Jay up at KFC (which conveniently is right off the interestate) and I took him to Downtown Arena, yet again another locally owned place. We watched March Madness, then watched a movie at my house, full of crazy dogs trying to not only cuddle with Jay but also barking at him everytime he placed his arm around me. We watched "Grown Ups" and he talked to my dad about golfing for a little while. After we ate dinner at The Forum, we drove out to Salt Fork and sat by the fire. Basically we kind of relived our first date since we went to The Forum for dinner and then out to Salt Fork to have some quiet time to talk to each other.

Well, it is going on 2 am, and I have to get up and get a move on tomorrow morning. I not only have to have 10 pages of my Seminar completed by Thursday morning to discuss with my professor (I never reached my goal if you cannot tell) but I also have to have a rough draft of a 3 page paper completed for tomorrow afternoon but also a 5 page research paper due Friday. This week is seriously just crazy busy. Next week will be much smoother. I plan on getting a lot of Seminar done this weekend, which includes more research and more chapter analysis over Great Expectations. I am ready to say Goodnight!

Home From My Vacation

Well, I didn't exactly take a vacation, but I would still like to say I did. Instead of spending all of my Spring Break working or sitting around my house I spent 5 days and 6 nights in Chillicothe. It was really nice to sit in a quiet house during the day with no barking dogs or someone telling me to come down stairs for a moment, which can turn into an hour or more. I didn't have to listen to MTV when I woke up in the morning. Pure silence...Well, almost pure silence. Some days there were rain, but I did notice I heard a train quiet a bit in the area whistling its approach.

The best part about my time away from home was spending what time I could with Jay. We went out to dinner and lunch, I made dinner for us, we watched "Troy" with Brad Pitt as the star (yet, I must say I think Orlando Bloom was the handsome one of the two), talked and he played the guitar. Sunday we went to the bowling alley, met up with his friend Ben and we ate pizza and bowled. Jay's last game was the best ever. He bowled over 200 (right now my brain and I are arguing if it was 211 or 214, or if it is either of those). We also went to his parents' house on Sunday night for their annual dinner night (usually pizza) and his mom told the interesting ghost stories that happen in the house, one Jay never knew about till that evening, and believe me it sent shivers up my back.

While he was working, I spent my days enjoying the quiet. One day I didn't turn on anything for background noise until well after 5. I remember working on the dishes and decided I needed something to listen to. I put in "Marlie and Me" and got to work. Throughout that day I did laundry for Jay, too, and doing laundry for someone else is a lot easier and more motivating than doing it for yourself. I hate doing my own laundry. I absolutally hate folding it and putting it away. A lot of the time my jeans and hoodies sit in the clothes basket after I bring them up. I also can never find my socks. Anymore I pretty much just buy a large bag of socks and probably will wear them once before they get up and walk away from the laundry pile. I had also made no bakes twice while I was there, so I cleaned up that mess, twice.

The biggest accomplishment I made while I was at Jay's would have to be the subject of my seminar paper. I worked for over 5 hours on it, and managed to crank out almost a full 5 pages. I was a paragraph short of having 5 pages. I do have an outline for information for my next subject I wish to discuss in it, and I need to do some more research in order to do that. My goal by next Friday is to have 10 pages of seminar complete. I will be spending a great majority of my time in the library this week. I need some book sources. Right now I only have 4 or 5 internet sources for the subject plus the seminar book itself, "Great Expectations."

My fun project while I was at Jay's is my knitting, which was a lot of the reason why I decided to update my blog. It is currently 5:30 am, and thankfully I do not have to work until 6 pm tomorrow night. I will be taking advantage of my extra time snoozing! I started a blanket while I was at Jay's. Last night (Wednesday night) I completed the 45 rows of my first color, and started on my second color while I was up there, and I do remember when I packed up this morning I had 15 rows of my second color left to finish. Right now I am at 25 rows into my 4th color. So, in the process of 5 hours I knitted 85 rows. I am pretty excited. Tonight's goal is to have the panel of 6 colors completed. This blanket is going to be huge! I cannot wait to have it all completely finished. The biggest reward when it is all said and done with is when you get to snuggle with your finished work, unless of course you are giving it to someone.

Well, I do believe it is about snooze time. Murphy is at the foot of the bed ready to snuggle. He was very excited when I came home for the hour and a half I was home before I left for work. When he saw me walking around with my work uniform and keys in hand he was in a mood! I mean a MOOD! He is ready to snuggle with Mama. I really did miss him while I was away. Oh, in case anyone was curious about the tuna steak recipe, we never managed to go to the store together and decide on a recipe. Hopefully next visit I made to Chillicothe I can figure out a recipe and have a really great meal. It will be a challenge that I am looking forward to! I've never had tuna that was not right out of the can before.

Chili, Cornbread and No Bakes

In the past 2 hours I have spent my time making chili and no bakes, but also cleaning up the house and doing a little bit of laundry. No, not everything is cleaned up and finished, but it is a start.

My chili is really basic. A large bottle/can of tomato juice, 1-2 pounds of hamburger, a can of kidney beans and also a packet of Chili-O. What I also like to add to the chili is a can of finely diced tomatos, and a can of whole sweet corn. Right now I have my corn bread mixed and on a greased pan (recipe provided by Quaker on the back of the cornmeal container). I'm just waiting until dinner time to bake it for the 20 to 25 minutes.

My biggest success today was my no baked cookies. I found a recipe on my favorite cooking site (http://www.grouprecipes.com/) and I followed the directions. Even after 2 days of being set out, the cookies never hardened and had to be eaten with a spoon. The mix was good, but the mix was gooey and not as satisfying as a cookie would have been. After asking my mom about it, she recommended cooking the sugar, milk and butter for 1 minute, take off heat and mix in the vanilla, oats, peanut butter and cocoa, then place a spoonful onto the wax paper. I didn't have wax paper last time so I used tin foil. The more I think about it, I do believe that the tin foil held the heat into the cookies too long, but I do not think that is the extent of my issues...

I boiled the mixture on medium heat and stirred is very often. It took me about 10 minutes to bring it to a boil. My mother told me instead of letting it boil for a moment, boil it longer. I counted to 100 once I noticed it boil and stirred it every so often. I pulled it off the heat and added the vanilla, then the oats, the cocoa and then the peanut butter, in the order that it was least likely to stick to the measuring spoon (I only had one 1/2 cup spoon on hand. Even as I was mixing it all together well I noticed that the mixture was hardening as I was mixing it well. I went and bought wax paper and used a spoon to make my cookies. Within 10 minutes after they were on the wax paper I could almost pull the cookies right off the wax paper. I gave them an hour before I pulled them off, and placed them onto a plate to set up the table for dinner and dessert.

I have become quite a cooking addict. Jay is at work currently, and I am watching "The Secret to My Success" until he comes home. My next experiment is tuna steaks tomorrow evening. I will update with the recipe we decide on one (there are so many out there on the internet to choose from).

Growing Up With Grandma

As long as I can remember I was at my grandmother's house quite often. She was a divorced woman in her late 50's when I was born. I remember playing outside her one story home when I was very young. One of my earliest memories of being with her is simple: She had a small table for me set up in the kitchen area for lunch time. I cannot remember exactly what I was eating, but I remember the layout of the kitchen, and especially the black and white checkered floor.

She moved quite a bit in my years. After leaving the one story home she moved about an hour's drive to live in a retirement home, but the irony is she was not retiring there. She was the manager of the building. I remember walking into the front doors of the home and then right into her apartment. It was small, but I remember taking up the whole living room to play with toys. The porch to this retirement home was nice. I remember eating strawberries coated in sugar here, and it quickly grew into my favorite snack.

I had an experience at this retirement home that I will never forget. I was outside on the sidewalk playing, and there was this very large dog sitting beside this older woman who had on dark sun glasses. I was (and still am) an animal lover. I was only five at the time, and I wanted to pet this woman's dog. She had a harness on her. My grandmother told me I had to ask, so I did, and the woman said I could. I remember asking a variety of questions about the dog. Why she was wearing the harness? Does she bite? How old is she? The lady said that she was a working dog, and was on guard when she was working. You see, the dog was a seeing eye dog for this woman.

During my stays at the retirement home with my grandmother she and I did a variety of crafts. I remember watching her crochet in her chair all the time while she puffed on a few cigarettes. She would sit in her pink and white flowered night gown for hours and just crochet. She also took needle and yarn and "sewed" designs into these plastic grids and made "jewelry" sets that I could wear to school on special holidays. She made a crown, braceless and ring set out of these grids with the yarn, and then she would glue on stickers or beads with a hot glue gun. I loved wearing them when I was younger to school, mainly because it was something different the other students did not have and I stood out.

She only stayed at this retirement home for a few years, then moved back home again to be closer to the family. She moved into a one story home again, and I must say I loved this house. It set in the country on a dirty road just off from a highway. The inside had wooden walls and floors. I can still smell the wood if I think about it hard enough. At this home I received my first set of spider bites all over my ankles. I remember sitting at the kitchen table making homemade noodles. I took puffy paint and made a design on a piece of scrap fabric my grandmother had in her craft collection. I also remember going through boxes with my grandmother one day and we found a set of bouncy balls she had bought for me, and I spent hours bouncing them up and down on the hardwood floor.

This home was located on my aunt's property, and she was building a newer, bigger house on the property just yards away. They had went out and adopted a mixed breed puppy. He was black and white, and I had a great time playing with him. I remember one of my parents dropping me off at night, and I walked into the kitchen and looked in this large cardboard box and there he was looking up at me. His name was Bullet. We played out in the yard for hours at a time, and even as he grew up into a 60 or 70 pound monster I must say he was probably one of my favorite dogs I was around growing up. My aunt's husband accidently ran him over with his truck one day when Bullet was about eight or nine. The dog couldn't hear well anymore, and had been lying out in the driveway. Tragic death.

My grandmother moved yet again closer into town where I lived. This was the home I spent most of my time in with her when I was growing up. This home was actually the home she had built with my grandfather when my dad and his siblings were younger. My aunt had purchased it from my grandmother when she had decided to move to the first home I described. My aunt and her husband lived in this home until the larger home they had been building together was completed.

In this particular home, I remember mostly baking cookies for Christmas gifts with my grandmother, and also watching a lot of America's Most Wanted. She also bought a long arm machine to put quilts together at one point when I was younger but she never learned exactly how to use it. The machine took up most of her front living room. The home was a small home, another one story, but it was big enough for the two of us to spend time together and also for us both to have alone time. I was always wondering off doing my own thing. I could entertain myself for hours at a time. I was a loner for the most part growing up, and I was fine with this.

The home had three bedrooms, and I always went to this one bedroom, the room with the navy blue carpet, to draw on a dry erase board or play with the Legos my grandmother had for me. I would build houses and play with the little man and the horse I remember purchasing myself with my allowance money.

My most vivid memory of my grandmother is her sitting in her armchair, the one that she always fell asleep in during the late afternoon, crocheting. She was no longer smoking after her lung cancer surgery. She would sit in that chair for hours while I played, colored or watched movies and crochet. I would watch mesmorized while she would wrap the yard around her right hand and the needle would pull it through all the loops she had of her project, which was mostly afgans. I had tried multiple times to learn how to work with yarn the way she did. I thought it was a beautiful motion. I grew up sleeping with many of the afgans she would give us for Christmas, and wanted to make one myself. As a child I would have never had the patience to make such a large project even if I had attempted, but I could not get the hang of crocheting if my life depended on it. I was proud of myself for learning how to make the first row chain, and I made one that went about forteen feet across the floor once.

In my early years I was more focused on drawing pictures, and many of the pictures I drew I still have today. Over the years I grew tired of drawing, and when I was sixteen I took a sewing class and learned how to make the Log Cabin quilt. Even this class was too much for me. I was exhausted by the time this class started at six in the evenings and I had already been up for twelve hours between getting ready for school and then going to school. I learned more at home sewing than I did at this class.

The irony of this: When I was 16 years old my grandmother was diagnosed with lung cancer for the second time. She was in her early 70's in 2004. I remember seeing her at family events the year and a half before she was diagnosed with an oxygen tank close behind her. She did not have it all the time. I remember being younger and we went on trips and she would have to sit down to catch her breath, and this was after her lung cancer surgery had been completed. This second time she was diagnosed there was nothing the doctors could do but let it run it's course. She was given until July to live, but she made it until September 1st. I had started taking this quilting class about the time she was diagnosed, and one day in April or May I went over to her house to ask her to show me how to make a draw-string bag for a little girl I had been babysitting at my sister's soccer games, and she showed me her latest projects.

She was making over 3o Log Cabin Quilt tops. Her intensions were to give them to family members for Christmas, the Christmas she knew she would not be around for. I had no idea this is what she was planning on doing with those tops until after she had passed away. When I took my glass I had learned to use a cutting mat and rotary cutter with a ruler, which is a very quick process to cut fabric. My grandmother used SCISSORS to make her fabric strips. Using scissors would take more than twice as long as the rotary cutter. I could not imagine using scissors, but she said it was easier for her than using the rotary cutter. The rotary cutter was more of a modern invention for quilters when I started using it. Scissors were something of the past and she had grown up using the scissors. Needless to say I was impressed, as always, with her.

She showed me how she laid the blocks out to decide what pattern she wanted in the quilts. She had hung a piece of batting up in her room with a rod and shower curtain hooks and used it to stick the fabric on and moved the blocks around. I was crawling on the floor trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my quilt and how to lay it out. My grandmother could not do that in her condition. Not only did she have lung cancer but she had a hump on her upper back that caused her to hunch over, and she had arthritus, and in my family you are cursed with bad knees the moment you are concieved. My grandmother was very independent in her years of life, she proved that one to me.

When she passed away I still did not know how to crochet. I had just started to learn how to cross stitch (I only completed a small project with it). Over the years I have started many sewing projects, mainly quilts, and many have gone uncompleted. I have only completed two quilts out of the near dozen I have started. About a year and a half ago I learned how to use the Knifty Knitter Looms, and I am proud to say I have completed many yarn projects with them. I have made many scarves, but my proudest is the afgan I made for my friend Jessi's daughter Mileigha. I plan on making more in the future. I loved sitting on my bed for hours counting rows and watching the same movie over and over again. I know I watched the first Harry Potter movie over a dozen times while I made the afgan. Since I made the afgan I have messed around with crochet, and am starting to get the idea of how to do it. I know I will never be near as good as my grandmother with the crochet, but I am very thankful that I had her in my life to teach me how to be crafty. I know partly because of her I am the person I am today, who enjoys sitting at home even on Friday or Saturday nights sewing quilts for loved ones. She loved doing things for others, and so do I.