No more election :) being productive

Hey ya'll,
   I just said ya'll. ahahahahaha! I'm not that southern yet.  However since moving to the south I notice myself picking up a slight southern accent and being nicer to people.  Not bad things overall.

Thank goodness the election is over! No more nasty campaign commercials and people might start being nicer to each other again. And no longer will people's political views be all over Facebook.  again, thank goodness! everyone has their opinion, but not the right to push those opinions on others.  Politics, religion, and marriage are all examples of things you shouldn't push on other people.

Somedays are just stay in bed and get work done days.  The past 24 hours have been that day for me. It is raining and cold in Knoxville, TN.  Makes me not want to leave the comfort of my nice, warm bed. I have 14 pages of the dreaded 60 page sport psychology manual done.  :) yay!  It is not nearly as hard as I thought it would be.  I also filled out most of my University of Utah application.  And did homework for my sport psych class. I even remembered to eat and now I am enjoying watching the Chew from yesterday and having a bloody mary. :)

I am going to spend the rest of the day working on some other work as well as my sport psych manual. :)

Picking up my roomie later tonight from her travels and interviews in Atlanta, GA.  I really hope for her sake that they went well, however, I'm going to miss her when she leaves.  :(

Hoping your day is going well,
<3 B

Catch up, again...

Hello Peeps!
 Sorry it has been so long since I've written on here. Life has been...all kinds of crazy.  I finally decided on graduate schools to apply to for my counseling PhD. :) Had a fantastic time at the AASP conference and made great new contacts.  Became friends with girls I never thought I would cherish as much as I do. I don't feel so isolated here in Knoxville anymore. :) 

The man came down and spent a week with me. I cannot explain how happy that made me.  We worked out 95% of our issues and it makes me so much more relaxed regarding our relationship. We went to our first wedding as a couple, seeing my sorority GBig get married. What a beautiful bride she was!  I got to see my Big for the first time in two years and it was fantastic! It's crazy to think how much has happened in such a short period of time. :) 

I wanted to share with you some things that made me really happy today, since part of the point of this blog for me, is to share things that make me happy. :)

1.  the knowledge that I exercised my right to vote
2. donuts and milk for breakfast
3. waking up before my alarm
4. not having to defrost the car this morning
5. a random enthusiastic hug from a friend
6. taking a nap between classes one and two
7. eating my delicious sandwich
8. already having a partner for a project in one of my classes
9. being let out of class two and three early
10. spending time girl-talking with a friend
11. Knowing one of my girlfriends <3's me 
12. great relaxation activity in class three
13. Dove dark chocolate pieces to eat in class
14. ordering the new Nora Roberts Inn Boonsboro book on Audible and starting it :)
15. feeling like I learned something in class three today
16. having chicken nuggets and milk for dinner like a five year old :)

Happy Day lovelies!!!!

flaws...are our strengths

There are some days when you just need to take a breath…and let it go. Today is one of those days for me.  I even went and walked the labyrinth, not that the benefits lasted very long. I never thought I would enjoy walking the labyrinth, something that is monotonous and takes up a good deal of time.  The one at the UT gardens doesn’t take a long time, however it is monotonous.  I have found peace in the monotony of the task. Just breathing in for four counts and out for four counts.  Before you know it you are in the middle and then again you are where you started.  There is something incredibly peaceful about the process somehow.

I think I may be antsy because I know my boyfriend is traveling and without clear cell phone reception. I never know when or if he is going to call. It also could have something to do with the fact that we now fight Every time we talk to each other.  Most of that is my doing and I’m ok with it. A famous woman said “if you can’t handle me at my worst, you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.” Audrey Hepburn. I believe this. If he can’t handle a mess that he created and talk to me about it, then he doesn’t deserve to have me in the first place.  I said I would never be the girl who stayed with a guy who continually fucked up.  Well, I guess right now I am that girl.  My boyfriend has no idea what he wants other than it may not be me.  He says he wants me and then turns around and says he doesn’t know if the life that I have in mind for myself fits into his dream life. You chose me dude. You told me you wanted to marry me, have kids with me.  How can I believe anymore that the things you have said are just because you think its what I want to hear and will keep me in your bed? I don’t get it. Not at all. He says I’m putting all the blame on him…I know my flaws…

1.   I have to be right, all the time

2.   I am ambitious in my choice of career.

3.   I feel the need to “fix” people

4.   I need to feel connected to my partner (holy shit it’s a crime!)

5.   I am high maintenance when I’m not with my partner

6.   My top priority right now is my education

7.   I have a very hard time forgiving.

8.   My feelings can be easily hurt by my partner

9.   My heart and head are connected; I cannot separate the two.

10.  I love being with people. I find them incredibly interesting and that everyone has value

11.  I’m anti- racism, sexism, pretty much any –ism, and I judge people hardcore who are racist, sexist etc

12.  If you fucked me over in the past, don’t expect me to be pleasant to you

13.  I like to dress to impress myself. I want to feel good about myself and how I look

14. I have a temper and once it gets going, it’s hard to stop

15.  I judge people who drink in excess, smoke, speed excessively, do drugs, beat their spouses/children, verbally abuse others, etc.

16.  Communication is key

17.  I hold things in and then blow a gasket

18.  I get upset for no reason

19.  I try to fix things on my own

20. I don’t like being touched while I sleep especially my feet

21.  The only time you have the right to tell me what to do is in bed

22. I have trouble sharing

23. I believe in equality in all things- money, jobs, happiness, education, marriage, childcare, housework, etc

See?  I have flaws just like everyone else. And I can admit to them. So there! Suck it! However, these things are also what make me so strong. I don’t forgive easily. I believe in equality. these things make me strong and are a big part of who I am. 

AASP is next week!  I am so incredibly excited.. I will hopefully almost be to my aunt’s house at this time next week. I love Aasp. It is a wonderful time and it fills me with even more love for my chosen profession.

Then I get to see my boyfriend the next week. It’s weird to think that I will get to see him, my kids, my littles’, Cassie, Ally, and my family.  It has been quite a while since I have seen any of them.  It will have been six and a half weeks since I have seen David or my family or Cassandra. Longer than that since I’ve seen ally.  Much longer since I’ve seen either of my littles or my kids. That’s not even a full sentence I just realized. Lol.

My favorite show, NCIS, is on right now, but since I do not have cable, I will have to wait until later tonight, or tomorrow to watch it. That’s ok though.  It will be a good break from working on homework all day tomorrow. 

Hope you like the font :)

B-

Is it really Wednesday?

I cannot believe it's Wednesday already. What a week it has been!  My phone broke saturday, couldn't get a new one delivered until Monday.  That phone wouldn't charge even though the cord was compatible with the same phone before. Had to buy a new one. :(

  Went to see a friend in my program whoop on Alabama in women's soccer friday night!  And I got to take a picture with smokey! Watched the UT vs Florida game...what a misery that was.  However it was made much better by eating at Soccer Taco and having a peach Margarita with the roomie!  Also I got my first pair of TOMS!  Kids size 4 lol.

      Sunday was awesome!  Went grocery shopping with my roommate and got crab legs to make!  It was my first time making crab legs and they turned out to be delicious!  Watched an entire season of Say Yes To The Dress! And....I painted an accent wall in my room!!!!!

Isn't it pretty????

Also finished the new Susan Wiggs Return to Willow Lake last night!  What a great story!

B

Mother nature's revenge

Once a month...
   Should you choose not to get pregnant as a woman...
   You're ovaries throw a fit.
Thanks ovaries. Not.

I think of this as mother nature's revenge and a woman's way of unconsciously getting back at every guy who has been mean/rude/ a guy to her in that month.

Now, is my time.

 Time for hot baths 

copious amounts of ice water

and ramen. 

Now that I look at it, I see a theme here, water.
   
Even though I feel as if I'm constantly being run over, I'm attending the UTK(University of Tennessee Knoxville) vs. Alabama soccer game tonight to see one of my friends play! So excited!!!! It will be my first UT event! :)

  Hopefully it will be a great game. GO VOLS!!!!!

B

Fried rice and farmers markets

Wow, what a crazy few days it has been! I have so many pictures to post about. On Monday after class,( isn't my hair cute!) I came home and realized I had chicken in the fridge that I needed to make. What to do with this? Obviously, make fried rice!  I decided to branch out of my fried rice bubble and spice up my rice a bit.

This was a totally bomb idea! It looked a little funny while it was cooking, but it turned out so well! It was delicious and a little spicy. The cocoa really added to the spice.  I got the chicken out and prepared it using Dave's Seasoning. Cooking it in the oven did lead to a burnt pinkie finger. :(

 The final product was made by scrambling 4 eggs, and adding the chicken and frozen veggies into the rice- cooking it until it was all warm, and serving immediatly. It was SOOOOO good!

Tuesday night- Walked into my bathroom and there was a cockroach crawling on my shower wall. I am fine admitting I screamed and ran out of my bathroom. Once I finally killed the thing with my roommate standing right outside for moral support which took ten minutes because we were so busy screaming every time it tried to get away(I think we woke up our whole complex)- I doused my floor in hydrogen peroxide and we tried to flush it down the toilet. Except it did NOT want to flush. It took ten minutes of flushing the toilet to get it to go down the drain. Trick- put as much tp in as you would if you just had a #2. 

Let's skip to today- Wednesday. 

Both my roomie and I woke up feeling less than stellar. I decided a walk was in order and went to try the path near my apartment. I met a very nice 50 year old woman who was also walking the path for the first time. We spent a little under an hour walking 2 miles and talking.  It was a great way to get some exercise and sunshine and sweat some of the fever out. 

The roomie and I went to two farmers markets today. One in Market Square where we picked up- many tomatoes, an eggplant, basil, and some locally produced raw honey.  We then went to POP- a gourmet popsicle shop in Downtown Knoxville. I had a fantastic Honeyed Watermelon popsicle that tasted just like biting into a frozen watermelon. The roomie had a coconut-lime one and we talked with the owner and his mom about UTK, where she attended as an undergraduate. People in the south are just so friendly!

Look Below for our second farmers market!

The final one of the day was at the UT gardens! We got there over an hour early and walked the gardens! I got some great pictures while we were there and they have a labryinth that was very helpful and restful for both the roomie and me. 

Stay happy folks!

First about Sunday

Sunday really was a great day this week!
     Although my handsome bf was driving across country and roaming the entire time, so we couldn't call, text, or skype for two days, it was still a good day.  After a Saturday night in with my roommate where we had breakfast for dinner(orange rolls, cherry spiced sausage, and her first bloody mary) and watched Charmed.  We are watching the whole series from the beginning.
     I tried to insert a picture here, but well it didn't like me at all. Typical.
     Skipping to Sunday morning, I got up around 10:30 and made some eggs for the roomie and me. She worked on finishing her bloody mary and I had some apple cider. Yum! The eggs I made this morning were delicious.  They were helped along by the sausage grease from last night, italian seasoning, and a little bit of italian dressing before cooking and a sprinkling of mozzarella cheese after they came off the stove.
     I got the new Food Network Magazine! I have to say, I love that magazine. It's like buying a cheap, beautiful cookbook once a month! Yes I am that dorky person who gets excited over a magazine. I also bought 4 kinds of cheese as well as raspberry preserves and blueberry preserves. My dinner consisted of a cheese board, preserves, grapes, crusty bread, ham, and pepperoni. With a nice glass of wine on the side.
  I also treated myself to a long shower. It was fantastic!  I lit a candle, showered in candlelight, used a homemade body scrub, and listened to the beginning of a new book I got from Audible.

Oh and I put together the gorgeous light I got from Ikea and moved my yellow chair into my room! Now all I have to do is paint the wall! Being a big kid, isn't half bad!

Hope your Sundays were amazing!

B

Personal Happiness Project

So much of my life right now, involves school. Adding up how much work I put in last week for my classes, not counting time I was actually in class- over 30 hours.  Oh and I’m in class 15 hours a week. So I have a full time job- it’s called graduate school.

Being in graduate school is equivalent to treading water constantly.  You can’t always tread the water and sometimes you sink a little, but you kick back to the surface and breathe again.  This is how I’ve been feeling since starting graduate school two weeks ago. 

            So today I am starting my personal happiness project.  It is time to be thankful for the things I have and to make myself happy.   I am a surprisingly easy person to make happy.  Showering makes me happy. Making food, makes me happy. So, you ask, if everything makes you happy, aren’t you happy?  And the truth is, no. 

            I’ve been living with my boyfriend for over four months and now we are separated by school and soon to be even larger amounts of distance.  He lives in Cleveland, Ohio and I live in Knoxville, Tennessee.  Later today he will leave to go visit his brother in Seattle for three weeks.  So instead of a little over eight hours of distance by car, it will be- I don’t even want to think about how far away that is. We’ve both done long distance before, but not like this.  Not when so much of our being is tied to someone else. 

             It’s not easy being in a long distance relationship.  You become very good friends and occasional lovers.  So much of your relationship revolves around how supportive you can be of the other person from great distances and then be able to rekindle the flames when you are lucky enough to be together.

            So while school keeps my mind busy and I try not to think about how much I miss him, I need to think of other things that make me happy.  I have to be independently happy again.  

      Starting on Monday, I'm going to do a post about something that makes me happy. 

B

Lets play catch up

So, today isn't sunday. It's Wednesday and I haven't written on this in forever. So much for doing it everyday or every couple or days, or heck every Sunday.

  I have so much information to catch you up on.  So here is the short version:

Vacation at the lake was amazing! It was my man's first time and the first time I have ever taken a guy with me to the lake. Great week of spending time with friends and family. Loved seeing my girlfriends from past summers and getting closer with my female cousins. :)

Two weeks later I left for Tennessee. Talk about heartbreaking,  not knowing the next time I was going to see the man. Upside- I have an amazing roommate who I am good friends with.  We have family dinners every week :)

I started graduate school at UTK(University of Tennessee Knoxville) for those of you not literate in college speak. I'm taking 15 credit hours.  The normal for graduate students, is 9.  So, I have NO life.

Spent labor day weekend in Cincinnati with the guy and the family. Had a blast, but semi glad to be back at school and on my own schedule again.

- So that's the overview of the last month+ of my life.

Hope all is well on your end

-B

Today has been A LONG day, and contrary to tomorrow being Sunday(the best day of the week), tomorrow is not going to be the best day of the week I have a feeling. But let's talk about today...
      Woke up at 7:30 this morning. My bf was cranky.  The dog(a 5 yr old english bulldog(Carl)) was being fussy.  We got McDonalds so the bf wouldn't be cranky anymore.
      We cuddled on my front porch while we waited for my parents, for 40 minutes.  Not that I hate cuddling with my boyfriend or anything, but my parents were 40 minutes late!  That's 40 minutes I could have still been cuddled up in bed with said boyfriend!  My parents are New England bred and so punctuality is a must with them.  If the situation had been reversed, I would have been read the riot act.  Gotta love being a parent.
      I gave Carl a ball that was lying around and he LOVED it. It was so cute to watch. His teeth are brutal; he popped the ball in less than a minute, and then gnawed happily on it.  My parents finally arrived with the truck(god bless them) and we loaded it up. It was amusing to watch Carl go up and down the stairs with me and the bf. He certainly got his exercise for the day.  It only took an hour to load the truck up and then my parents headed home and I headed back to the other house with the bf. After half an hour, I had to hit the road too. I had a bunch of cd's to listen to so the 4 hour drive wasn't bad.  I stopped at a rest stop and ran into...my parents who also stopped to use the bathroom. We have tiny tanks in our family.  I caught them about 20 miles north of Columbus, leaving Kent.  Needless to say, they were going slow.
    All in all made it home in about 3.5 hours and then loaded up stuff from home.  A kitchen table, a couple of side tables/living room table. Then my brother and I went to Ikea.  I LOVE Ikea.  It's like the heaven of designing the inside of a house. I got a couple of little things.  The thing I am most excited about, yes I know this is totally dorky and ungirly, is the cordless drill I bought. :) And I am making my desk for $25.  Yup!  I'm awesome! Now all I need is a desk chair.
   I can't seem to keep my eyes open.   It's only nine o' clock, but I'm beat.  Ready to hit the hay and start again tomorrow, same time, different place.

NEW APARTMENT, HERE I COME!!!!!

B

Well, this is my first post. SO here goes.

I'm about to move to Tennessee to start my life as a graduate student. This is all so real all of a sudden. After months of trying to find the right place, I did, by finding the right roommate. I can't wait to get this process of moving from Kent, Ohio to Knoxville, Tennessee.  My boyfriend and I packed up the rest of my stuff today, took care of getting insurance for the apartment, and I got my car checked up for the drive(it needed it).

My family is coming up early tomorrow for Part 1 of the move.  We are loading up at the hind end crack of dawn in the morning and moving the whole shebang down to Cincinnati(where I'm originally from). Then Part II on Sunday after we load more stuff into the moving truck.  By Sunday afternoon I should be completely moved into my new place with my new roommate! It's so exciting!

Moving to Tennessee is another baby corner for me.  I've lived 4 hours from home for 4 years and now I'm moving 4 hours in the opposite direction of home. Thank goodness I'm going south! Time to live where the living is easy(except I'm on a broke grad school student budget).  I'll be on my own completely. Time to make new friends, see new places, and really have things of my own.

EXCITED!!!!!!

B