As many of you know, I live in a place that has provided me with my every want and need over the past 6 months. They have also provided me with this, a lovely dresser, with a not so lovely image. It holds my clothes, yes. What it doesn't do is look nice. I've been trying to cover the top of this dresser with anything and everything I can find to hide those scratches!
I was reading about how to fix scratches in wood and I came across a simple and seemingly outrageous idea.. walnuts. What do I mean by walnuts? Let me tell you step by step. 1) Buy walnuts from the grocery store (the bigger the chunks the better.. like halves are great). 2) Rab walnut directly onto scratched surface in a small circular motion. 3) Be amazed. Don't believe me? Check out these before and after pictures. (Note: The oil from the walnuts does not heal or fill in the scratch.. it simply darkens it so that it is closer to the original color of the wood. It works ike a wood marker/crayon but the natural way!)
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As 2012 came and went, I feel as if it were all a blur! A sweet, beautiful, and magical blur! Just like everyone else, I figured now is a good time to reminisce about the past year. I feel like 2012 was a year filled with the most changes in my life! JANUARY I learned that my cat can climb a ladder. FEBRUARY I drug my ultimate team to a tournament during a blizzard so we could show off our brand new jerseys... but no one saw them because we looked like this the whole time. MARCH BHW and I traveled 2600 miles in 10 days while on a road trip that took us to a beautiful beach in Texas. While there, he just so happened to get down on one knee and propose at sunrise. APRIL I stopped using shampoo and conditioner in my hair for a total of 39 days. I also witnessed BHW wear his dads super old corduroy suit while he danced around the living room. MAY I spent a month with my very closest friends. Sunbathing, chick flicks, and karaoke make for an extremely fun summer. My nephew also celebrated his first birthday with a Hungry Caterpillar themed party! JUNE BHW's brother got hitched! I was so thankful to be able to witness such a beautiful event! I'm also thankful that he snagged a super awesome lady whom I LOVE TO DEATH! JULY I spent a week in New Hampshire with my family. Zip lining, waterfall hunting, and good eats were among the highlights of the trip! Oh yeah, and I graduated.. barefoot. AUGUST I moved to Pennsylvania with my fiance to work at Camphill Soltane, a college like experience for young adults with special needs. Oh how our life has been blessed by it! SEPTEMBER The students arrived on campus and my life was flipped upside down. Each and every student on campus has something so special about them. I celebrated my first Michaelmas Day, what a great experience! OCTOBER I took shots of chocolate at Hersheys Chocolate World. NOVEMBER We had our first blizzard in Pennsylvania, and what a beautiful sight it was! DECEMBER I was in the Shepherd's Play at Soltane, playing one of the three shepherds! It was so much fun! We also had Emerson house Christmas and I flew home to spend the holidays with my beloved family and friends! This year, we rung in the New Year at a Masquerade Ball held in Union Station! There was a live band and we had an amazing time dancing the night away! Hoping that you had a wonderful holiday and wishing you all a fabulous 2013!
Wow, I sure haven't updated this part of my website in a long time! I've been busy crossing off things from my bucket list and taking up a new challenge you can read about here.
A lot has happened in the past month or so! First, I got engaged! That was super exciting, duh. Just click the link and you can read all about it. :) Second, I graduated! Well, not technically.. but pretty much. I have fulfilled all the courses that apply to my major. I am currently enrolled in a summer class that is a prereq for grad school. Yes I said (typed), Graduate School! I applied to IUPUI's School of Social Work and have been accepted! It's a 2 year full time program that I would start this August in Indianapolis. With my Master's, I hope to one day become a school social worker! I had a job shadow day at an elementary school and I just knew that's what I wanted to do with my life! Well, that was until I found an opportunity.. in Pennsylvania! It's not a job.. but that's the only word I can find to describe it. The program is called Camphill Soltane. Camphill is an organization that helps people of all ages that have special needs. The specific campus in Glenmoore, Soltane, works with young adults with special needs. Here they attend a 'college-esque' campus which helps them become self sufficient. I would be a 'co-worker' which is a mentor to a couple students on the campus. During my time there I would live in a 10 bedroom house with other co-workers as well as students, kinda like a dorm. We live, cook, clean, and learn together all under the same roof! The students will also attend classes such as gardening, bike repair, money management skills, world history, mythology, and movement! I found this opportunity through Americorps.. like the Peace Corps but in America (kinda obvious). Americorps is a 1 year stint with little pay but amazing lifetime experience! I had my phone interview with them on April 30th and I feel like I totally ROCKED it! They said they'd let me know in 2-3 weeks if I got the job so I'm just playing the waiting game right now! Soltane also begged for BHW to apply too! If he did, once we get married, we'd be able to move into the same room and have the same off days as each other! We wouldn't be making much money.. but we would have a free place to stay and free meals for an entire year! The schedule is pretty rad too.. Wake up at 7 and cook breakfast with everyone. Students attend class from 9-12. Break time from 12-3! Classes again from 3-5. Dinner prep and eating at 6! Then we all just hang out til bedtime, 9pm. Since it's a college, we also get tons of vacation time! I feel that this will be an amazing experience, challenging but rewarding. So, that's what's going on in my life right now! 1 major decision to make and 2 amazing choices! If I do not get the job, it'll be easy to decide, grad school it is! But, if I do get the job.. that'll make the decision much harder. My current point of view.. grad school will always be there. I've already been accepted once.. how hard will it be to get accepted again? Soltane is a once in a lifetime opportunity and what better time to take the leap?! Any advice or words of encouragement.. I'll take anything! :) xo To prove to everyone that my cats really are humans. My sister came into town to help me accomplish my first task on my bucket list.
She was a little sick at the time so she had to take some medicine.. or at least try to. Eek! It's 2012! A fresh new year for everyone! It's time for me to start
digging into my new Bucket List for 2012. You can see how I'm doing here! By the way, I've gotten so much better at updating regularly haven't I?! So proud of myself. Ha. I hope everyone had a wonderful New Years Eve, if you made resolutions, good luck sticking to them! I didn't make any resolutions this year, I can never seem to stick with them. :( Enjoy the first day of the last year.. for those of you who believe the world will end in 2012. xo Merry Christmas dearest followers of mine!
Here are a few things my nephew, Baby E, likes to put in his mouth. Wow, hello readers, if there are any of you left out there! I am doing a miserable job at
updating my website regularly. I have the same excuse that I've had for the past 6 months, I'm actually pretty dang busy. I won't bore you with the details so let's just get right down to business. What have I been up to the past semester? I was taking 15 credit hours, working, and being president of the women's ultimate frisbee team. Now that the semster is over (All A's and B's by the way) I'm headed home for a couple weeks to enjoy my time with my little family. I start my online grant writing class (barf) this Saturday, hoping to get ahead of everyone els. In all truthfullness, I'll probably wait until the week before everything is due to actually work on it. I was warned not to do that, let's see if I listen to their advice or not. My schedule for next semester is looking pretty open so I'm hoping to get a better hold on this 'blogging' thing. I made this website to document my travels but sadly I haven't gone anywhere in a year, or more! Talk about a bummer. Before this gets too long and drawn out I'll just give you a little run down of what my life has been consisting of the past few months: 1) Visiting my sister at college. She is a freshman at Anderson University. *tear* She is growing up! 2) Cooking lots of yummy dinners with the man 3) Celebrating my 3 year anniversary of dating this super tall hot dude who plays guitar 4) Running in my first race (The Drumstick Dash) and making it on the 6 o'clock news 5) Owning my first Christmas tree 6) Doing fun holiday things with friends I'll have for the rest of my life 7) The Griswold Family Lighting .. that almost didn't happen 8) But DID happen, beacuse of this guy 9) Being the worlds greatest Aunt (ok, maybe it's a 3 way tie) I'm making a New Year's bucket list that will be posted on my blog.. after new years.. obviously. It will be a bucket list of sorts for the year, kind of like my 21 by 21 list. You can keep track of all the things I've accomplished! Anyways, I'll be posting more often.. this time it's not a lie. Check back next week! School. For the past 15 years, school has been my life.
It's like a full time job, only worse because you have to come home and do more work! Isn't it crazy the hours that have been put into school, homework, extra curricular activities, and study for exams? If I calculated it all out, I would probably cry a little. Like I said in my blog from last week, ever since my dad passed away, time seems much more precious than ever before. I started out attending Ball State with a major in Special Education. I wanted to work with children with special needs, it's always been a passion of mine, since I was 10 years old. Oh how quickly things change. After my first semester, I decided to change my major. I didn't want to be in a classroom, I heard all the stories about mounds of paperwork, not my style. I scrounged around and found a major called Family Studies. It involved taknig classes like marriage, parenting, child development, and family relations. Sounds interesting right? Well, to me it did, until my sophomore year. I finished my sophomore year and I hadn't taken a single class on children with special needs. How am I going to get a job working with these children if I haven't learned a single thing about them? Off to my advisors office I go. I tell her I want to work with children with special needs but I don't want to be a teacher. She said the thing that all advisors at Ball State say, 'Well, I think you're in the wrong major.' Oh great, I spent 2 years learning about things that won't even help me get a job?! I ask her what major I should be in and I was hit with another punch in the gut, 'well, Johnny, that's a good question. I don't really know where we should put you.' Now I'm in a real pickle, I've spent time in this major but it's not really what I wanted, I can't just quit now! I've been thinking about my future and what I want to do and people have been mentioning enrolling into a Masters Program. Ugh, sounds like more school, more money, more work, and more of my precious time down the drain. I found the perfect Masters Program, a degree in Master of Arts in Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) with an Emphasis in Autism. I'm really thinking about taking the courses! It actually get's me a little excited. Now, this is what I really want. I'll keep mulling it over and thinking about my options, I want to help others, which I can do now with my degree, but I also wouldn't mind making a little more money in the process. Sorry this blog wasn't too super interesting, next time it'll be better. :) Anyways, thanks for keeping up with my crazy life! P.S. I miss traveling. :( Of course, my work computer is a peice of junk and deleted my entire post before I could save it. Drats. Anyways, I'll start over, and try to remember most everything I said.
Don't hate me for not updating in forever, this girl lives an extremely busy life by choice. I've been journaling lately, scratch that, I've been trying to journal lately. It's much harder than one would think. It seemed so easy in my head 'oh, just sit down for a little bit each day and write down your thoughts and feelings.' Yeah, if you don't know, it doesn't actually happen like that. By the time I actually get a chance to sit down and journal, I'm too tired and I just sleep instead. So, needless to say, it's not going too wel so far, but I'm not giving up. I'm writing it all down and then typing it because when I write, my feelings and emotions actually leave my body and are transfered into the ink. It's quite freeing actually. Typing just doesn't have the same effect. What a whirlwind of a week. So much seems to have flown by me and I hardly got a glimpse of it. I've been going through this phase where I'm in 'ultra freak out mode' about graduation/life in general. Is this what a quater life crisis feels like? If not, I don't ever want to experience that, this is enough, thank you very much. So, I'll admit to the stereotype before I begin: I'm a woman (O.K. maybe more like a girl but that's besides the point) so I enjoy blabbing and making very little sense. The following paragraphs are me attempting to be organized. A few things going on in my life that I'd like to elaborate on; my stressful life, school, ultimate, love, and my future. I most likely won't get around to all of them in this post (I don't want to bore you to death), so I'll save some for the next update, which will be 235908234 times sooner than the last update. First things first, my stressful life. I think I bit off a tad more than I can chew. You know, you're on a first date with someone and you're at dinner. Eating and talking, just having a grand time. You take a bite of chicken, not looking at it, and you end up feeling like you have an entire chicken leg in your mouth. Yeah, you know the feeling, admit it. You're thinking 'crap, do I chew this honking peice of chicken and loko like a total moron/ risk the chance of chocking on it or something equally as ridiculous? OR do I what? Spit it out? Go to the bathroom and flush it down the toliet? First impression: FAIL.' Personally, no choice is a good choice in this situation. So, anyways, that's how I feel right about now, except take out the chicken and replace it with life. I have so much going on but I can't really lessen my load because everything I'm doing is 'important' or so the world seems to think. 1) I'm in school to get a degree to eventually, if I'm lucky, land a good career. 2) I'm working part-time so I can have a tiny bit of money and try (although failing miserably) to save as much as possible. I have $100 automatically put into my savings but, let's be real, $27 is pretty hard to live on for 2 weeks. 3) I'm also the captain of the Women's Ultimate frisbee team, the one thing I'm actually enjoying currently. Our website. It requires all of my spar etime which leaves zero time for 4) homework, let alone 5) the serious relationship I'm in. And oh ya I'm also supposed to be 6) finding a job?! Oh please, only so much this girl can do at one time. I'm sure you've had enough of my rants and raves for one day, check back next week and I'll talk about the other 4 things in my life. It's safe to say that I'll probably just stick with one topic per blog. Until next week, read the website for my ultimate team! We're going to Lowell, Indiana this weekend for our last tournament of the season! Thanks for not forgetting about me. xo |
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February 2013
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