I don't really have anything to say. Work is keeping me busy. I am overwhelmed with grading and hours. I am just waiting for the middle of April when my life slows down. Let's hope I keep my head above water until then.

Well, I've officially moved into my cousin's house for the duration. There wasn't room for me in the apartment with a fiance practically moved in. I'm doing much better now that I have this arrangement.
I've started reading Absalom, Absalom! by Faulkner and Frankenstein by Shelly. It will take a while for me to get through them that's for sure. Faulkner requires too much concentration for a before-bed book. So far I am enjoying it, but it is heavy stuff.

I don't really have anything to say, so I guess I'll ramble about a few things I've been thinking about lately.

I'm so glad it is Daylight Savings next week. I know a lot of people hate it and I don't much care for when it ends, but I love having light later in the evening. Before work: who cares? During work: I'm in the basement. But after work I can exercise outside because it is light and it is so nice.

The TV show Lost, which I just finished watching with Lisa, has a really good point about Satan doing his best to talk you out of good actions right up until the moment you actually do them. You have to stay firm in your course and have an individual knowledge of right and wrong to guide you.

I am getting a little trunky in my BYU-I job. The end of the semester is coming and I can feel it. I'll have to endure to the end.

I turned in mid-term grades for my students and their assignment next week is minimal, so I should be able to stay on top of the grading I have. I hope. My other job just gave me a long-term training course to design, and that will keep me busy for a while, which for right now is not stressful.
I still float between cafes and libraries to do my online job and then between sleeping at my apartment during the week and Lisa's (my cousins) on weekends. It is getting kind-of old. I miss cooking and baking. But my roommate who doesn't leave me clean dishes to cook or bake with (or a clean apartment to stay in for that matter) will be gone in two months and I look forward to the return of normalcy.
There's my update.

Update on amaryllis, which is progressing far better than I am at the moment.

Nothing much to post these days. I am again behind in everything I need to do. How do some people do multiple jobs? I am not mentally able to keep up.

But the good news is the amaryllis I thought I had killed just needed a little warmer air. Now look at it. Yay.

I got caught up on my grading last week (which I am promptly procrastinating again), and my life feels so much more managable these days.

I thought I would post a great song by one of my favorite folk duos: In Lieu of Flowers

Well, it's been a while. I don't have to go in today until 11:00 so I thought I would post something hilarious that my friend Jen showed me.

On this website they discuss a new internet series "Portlandia," where they do little skits about indie designers, locavores, those who only eat organic, etc. Here is the link to a website that links to the three video skits. My favorite is the second one about chicken.

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/ny/portlandia-put-a-bird-on-it-know-your-chicken-137921

My instructional design job has got to stop working me 10 hours a day!

Two things I have noticed:

1) One of the "option jingles" that we can choose to have as background music on the trainings we create in my instructional design job is a rip-off of U2. It has the same chord sequence and guitar effect of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," but played differently.

2) Never let someone else write your curriculum (very ironic considering my daytime job is to write curriculum for other people). They will have a bunch of mistakes that you will then spend hours emailing your students about the corrections.

So I find it highly ironic that I am the new Avon designer. I have to create the training materials for Avon Representatives to help them sell their products. We are talking about me here! Someone who doesn't wear makeup, doesn't dress fashionably, struggles to write things like "beautiful and romantic ingredient stories." Now I have to fill my writing with it. Yuck. The universe is against me, I tell you. I will probably be creating their materials for the next two years (thank goodness they won't be the only projects). Agony.

I am catching on to the software program. I still have 80 small assignments to grade. I have gotten things off my to do list, but I am still a little overwhelmed. I am to the point where I like doing instructional design though. It is fun. I even don't mind the writing I have to do. Now that is shocking.

Well I started both jobs Wednesday. I am feeling a little overwhelmed and anxious about learning the software for my instructional design job and grading the 72 items that are waiting for me after the first three days of class. I know it will take some time for me to get into a schedule, but hopefully in a week or two it will be easier.

It is my last day of freedom. Both of my jobs start tomorrow. I'm spending the day running errands and trying to make my to-do list as small as possible. Hopefully there will be a little sushi thrown in later on.

A friend sent me this from a site about funny facebook conversations. I got a kick out of it.

I found this comic and thought it was very funny, although I have always found "The Yellow Wallpaper" a little too close to my fears about mental illness.

Good news!
I got a job. I will be an instructional designer-creating trainings for companies. I will still continue to do BYU-I as well because the instructional design job is contract work that varies between 30-40 hours a week.

Well, after posting about Undiscovered, I found the album at DI and wow, is he ever an INFJ. Every second of the album confirms it. Where was this back in 2005 when I needed it?

Wonderful World




The Last Goodbye

The Pieces Don't Fit Anymore

Call the Police

I am currently reading My Antonia. There was a quote I thought particularly applicable to me. I felt this while doing my thesis, but I couldn't express it in words-I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric [his mentor in college], I was not deceived about myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the plough against the sun. They were all I had for an answer to the new appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things. But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to wonder whether they were alive anywhere else, or how.

I have been scanning in my scrapbook. I thought I would display some of my more bold moments from my childhood. Apparently I thought I was hot stuff, even with my ginormous glasses. And apparently I liked to cook even back then, when I was making use of my new Christmas present and Strawberry Shortcake doll.