I have this horrible tendency to start a blog and then not finish and over time it slowly accumulates a massive amount of pictures added at each boring pause between moments in my life.
So I am finishing this. FINISHING IT. TODAY.
The Friday morning before Labor Day I was wasting time between some institute group breakfast and class and as I was wasting my time and brain cells on the internet I read a post on Facebook inviting anyone to join my friend in a trip up to SLC area for the weekend. Needless to say I immediately made the necessary arrangements and jumped in a car for a 12-hours-in-the-dark ride. Never again do I want to arrive in another state at 5:30 in the morning. Never.
But it was worth it. I had a fun weekend and got to see Danny again and meet the famous Elder Ogden who I still refuse to call Sterling because that is just super weird. And of course the love of his life Nyrie who is pretty dang awesome too.
Then some time around the beginning of October I decided it was time to dye my hair dark brown again. I had successfully not dyed my hair an entire year and I was itching to do so again. But surprise! I was mad when I went to buy the dye so instead of brown, Walmart's darkest black was swiped at the register instead. And as Brianna put it-- my emotions were put into my tendrils. Of course I also added my teal highlights that I've always dreamed of and I must admit I fell in love. I think I could be completely happy with blue and black hair for the rest of my life. You would think that would look hideous on a natural blonde but hey it wasn't so bad.
My grandma gave me her '89 Escort so now I have a car! Not the Geo Tracker that I was planning on buying but it is really nice to have a car to get where I need to be when the bus is not quite adequate. I named my new car Clovis and I love her.
Clovis hit 100,000 miles a couple weeks after I got her. Yes, she is older than me but I have passed her up in distance of miles traveled.
One day I went over to Brianna's house to discuss my house stuff with her father who has been helping us get workers and get the dang thing finished. Well we were gonna go take a trip out to Peoria on a random whim but that plan failed so we called up Stephannie and busted out a camera.
Stephannie especially appreciates this picture with my hideous hair and Brianna's Nicholas hair
Of course we all wore our beautiful shirts we decorated and even tried to take some normal pictures which of course didn't really turn out all that well. How could they when we've had so much practice destroying such a thing?
We also had some fun killing huge Joes on Stephannie's wall. Extremely fun and satisfying.
THEN.... there was the storm. The storm that Mesa, AZ will always remember. The storm with hail that destroyed all of the cars at Enterprise and cancelled many school trips. The storm that flooded the roads. The storm that created the first rain during the daytime that we've seen in quite a while.
Do you remember those 2 minutes of hail? The sudden downpour of rain so thick it was practically impossible to see? Where were you during those 2 minutes? I was on a bus whose windows suddenly went blank as did my poor mind when I realized the next stop was the one I needed to get off on.
Now imagine..... can you picture those scenes in the movies when the phrase comes up that "things couldn't get any worse"? Then directly afterwards someone drives by and a wall of muddy water drenches the person who just made the comment? Now picture me... walking down Alma School road trying to protect my $1500 worth of electronics in my backpack and see that wave of water. Repeatedly.
Needless to say I was a little bit wet when I arrived at my house but thoroughly happy to tell the story.
Now we have reached my house. Yes that place that I am now less frequently daydreaming about burning down.
Item #1) beneath the counter. You look at this picture below and think.. "no big deal. Pretty normal looking. The blue is a little strange but I have seen worse."
NOW--- realize why this is on here. Do you see that my house was as ABC'd as a boring highschool physics classroom? But it is gone. My grandma scraped, dissolved, and washed the gum away. And all the random pieces of gum on the walls and floors-- I believe I have disposed of all of them too.
Item #2) My kitchen. It was the remnant of a mystery oil gun fight. That stuff didn't come off. Fortunately, 8 hours and a heavy dose of ammonia repaired a majority of the damage.
The kitchen is finished. I have not moved any of my things into it but the cupboards and drawers are washed, the black grout between the tiles has been severely lightened, the walls and ceiling has been painted, and the appliances are working. All except for the dishwasher but for now it is staying since I cannot afford a replacement and it's prettier than a hole.
Item #3) the laundry room. Still a work in progress but the walls have been painted and the cupboards are being worked on today.
Yes. It is orange. Really orange. I have blue paint for the room too but I have not yet been able to incorporate it.
Item #4) The 3 bedrooms. As you can see from the blue tape, the walls had a lot of areas of needed repair. The drywallers were far from superior or complete in their task which is truly saddening due to the amount they were paid and the previous highly satisfying work they had done in our home before. So we will not talk about them anymore. The idea is much too distressing.
Here is what we refer to as the "pool bedroom" or now, Kendra's room. First, up came the vomitous carpet. Then the drywall was supposedly repaired well........
Then the walls were painted. Tan with a dark green accent wall. Let me tell you, I have figured out why so many people have all white walls and white ceilings. It saves a lot of time painting edges and must look a lot better than Kendra's room which was my gerbil room in painting edges. Good thing it's too cramped in their for me to pay attention to the edges.
Next came carpet. It was the first room with carpet in order that she could move in since her apartment lease was up before the whole house would be done and she needed somewhere to live.
And now see the final product. Yes, an extra big queen size bed, 42'' TV and a whole lot of stuff. Mostly clothes. Let me show you....
Now normally, I am not a snoop. I respect other people's private living areas and never have a looksie. OK who are we kidding? I am a creeper. I want to see everything. Well, not everything. I will not dig through your drawers or look at anything that is not plainly in sight but I do not have any problems with having a look around.
This is Kendra's closet. And no, all of her clothes are not in it. I have about 25 jackets in my closet of hers that fill another entire rack. She works at Buckle so I am giving her the benefit of the doubt that the reason she has 40 pairs of expensive jeans is due to her employment.
BTW- the first thing I did when I saw all of these shoes was to check the size. Bad news I do not wear size 7.5
The "corner" bedroom had these lovely shelves in it that I wanted to keep in there because if it was my bedroom I would want them. Turns out other people do not feel the same way. So out they came
See?? Gone. We also painted this bedroom a light greenish tan color. It doesn't look nearly as marvelous as it did without the carpet that is now in the room but I still find the color rather attractive.
My mother, grandparents, and I spent part of last Saturday painting the bedroom door trims and closet trims. Also, I painted a few closets and now you can barely tell there used to be shelves.
This is the "bookcase" bedroom now finished. (yes it does now have carpet) I painted it tan because that's what the girl (Jacque) who is moving in Monday wanted. I find it a rather drastically boring color but it's not too bad with the bookcase and a matching fan of the same dark color.
This is my back porch with the pool gate on the left and my bedroom and the family room sliding doors on the right. I have always wanted a back porch. I kind of always imagines more of a Victorian style wrap around porch with a white wooden railing around the edge but I am going to make my porch into a beautiful wonder.
Here is the pantry before it was loved. I love having this huge closet and three more in the hall for plenty of storage space. I've decided this closet is for food. The front closet will be a "coat" closet although since I live in AZ this will be an interesting thing to have. Another hall closet will be for all the lovely games I have been collecting. The last closet is for my roommates' bathroom stuff... like towels. . . and whatever else they want
Here is the pantry finished with it's fresh coat of paint and clean shelf paper
Here's the bathroom hall closet before it was cleansed.
And after. You can't really see much of a difference but let me guarantee to you that everything these pictures show look at least 5x better from before than they appear.
Now, as you can see, Kendra has taken it upon herself as my single roommate at the moment to fill the closet with her possessions. That girl has had her stuff in every single room in my house. I really don't know how I am supposed to force her to fit it all in her room.
She has lived with other roommates before but I suppose she fills the rule of if there is a flat space it will be filled. I'm just hoping that as more people move in everything will adjust well.
Her jackets. Just to prove I wasn't joking.
So here is the lovely Miss Kendra. Isn't she gorgeous? She is from Idaho and sells pest control in the summer. She has perfectly straight white teeth and seems to always look good. Yes, even this week when I'm pretty sure she hasn't showered or left the house in the last 4 days while she has been drugged up after her little surgery. She seems to have a very congenial personality so I think things will work out well even though we're practically polar opposites.
My entire life I have lived in houses with boring walls. White or tan. It kills me inside. So now I am unleashing my love of colors on my walls. I found this drastically bold green on the rack of Oops paint at Home Depot one day and both gallons went directly in my cart. I had to have them. I fell instantly in love. The bad thing though is that it is so green that you cannot paint an entire room that color so I settled for a big wall in my family room. And I quite love it. A lot. I get a little bit of crap from people who look at my paint before I put it on the wall but once it is painted they stand back and say they actually really like it. Which is good but even if they didn't still like it I don't really give a hoot.
To tone down the green I put a nice simple tan on both of the other walls with white on the top sections. We just stained the big shelf that sits along the tan and white line and will probably be putting that up today.
Here's another shot of the green wall next to the fireplace. I finished painting the edges so it now looks a lot better. The green is interesting with my Mexican tile but I have the most perfect painting to hang on the wall that will match wonderfully.
My bedroom is the storage room. We finally started working on it this week and are trying to hurry and get it done now that we don't have to worry about roommates' rooms. My bedroom is being painted blue, teal, and green. I got the green and blue completely done already but I need to go buy some teal to finish. I tried to make my own teal paint yesterday so now we have a bucket of gray paint.
I carried the green from a wall in my room along my closet into the area by my sink. I quite like it. It is so lovely bright and cheery and bold. I also got half of my bathroom painted. It's gray on the top 2/3 and tonight I plan on painting the bottom third magenta. Now I just need to find a black and white retro border to cover the inbetween line.
Other than school and working at Bahama Bucks and working at my house I have somehow managed to maintain a life. Stephannie, Brianna and I had a Halloween party a couple weeks back and we all dressed up as "death" and ate orange and black food and things like candy body parts.
We sat out in Stephannie's backyard for our fiesta and lit up her mother's stenchy orange candles.
And of course, took pictures. Doesn't this picture just trigger nightmares? Like really?!!!
I've gotten used to my boss getting his panties in a twist over me asking off days and went ahead and took off a weekend to travel up to Trona, CA with GeoClub. We drove up there all day Friday and camped at the campground there. Saturday we went out on the Searles Lake bed to dig us up some hangsite crystals in "mud." I say "mud" because the gooey black concoction is a lot more like fresh street tar that it is mud. But I found some lovely stuff and it was a fun adventure.
T for Trona! Can you see it? Trona really is a smelly armpit in the middle of the desert. And I really do mean smelly. You can smell the area from miles away. The brine pools in the lake bed are not exactly the perfume of the elite. Sunday we climbed into these knee deep brine pools and hacked out shelves of pink halite crystals which we sold quite a few of at our last sale at ASU. On the ride home-- let's just say I was crusty with sparkly salt and didn't smell the best but it wasn't like I was the only one.
P.S.- the brine pool salt really is sparkly so my white glittery skin in the sun did indeed cause me to shout out VAMPIRE!
I thought of this idea a few months ago. The idea of me being a waterproof rainbow. Something beautiful after a storm that exists only due to the residue of the rain. Something you can only see if you're in the right place at the right time. I thought it was an interesting idea. I discovered a paint-like program on my laptop and spend a 45 minute bus ride home creating this rainbow shown below. Sometimes I wonder if people think I'm a crazy.
The weekend after my Trona trip I took another Saturday off. My poor boss throws fits over my not being able to occasionally work weekends, especially Saturdays but for some reason even when I don't take the weekend off I still don't usually work then. So I don't really see the problem. But whatev it is not even worth my attention anymore.
On Saturday I went with my GLG 310 Structures class to Barnhart Canyon. We drove in 9 matching mini vans of either white or silver. Talk about looking like a retarded caravan.
Barnhart Canyon is quite beautiful as far as Southern Arizona landscapes go. On the left in the middle you can see where a layer of white sediment has gone through a sequence of thrust faults. I have a sketch and calculations of said geologic structure.
Here you can see a whole bunch of Chevron folds which I also sketched but apparently did not sketch enough of them because that is where I missed a few points on my assignment. It was quite amazing though to work at a GeoClub sale a few days later and find Chevron amethyst and know what it was talking about.
I would love to go hiking again at Barnhart Canyon in the next year so maybe I get ambitious I will get a group together. It's quite nice and with the 10-degrees-above-normal-92-degree weather we've been getting I don't think it will be too cold for hiking up there any time soon.
We also went to the Lake Pleasant area in Sunday and sketched a nice road cut that revealed a few faults and two different layers of volcanic ash. It simply reminded me of a year ago when I was stranded on the side of the road in the heat by another dry AZ road cut near a lake. But moving on...
Due to my friends' employment and the best movie theater in the area I have seen two wonderful movies recently.
The first one was called It's Kind of a Funny Story. About a guy who is suicidal and is afraid he's going to hurt himself so he commits himself to this hospital. Once he's in there he realizes how much he has to live for and learns how to love life again and makes differences in others' lives. Below is a picture of the girl he likes after he was a jerk to her. I'm a little bit in love with her shirt. OK.. a LOT in love.
The other movie I saw recently that I loved was Life As We Know It. About a couple who each have a best friend. These 2 best friends hate each other but still spend time together because they're friends with one of the couple. Well the couple dies and the 2 are left with their baby. And the story goes on. Good movie-- go see it.
I've had a little bit of a crush on Josh Duhamel since Win A Date with Tad Hamilton.
And most DEFINITELY have had a crush on him since When In Rome
I really love the characters he plays. He is this laid back boy who doesn't seem like he is worth much more than good looks but by the end of the movie he's got the perfect amount of charm and responsibility.
So now---- this is my desktop picture. To remind myself of fairytales. And because when I open my laptop it makes me smile. I mean, how could you frown while looking at this?
In my ASL class we had to do a presentation on our famous hero. Well, I don't have famous heroes that are presentationable. And no, not presentable. Presentationable. So I chose President Uchtdorf because I loved hearing him speak while I was in London and I love how much he very much loves his dear Harriet.
I requested Hunger Games at the library since I have been hearing such good things about it. WEll I was 100th in line but I finally got my hands on a copy. And I got it right in the middle of the midterm/project rush. Unfortunate so I had to wait 10 days before I actually got to read it but I read it in 1 24hour period. It was wonderfully refreshing and reminds me of the storylines of Harry Potter or Twilight where the setting is a normal life that has been altered into an unreal setting. VERY GOOD book. I need to read Catching Fire now soooo bad.
And now I will end. Until I find time for more house pictures and life pictures. I am already behind even with finishing this post. But alas! (name the character) reality calls. I must go stand up for 4 hours while waiting for someone to PLEASEEEEE come buy a shaved ice so I have something else to do. And I am going to ask my boss if I can apply for a second job. SO if I don't post in the next week, it will be because he finally blew up because of all the unneeded stress I put on him.
P.S.- Today--- was yesterday.
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