Lately, because everybody has such funky cool necklaces, I’ve been trying to make my own again. It’s hard because, as you can see, my kit is greatly depleted from all of my attempts. At least it’s pretty organized. All of the colorful ones on the right came together in a single container, so I separated all of those out by hand. I was pretty ambitious about making my own stuff.

I haven’t made anything picture-worthy yet, but a few of the girls and I are going to have a jewelry-making blowout next month when I move into town. I know a few cool techniques that they don’t, and they know a lot of sweet things that I have no idea how to do. I’m glad that I have the job that I do because I do have amazing coworkers, and I’m hoping that we all become great friends outside of work as well.

Today was my friend B.’s birthday, so we checked out the new pizza place in town, which is in an old savings and loan building. Gabe now holds the high score on the Pacman machine, so that’s pretty cool.

We spent the evening packing up a ton of our stuff, like shoes and books and all of my excess girly stuff, which will hopefully make moving a lot easier. Luckily, I can get a limitless supply of boxes from work, even more than the five or six a day that we go through in my department. I can take thousands of boxes if I wanted to, but I hopefully won’t need that many. We used like ten, and half of our stuff is all packed up. We only have two or three more weekends to get everything other than the bare minimum packed, but I have no idea where we’re going to keep all of it. These are stacked in his sister’s room right now, but I’m not sure that all of our stuff, when separated into boxes, is going to even fit in there.

Shiny.

I’m pretty burned out on studying, probably about as much as you are of me talking about it.

Instead, even though I’m pretty much down to the wire, I glued the fabric to the inside of my jewelry box today, and it looks okay. It looks better than it did, with the glue peeling off the back wall and all of that. I mostly filled it with the jewelry I made in the past year, but I put in a lot of my favorite older things as well. I have a lot of jewelry, and there’s no way it would fit in here anyway.

I’m feeling pretty blue today. It’s 10 pm and I’m still in my pajamas, and I have no intention of changing that. Everything is exhausting.

I couldn’t just give up on it; on the outside, it’s in pretty great shape. Also, when you pull out the drawer, it plays music. I have to save this jewelry box.

Instead of finding a mirror to fit the back wall, which would be kind of ridiculous, I instead bought some blue velvet from the local craft store. I cut it and sewed the edges tonight, and I’ll glue it in sometime next week. I also took out one of the window panes so I could glue the door back together, which is drying right now. It’s a little banged up, so I’ll probably have to sand it and re-stain it eventually, but I might just leave the scratches there because I barely passed woodshop in 10th grade, and I’d hate to destroy the whole thing.

I know, I probably shouldn’t take on some sort of project when I have four days left to study for my test, but I’m pretty bored with studying. After I put in all of that effort, memorizing so many brand name and generic drugs, after learning alligation and flow rates and weight/volume conversions, the girls at work told me I was pretty much just wasting time because that’s way beyond what I’m going to be tested on. I’ll probably sneak in a few more hours of learning a little more about syringe sizes and antidotes or something, but after that, I’m going back to piecing together my jewelry box.

This is Brandee, my coworker and carpooler. She lives about ten minutes further out than I do, so she drives to my house, and then we take my car in the morning. We don’t usually have real problems with it, except when she’s occasionally running late, and then she knows if she’s more than fifteen minutes past the hour, I’m leaving without her (after I call her anyway).

This morning, she called me at 8:05 and told me that she ran out of gas. She was only five minutes away at that point, so I picked her up and we went to work, deciding to just buy a gas can and fill her up afterward. We got back to her car at 8 pm because that’s how Saturdays work, and the gas can nozzle wasn’t long enough. We backtracked to my house, got a nozzle from a different can, and used that to fill up her car.

It still didn’t start. We tried jumping it, and just nothing. Nothing. It sucked. Gabe came home from work a little early to help us.  We ended up getting it stuck in a ditch after about two hours of fruitless attempts and crazy, far-fetched schemes. We had to steal a truck (kind of, but shh! anyway) to tow her car back into the road. And after all of that, at about 12:50, it finally started.

If you HAVE to buy a Pontiac, NEVER EVER EVER EVER let it run out of gas. It was a total f’ing nightmare. At least her car works again. She’s at my house right now, and we’re making chili cheese fries and pepperoni sandwiches, even though we have to be at work in 8 hours. I should probably go back in and hang out with her and Gabe.

I also got some towels, some bathroom stuff like towels and a toothbrush holer, and a polka-dot oven heat pad. Gabe isn’t thrilled about it, but hey, a few less things we have to buy later.

It’s purple. Luci colored the sides of his hair purple with a sharpie today. I have the most awesome job and awesome coworkers on the face of the planet.

We paid our deposit on the new apartment today, and I finally got to look inside. It doesn’t have a back door like the one across the courtyard that our friends live in, but it does have a much better layout like a smaller living room in exchange for room to put in a kitchen table.. And the bigger bedroom has TWO CLOSETS. Two! After sharing a closet that is only four square feet for the past year and a half, it seems a little indulgent.

Just…what?

That look in his eyes is fear. I took this picture in the bathroom, and I had to hold his head steady just so the picture wouldn’t be so blurry because he was shaking so bad. I would have felt bad for the little guy except that, you know, I just spent half an hour cleaning purple ink off of everything, and then I had to give him a bath. He’s bites people when he’s afraid, and he’s scared to death of water. Freaking dog.

This is Brian. He’s one of my very best friends despite the fact that we have little in common other than DNA. I think if we had any more siblings, we wouldn’t be as close, but I’m happy to just have the one brother. Less sibling rivalry that way, you know? That and he’s awesome I guess. Just kidding, he’s a very good listener, a good father of his one biological daughter and his three semi-stepchildren (and also his biological daughter’s two half-sisters), and has a heart of gold even though he looks pretty intimidating (this picture aside). The guy spent six months working in the south after Hurricane Katrina, he spent a few years working weekends as a volunteer firefighter, and one time, he actually saved my life. We still have petty arguments sometimes, but as far as older brothers go, he’s about as awesome as I could get.

I really miss my family today.