Practice Practice Practice

I feel the need to document this here:

I practiced every day this week, yesterday for 3 hours and today for 4. I plan to continue this for as long as possible. If I practice four hours a day, six days a week, for 16 weeks, I will practice 384 hours for the semester. I think this is manageable, but I will give myself 84 hours of leeway in case normal life and observation hours get in the way. If I seriously implement this new practice regime, I HOPE I'll be fantastic by the end of the semester.

Also, regardless of student teaching, I will be taking lessons and participating in Wind Ensemble and orchestra next semester. Let it be written.

We'll see how this goes.

And they told me to eat my fruits and vegetables...ha...

Sometimes I think that I should just quit school and become some sort of houseperson. (I can't be a housewife as I'm not married. Thus houseperson.) I think this because any time that I've had free time in the last few days, I've been cooking or baking, and I've felt very accomplished. Then I remember that I like playing oboe just as much as I like to cook. On Wednesday, I made tomato sauce. It turned out pretty well, although now it's sitting in the fridge until I make pasta to go with it. On Thursday, I ate leftover chicken. Uh...not so exciting. Moving on. On Friday, I baked oatmeal honey bread and ate it with butter and jam, and subsequently tried to feed it to anyone who came to visit. Today, I made bruschetta, and it was one of the best and easiest meals that I've made yet. And it was healthy!!






And - the best part - it made me eat chunks of raw tomato for the first time in my life! There are a lot of very normal fruits and vegetables that I've never tried. Let me come up with a list:

-peaches
-plums
-mangos
-cherries (I half-tasted one once, but I don't count that)
-apricots
-grapefruit
-lemon
-lime
-pineapple
-beets
-rhubarb (not even in pie)
-sweet potatoes (except for sweet potato fries)

Up until this summer, I had never eaten kiwis, oranges, avocados, artichokes, tomatoes, or grapes, so I feel that I'm slowly making some progress. As it turns out, I like tomatoes, artichokes, and avocados, so clearly I'm missing out on all the rest. Maybe trying everything will cure me of my dislike of fruit.

Late Night/Early Morning Thoughts

It's 3:40 in the morning, and I can't sleep. I would very much like to sleep, as I know that I will be exhausted if I ever do fall asleep and wake up later, but that seems to be an impossibility right now. I don't know what's keeping me awake. In any case, I will take this opportunity to record one of the best quotes from The Count of Monte Cristo, which I finished this past evening. After classes started, unfortunately.

"Women have infallible instincts, and, by means of an algebra unknown to man, they can explain the most marvelous things."

I think that this quote is highly amusing. I also think I should stop typing now, or I risk waking up my roommate with the sound of tapping keys.

Apartment!

I think our apartment is nice, so I figured pictures might be interesting.



Note the minimalist, rather neutral-colored decorations on my side, and the bright pink brilliance of Meghanne's side. I find this hilarious. For the record, I do intend to put stuff on the wall to the left of my bed.





The other corner....





My desk! The bag of pretzel M+Ms is an absolute necessity.





I put the shelving thing together. I feel very accomplished.

In other news, my dress was shipped and it's supposed to be here tomorrow! I'm so excited!!

Cooking Mishaps, Apartment Life, and Organization

This evening I made myself dinner. I'd made breaded-fried-mixed-with-Italian-seasoning chicken before and it turned out just fine, but tonight I didn't put enough oil in the pan and had the heat up a little too high. This combination of events led to rather dark undersides of the chicken, and me bemoaning my oh-so-skillfully prepared poorly cooked food. How unfortunate. In order to make up for this sad event, I am determined to redeem myself tomorrow night with bruschetta. There is no possible way for me to mess up frying slices of bread. If I do....I will eat frozen food for the rest of the year. Well, maybe not frozen food. Cereal. I could survive off that for a very long time.

Despite my minor food disaster (ok, saying that blows everything out of proportion), our apartment is absolutely wonderful. I foresee this being an excellent school year, regardless of how daunting student teaching second semester sounds. There will be many awesome things to make up for it. I do have a lot of things to do before tomorrow though: I NEED to finish The Count of Monte Cristo tonight, because I am determined to finish it before classes start. That shouldn't be too hard, because I have less than 60 pages left. Half hour boost. I also need to figure out if I can get all of the 20+ English books from the library, because there is NO WAY I am buying that many books for a 100 level class that does not pertain to my major in the least. Granted, they are literary classics, but I don't think I need every classic ever written in my personal library. I don't have enough room for that on my shelf. I may need to do laundry, but I think I have enough clothes to last me for a while without doing it. I would mostly consider doing laundry just because it's now FREE!!!! This novelty gives me an incentive to do the laundry much more frequently than is necessary. The downside of doing laundry more often is that then I have to fold it all and put it away, and that's my least favorite chore in all the world. I'd rather clean the bathroom. I guess that pretty much covers all the things I need to do tonight, so now on to the list of things I want to do. I want to go to bed awfully early. I want to make some pasta sauce. I want to go to Target to get the ingredients for said pasta sauce, among other things. Side note: never in my life did I foresee myself voluntarily buying whole tomatoes. The world is a surprising place. And I want to watch last night's episode of Lie to Me. That could potentially wait though.

And finally, I feel that I need to note my new-found love of coupons. I had no idea that I could save as much money as I can using coupons, and so I'm trying to figure out how to organize them so that I can easily find them when I need them. Organizing and subsequently shopping using them automatically requires that I make grocery lists, which will probably be better than my usual method of going to the store and figuring out what I want for the upcoming week while there. Therefore, it seems that this year will be The Year in which I Become Organized, Both in Terms of Academia and Domesticity.

WOO!

TODAY IS MY LAST DAY OF WORK! Elation abounds!

New Dress?

I recently found this dress online, and I really like it. The problem is that it's quite out of my budget, so I guess it will have to wait until I'm rich and famous. Ok, maybe just rich. Or just famous. But either way, it will have to wait.

Maybe I can save up a lot of money over a good long period of time, and then justify purchasing it by saying that I need new concert attire. Maybe.

New title...

My blog title is bothering me. I think it's cheesy, and I want to change it. Any awesome ideas?

Stress? What?

I never thought that I got stressed. But after waking up around 7 with no alarm with a very slightly upset stomach the past few mornings regardless of how late I went to bed the previous night, I'm thinking that maybe I'm subconsciously more stressed than I think I am. I don't really have any reason to be stressed, except for the paper that I have to finish before 9:45 this morning, the audition(s) I have during the first week of the semester, the reality of the fact that I am graduating this year and I need to figure out what the heck I'm doing after college, and normal everyday things that everyone deals with. Really, these things don't even come close to the amount of seemingly stress-inducing things that occur at other times of the year, like the end of a semester. So stress should not be an issue right now. How bizarre.

The Story of the Hammock, the Bed, and the Process (Part 1)

One day, Jillian bought a hammock whilst visiting a friend in Maine. "This hammock," thought she, "would make an excellent addition to the residence in which I currently abide." However, a problem soon became readily apparent. How could it be suspended? The reigning authority forbade anything from marring the walls or ceiling, so this method of levitation was impossible. At last, she came upon a most brilliant idea. "If I could have a different type of sleeping arrangement, I could hang the hammock underneath!" Thus, a plan was created. A different bed was available if she was willing to transport it from one distant point of the hallway to the furthest possible point at the other end. Because of the incessant lure of the fantastical hammock idea, she was prepared to make the attempt. At last, an opportunity arose. The other room was unlocked; all she had to do was figure out how to move the bed. With much fortitude and a small bit of perspiration, she and a comrade began the migration with bed number one. It was successfully transported to the distant point, but a dilemma occurred! Bed number two became ensnared between the two posts of the doorframe. Nevertheless, this dilemma could be easily resolved with the aid of a wrench. Because of a lack of time, the project had to be postponed, because a wrench could only be found within the depths of her car trunk. Thus, this story remains to be continued...

On Dancing

Periodically, I think about going dancing. I know I've said this before, but dancing, for me, is a form of self expression that can occasionally be even more effective than music. That's saying something, I think, considering I'm a music major. In various music ed classes we learn about - ::ahem:: (to be read in a teacher-ly, rather English-sounding manner) - the benefits of moving to music, feeling the beat, and integrating music with motion, but we then spend class time creating somewhat ridiculous movements to "express" what the music is "saying." Um...most of the time, this form of moving to music just makes me feel, and probably look, awkward and uncomfortable. Somehow, however, "dancing" is vastly different than "moving to music." There is something incredibly freeing about being able to be graceful and uninhibited by classroom expectations, anxiety about looking funny, and preconceived notions about lack of dancing ability. Not that I'm an especially fantastic dancer, but I don't necessarily think that not being awesome at something translates into a lack of effectiveness. A few of my friends and I have discussed taking a ballet class or something of that nature during the school year, and I just saw an advertisement for a dance place in Peabody, which is pretty close to the campus! I'm planning on calling them in the next few days to see what the times and prices are for various classes. I'm also hoping to be able to do some ballroom next year, which is conveniently available at church! Hooray! We'll see how everything transpires.

Furthermore, I definitely, definitely want to resume the occasional trips to the ballroom place at the roller rink in Saugus. Best. Adventure. Ever. We went a lot my sophomore year, but we didn't go at all last year. TERRIBLE. This problem must be resolved in an appropriate manner. I think we should be able to find a group big enough to make the trip worthwhile based on the few people I've talked to, and we would (of course) be happy to take pretty much anyone along!