Work, School, and Goals

I must say that I am happier with work now. I no longer have to describe myself as a cashier, but rather as an assistant manager. It helps reconcile the age and level of education with the position.

School is keeping me more than a little busy. My children's lit class (which I do enjoy, but still) has an immense amount of work, and I've got two practicums on top of that. Which means I have to do that whole dressing like a teacher thing almost every day. This is difficult because I don't have a lot of teacher appropriate clothes right now and am not eager to rush out and buy more because....







22.6 lbs down. It's not going as fast as I would like, though hopefully that will make it more sustainable, but it's still progress. And hey, I'm even sharing the real numbers.

I have lost 3 inches of my waist, 3 1/2 off my bust, 4 off each thigh, and have gone from a 38HH to a 36H. My weight goal involves losing 40 more pounds, but more important is keeping it off.

Tiny Visitors

I was on the patio theoretically working on homework, but some visitors dropped by and I had to go grab the camera. All I've done with any of these is crop them. Was fun to have the camera out and get some quality pictures again. It's been too long.

The Girly Girl

                                      VS.









A couple of weeks ago, a blogger over at the HuffPo decided to write a little blog about the loss of feminism that she started with the line "Women are girly. Again.." Great. Yet another writer (and a female one at that) buying into the mindset that being a feminist means trying to be a man. She laments that we bake cupcakes*, garden, and knit because instead we should be ditching all that stupid "girly" stuff and learn to hotwire cars, shoot guns, and manipulate our way into bomb shelters. (She didn't really go into the details on this last one, but I suspect it involves cleavage). She even gives us role models- Jane Austen = bad, Sookie Stackhouse = good.  The more I think on this, the more it bothers me, and not just that she couldn't find any real people (who weren't drug addicts) for role models  on what she thinks women should be. If it's tough girls she wants:

• I have butchered, dressed, and cooked any number of chickens (plucking the feathers is the worst part)
• I have helped deliver a lamb. By which I mean my hand was up there pulling because it was the only one small enough. 
• I have cleaned and replaced a prolapsed uterus on a ewe. 
• I have shot a gun
• I know how to change a tire and change my own oil (though I'll happily pay someone to do the later)
• I have a working knowledge of how to use hand tools (both power and not) to build a basic structure. 
• I enjoy hiking, camping (no trailers for me, please), biking, and boating. 

However, I also

• Spin, crochet, cross-stitch,  and sew
• I enjoy cooking from scratch meals for my family
• I like to garden and look forward to have a proper place to do it
• I am married and took my husband's name, with no real thought of not doing so

So, according to Ms. Aloi, I am a girly girl who forgot all about feminism. Well, that's fine, I don't need her approval. However, more than once in her article she mentioned some crazy apocalypse.  I've got news for her. If that happens, I'll be the one munching on the produce and animals I raised while keeping warm in my handmade garments and she'll be the one hungry and cold with nothing useful to bargain with. I think I'll be sticking with Jane then, and not Sookie.



                                                   

Ok. That aside. The fair was the past two weeks. It appears that none of the pieces I took down placed. It will be interesting to see the judges comments on them; there were several things (even in categories I didn't participate in) that made me seriously question the judges. Dustin will be picking them up tomorrow, as I have class all day.

School starts again tomorrow. Part of me is looking forward to it, but part of me is really not. Between classes and work I'm not really going to have any days off. Which means bossman isn't going to find out about days that school is out unless we really need the money, which we likely won't.

Dustin is going to be starting a new job on Friday. I'm not going to go into a lot of details, but it's a pay increase, has benefits, and isn't likely to have any of the slowdowns that we've been forced to become accustomed to. There might be some travel, but we've dealt with that before. We're working on bringing down our total debt and this is a good step in the right direction. (It's a very scary number that just got larger because of this semester's student loans, but I also know that it's less than some people's debt that's just from those student loans.)



*Interestingly, there is a woman of the same name who does blogging about cupcakes. All evidence points to this being the same person. Existential midlife crisis?

It's been a while. On the crafting front, Quarter 2 has come and gone, and I did manage my goal, which was to enter something in the Indiana State Fair, preferably something new. I'm taking the sweater I made earlier this year, a lace shawl I just finished, a doily (if I get it finished in time), and a photo from our Colorado trip if I can get it printed and matted correctly in time. I don't have any great pictures of the shawl yet; I just wove in the last ends yesterday and it's all cloudy and overcast today (but hotter than hell, we've a 104/40 heat index right now, hate humidity). 

                     The doily is the image from the Ravelry page; I'm doing mine in a similar color and the plan is to frame it once it's back from the fair.















My plan for Quarter 3 is to get that doily finished and then get my sock count up- the Sunday group had made a plan to make 12 pairs this year, which turned into 12 socks. I've got 3 done now. Since I love handmade socks and would love to be able to wear only those, that's what I'm going to focus on- especially since it means I can largely work from stash.

In crafting related news, I realized I never posted a picture of the awesome birthday gift I got this year.  Getting using it down to an art is still a work in progress. Who knows, maybe next year I'll be entering some handspun into the fair as well.

 I've also been working on losing weight and am currently down 15lbs since February which was my highest weight... well, ever, really. Still have 47lbs more to go to get to my eventual goal, but it's coming along nicely enough. I'm not really dieting- I want this to last and therefore I'm making life changes and teaching myself how to eat properly. I come from a family of over eaters and portion control really is my downfall. I've also been better about taking the dogs for daily walks, I've started going for long bike rides on the Monon in Carmel/Westfield on my days off, and (most recently) I've started a running training program. Not exactly C25K but something similar. Never in a million years thought I would say this, but I'm actually enjoying the running parts.

Some of this is vanity, some of it is expenses (for example, it would be nice to consider $60 expensive for a bra rather than cheap), and some of it is health. My family is all overweight, though who knows how much of that is genetics and how much is eating habits, and I have a medical condition that makes me more prone both to be overweight and get diabetes (which is also made worse by the being overweight). Since I've no desire to deal with that, the medical aspects are some of the more important. I also like the fact that I can see the weight coming off (as can others, I've recently gotten some positive random comments) and I can feel myself getting stronger. True, the bad leg is throwing a fit, but not as bad as it used to do and the physical therapist I used to see would say that working it is the only way to have a chance of getting it better without surgery (which it will need eventually anyhow).

Musings

There will be sone crafty stuff soon (I have a new toy!) but for now, just something that's been bothering me today.

When did Memorial Day become the sort of holiday that people stick "happy" in front of, as though it were akin the Thanksgiving? It suggests to me a horrible lack of knowledge about what it's actually for; despite what people here seem to think it's not just a long weekend in honor of some stupid race.

I'm not generally a fan of the flag waving sort of patriotism- far too often it seems to come hand in hand with the sort of "patriotism" that says that questioning the government is treason and the freedoms of speech and religion apply only to their speech and their religion. Still, I was raised by a veteran (who taught me disdain for lipservice patriotism) and I am married to one. Because of this, and because I do know our history, unlike so many "patriots" it bothers me to see a day of mourning and remembrance turned into a celebration of summer. Saying "happy Memorial Day" is flying straight in the face of that history.

Roller Derby

I first went to see roller derby a couple of years ago with my friend Meghann and her new boyfriend James (they're married now; how the time does fly). We went down the Pepsi Colosseum to see the Naptown Roller Girls, Indy's local team. It was fun, but we never made it to any other matches.

Last year or so, my awesome sis-in-law joined Muncie's new team (or at any rate, their existence was news to me). She's a shy quiet little thing, so this was something of a shocker. We went up to their first homebout on Sunday and they're really very good. They'll be playing Naptown in July, so the plan is to make it up for that as well. (and if you're local you should too)

If you've never seen a bout- you need to go. Watch "Whip It" first, though. It's not a bad movie, and it does a great job of explaining the rules, although it's banked track and everything around here is flat track (both cheaper and safer). If you have been, go back! The girls need your support; it's not a cheap sport.

That's Sarah (Jane Damage) in the sparkly blue helmet; she was pivot in this jam. If you read the rules, you'll know what that means.

2 posts in as many days. This won't happen again.

I stopped paying much attention to American news sources a long time ago. Too much obsession with celebrity gossip (I refuse to call any of it news) and sports. BBC news is my homepage on the internet and I really only look at anything else if I'm looking for something specific or more facts. Today, however they are completely obsessed with the Royal Wedding. This is obviously completely understandable. I don't care about the wedding (though that dress was gorgeous) but I understand them covering it the way they did. The problem is that it's making me miss London very badly to see it plastered all over every time I open a new browser window.

I spent a semester there for school in 2004. Life has kept getting in the way and I haven't been able to go back since then. Sometimes the missing it is worse than others. I grew up a small town girl (there were 1800 kids in the entire K-12 district I attended) but I love the big city.  I've always been very much a home is where your family is sort of person, but if I was forced to pick on physical location to call home, it would be London (though not, perhaps, the exact place we stayed).

I love this picture, despite the blurriness.

There was a whole group of us from Ball State that went, and we lived in a wing of a hostel that had been set up as a dormitory for us. It changed ownership while I was there, and has apparently been closed for renovations over since. Either it's never going to reopen or they've gutted the entire thing. It wasn't a bad place, but it wasn't great either. We were, however, just a few short blocks from Hyde Park.

This the Google satellite view of our neighborhood. The red dot is the intersection we lived at. Number 1 Queen's Gardens. School was past Paddington, just off Edgware Road* and the touristy stuff was on the other end of the park. The mall, Whitely's, became more interesting later when I learned it had originally been one of the first department stores.

I hope to be able to go back before we have kids. Dustin has never been, and I'd love to be able to show it to him without having to worry about having wee ones be able to keep up. Had his boss's corporate contract not run out and so vastly changed our financial situation, we probably would go this summer.

This was actually not taken in London. It's York, actually. But it is the people I spent the most time with. Stephanie, my two roommates Sarah and Mandy, Debbie, Me, Jenny, and Kari. Debbie's the only one I still keep in contact with. Last I heard, Stephanie was married to one of the guys who went (they started dating there) and Kari was living in Germany teaching on a military base. I don't know about the others. I miss it. I miss them.




*Terrorism takes on a different face when they hit somewhere you know. I was through that station on a very regular basis.