What?!

I have loved the song "One Reason" by Tracy Chapman since I was a kid. Today I found out Tracy Chapman is a WOMAN! I just thought that Tracy was a man's name like Ashley is a man's name. Never ever would I have thought that a woman sings this song. Her voice is really deep. What do you think? You can click the link to listen to the song.

Tracy Chapman - One Reason

YES!!!!!

I made an A in history, the class from hell! Yes!!!!

My Top 8's!

Yeah, I'm bored. So what?! :P

8 TV shows I love to watch:

Nip/Tuck
CSI
Reba
Family Guy
Law and Order SVU
VHS I Love the 90's
American Dad
Futurama

8 Things That Happened Yesterday:
Got a new purse
Studied for my psych exam
Did laundry
Went to BWW
Drove to Mt. Juliet
Went to the bank
Put gas in my car
Nothing else. Sundays are lazy days

8 Favorite Places to Eat:
Chili's
Camino Real
Olive Garden
Huey's (no Huey's here, boo)
Fino Villa (no Fina Villa here either)
McAllister's
I don't know any more. We haven't eaten out in so long that I've forgotten all my favorites haha

8 Things That I Am Looking Forward To:

Christmas!
My birthday :) 21!
Studying for the GRE next semester (I know I'm a nerd)
Warm weather
New clothes for the spring
A house someday
Living in a big city
Graduating!

Now, long-awaited pictures of the Christmas tree...
Ok, so one picture. Here are some more to make up for it.

"Sleep is like the unicorn. It is rumored to exist, but I doubt I will see any."

I am SO. SO. SO. GLAD that this semester is almost over. Tomorrow is my last full day of classes and I have 4 short (and hopefully easy) exams next week and then I'm free. And I am going to sleep my booty off. Next weekend I will probably lay in bed and not get up once. That is if I don't collapse from exhaustion today. Getting a full night's "sleep" but no REM sleep is just plain wrong. But back to next week...the end of the semester! I can officially see the end of undergraduate school. Only 3 more semesters left. Woohoo!

Daniel has spent the last 3 days trying to figure out what he's going to do with all of his birthday gift cards/money. (I think I was the only one who actually got him a present! Although it did end up being the 5th book in a series so now he claims I have to by him all 4 other books too. He can keep waiting on that to happen haha) He already went to Buffalo Wild Wings with one of his gift cards last night and he was really excited about not having to eat pizza for once (thanks Missy!). So I am saying thank you to everyone from him because I will be really surprised if he remembers to call you all. He surprises me sometimes though :)

Pictures of the Christmas tree to come soon, if Joey and Gemma don't tear it up before then.

Happy Post-Thanksgiving!

Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving! Some highlights of our trip to Knoxville...

-Daniel and I taking the wrong way and having to go all the way through Chattanooga
-A "whose baby picture is this?" game where the prize was a very old picture of my granddad in a Speedo
-My cousin Zack looking so grown up that we didn't recognize him
-Daniel's birthday
-Making cinnamon bread and cookies with my sister and cousin Ali
-My cousin Christopher puking up his Thanksgiving dinner on the side of the road
-Stopping at a huge outlet mall on Black Friday
-Putting up the Christmas tree when we got back to our apartment
-Delicious Thanksgiving dinner!!!!

It might make me a nerd, but...

hanging out and making cinnamon bread with a 10, 12, and 14 year old and being forced to watch Disney channel shows is a lot more fun than some other things I've done in my life. :)

New phone numbers

Daniel and I both got new phone numbers. Mine is 615-589-5042 and Daniel's is 615-589-5016. We have unlimited minutes again and now we can actually use them so call us whenever... no more internet phone!

The end of the semester is coming up really fast. I registered for next semester's classes today. I'll be taking...
-Interpersonal Communication
-Mass Communication and Society
-Media Writing
-Tennessee History
-History of the US I
-Computer Orientation (hopefully this should be a really easy class; I'm required to take a computer class and I didn't really want to learn how to write CSS)

2 of those classes are online so that will give me a little more sleeping time in the mornings. So I am definitely excited about that!

5 minute update

Sorry for the lack of posts...we have been really busy lately! I am trying to keep my grades up since the end of the semester is coming up. Right now I have all A's and I'm trying to keep them there. I made an A on the last test in my crazy history class (thanks to the 20 point curve!) so even that's going ok. Plus registration is coming up in a few days so I have been seeing my advisors and all that stuff. I'm also starting to research graduate schools. Apparently not a lot of schools in Tennessee have graduate programs for communications so that might take a while.

Daniel has been really busy too. There is a field behind our apartment that is absolutely covered with the bulldozed remains of a forest, about 10 feet deep. Daniel discovered a crevice in the brush and has made himself a little hidey hole complete with a "chair" (made out of sticks) and a "fireplace" (made out of bricks). So he has been spending a lot of time there :)

We're not going to be in Memphis for Thanksgiving this year because we are going to Knoxville to see my mom's family. I haven't seen any of them since our wedding so I am really excited about that! We'll be in Memphis for a whole week at Christmas time though, something like 22-28ish.

Also one of my all-time favorite shows, 3rd Rock from the Sun, has been syndicated for reruns on TVLand so we have been spending way too much time watching it!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

"Anything important is never left to the vote of the people. We only get to vote for a man; we never get to vote on what he is to do."-WILL ROGERS

I don't know if that quote is entirely true but either way I'm glad I voted! This isn't my first time voting but it's my first Presidential election. Daniel is hopefully voting tonight.

“Serious illness doesn't bother me for long because I am too inhospitable a host.”-ALBERT SCHWEITZER

So evidently I didn't give Daniel my cold but he did get something worse. :( For the past 3 days he has had a sore throat, been achy, congested, and all that mess. To top it off his stomach and chest are now hurting. We have no idea what is wrong with him, really. Today they sent him home sick from work so I decided he would have to go to the doctor. Well, that probably won't happen because there is only one free clinic besides the MTSU clinic (which only treats students) and they are very busy. They said if we come in Monday, he might have a chance of being seen by their nurse practitioner. I looked up a few other places but they are all really expensive just to be seen, let alone run any lab work. Things like this are what keeps me in college... the hope that one day I will have a job that pays well enough that we don't have to worry about paying for doctor's visits! So please keep Daniel in your prayers.

Yay for the weekend!

Finally the weekend! I have just about managed to unwind and unpack from our vacation despite the fact that I am sick and may have given whatever I have to Daniel too. I'm just happy to not have to work for two days! I have more respect for parents every day... driving 3 girls around, making sure they remember to eat, do homework, chores, rent movies, put up signs for the lost cat, go to dance, drop off at doctor's office, pick up from school, supervise DI meetings...blah blah blah... is a lot harder than it looks! :) I think Henley was definitely easier to take care of. But I still really like my job!

Not exactly true but hilarious anyway :)



School is still going pretty good. I am counting down the weeks (6) until winter break. Finals come then too but so does my birthday and Christmas so it all evens out!

Daniel has been listening to a Harry Potter book on his iPod for the past week so I haven't seen a lot of him. The book is over 21 hours long. He hasn't been doing much of anything else so no real updates there. :) The cats are goofy as usual so that is pretty much all we have been up to lately.

Though California pays big for their art, their fanmail comes addressed to NYC!

So, I have about an hour's break between classes and work today because of 3 fire trucks, 5 haz-mat trucks, about 6 cop cars, and one unidentified cardboard box possibly containing a hazardous substance outside of the building of my last class. So I thought I would write about what we did in NYC.

Our plane from Memphis (after waiting 5 hours in the airport) was a 48-seater and I am claustrophobic so I cried for about 30 minutes :( it was not fun. But that was the only bad thing that happened. We took a shuttle from the airport to our hotel and luckily they let us check in early. Our hotel was tiny but very nice and in a really fun part of town. We walked around Greenwich for a few hours, had dinner at a Mexican place, and then saw the off-Broadway show Altar Boyz, which was hilarious.

The next day we went to the Museum of Natural History which Daniel loved. There were 4 floors full of dinosaurs, bugs, rocks, all that kind of thing. Then we had lunch and went to a Columbus Day craft fair. Most of the crafts there were handmade (i.e. really expensive) but we got a few things. We also saw the Dakota, the apartment building where John Lennon lived and was killed. It's still a private apartment building so you can't go in unless you live there. We also spent about 2 hours in Chinatown buying souvenirs and I had a lot of fun doing that. That night we had dinner at a tiny pizza place where you could get about a pound of delicious pasta for 5 bucks. Then we saw an off-off-Broadway show at this tiny underground theatre called Under St. Mark's and the show was called Brew of the Dead. It was about the zombie apocalypse and these 5 people who figure that if they're going to die anyway they might as well drink as much beer as they can before it happens. Their only props were three metal folding chairs with a wrinkly white sheet covering them (the "couch"), a couple fake guns, and a real keg of beer. It was pretty funny for being so low-budget. We also found a tiny bookstore across the street where Daniel got a really old book for $2 that he loves, and I got a book of poetry by Sylvia Plath.

On Sunday I woke up really early to go buy something else at that craft fair and got lost on the subway. I made it all the way into Queens before I figured out I was lost. After I made my way back to the hotel we walked around the fashion side of Manhattan, 5th and Madison. Plus we went to Dylan's Candy Bar, a 3-story candy store owned by the daughter of Ralph Lauren. Then we spent about an hour walking around looking for St. Patrick's Cathedral but it was worth it when we finally found it because it was gorgeous. That night we went out to eat at some bar near Times Square that had the best, crunchiest french fries I have ever had. After that we walked around Times Square and went into the Hershey's store and then went home.

Monday morning we got tickets to go to this museum in the Lower East Side called the Tenement Museum. A tenement is basically an apartment building, and this tenement that we saw was built in the 1860's, closed in the 1940's, and had had around 4,000 immigrants from over 20 countries live in it during that time. It had 20 apartments and each of them were only 325 square feet divided into 3 rooms. Some of the rooms had been redecorated to look like what they would have looked like in the 20's, 1800's, etc, but they left some of them looking like what they looked like when the museum found the building in 1988 (basically a falling-down rat hole). That was really fun. Then we walked around the financial district and Battery Park and we saw the Statue of Liberty but didn't take a ferry out there. There was a huge street fair on Broadway with tons of vendors so we got a lot of food and souvenirs there. Finally we made it back to the airport, where they switched our gate about 3 minutes before the plane took off. It was a tiny plane again but I figured it would be so no crying on the way back. :) My mom and dad picked us up from the airport and we drove home and unloaded the car and I am still staring at all our suitcases and souvenirs on the floor which I don't plan on unpacking until this weekend. :)

We had a lot of fun!

Pictures!

Here are a few pictures from our trip to NYC...





And here are the rest! http://photos.walmart.com/share/p=282141224018848117/l=14932051/g=20832943/cobrandOid=1011/otsc=SYE/otsi=SALB

“If automobiles had followed the same development cycle as the computer...

...a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside." - ROBERT CRINGELY


I wish that was true! Because then I wouldn't have to pay for a new headlight cover for the girl whose car I hit today. I could just buy her a new crappy car that cost about $10 bucks. What really happened was I was backing out of a parking spot on campus, she came whipping around the corner, and stopped right before I bumped her headlight cover with my plastic bumper, making the "wreck" my fault. The only damage was the headlight cover which cracked off and will need to be replaced. She didn't call the cops to file a report or act mean about it or anything (I think she knew it was partially her fault!) and she said she wouldn't have a problem with me paying for it out of pocket.

It sucks because I know I looked both ways before backing out, and she had to have come really fast around the corner in the parking lot to be as close to me as she was. Unfortunately she stopped before she hit me, soI got the pleasure of hitting her at 1/2 mph (I seem to have a knack for these slow-speed fender benders). And I'm glad the Jeep wasn't damaged at all--that plastic bumper is awesome.

Oh well. I'm not too worried about it, I just hope the headlight cover doesn't cost too much!

I also changed the colors for Halloween because I'm cool like that. :)

More index cards are a'comin

I got back test grades from last week and made A's on all 3 so I am infinitely less stressed out than I was at this time last week. Unless you count Friday's psychology test and next Wednesday's math test. Which I don't! :)

Yawn

We are both pretty tired this week. Daniel is not used to working so much so he's pretty worn out. I'm just ready for our trip to NYC to get here so I can have some fun!

Fall keeps pretending like it's coming but then sneaking away. I went to a dog show at the campus this morning with a friend and it was freezing but when I went back to campus to work out today around 5:00 it was burning up. I have bought some pumpkin and gingerbread candles and have been drinking hot chocolate in the mornings so obviously I'm ready for fall.

"One of the great mind destroyers of college education is the belief that if it's very complex, it's very profound."-DENNIS PRAGER

My stack of index cards, somewhere along the lines of 300+, for my History, Theatre, and Advertising exams this week, and my Psych test next week. No math index cards because Daniel is essentially reading my math book and teaching me the lessons so I'll get them twice. College is hard!!!

P.S. Notice the old desk stained by Danny and Daniel and looking awesome!

"Dawn: When men of reason go to sleep."-AMBROSE BIERCE

Daniel has been working a lot so he is pretty tired. It also doesn't help that he goes to bed at the crack of dawn :) He got a second job at another pizza place so he is going to be a pizza making machine. He also put up a laundry line in our "backyard" so now we actually have clean clothes! (The dryer's heating element doesn't work.)

I ended up getting gas yesterday. I found some at the fifth gas station I went to for $4.19. It was pretty out of the way (I only knew it was there because I saw it when I was lost) so there weren't too many cars there. There was a big sign outside saying "Gas sold here!!!"

I have been studying my butt off for two exams I have this week, history and advertising. The advertising one should be really easy but the history professor is a nutcase so I'm trying to be really thorough. She seems like one of those people who will mention something once that seems totally insignificant then put five questions about it on a test. Hopefully I'll do okay.

What choo lookin at?!

"Nashville pumps dry after panic about rumor of no gas"

So people are pretty much going crazy around here this week. There has been a delay in getting gas to this part of the state and something like 90% of the stations are out of gas. Today I counted 15 gas stations, and 2 of them had gas, and each of those 2 had about 25 cars lined up outside of it. The way you know they are out of gas is because they take the numbers off the price signs. We are not supposed to get more gas until the middle of next week and people are panicking and buying up what is left. There is no gas shortage but people don't seem to understand that! I have been trying not to get gas so I don't feed into the panic but I'm worried that if I don't get any soon, there really won't be any left and I won't be able to get enough gas to get to Franklin for work on Monday. I have heard that people are waiting an hour in lines just to get gas. I am probably going to go sometime really late tonight to try to avoid the lines and get only as much as I need. So that is pretty much all that has been going on around here lately!

First exam

I got a 95 A on my first math exam! W00hoo!

You can't have your cake and eat it too

It's not the world's prettiest two-layer cake and it's sitting in a stovetop pan. But I made it, and it is delicious!

Note to self: Buy cake-serving platter when not poor anymore.

a five minute update

So I started my new job this week. So far it has been really good! It is a long drive to Franklin (about 45 minutes each way) but I really wasn't able to get a job here in Murfreesboro. The family is really nice. There are three girls, 14, 12, and 10, Mary, Emily, and Lydia. They are all really skinny because the family eats all organic and take a ton of vitamins. This week the mom, Kathy, is just hanging around and showing me the ropes. Mostly I will just be driving the girls home from school and to their activities and doing some light housework.

Daniel has been working a lot (as much as they will let him) and trying to fix our dryer. He has been pretty much fixing broken things since we got here but that's just the way apartments are I guess. I just asked him if he had any updates for the blog but he is too busy stuffing his face with chocolate cake :)

“Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need."-VOLTAIRE

I got the nannying job! :) I start Monday. That really takes a load off my mind.

“Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.”-DREW CAREY

Well, the job hunt has gotten a little better. Daniel is still trying to get a job with the post office, but first he has to study for and take the civil service exam, plus a post office battery test, so until then he is working at a pizza place. I had an interview with a family the other night and they have talked to all my references, and my references all said that the lady sounded like she was probably going to offer me the job, so I'm excited about that. It's a bit of a drive but it pays pretty well, plus no nights/weekends, and paid holidays/vacations.

Daniel's mom and Danny came for a visit yesterday so it was really nice to get to see them. We miss everybody! But we're glad to be here.

School is going well. I dropped my English class for a history, and settled on a Communications major in the school of Journalism with a concentration in Advertising, one minor in Speech and Theatre with a concentration on Communications Studies, and my second minor in Early Modern European Studies. That's a mouthful. I chose that random second minor because it will accept my credits for all that German I took. We are starting to look into getting Daniel some grants for school also.

I got a bike for school too. I have been throwing it in the Jeep every morning and riding it from class to class so I won't have to wake up so early to get a parking space that is not a continent away from the campus. Who would have thought with 25,000 students that parking would be an issue? I bought the bike off Craigslist for $20 and it had a bent rim and flat tire so Daniel got to spend a few days fixing it. I think he secretly enjoyed it though :)

Here are some updated pictures of the apartment. I got a cover for the couch so I am happy about that.

"I've never let my school interfere with my education." -MARK TWAIN

We have officially been here a week tomorrow! The place looks a lot better than it did a few days ago. I had a few interviews but one place said I had "no childcare experience" (guess a year of nannying full time doesn't count haha) and I also interviewed with a private family but they weren't able to give enough hours. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

I got registered for school today and should finally be done with my GenEd after this semester is over. This semester I'll be taking Math, Psychology, English, Theatre, and Survey of Advertising. I am going to be testing out of 3 other classes this semester, and I might also try to pick up a Saturday class to get back on track with graduating on time.

I also found out I got a Federal Academic Competitiveness Grant for $1300/year in addition to my other grants and scholarships so I am really happy about that! My overall GPA is 3.33 and hopefully I can raise that up to a 3.50 or higher this semester.

Daniel has been a little bored here so far but he is doing well too. He is definitely going to be back in school next semester but we are not sure where just yet. There are lots of colleges in the Nashville area so he has a lot to choose from.

We will try and post some updated pictures of the apartment soon.

Our new digs

We thought everybody might like to see some pictures of our new place. Please note that the boxes of trash will not be staying in the living room and as soon as I can find a slipcover for the couch, it won't stick out like a sore thumb in the living room. :)


We also have two miniature closets, a tiny bathroom, a huge bathroom, an enormous pantry, more kitchen cabinets than you can count, and absolutely no storage space whatsoever. So far, so good.

I have a job interview at a preschool tomorrow and Thursday I register for classes at MTSU. Daniel is probably going to be temping and getting his resume' out there. Oh, and if your phone's ringing and your caller ID says "unknown," it is probably us. Long story short- we have very few long distance minutes, but we got an internet phone service that lets us dial out and it's pretty cheap. So call us (same cell #'s) or text and we'll call you back when we can.

Joey and Gemma say hello. Here's Gemma enjoying her new house.